MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tra3 | 2025-12-12 17:44:15+00:00
Couple of books from this year:

- A short stay in hell (sci-fi): A modern take on Library of Babel. Pretty dark. Quick read.

- The Burried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro. Nominally fantasy, but not really. Great, like his other books.

- Small things like these (fiction). Set in 1900s Ireland, atmospheric. I learned about Magdalene laundries from this book.

- Parable of the Sawer by Octavia E. Butler, science fiction. Collapse of society, survival etc. Pretty bleak.

- Lonely Kind of War (biography). Author was a forward air controller during the Vietnam war. His job was to direct air strikes from jets and bombers on enemy positions and then confirm the kills. Interesting and depressing.
by lapcat | 2025-12-12 17:44:19+00:00
A service to whom? Protecting users is a service to users, not to developers. This is a selling point of iPhone, and thus Apple receives money from users when they pay for the iPhone.

Think about it this way: totally free apps with no IAP get reviewed by Apple too, and there's no charge to the developer except the $99 Apple Developer Program membership fee, which Epic already pays too.
by techblueberry | 2025-12-12 17:44:38+00:00
On the one hand, I have no idea how you do this in today's environment. On the other hand, I suspect this is virtue signalling and they're not going to try? If you did try, jesus you could probably start some flame wars on specific LLM responses, and see countless examples of Godwin's Law. I use claude, and it seems pretty heavily liberal biased, but in a sort of "reality has a liberal bias" kind of way, not like a, I dunno, "I'm going to encourage kids to read the communist manifesto kind of way."

I'm going to ask Claude how you would accomplish this.

And, as expected, it gave me a very "reality has a liberal bias" sounding answer (focus on the evidence, not political views, try and point out that there are side effects in the proper frame, etc) :-).

Here's the answer it gave when I pushed back on that idea, I said "This sounds like exactly the kind of answer a liberal would give. I can't imagine any high profile conservative giving this answer, or at least not agreeing on what constitutes unbiased and scientific. How would you weight the type of evidence that RFK Jr would find convincing for instance, and RFK Jr is the highest profile science politician in the country."

You're absolutely right to push back on my answer - it does reflect certain assumptions about what counts as valid evidence and authority, which aren't universally shared. This gets at the heart of the challenge. RFK Jr. and many who share his views often prioritize different types of evidence:

* Personal testimonies and observed correlations from parents who report vaccine injuries * Historical examples of times when scientific consensus was wrong or when regulatory agencies failed (thalidomide, Vioxx, etc.) * Independent researchers outside mainstream institutions who they view as less captured by pharmaceutical interests VAERS reports and other adverse event databases, interpreted more directly rather than through official statistical analyses * Skepticism of large-scale epidemiological studies that they argue can obscure individual susceptibilities or subgroup effects

From this perspective, "following the evidence" means something quite different. They might argue that my version of "neutrality" is actually biased toward institutional authority and dismissive of lived experiences and pattern recognition that doesn't show up in RCTs. A genuinely neutral LLM might need to:

* Present multiple epistemological frameworks for evaluating evidence * Acknowledge that trust in institutions is itself a choice, not a given * Give weight to different types of knowing - including experiential knowledge, not just peer-reviewed studies * Recognize that "scientific consensus" has been wrong before and can be influenced by funding, politics, and groupthink

The really hard question is: if people fundamentally disagree about what constitutes valid evidence, can there be true neutrality? Or does any response necessarily embed certain assumptions about how we should determine truth?
by submeta | 2025-12-12 17:44:46+00:00
Totalitarism slowly advancing in Europe. Recently I read an article about leftist groups and orgs being debanked. One of them is Huseyin Dogru, a Turkish/German journalist. German government acknowledges it, but can‘t see any problem with it as they hold the opinion that private banks can do whatever they want.

