MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by DennisP | 2025-12-19 23:16:56+00:00
It's not just that. E.g. Cooper and Hutchinson's edition of Plato's complete works, available on Kindle for $31.[1] Or on another tack, Yudkowski's recent If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies.[2] Neither book is on Unlimited, and I couldn't find either one on Kobo. I struck out half a dozen times in a row and finally gave up.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00OZ4NMHU

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Anyone-Builds-Everyone-Dies-Superhuma...
by adam_gyroscope | 2025-12-19 23:17:03+00:00
Yeah, we could absolutely do a better job with solid interfaces for each service. To be clear, our nextjs apps, temporal workers, etc are all well defined, and changes in a single package are easily tested (and well tested). It's integration testing we struggle with.

And, there's always a tradeoff here between engineering & our real job as a startup, finding PMF and growth. That said, we want as much eng velocity as possible and a fast, solid integration testing platform/system/etc helps a ton with that.
by betterhealth12 | 2025-12-19 23:17:13+00:00
- Facts are claims that are citing matter-of-fact reporting, public data, sequences of events etc. - Opinion statements are ones where its clearly the author's perspective or take on what's being reported on - the embedded reasons show the explanations in context. - Dubious claims usually highlight either exaggeration of some sort, or manipulative argumentation including extreme emotional language, appeals to authority and such
by clbrmbr | 2025-12-19 23:17:22+00:00
Oh I should add that team adoption is mixed. A lot of folks don’t seem to see the value, or they don’t lean in very hard, or take the time to study the tools capabilities.

We also have now to deal with the issue of really well-written PR messages and clean code that doesn’t do the right thing. It used to be that those things were proxies for quality. Better this way anyhow: code review focuses on if it’s really doing what we need. (Often engineers miss the detail and go down rabbit holes that I call “co-hallucination” as it is not really an AI error, but rather an emergent property.)
by azangru | 2025-12-19 23:17:26+00:00
> Lol are you really implying it's hard to scale a message board?

I am implying that it is beyond the "3 pages from W3Schools", as you put it.

> A. Message. Board.

Yes. A fast, reliable, accessible message board that I and many others thoroughly enjoy. An awesome product.

Again, I have never suggested that its ui is complex. In fact, it's glorious how simple it is. This is the point that those htmx people make: use simple tools for simple UIs; and also, try to make your UIs simple.
by penultimatename | 2025-12-19 23:17:43+00:00
I double checked my RAM purchase from early September. $450 for 128GB of DDR5. That same RAM is now $1400.

I know it’s a bit naive to extrapolate from that, but something doesn’t smell right, the PC hardware market is clearly going through something, probably caused by the AI boom. I wonder what else is shifting that isn’t so apparent.
by dctoedt | 2025-12-19 23:18:25+00:00
> Further, in your "formal philosophy" studies, how much of logic and proofs did you study?

Logic and proof only get you so far — IIRC, lots of math-based cosmological conjectures don't survive confrontation with observations from the real world. Cf. my favorite proof-texts:

- Rom. 1.20: "For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse." (Emphasis mine.)

- 1 Thess. 5:21: "Test all things; hold fast to that which is good."

- Deut. 18:22: "If what a prophet proclaims in the name of the Lord does not take place or come true, that is a message the Lord has not spoken. That prophet has spoken presumptuously, so do not be alarmed."
by red2awn | 2025-12-19 23:19:14+00:00
Very confused. When you enable structured output the response should adhere to the JSON schema EXACTLY, not best effort, by constraining the output via guided decoding. This is even documented in OpenRouter's structured output doc

> The model will respond with a JSON object that strictly follows your schema

Gemini is listed as a model supporting structured output, and yet its fail rate is 0.39% (Gemini 2.0 Flash)!! I get that structured output has a high performance cost but advertising it as supported when in reality it's not is a massive red flag.

Worst yet response healing only fixes JSON syntax error, not schema adherence. This is only mentioned at the end of the article which people are clearly not going to read.

WTF
by acituan | 2025-12-19 23:19:30+00:00
I understand your point about misattribution but it cuts both ways. How about when a company is better than competitors because they executed better because they had a superior organizational culture. Or not successful and this is due to poor culture.

