MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cherry_tree | 2025-12-28 06:58:53+00:00
Behind who?

Is there someone already mastering “agents, subagents, their prompts, contexts, memory, modes, permissions, tools, plugins, skills, hooks, MCP, LSP, slash commands, workflows, IDE integrations, and a need to build an all-encompassing mental model for strengths and pitfalls of fundamentally stochastic, fallible, unintelligible and changing entities suddenly intermingled with what used to be good old fashioned engineering” ?

And do they have a blog?
by MyOutfitIsVague | 2025-12-28 06:59:13+00:00
There is plenty of room in science for research that is just to examine and collect data. I don't understand your argument that science should only be to demonstrate claims and "completing" theories. Is science not about experimenting to slowly form a more complete understanding about how our world works? Research that does little more than collect novel data and show probable correlations is still extremely valuable.
by hibikir | 2025-12-28 06:59:31+00:00
That's only a problem when you decide that the way to do error handling is exceptions. When you go with a strongly typed functional programming language, you throw exceptions away, and the fact that something can error, and what kinds of errors it can produce, are encoded into the type system.

So yes, generating errors at a deep level and catching them at a higher one is a normal pard of the system design, it's purely functional, ando nothing strange happens, in very large systems. You ADT the errors, pipe up entire families of them, and select what you manage. It's significantly easier than exceptions, in the sense that I can be sure when I've validated the error.

It's practical, and typically one dedicates less code to the error handling than, say, yor typical enterprise Java program that is terrified of runtime exceptions and null checks every step of the way. In fact, I'd argue this is the main selling point of strongly typed FP.
by mmooss | 2025-12-28 07:00:00+00:00
These flaws aren't failings of the article, but univeral to science, knowledge, and human endeavor:

> Either it is correct; or it is not. Perhaps it is somewhat correct, but then it may not be fully correct, so it would contain wrong information.

This describes all science and all knowledge; if that's not good enough, nothing is good enough. Everything somewhat correct and somewhat incorrect; the best stuff is much more of the former. Newton's Laws are mostly correct, somewhat incorrect.

> science does not really work well when it is based on speculation

Speculation is the foundation of science: it leads to an hypothesis, which leads to research, which leads to more speculation.

> their theory is incomplete as of yet. That's not good.

That also is the nature of all science. For example, papers include analyses of their own blind spots and weaknesses, and end with suggestions for further research by others.

> There are examples of where theories were lateron shown to be wrong.

That's also part of science and all human endeavor. If you disallow that, we might as well go back to being illiterate - everything we read is flawed, and inevitably some is wrong.
by anal_reactor | 2025-12-28 07:00:24+00:00
Yeah. Let's not fetishize "real world". Offline space is often boring and most people suck. There's a reason why we prefer to be looking at the screens. Having said that, I think that it makes sense to be more cautious about screen time and interact more with the offline space. Not because offline space is better, but because our brains are fried and they peceive online space to be better than it really is, we're literal addicts. I'm trying to teach myself that it's okay to be bored.
by yes_man | 2025-12-28 07:03:25+00:00
Theres huge uncertainty and layered assumptions in all of microbiology and biochemistry about how exactly things work on small scale. Because it is really hard to study live reactions in little things you can just barely see on an electron microscope.

But yet humanity has managed to assert statistical truths about for example genetics and explain countless diseases, even cure and alleviate some. So even if you don’t have a theory on how exactly something works from the ground up, if you have statistical evidence, plenty of useful and practical advances can be built top-bottom and we have outcomes that validate this.

Not giving any opinion on this piece specifically but just saying there can be scientific value even if the details are hand-wavy.
by survirtual | 2025-12-28 07:04:50+00:00
I am not insinuating anything.

Road management should be administered by federal and state agencies, including the administration of tolls when they are foolishly utilized. It should not be a for profit venture, it is a mechanism of taxation for public logistics.