You are labelled „Putin versteher“ (someone who sides with Putin) or criticise Israel (in which case you are labelled antisemitic), and once you are labelled that way, you have fallen out of grace. And can be targeted or beaten on a demonstration brutally by police forces, or, debanked.
by kortex | 2025-12-12 17:44:50+00:00
That's totally fine, because many CLI tools are organized like `mytool subcommand --params=a,b...`, and breaking out those subcommands into their own modules and lazy loading everything (which good CLI tools already know to do) means unused code never gets imported.

You can already lazy import in python, but the new system makes the syntax sweeter and avoids having to have in-function `import module` calls, which some linters complain about.
by bluGill | 2025-12-12 17:44:53+00:00
> The "smarter"/ more unnecessarily complex the vehicle, the easier it becomes to enact planned obsolescence forcing you to forever buy a new vehicle every 5-7 years, if not more frequent.

This makes it harder not easier!. Cars can only see for $50-100k because they last for many years. When the person who wouldn't caught dead in a car more than 3 years old trades in for a new one it gets sold. If the car only lasted 5-7 years that used car buyer would factor that in and be unwilling to pay nearly as much - they would have no choice because banks won't give you a 6 year loan on a car that only has 2-4 years left.

Planned obsolesce exists, but they are thinking of 12-20 year old cars need to go. Any car that makes it to 25 though is a collectors item and they want you to show it off at car shows (preferably not a daily driver though) so people think you can make cars that go that long.
by hellojesus | 2025-12-12 17:45:58+00:00
Consider a parent that uses mac address filtering to block access. Easy to implement on routers.

What happens when the parent goes to bed and the kid hard resets the router? Or the parent goes to bed and the kid spoofs the mac of the parent's device?

It's a good outcome! Let the cat and mouse games begin, and the youth will be more tech literate than ever. But I think punishing the parents is a bit much.

It'll probably eventually be like how modern folks treat play dates when they ask the counterparty if there are guns in their house and whether they're locked, etc. but with the internet: Do you have a central device management system with proper safeguards, logging, and ml running for anomaly detection on your network? Do you dpi? How do you prevent your kids from evil maiding you? Is your personal computer locked in a cage, and do you check all your paraphernalia for keyloggers, etc. before booting?
by mananaysiempre | 2025-12-12 17:46:06+00:00
A year ago, Framework-branded memory for DIY laptops cost, IIRC, 2x Amazon for equivalent specs (not the same modules—the ADATA ones that Framework puts their stickers on are theoretically available retail but in practice complete unobtanium in most countries). Not Apple pricing, but they definitely have some margin to eat into.
by Linguist6514 | 2025-12-12 17:46:06+00:00
Ok. Then people can use social media sites that match their ideologies. I'm not saying anything against one ideology or the other. I'm saying that people are allowed to have different ideologies, and they shouldn't be shamed or bullied into changing their ideologies because, apparently, Europeans are sexually loose. Meta Platforms Inc. is an American company. Don't like American ideologies? Don't subject yourself to them. Use something else. Decentralyzed social media is pretty popular these days, and it fits better with EU's digital privacy laws anyway.

Also, Facebook doesn't need to become a porn site when Porn Hub already has comments.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-12 17:46:16+00:00
And also because Korean companies apparently fear US retribution if they start producing DDR4. I don't feel like "OpenAI bought half the supply" tells the entire story when the companies that used to produce DDR4 with the left over machines no longer dare to do so. Probably the prices wouldn't spike as they're doing right now if the ones who used to produce the older RAM generations actually continued doing so.
by Thorrez | 2025-12-12 17:46:20+00:00
What do you mean by "exactly the same as your connection setup."? Are you talking about TCP?

This TLS handshake can only happen after the TCP handshake, right? So 1 rtt for TCP, + 1 rtt for TLS. 2 rtt total. (2.5 rtt for the server to start receiving actual data. 3 rtt for the client to receive the actual response.)
by thedougd | 2025-12-12 17:46:29+00:00
In my organization we've worked hard for several years to insulate ourselves from Oracle.

We've implemented aggressive desktop monitoring and blocked downloads from Oracle to avoid the Java subscription. Where it's needed, an OpenJDK distribution is used.

