MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jchw | 2026-01-08 12:39:25+00:00
This doesn't make any sense to me.

If you wanted to verify the contents of a dependency, you would want to check go.sum. That's what it is there for, after all. So if you wanted to fetch the dependencies, then you would want to use it to verify hashes.

If all you care about the is the versions of dependencies, you really can (and should) trust go.mod alone. You can do this because there are multiple overlapping mechanisms that all ensure that a tag is immutable once it is used:

- The Go CLI tools will of course use the go.sum file to validate that a given published version of a module can never change (at least since it was depended on, but it also is complementary with the features below as well, so it can be even better than that.)

- Let's say you rm the go.sum file. That's OK. They also default to using the Go Sum DB to verify that a given published version of a module can never change. So if a module has ever been `go get`'d by a client with the Sum DB enabled and it's publicly accessible, then it should be added to the Sum DB, and future changes to tags will cause it to be rejected.

- And even then, the module proxy is used by default too, so as soon as a published version is used by anyone, it will wind up in the proxy as long as its under a suitable license. Which means that even if you go and overwrite a tag, almost nobody will ever actually see this.

The downside is obviously all of this centralized infrastructure that is depended on, but I think it winds up being the best tradeoff; none of it is a hard dependency, even for the "dependencies should be immutable" aspect thanks to go.sum files. Instead it mostly helps dependency resolution remain fast and reproducible. Most language ecosystems have a hard dependency on centralized infrastructure, whether it is a centralized package manager service like NPM or a centralized repository on GitHub, whereas the centralized infrastructure with Go is strictly complementary and you can even use alternative instances if you want.

But digression aside, because of that, you can trust the version numbers in go.mod.
by rambojohnson | 2026-01-08 12:40:29+00:00
“Bit rot is a myth” is junior dev bro pedantry.

Bit rot isn’t some mystical decay, it’s dependency drift: APIs change, platforms evolve, security assumptions expire, build chains break. Software survives because people continuously adapt it to a moving substrate.

Reducing churn is good. Pretending maintenance disappears is fantasy. Software doesn’t decay in isolation, it decays relative to everything it depends on. And it sounds like you don’t know anything about Newtonian dynamics either.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-01-08 12:40:36+00:00
Re signed - that is a fair point, although it raises the question, why is the distributed artifact not cryptographically authenticated?

Maybe I'm misunderstanding but I thought the whole point of the exercise was to avoid token compromise. Framed another way that means the goal is authentication of the CI/CD pipeline itself, right? Wouldn't signing a fingerprint be the default solution for that?

Unless there's some reason to hide the build source from downstream users of the package?

Re verified, doesn't this qualify as verifying that the source of the artifact is the expected CI/CD pipeline? I suppose "authenticated publishing" could also work for the same reason.
by machomaster | 2026-01-08 12:41:13+00:00
> We have to take the Presidents Statements are credible, firstly, because it's the closest thing to the truth anyone has.

You are welcome to believe everything that President Putin is saying about anything, including Ukraine.

That's a profoundly absurd statement. Appeal to authority is a fallacy, especially with a trackrecord of an "authority" lying.

If the President's words are the truth, what to do with the statements in which he contradicts himself? What about situations in which 2 presidents disagree?

>The presidents statements in an official context are official, that's it.

Official, perhaps most of the time. Truthful, definitely not.

What's up with the inability to separate "opinions/statements" vs. "facts/truth"?..
by class3shock | 2026-01-08 12:41:25+00:00
"Real estate investors, both individual and institutional, bought one-third of all single-family residential properties sold in the second quarter of 2025"

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/07/home-sales-investors-make-up...

As long as we have this focus on using homes as investment and rent prices are kept high through collusion, the industry refusing to build "non-luxury" units, and regulation hurdles stopping new entrants, we will be stuck with this problem.
by htmXlabs | 2026-01-08 12:42:08+00:00
The reasons however are not so valid anymore in 2026.
Plain HTML has lots of extra features that did not exist in 2010 (form-validation and input-types, canvas, fetch, history-API), and some shortcomings have disappeared (like 'Flash of Unstyled Content'.)