YC sets the prime examples. It is never product at the expense of who the team is and in what proven way they have worked together and plan to execute at scale.
by avianlyric | 2025-12-19 23:19:51+00:00
> One thing I find interesting about Western governments is that they're very similar to the Indian governments that I am familiar with.

That’s probably because both the US and Indian systems of government and state bureaucracies both originated in the UK (with significant alterations, but still fundamentally forks of the UK systems). Even chunks of the EU bureaucracy are based on UK customs and rules in places, a consequence of the UK being the only Western European country that wasn’t completely demolished in World War Two.
by nis0s | 2025-12-19 23:19:54+00:00
> Are racism, misogyny, and superstition useful or useless?

Someone can just call you racist, misogynist, or whatever. Those labels don’t mean anything anymore because they’re used as weapons to shut down anyone who is ideologically opposed to you. Are some people racist or misogynistic, yes. But when you use these labels carelessly for anyone who says something you don’t like, you pave the way for actual racists and misogynists because they can call you unreasonable, inaccurate or unreliable.

And what is an apologist, exactly? If you’re unable to come up with a different way to look at something, that doesn’t make someone else who looks at the same thing in a different way an apologist. These are just political smears of the incurious or browbeaters.

Just because the leftists happen to align themselves with pro-social values that I prefer, like anti-racism or anti-misogyny, doesn’t mean they’re right about everything.
by exasperaited | 2025-12-19 23:20:05+00:00
Sooner or later, the age of your machine will affect browser compatibility.

It doesn't even take many things to do this — the knock-on support of a bug in a driver that no-one wants to fix, a package that you like that prevents you from upgrading your host OS, web browser developers abandoning something about your GUI (how long before they drop X?) etc.

In the Linux world, the age of your machine is a limit with a blurry edge, but it's still there.
by ineedasername | 2025-12-19 23:20:13+00:00
“what is it about capitalism you don’t understand?”

This question, asked by the person wanting to not put capital into investing further in the company’s lucrative core competency, instead favoring dividends depriving capital and a slow death milking a product facing ever steeper competition.

Capitalism has some awful failure modes, but I’m not sure what system of economics was on display in this case, but it doesn’t look like capitalism. Theft? That seems closer.
by jjj123 | 2025-12-19 23:20:34+00:00
I don’t think my system is zero sum! Acknowledging that some population will be harmed is not saying it’s equal and opposite to the benefits. Medicare for all is useful to many, many people. But it does have downsides to some populations: the ownership class loses some amount of power and control, wealthy people with excellent private healthcare are likely to have worse outcomes, the healthcare insurance industry would likely be decimated.

I don’t consider that zero-sum, the benefits far, far outweigh the downsides to me.

These are the practical impacts of implementing a policy. I do not believe in some technocratic ideal where we can logic our way out of resource distribution causing some people to lose things.
by siliconc0w | 2025-12-19 23:21:39+00:00
* local development and speed are both important to me so I spend some effort ensuring our app can run fast locally both in a 'lightweight' mode with 'fakes' and in a slower/more accurate prod-like mode.

* We do enable agents to able to interact with the application locally via a browser and some app controls to enable testing certain scenarios but it's generally better to have them iterate by writing and running tests.

* I usually have about three agents going locally via codex/gemini CLIs in separate tabs using work-trees with an IDE to supervise and shepherd them along. Any more and I have trouble feeding them with work and supervising them. I also agree work-trees suck and sometimes I YOLO having agents collaborate on the same tree if I think it'll be less work.

* I use async web agents like codex but really only for paper-cut issues I'm reasonably confident the agent can one-shot or random experiments I'm curious about that I don't really intend to merge.

Right now it's mostly gemini/codex (sorry claude).
by afavour | 2025-12-19 23:23:37+00:00
> Is this increasing complexity in the Web layout world worth it?