It should not be possible to offload management to private orgs outside of very specific subcontracting / purchasing of components.

Instead, often times full road management is given to private orgs. They are not given a robust legal incentive to act in the interests of the road system, and how could they? They are interesting in using the road to maximize their profit, at the loss of everyone needing the road.
by exsomet | 2025-12-28 07:05:01+00:00
I remember getting an Xbox One and being excited about the concept of it being the center for entertainment in my house. The marketing promise was that it would integrate with TVs and music and make those things better in ways that were sort of nebulous and not super well defined, and that unfortunately came at the expense of it delivering a good gaming experience.

The first red flag should have been Microsoft trying to push the weird metro/UWP interface that it had with news, the store, movies and a tv guide, and more versus a library of games, and then of course all of the bad PR around Kinect and the DRM. It didn’t have backwards compatibility at launch and most of the games were things that were already out on 360, but for some reason we needed to re-buy.

The game experience never improved and the home entertainment thing never materialized, so you were just left with something that did exactly what the 360 did and duplicated your existing DVR/cable box.

The X/S wasn’t better. First you had to fight scalpers to get one, and then my first experience with it was browsing the store and seeing that I had to pick between buying the Xbox one version of games or the X/S version. The entire thing was built around some new revolutionary concept of streaming cloud games, which didn’t work. Games are FPS capped and if you install them locally they require 15 of the 45 minutes you have to game to download updates that should happen while the thing sleeps. It got slightly better over time, but juxtaposed with my pc and steam it was such an unpolished experience.

What it really comes down to for me is that it’s a gaming console that tries to do a bunch of stuff I don’t care about and fails at the one thing I do care about it doing (playing games). There’s a larger commentary here about Microsoft, but this isn’t unique to them. I should have been a lifelong console buyer; instead I will probably not buy another one because for the past two generations the experience has been awful, and whatever they come out with next is going to be packed with a bunch of streaming junk and AI and other stuff I don’t want, and will not do the thing I do want in any way that competes with the old faithful PC and steam.
by toast0 | 2025-12-28 07:05:27+00:00
> Also the phone should keep track of system time as epoch time, and convert to local.

Yes, but imagine your local time is US Pacific time, but you have a phone intended to be sold in Mexico, so your phone only has Mexico time zones and MX Pacific Time has no DST. During part of the year, you can use automatic time sync, but during the summer, you disable automatic sync and set the clock so that the time displayed matches local time. Your epoch time is now an hour ahead of properly synched devices, but whatevs, your phone shows the right time and that's what counts.
by commandersaki | 2025-12-28 07:06:26+00:00
Would really have to come down what a reasonable consumer would expect; that is part subjective and part objective. If you could show an experience of having laptops for various lifetimes, some extending beyond 7 years some below, none having a failing power socket, that might be sufficient to convince that it is a major fault. If it is a cheap laptop maybe you don't have a chance, but a premium product you could argue that it failed to be durable.

(I read this as the power socket in the laptop, not so much the power supply, obviously you'll have less luck there.)
by saghm | 2025-12-28 07:07:13+00:00
Given how many people have been deported this year in violation of judicial orders, and how the secretary of the DHS earlier this year even testified to Congress that they thought "habeas corpus" was a right the president has to unilaterally deport people, I don't think it's unreasonable for people to be trying to get out in front of any potential unconstitutional deportations by arguing against them. If the fears turn out to be unfounded, that's a good thing.
by ChadNauseam | 2025-12-28 07:07:34+00:00
No matter how good public transit is, it will never fully replace the need or desire for cars. Especially now that self-driving cars are hitting the scene. There will be routes poorly served by transit, people hauling stuff that can't be easily taken on a bus or train, people who prefer privacy, stuff being transported by truck, and people who just like road trips. These people are all still imposting a cost on other drivers by driving (when there is congestion). I haven't yet heard a good reason for why that should be free, no matter how good public transit is.
by akkad33 | 2025-12-28 07:08:18+00:00
> Java type shenanigans are endless if you want some fun but baseline you can cast to arbitrary types at runtime and completely bypass all compile time checks.