Endless scrolling (made popular by Facebook/react) used to be heavy on the browser and sometimes made mobile devices unresponsive. That is not an issue anymore.

Tbh, I can't name a single issue we have today that requires large client-side frameworks for a fix.
by glenstein | 2026-01-08 12:42:17+00:00
I'm sorry but is nobody reading TFA? It quite specifically is saying there's a population of disproportionate meat eaters, noting that they're older, they're whiter, and influenced by cultural traditions normalizing it.

It's not just saying it pops out of the data as a statistical curiosity, it's saying that there is a real subset of the population who are disproportionately eating more beef.
by josefrichter | 2026-01-08 12:42:42+00:00
Didn't he basically observe the second law of thermodynamics?

The Second Law says an imbalance (like heat in one corner of a room) will "solve itself" by spreading out until the room is balanced. The Napoleon Technique assumes that a "social imbalance" (a crisis, a frantic email, or a minor conflict) will often "cool down" or reach a state of balance on its own if you simply wait.

In my part of the world, we call this technique "let it rot out" :-)
by staticassertion | 2026-01-08 12:43:28+00:00
> IMHO a fact that a bug hides for years can also be indication that such bug had low severity/low priority and therefore that the overall quality is very good.

It doesn't seem to indicate that. It indicates the bug just isn't in tested code or isn't reached often. It could still be a very severe bug.

The issue with longer lived bugs is that someone could have been leveraging it for longer.
by onion2k | 2026-01-08 12:43:38+00:00
I've always thought it's a shame that CSS PaintWorklets (https://developer.chrome.com/blog/paintapi/) can't access DOM elements to apply GLSL effects to things on a page. I understand why (it'd be a security nightmare having things rendered by something that's not the browser) but it's still annoying. I could make some cool stuff.
by donnietb | 2026-01-08 12:44:39+00:00
I think they tried it already in the original transformer paper. THe results were not worth implementing.

From the paper(where Additive attention is the other "similarity function"):

Additive attention computes the compatibility function using a feed-forward network with
a single hidden layer. While the two are similar in theoretical complexity, dot-product attention is
much faster and more space-efficient in practice, since it can be implemented using highly optimized
matrix multiplication code.
by DonHopkins | 2026-01-08 12:45:42+00:00
That's a trite, low effort, worthless, content free comment, which totally misses the point and fails to engage. You haven't made any other comments contributing to this discussion, except that one shallow drive by complaint. If you're going to whine about using llms as a shell, then at least try to do better than an llm or redditor yourself.

So do you disagree with any of my points, or my direct replies to other people's points, or is that all you can think of to say, instead of engaging?

Do you prefer to use bash directly? Why? If not, then what is your alternative?

What do you think of Anthropic Skills? Have you used or made any yourself, or can you suggest any improvements? I've created 50+ skills, and I've suggested, implemented, and tested seven architectural extensions -- do you have any criticism of those?

Obviously you use llms yourself, so you're not a complete luddite, and you must have some deeper more substantial understanding and criticism than those two words from your own experience.

How do your own ideas that you blogged about in "My LLM System Prompt" compare to my ideas and experience, in your own "professional, no bullshit, scientific" opinion?

https://mahesh-hegde.github.io/posts/llm_system_prompt/

Your entire blog post on LLM prompts is "I don't like verbiage" in five sentences. Ironic, then, that your entire contribution here is two empty words. I made specific technical points, replied to real people, linked proof. 'Slop' is the new 'TL;DR' -- a confession of laziness dressed as critique. Calling substance slop while contributing nothing? That's actual slop.
by mxmilkiib | 2026-01-08 12:47:12+00:00
"immersion" as a better translation than "concentration", suggested by Sujato