Yes. I held off learning about CSS Grid for a very long time and as soon as I did I was converted. Sometimes I think the web doesn’t get enough credit for its ambition: mobile viewports, desktop viewports, touch interaction, pointer interaction, complex documents, webapps… it’s a lot. But you get some complexity as a side effect. The complexity we do see these days isn’t invented out of whole cloth, it’s standardising and improving layouts people are implementing with JavaScript, often badly.
by dabockster | 2025-12-19 23:23:42+00:00
> Element has ended up focusing on digitally-sovereign govtech (https://element.io/en/sectors) in order to prevail, and it's left a hole in the market.

And unless they have verifiable testimonials, I'd take their reach with a grain of salt. Anyone can plaster a bunch of public domain government and defense logos all over their website.
by mnahkies | 2025-12-19 23:24:14+00:00
I'd consider myself pretty familiar with postgres partitioning, and even worked with systems that emulated partitioning through complex dynamic SQL through stored procs before it was supported natively.

But TIL, I didn't realize you could do multiple levels of partitioning in modern postgres, found this old blog post that touches on it https://joaodlf.com/postgresql-10-partitions-of-partitions.h...

Something that stresses me is the number of partitions - we have some weekly partitions that have a long retention period, and whilst it hasn't become a problem yet, it feels like a ticking time bomb as the years go on.

Would a multi level partitioning scheme of say year -> week be a feasible way to side step the issues of growing partition counts?
by jackb4040 | 2025-12-19 23:24:38+00:00
ChatGPT allegedly has similar guardrails in place, and now has allegedly encouraged minors to commit self-harm. There is no threat actor, it's not a security issue. It's an unsolved, and as far as we know intrinsic problem with LLMs themselves.

The word "accidentally" is slippery, our understanding of how accidents can happen with software systems is not applicable to LLMs.
by bobbylarrybobby | 2025-12-19 23:24:57+00:00
Try blocks let you encapsulate the early-return behavior of Try-returning operations so that they don't leak through to the surrounding function. This lets you use the ? operator 1. when the Try type doesn't match that of the function this is taking place in 2. when you want to use ? to short circuit, but don't want to return from the enclosing function. For instance, in a function returning Result<T,E>, you could have a try block where you do a bunch of operations with Option and make use of the ? operator, or have ? produce an Err without returning from the enclosing function. Without try blocks, you pretty much need to define a one-off closure or function so that you can isolate the use of ? within its body.
by runarberg | 2025-12-19 23:25:46+00:00
Most web devs get screemed at (by their peer reviewers or [preferably] static analysis tools) if they use a feature which has less then like 98% support without gracefully denigrating it, and rightfully so.

But your GP is in a massive minority, if every developer would cater to 11 year old browsers we would be wasting a lot of developer time to inferior designs, with more hacks which brake the web for even more users.
by idle_zealot | 2025-12-19 23:25:46+00:00
The issue with this is that the browser is the cross-playing operating system, the VM that runs webapps. But we treat the platform like an evolving document format. If we want to declare it complete, we need to make it extensible so we can have a stable core without freezing capabilities. I foresee all of this CSS/HTML stuff as eventually being declared a sort of legacy format and adding a standard way to ship pluggable rendering engines/language runtimes. WASM is one step in that direction. There are custom rendering/layout engines now, but they basically have to render to canvas and lose a lot of performance and platform integration. Proper official support for such engines with hooks into accessibility features and the like could close that gap. Of course, then you have every website shipping a while OS userland for every pageload, kinda like containers on servers, but that overhead could probably be mitigated with some caching of tagged dependencies. Then you have unscrupulous types who might use load timings to detect cache state for user profiling... I'm sure there's a better solution for that than just disabling cross-site caching...

I digress.
by KronisLV | 2025-12-19 23:25:49+00:00
> I just don't buy the idea that doing the same thing 10 times over the course of 10 years is somehow worse than doing different things over the course of 10 years.

I always read it as making the same mistakes as you initially did and either failing to learn from them or not even trying to improve. Maybe you haven’t even explored enough approaches to see what actually works and what doesn’t and most importantly, in which circumstances.