For this reason Java is a bad example of a typed language. It gives static typing a bad rep because of its inflexible yet unreliable type system (only basic type inference, no ADTs, many things like presence of equality not checked at compile time etc ) Something like ocaml or fsharp have much more sound and capable type systems.
by handoflixue | 2025-12-28 07:09:31+00:00
> 99 times out of 100 you need a solid budget to make a solid movie/game.

Sure, but 1 in 100 still gets you dozens of games a year now. There's plenty of genres where the top titles are nowhere near an AAA budget: Hades 2, Silksong, and Claire Obscura all being popular examples from this year, and Factorio being another well known example around here. Even simpler games like Balatro and Vampire Survivor are plenty of fun for some people.

The biggest studios have rarely been the ones producing the best work - budget gets you fancy cinematics and a beautifully rendered 3D world, but it doesn't make level design go any faster. It could plausibly buy better writing, but that requires all the executives to back off and trust the creatives.

And for what it's worth, the big studios are all happy raking in money on mindless remakes - it keeps working for them.
by vel0city | 2025-12-28 07:09:37+00:00
> If the car was a 35mpg hybrid that would be 35,000mi of equivalent driving.

> that's true, then 12-15k miles in an EV would be equivalent to 27-33k miles in a gas car.. so "taxes equivalent to 35k miles" isn't far off

You absolutely did suggest me paying taxes for 12k miles is practically the same as ~35k miles, you said it several times. That it's not far off. How else am I supposed to read that? You were so sure of it you mentioned it many times.

> Regardless, it would be interesting to see the actual number worked through to see what the equivalent EV registration fee should be if road damage/maintenance is the sole factor.

Sure, but it's likely far less than what I'm paying. As mentioned elsewhere, a similar weight unloaded F-150 pays half the taxes. So I'm at least paying double for similar weight vehicles, and yet you tell me it's really only 6%. But sure, tell me again how I'm really just paying my fair share and 12 = 35.
by pjmlp | 2025-12-28 07:11:59+00:00
UNIX originally wasn't closed source anyway, and most people like nowadays, only cared about the freebeer parts.

GNU only took off when Sun created the split between user and developer UNIX SKUs, which other UNIX vendors were quick to follow as well.

Suddenly having access to UNIX no longer meant having development tools around, if the server wasn't to be used by developers themselves.

Thus installing GNU became a common workaround to pay for a UNIX developer license.
by XorNot | 2025-12-28 07:12:30+00:00
That's a "motherhood statement"[1] - you haven't answered the question.

Militaries make targeting decisions with data. That's entirely separate to whether they have been ordered by civilian government to target something, and Palantir do not control that part of decision making (you as a voter do! You did vote right?)

1. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/motherhood_statement
by mmooss | 2025-12-28 07:13:40+00:00
> who really cares if “æ” is written as “ae”?

Nitpicking, but if you're writing about text rendering you should know:

Yes, ligatures are really about presentation and not semantics. For example ﬁ (U+FB01) means the same thing as fi; it just looks neater in some situations.

æ (U+00E6) is not a ligature; it's a mostly obsolete character, with different semantics (or phonetics) than ae.

For example, for purely typsetting beauty, your word processor might substitute the ligature ﬁ for the two letters fi (which can f* search, and I resent both the ligature and lazy search function developers). It would never substitute æ for ae; that would misspell the word as much as substituting an o.
by busymom0 | 2025-12-28 07:15:44+00:00
I really try not using JavaScript unless absolutely needed. On my latest project, the whole site actually functions without JavaScript and is server side rendered. However, there's some small piece which I really needed JavaScript for couple reasons.