(can't remember their exact chat about that EBT translation compared to Bodhi or Brahm in whichever of the miriad of Buddhist Society of Western Australia talk/retreat videos I heard it discussed)

e.g. in https://suttacentral.net/mn44/en/sujato

mindfulness of body sensation, feeling, thought and principle bringing enough equanimity to start ignoring it all really easy, though the moral aspect can't be separated because doing not wholesome actions will leave you thinking about them
by SkiFire13 | 2026-01-08 12:47:17+00:00
> This will prevent bucket collisions on hash table resizing

Fibonacci hashing is really adding another multiplicative hashing step followed by dropping the bottom bits using a shift operation instead of the top bits using an and operation. Since it still works by dropping bits, items that were near before the resize will still be near after the resize and it won't really change anything.
by HoJojoMojo | 2026-01-08 12:47:31+00:00
Provocative is a stretch. A year ago a Danish soldier who responded to an ambiguous situation involving US bases that might be real or might be an exercise would have been court martialed and probably not able to justify their actions with this law despite it being on the books. The reminder is an emphasis that the US can be presumed to be such an invading force.
Shared State Context for AI Agents [Ask/Show][Looking for Beta]
by aperi | 2026-01-08 12:47:33+00:00
Hola Hackers!

I'm building Rice (docs.tryrice.com). Think of Rice as a managed state machine for AI agents with long term memory.

Rice is a platform that unifies long term memory and short term state management for AI agents. Effectively, Rice solves the context compounding issue in the immediate sense - by using Rice Slate (our state management service), the context consumption was down 60%. This makes the agents more efficient. The state management layer also allows agents to share context without the conventional "message passing" approach meaning you can run parallel AI agents.

The memory layer enables the agents to have a broader contextual understand of the data and relationships - personalisation and automation at scale for agents.

How we're different (https://docs.tryrice.com/rice-vs) and working on some cool aspects.

The core value prop -

1. Auditable Agentic executions out of the box
2. Shared state for AI agents (not using message passing approach) for efficient executions
3. Persistent memory for historical data and more.

Currently in beta phase, so looking for beta testers. Appreciate any thoughts and tests.

Please enter your email at tryrice.com if you'd like to get in the beta.
by jiggawatts | 2026-01-08 12:47:33+00:00
The default Mutex struct in Rust makes it impossible to modify the data it protects without holding the lock.

"Each mutex has a type parameter which represents the data that it is protecting. The data can only be accessed through the RAII guards returned from lock and try_lock, which guarantees that the data is only ever accessed when the mutex is locked."

Even if used with more complex operations, the RAII approach means that the example you provided is much less likely to happen.
by treetalker | 2026-01-08 12:48:34+00:00
I'm a lawyer and I do not do this type of work. My spidey sense is tingling nevertheless, raising questions about UPL and whether this appears to reduce upfront costs in exchange for a time-bomb of (not so) invisible risk and far greater costs down the line. What happens when things go pear-shaped and the claim is lack of due diligence? "Oh, 'the chatbot must have missed that,' you say?" A single lawsuit from anywhere could easily cost multiple times what the firm quoted.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
by ghyvcggvv | 2026-01-08 12:48:53+00:00
Define BBQ; in the US it means two things depending on the location; Southern style slow cooked meat that falls apart on your fork, or grilling?

If you mean grilling, at least every 8 days! Hopefully more often than that! And what's the issue? I can cook indoors or outside the same meal but avoid the smoke and heating the house.
by thicccaf | 2026-01-08 12:48:56+00:00
I appreciated them in earlier hearing aids. Back when the programming of them was still average (voice focus tech was still infancy) they were a godsend. When I was in primary school and HA tech was super average, I had a mini version where a teacher would wear a mic and I had a receiver that went directly to my hearing aids. It was amazing being able to hear the teacher clearly over even average background noise. As mentioned some have gone with BT over induction loops which I can understand. However, on my Phonak, they are super disappointing range wise. As an aside the integrated mic in my Phonak is practically useless. Very disappointing given their cost of nearly $10k AUD.
by y-curious | 2026-01-08 12:48:59+00:00
> positive change happens

> “Goshdangit why did arbiter of change get lobbied by [tangential cartel]?”