For example, someone might do CI/CD with manually created pipelines in Jenkins (the web UI variety) with stuff like JDK configured directly on the runner nodes. They might never have written a Jenkinsfile, or tried out Docker for builds and therefore are slow and have to deal with brittle plugins and environment configuration. They might also be unaware of how GitHub Actions could benefit them, or the more focused approach of GitLab CI or even how nice Woodpecker CI can be, especially for simpler setups.
by arjie | 2025-12-19 23:26:39+00:00
The fact that ZIP files include the catalog/directory at the end is such nostalgia fever. Back in the day it meant that if you naïvely downloaded the file, a partial download would be totally useless. Fortunately, in the early 2000s, we got HTTP's Range and a bunch of zip-aware downloaders that would fetch the catalog first so that you could preview a zip you were downloading and even extract part of a file! Good times. Well, not as good as now, but amusing to think of today.
by boznz | 2025-12-19 23:27:01+00:00
As an independent author you can do what you wish. The only restriction is if you are in the Amazon KDP select program then you have promised Amazon exclusive use for a cut of the Kindle Select pie. I also distribute my books on all the other platforms, and for my free sci-fi book host it direct on my web site and on my Ko-Fi shop (the 'buy-me-a-coffee' site). Selling directly and collecting money requires a bit too much work but technically you could do it.
by lukeschlather | 2025-12-19 23:27:03+00:00
I used GAN to mean graph attention network in my comment, which is how the GraphCast paper defines transformers. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2212.12794

I was looking at this part in particular:

> And while Transformers [48] can also compute arbitrarily long-range computations, they do not scale well with very large inputs (e.g., the 1 million-plus grid points in GraphCast’s global inputs) because of the quadratic memory complexity induced by computing all-to-all interactions. Contemporary extensions of Transformers often sparsify possible interactions to reduce the complexity, which in effect makes them analogous to GNNs (e.g., graph attention networks [49]).

Which kind of makes a soup of the whole thing and suggests that LLMs/Graph Attention Networks are "extensions to transformers" and not exactly transformers themselves.
by jesuslop | 2025-12-19 23:27:12+00:00
I am testing it as a replacement of MathPix, first few tests look rather decent. In python for windows: https://pastebin.com/uyiFHKdJ (alpha version prototype). Launches windows snip tool, waits for clipboard image, calls Mistral, retrieves markdown and puts it as text in the clipboard, ready to be pasted in Typora, Obsidian, or other markdown editor.
by delaminator | 2025-12-19 23:27:16+00:00
What I love the most is the compiler error messages.

My experience is Claude can build the fastest and error free when targeting Rust. With a good spec and a clear goal it doesn't get stuck in loops or give up. Whereas Python seems to be the most difficult for it.

I've also tried Erlang, C#, Racket, Typescript, C, JavaScript. And of those, Rust has won out as the smoothest candidate.

I wasn't a Rust evangelist, indeed I've never written a line of it, but all my projects are in Rust now.

If you're interested in an example

https://github.com/lawless-m/iscsi-crate
by superb-owl | 2025-12-19 23:28:08+00:00
Lots of hate here, but I think this is clever and some iteration of it will sell well

I get that folks are worried about what AI-generated art will do to kids sense of creativity. Will they still learn to draw? Play instruments? Write stories?

But I genuinely believe that tech like this will only whet their imaginations. I would have had so much fun with this as an 8 year old, and would have spent hours just in my head, dreaming up ways to use my limited stickers.

Ofc parents will still need to encourage them to pick up hard skills (as has always been the case). But having an AI companion will mean they start seeing rewards for their efforts much faster. A shallower learning curve will prove to be a very good thing for most.
by cmiles8 | 2025-12-19 23:28:26+00:00
The story that’s solidifying is the tech is cool, it’s useful for certain things (eg, meeting note taking), but business have run a ton of “innovation lab” pilots that have returned little to no measurable value with leaders getting frustrated at the invested red ink. In short the substance isn't living up to the hype.

Everywhere I look the adoption metrics and impact metrics are a tiny fraction of what was projected/expected. Yes tech keynotes have their shiny examples of “success” but the data at scale tells a very different story and that’s increasingly hard to brush under the carpet.