Basically, I have a site which collects the top STEAMD posts from places like HN, lobsters, tildes, slashdot, bear, reddit etc and displays them in chronological order. I wanted a way for users to block posts with certain keywords or from specific domains. I didn't want to do this server side for both performance reasons plus privacy reasons. I didn't want users to need signing up or something to block. I also didn't want to collect block lists for privacy reasons. So, I resorted to using JavaScript and local storage. All posts within the filter for the date are sent and JavaScript is used to block posts with keywords before displaying. So my server never knows what keywords are blocked.

Site for anyone curious:

https://limereader.com/
by ycombiredd | 2025-12-28 07:16:52+00:00
Yes. I worked for the world's largest ISPs (NETCOM (#1), which merged with Mindspring (which was considered #2), which merged with EarthLink (the previous #3, then #2 to the post-NETCOM Mindspring). It was funny, in hindsight, that even though AOL had already adopted TCP/IP and integrated an "Internet Gateway" functionality and had more subscribers than even the combined #1, 2, and 3 rollup I just described, at no time did anyone in the industry actually consider AOL to be an ISP, so the "#1" in size distinction went to the companies mentioned. AOL, deserved or not, never really escaped their second class designation, which also tended to taint their users as they ventured on to the larger internet.

All that said, I still communicate with one person who maintains their aol.com email address to this day in spite of it all.
by rhdunn | 2025-12-28 07:17:38+00:00
https://www.w3.org/WAI/ARIA/apg/patterns/ is my go to for accessibility requirements of components.

And yes, being able to do all of these in pure HTML/CSS would be awesome. Though we are getting there with things like `details` and the newer `popover` features which should make things like rich tooltips, menu buttons, etc. a lot easier to implement. IIRC, there are also several anchor CSS properties to make positioning a lot simpler.
by ChuckMcM | 2025-12-28 07:18:58+00:00
I live in California, and they can. The key there is that is isn't "Unrelated to your work" it is "Unrelated to the work of the company." Also phrased as "The company's business." Google literally claims they could be in any business[1] at any time so anything you work on belongs to them. Further, as my lawyer pointed out to me at the time, California is an 'at will' state so they can fire you for any non-protected reason, one of which is 'working on things and forcing them to sue to get rights to that work product.' It isn't a very balanced situation from a power dynamic. My advice to anyone at Google (as it was when I was there) do not work on anything that you might later want to develop further while working at Google. If you really want to work on this thing, quit, and then start working on it. Otherwise you are at risk of the "success disaster" where your side hustle is suddenly worth something and at the same time you're being told to hand it over to your employer or be fired and sued at the same time.

[1] They rationalized this when I was there with their "20% time rule" which was time to work on what ever you wanted, but working on whatever you wanted still belonged to Google because they had a unlimited right of first refusal to productize whatever it was you worked on.
by JimBlackwood | 2025-12-28 07:19:54+00:00
> So their theory is incomplete as of yet. That's not good.

I hard disagree. Your comment to me reads as if a paper should either prove a new theory or disprove an existing theory.

However, publishing new results without a clear understanding of how it works is just as valid and this seems to be that. In Phsyics and Astronomy, new observations are often published without a theory of how it works. This is not a bad thing, that is part of the collaborative nature of science. The same holds true for papers suggesting a new theory, but lacking either observational or theoretical proof.
by bigyabai | 2025-12-28 07:22:13+00:00
I don't believe I did. Your first comment narrowly avoided my original draft, and the subsequent edit wasn't related to your disagreement.

I don't consider it a tacit rule that submission history is off-limits. dang can clearly make it private if that's a concern, but cross-referencing users to keep them honest is an ordinary forum tactic for determining good-faith. It's beneficial to moderators when they're judging patterns of behavior, and it's beneficial to users for the same purpose.