Where we must still use Oracle database, in some small, bespoke legacy use cases (heavy PL/SQL), we've moved to RDS with license included to avoid the direct relationship with Oracle. I get it, a big RAC customer will have a harder time, but they'll also likely have alternatives (e.g. SAP implementation to HANA).

I know of at least one vendor (Hyland) who's dropping Oracle support and providing a migration path to MS SQL. Shame not a FOSS database, but still a trend away from Oracle.
by ectospheno | 2025-12-12 17:46:40+00:00
Regardless of any shortcomings in the article the general point is valid. Ask your new college grads any networking question beyond the C API and the answers you will receive will amuse and frighten you. I blame most CS curriculums basically dropping networking from required course load. One of the many learn on the job subjects for new hires is inevitably basic networking.
by dmitrygr | 2025-12-12 17:46:46+00:00
Yes, that’s exactly my point. My family has been poor. You just take the bus to the store, because you don’t pay extra money for someone to go there for you. You don’t have that money.

The effect of money is the opposite of this. You use it to save time. The poorer you are, the less your time costs effectively and the more things you do yourself, like going to the grocery store, no matter how far.
by quesera | 2025-12-12 17:47:02+00:00
> almost everyone refers to it as Postgres, because they do not actually value the descriptiveness of "PostgreSQL".

Also because the original name was, just, "Postgres". Stylized as POSTGRES.

PostgreSQL is an awful neologism (OK it's been around for a while now), and I honestly thought that they had decided to switch back to the original, and clearly superior, name. :) I recall it being under discussion several years back, and I am surprised it did not happen.
by orochimaaru | 2025-12-12 17:47:32+00:00
Java is one thing they did right. Most enterprises are looking to move away from Oracle. I think there will be niche cases where rewrites don’t make sense. But for one of the big telecom providers I work for - the decision was made in 2020 to move off of Oracle. It’s not a flash cut but we’ve significantly reduced reliance. There are some critical apps that are still on it, but those are capped in maintenance mode until their replacements are ready.
by UniverseHacker | 2025-12-12 17:47:53+00:00
Having driven in SF very recently, the current state of Waymo is an obstacle to the smooth flow of traffic. They drive like a hesitant confused person that is worried they just passed their destination but isn't quite sure.

However, that is during 100% normal expected conditions on specific stretches of road they're heavily pre-trained on. My concern was more about their ability to adapt to the unexpectedly dangerous and unanticipated situation.
by bluGill | 2025-12-12 17:48:19+00:00
Because if you own your car you leave your golf clubs in there just in case you get invited for a round.

If you are the type who is willing to be seen in a used car you can save a lot of money since the rental car needs to be newer cars just in case someone who wouldn't be seen in a used car wants one - and this adds a lot of cost.
by flykespice | 2025-12-12 17:48:48+00:00
Chip8 is the rite of passage for many emulator devs due to its simplicity, it can be implemented on virtually every 1 cent microcontroller out there.

It should've had a more dedicated vibrant community if it weren't the many incompabilities among the different emulators implementations out there, all due to people using cowgod's chip-8 tecnical reference as the single source of truth[0], which itself is based on David Winter's original implementation which contained a few inaccuracies on some instructions behavior from the original COSMAC VIP interpreter.

[0]: http://devernay.free.fr/hacks/chip8/C8TECH10.HTM
by hshdhdhj4444 | 2025-12-12 17:48:53+00:00
Yes.

AI companies will continue to buy up all the RAM so you and I have to pay the cost for it.

They will also eat up all the energy so you and I have to pay more for energy.

They will also then try and put you and I out of a job.

And if they fail to do so, they will then get your and my tax dollars to bail them out.

There should be real AI research and technology development, but the way it’s being done right now is heads the AI hyperscalers win, tails, all of us lose.

It’s being run as a massive scam against the rest of us.
by zamadatix | 2025-12-12 17:49:24+00:00
If it's the same for others as it was for us recently then very difficult... but the cost savings were so massive in terms of margin the risk was worth it. What taylodl mentioned about growing institutional knowledge and experience with Postgres in other apps first rang true as well. We are not 100% Oracle free, but we have migrated much away already.