Given the amount of financial engineering shenanigans and circular financing it’s unclear how much longer the present bonanza can continue before the financial and business reality playing out slams on the brakes.
by Twirrim | 2025-12-19 23:28:41+00:00
Previously discussed in 2019, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20352439

Someone shared a link to that site in a conversation earlier this year on HN. For a long time now, I've had a gzip bomb sitting on my server that I provide to people that make a certain categories of malicious calls, such as attempts to log in to wordpress, on a site not using wordpress. That post got me thinking about alternative types of bombs, particularly as newer compression standards have become ubiquitous, and supported in browsers and http clients.

I spent some time experimenting with brotli as a compression bomb to serve to malicious actors: https://paulgraydon.co.uk/posts/2025-07-28-compression-bomb/

Unfortunately, as best as I can see, malicious actors are all using clients that only accept gzip, rather than brotli'd contents, and I'm the only one to have ever triggered the bomb when I was doing the initial setup!
by SeanSullivan86 | 2025-12-19 23:28:53+00:00
I'm aware of this to an extent. Do you know of any list of what degree of parallelization to expect out of various components? I know this whole napkin-math thing is mostly futile and the answer should mostly be "go test it", but just curious.

I was interviewing recently and was asked about implementing a web crawler and then were discussing bottlenecks (network fetching the pages, writing the content to disk, CPU usage for stuff like parsing the responses) and parallelism, and I wanted to just say "well, i'd test it to figure out what I was bottlenecked on and then iterate on my solution".
by Froedlich | 2025-12-19 23:29:09+00:00
I'm mostly retired now, and my paying work involves maintenance on proprietary inventory and billing software written in a 1960s language in a dialect that became unsupported in the mid-1980s. And it runs in MS-DOS.

I've mostly set aside the languages and tools I used to use, and I'm learning Haiku's variant of C++ to write some native-mode Haiku application software.
by fragmede | 2025-12-19 23:30:39+00:00
What is value, even? A dollar bill is worth a dollar, but even that’s made up too. A crappy crayon drawing of stick people and a house is utterly priceless if your kid made it, worthless if it's some other kid. AI is forcing us to confront how squishy valuation is in the first place.

Prices are not fundamental truths. They’re numbers that happen to work. Ideally price > cost, but that’s not even reliably true once you factor in fixed costs, subsidies, taxes, rebates, etc. Boeing famously came out and said they couldn't figure out how much it actually cost to make a 747, back when they were still flying.

Here's a concrete example: You have a factory with $50k/month in fixed costs. Running it costs $5 per widget in materials and labor. You make 5,000 widgets.

Originally you sell them for $20. Revenue $100k, costs $75k, pocket a cool $25k every month. Awesome.

Then, a competitor shows up and drives the price down to $10. Now revenue is $50k. On paper you “lose money” vs your original model.

But if you shut the factory down, you still eat the full $50k fixed cost and make $0. If you keep running, each widget covers its $5 marginal cost and contributes $5 toward fixed costs. You break even instead of losing $50k.

That’s the key mistake in "AI output is worth zero." Zero marginal value does not imply zero economic value. The question is whether it covers marginal cost and contributes to something else you care about: fixed costs, distribution, lock-in, differentiation, complements, optionality.

We've faced this many times before so AI isn't special in this regard. It just makes the gap between marginal cost and perceived value impossible to ignore.
by gsf_emergency_6 | 2025-12-19 23:30:40+00:00
>sock puppets

Those might soon become the drones of social (elite v "elite" culture) wars!

(Also occurred to me that Monotheism has been unreasonably effective against an other kind of sock puppetry. Hierophants. Had to get inventive :)

I asked Gemini to argue that Bernays was a populist (i.e. against the usual diagnosis):

He who seeks to manipulate public opinion must always heed it. (1923)

Started soft? Becoming more of a hard-line elitist later?

TIL the Daily Mirror used to be a feminist organ
by estearum | 2025-12-19 23:31:25+00:00
I can't parse your first sentence or what the relevance is to the discussion.

You said X has no incentive to allow foreign influence ops. Very clearly, not only do they have an incentive to allow them, but they have an additional disincentive to disallowing them (cost).

The fact those aligned incentives originate from different ultimate goals is totally irrelevant for as long as the two are aligned.