You're not going to bully me into editing my original post back, and I definitely can't delete it once you leave a comment below it complaining. I think my stance was principled and I'm willing to hear you out if you think that my edited accusation is off-base. Otherwise, we have nothing constructive to discuss here.
by pjmlp | 2025-12-28 07:23:01+00:00
Volunteers follow a charter set up by ISO, The C Standard charter, and definitely WG14 has not had security on C for quite some time.

I recall for the audience, that enable secure programming, and enable functional safety are two of such goals.

Nonetheless, other than some UB improvements has been business as usual.

If it is insulting to point out what isn't being achieved, then so be it.

As for volunteers, my point regarding WG14 and WG21 is that compiler vendors are the ones that should be part of ISO, and if they don't see any value in that, maybe it is about time to ramp down the whole effort, and finally replace them.
by 1659447091 | 2025-12-28 07:23:07+00:00
It does give information about "former Labour strategist [1,2], the CCDH he leads was founded by another Labour strategist and current Downing Street Chief of Staff" not in your exact words, but clearly disclosed connections and work:

has links to senior Labour figures. He was previously an aide to Labour minister Hilary Benn, and Sir Keir Starmer's chief of staff Morgan McSweeney has served as a director of the group he founded.

> but neglects to mention the UK has banned, among others, Renaud Camus and Martin Sellner, from entry, based upon their speech.

This event isn't about whatever broken system they have in the UK about banning people. It's about the US taking action against a US resident, which has clear free speech protections from the government doing what it is doing.

As I would expect of any reporting, that it not go off on tangents that are unrelated to this event. They have included or invite to comment from all parties involved. It's a mistake to read a subject's quote that is un-agreeable as biased reporting from a news outlet when the bias is coming from the people involved -- either the UK govt, the US govt, or the people at the center of it.

They quote UK govt officials making their UK talking points the same as they printed the US govt officials talking points. The "witch-hunts" and other claims are quotes from the people directly involved.

As for the "goal" or "tactics" that you found on some substack that is full of scare-quotes with an emotionally written bent -- is subjective at best. It has no relevance to real-world reporting, it doesn't meet journalistic standards to take every random one-sided internet theory as fact -- nor are they obligated to investigate and verify every substack posting on the internet.
by Botsmarket | 2025-12-28 07:24:58+00:00
I’m curating real-world AI bot/automation use cases (support, ops, HR, finance, analytics, productivity).

If you share one workflow, please include:
1) Trigger (email/form/ticket/invoice/Slack)
2) Current pain (time/errors/handoffs)
3) Stack (M365, ServiceNow, HubSpot, Zendesk, NetSuite, etc.)

I’ll reply with a practical approach + 2–3 tools that fit + a quick-start outline.
by froh | 2025-12-28 07:25:02+00:00
> _lazy_ search function developers

doing non-ascii first needs awareness and then quickly becomes tricky (encodings yay).

getting combining characters and/or homoglyphs right is hard.

and if you're still bored out: have fun with Unicode confusables.txt ...

with this in mind I dare to give them lazy bums the honor of the doubt and rather call them something between naïve and scared.
by spoiler | 2025-12-28 07:26:13+00:00
Ah. I know what you mean about Venli/Eshonai throwbacks. Those gave me a few "ugh here we go again" moments on my read through, but they do build up to give more context about the Parshendi and how/why the current conflicts starts and who they are as a people (trying to avoid spoilers as much as I can). I still think it's a bit of a slog, but I appreciate it a bit more now...
by LarsDu88 | 2025-12-28 07:29:29+00:00
There's a few things to consider here:
- there are many aspects to the video that are not convincing, indicating these videogen models do not grok the world the same way a typical human does
- A 6 year old child is almost certainly incapable of recreating pixel level fidelity video footage, yet understands the world extremely well... far beyond what current robotics is capable of.

The two facts above should be indicative that predicting noise (as with DDPM diffusion models), or predicting pixel level (or even VAE latent "pixel") information is probably not the optimal path to world understanding. Probably not even a good path to good world models.