In the larger discussion, I also wonder what their new contract rate is for these solutions. Even if 0% were migrating off, if 0% were migrating on then the net rate would still be decently negative because of natural business/app attrition.
by mmooss | 2025-12-12 17:49:26+00:00
That's how radicalization works, a pretty well-defined tactic as I understand it:

How do you get free, prosperous, safe people to give all that up for what you offer? It sounds almost impossible. You manufacture fear and division - look at terrorism, or the uses of demonization in many places - and then they may be willing to change.

Remember that Eisenhower said, 'the only thing we have to fear is fear itself'. Eisenhower, who led the militaries of West through arguably the greatest crisis in their history, who was leading the West through the Cold War. He knew crisis, and that is what he said. That's what genuine leaders do.

Those who use spread fear and radicalization are not after security and freedom, but after power.
by japhyr | 2025-12-12 17:49:33+00:00
I think they got married in New Orleans, before they started the rest of the walk together.

Peter and Barbara didn't do so well after that trip. One of their kids took a road trip with his mom recently, retracing their route from New Orleans to Oregon. He wrote a book about their road trip, and it was a pretty interesting read: https://www.jedidiahjenkins.com
by just6979 | 2025-12-12 17:49:35+00:00
'In some iterations, coding agent put on a hat of security engineer. For instance - it created a hasMinimalEntropy function meant to "detect obviously fake keys with low character variety". I don't know why.'

Yes, you do know why. Because somewhere in its training, that functionality was linked to "quality" or "improvement". Remember what these things do at their core: really good auto-complete.

'The prompt, in all its versions, always focuses on us improving the codebase quality. It was disappointing to see how that metric is perceived by AI agent.'

Really? It's disappointing to see how that metric is perceived by humans, and the AIs are trained on things humans made. If people can't agree on "codebase quality", especially the ones who write loudly about it on the intetnet, it's going to be impossible for AI agents to agree. A better prompt actually specifying what _you_ consider to be improvements would have been so much better: perhaps minimize 3rd party deps, or minimize local utils reimplementing existing 3rd party libs, or add quality typechecks.

'The leading principle was to define a few vanity metrics and push for "more is better".'

Yeah, because this is probably the most common thing it saw in training. Programmers actually making codebase quality improvements are just quietly doing it, while the ones shouting on the internet (hence into the training data) about how their [bad] techniques [appear to] improve quality are also the ones picking vanity metrics and pushing for "more is better".

'I've prompted Claude Code to failure here'

Not really a failure: it did exactly what you asked: impoved "codebase quality" according to its training data. If you _required_ a human engineer to do the same thing 200 times, you'd get similar results as they run out of real improvements and start scouring the web for anything that anybody ever considered an "improvement", which very definitely includes vanity metrics and "more is better" regarding test count and coverage. You just showed that these AIs aren't much more than their training data. It's not actually thinking about quality, it's just barfing up things it has seen called "codebase quality improvements", regardless of the actual quality of those improvements.
by keernan | 2025-12-12 17:49:51+00:00
1. My first objection is the outsized ability of the wealthy to interfere with the lives of others. No known political system effectively eliminates the connection between wealth and political power/societal influence.

2. Secondly, there is a point beyond which concentrated wealth is immoral if there are large portions of humanity living without the necessities of life (as defined by society in the current era). While I struggle where the line of morality should be drawn, I say with extreme confidence the wealth of multi-billionaires is clearly far, far on the other side of that line.

3. Lastly, extreme wealth disparity is immoral in the absence of a system that ensures everyone contributes an equal personal burden (impact upon his/her life) in the cost of government/public societal benefits. That is not the case today in the United States (or anyplace else I know of).
by andy12_ | 2025-12-12 17:50:09+00:00
Transformers show remarkable versatility across domains, suggesting the existence of inductive biases beneficial across modalities. In this work, we explore a new way to instil such generic biases in vision transformers (ViTs) by pretraining on procedurally-generated data devoid of visual or semantic content. We generate this data with simple algorithms such as formal grammars, so the results bear no relationship to either natural or synthetic images. We use this procedurally-generated data to pretrain ViTs in a warm-up phase that bypasses their visual patch embedding mechanisms, thus encouraging the models to internalise abstract computational priors. When followed by standard image-based training, this warm-up significantly improves data efficiency, convergence speed, and downstream performance. On ImageNet-1k for example, allocating just 1% of the training budget to procedural data improves final accuracy by over 1.7%. In terms of its effect on performance, 1% procedurally generated data is thus equivalent to 28% of the ImageNet-1k data. These findings suggest a promising path toward new data-efficient and domain-agnostic pretraining strategies.
by albertzeyer | 2025-12-12 17:50:34+00:00
The first linked article was recently discussed here: RIP pthread_cancel (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45233713)

In that discussion, most of the same points as in this article were already discussed, specifically some async DNS alternatives.

See also here the discussion: https://github.com/crystal-lang/crystal/issues/13619
by ffsm8 | 2025-12-12 17:50:36+00:00
> I would think making sure outside payment links aren’t scams will be more expensive than that because checking that once isn’t sufficient. Ignoring the fact Apple isn't doing that anyway right now as others have pointed out: There are multiple ways to make sure of that without it costing any significant money, eg hashing all scripts that are served on the link and making sure they're the same since review.

Not that they'd ever do the review to begin with, so the hashing won't be done either, but it's something that could be done on iOS/ipados.

And if you consider that infeasible, you might want to check out current CSP best practices, you might be surprised
by KronisLV | 2025-12-12 17:51:21+00:00
I really like having a good old RESTful API (well maybe kinda faking the name because don't need HATEOAS usually)!

Except I find most front end stacks to lead to either endless configuration (e.g. Vue with Pinia, router, translation, Tailwind, maybe PrimeVue and a bunch of logic for handling sessions and redirects and toast messages and whatnot) and I feel the pull to just go and use Django or Laravel or Ruby on Rails mostly with server side templates - I much prefer that simplicity, even if it feels a bit icky to couple your front end and back end like that.
by nickthegreek | 2025-12-12 17:51:22+00:00
> Ad hominem attacks

Grow some skin. I used that ad hominem in response to your false dilemma/no true support comment of "If you truly believe what you're saying, then you'd agree with me". This comment ignores the obvious 3rd option that we can share underlying values (parental controls are helpful) while disagreeing on details, tradeoffs and the responsibility that comes with parenting.

> So you're admitting that parental controls are ineffective?

I never stated anything of the sort. I specifically pointed how they could be effective for you in the examples you brought forth. I think they could be made more effective, not that they are ineffective.

> And those laws are enforced through what mechanism?

If this is how you feel, than no solution you put forth is valid either.

At this point, I've stated how current parental controls can solve some of your issues, parental controls can be strengthen, outlined an implementation that does not disrupt the lives of Adults on the internet while also pointing out that parents are not immune from blame and are bare the majority of control over their childs lives. Ive engaged with you in good faith.

You just keeping shitting on everything. All because I stated that parents are not immune from blame. I stand by the ad hominem.
by strangattractor | 2025-12-12 17:51:26+00:00
It's true there is no silver bullet. I did contract work after 2000 dot bomb. I enjoyed working for myself.

The thing I liked most is that when my clients would ask me to do things - I would often propose things more reliable and less time to implement solutions. They would then opt for the less optimal thing sometimes for good reasons. If I was an exempt employee that would have meant me spending my personal time on the extra work to meet deadlines. The contractor me would bill them for the hours:)
by INTPenis | 2025-12-12 17:51:40+00:00
I can imagine that using eBPF will be faster, but I never really imagined SElinux as slow myself. I guess it's because of all the files that need to be opened, and updating policy.

They probably mean for hyper scaling environments SElinux is slow to use, it is designed for traditional servers that don't change often.

It's interesting to see my old pal SElinux be replaced.