I don’t think it’s a good take, although I won’t go so far as to accuse you of political bias. It’s not like the guidelines say to eat Tyson-branded chicken; Let’s not complain about positive progress.

You know what got the flawed food pyramid created? Lobbying by Seventh Day Adventists. That did not get enough outrage as it hurt countless people in ways that are difficult to quantify. They made fat and meat the enemy across the country because of their religious beliefs. They paid off researchers and even had one claim that Coca Cola was healthier than steak.

Let’s focus on forward progress and not how we got there.
by jjav | 2026-01-08 12:49:32+00:00
> But it's not "correct" and doesn't make sense for the vast majority of people.

It is absolutely the correct way to track the value of assets.

Whether it makes sense for a particular person is subjective. Some people care, some don't. Clearly you don't. Nothing wrong with not caring so I don't say that negativelty. You do you, as they say. But, the fact that you don't care does not alter reality nor invalidate the math.

> Can you at least agree that a car doesn't lose any value just by driving it off the forecourt?

Of course it does lose value when you sign the purchase papers, this is not debatable. Not a matter of opinion.

You can trivially prove this if you wanted to. Go buy a new car from the dealer, drive it a mile or less to the nearest parking lot and now try to sell that car for the same amount you paid. You will never be able to find a buyer. If you want to sell that car you will have to lower the price to get any takers. So there, you lost money.

> The point of a post like this is to strip back the bullshit and just say it like it is: finance is a bunch of children in adult bodies playing games

Probably not worth trying to continue to respond factually in that case.
by _flux | 2026-01-08 12:50:03+00:00
> In order to have a chat with an LLM, every time the whole conversation history gets reprocessed - it is not just the last answer / question gets send to the LLM but all preceding back and forth.

Btw, context caching can overcome this, e.g. https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/caching . However, this means it needs to persist the (large) state in the server side, so it may have costs associated to it.
by ncruces | 2026-01-08 12:50:20+00:00
Conversely, I can say that an hash being in go.sum doesn't mean it will be used for anything.

Only that if the corresponding version does get used, and the hash doesn't match, you get an error. But you can have multiple versions of the same dep in your go.sum - or none at all - and this has no bearing on what version gets picked when you build your module.

The version that does get picked is the one in go.mod of the main module, period; go.sum, if it exists, assists hash verification.

Yes, if you want a lockfile in the npm sense, you need both.

But a Go module does not get built with new transitive dependencies (as was claimed) unless they're listed in some go.mod; go.sum is irrelevant for that.
by kachapopopow | 2026-01-08 12:50:25+00:00
haven't done bug hunting with openai so cannot comment, but given the right tools opus can most definitely solve bugs as well.

I think opus is special because it was trained explicitely on very strong reliance on such tools while gpt seems to "know" how things work a lot better reducing the need for tools.

opus being able to dedicate a lot more parameters for these things make it a better model if you give it what it needs, but that's just my observation. it's also much faster as a bonus.
by jcattle | 2026-01-08 12:51:10+00:00
> abusing open source as a vector for it

It seems like you are very against open source not being an altruistic endeavor. Or that you should not make money with an open source project. I would like to challenge you on that.

Would you say that the Linux Foundation is a net positive on the software ecosystem? How about big open source projects like curl or QGIS? How about mattermost or nextcloud? All of these have full-time employees working on them (The Linux Foundation generated almost 300 million USD of gross revenue in 2024).

I would argue that good monetization is paramount to a healthy open source ecosystem.

Both can be true:

- AI training on your code is success

- AI undermining the sustainability of your project by reducing funding is an issue

Also, I see you haven't changed your mind much on the training LLMs being one of the major benefits of open source since the last discussion we had ;)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44155746#44156782
by glenstein | 2026-01-08 12:51:22+00:00
>ie, we may legitimately have different needs.

Well the point of nutrition research is to account for that kind of thing. And it's true enough that men and women have specifically different protein needs. But person-to-person variation doesn't scale up into pure randomness. The reason it's possible to make meaningful population level nutrition recommendations is precisely because of broadly shared commonalities, about what is both good and bad for us.
by sarreph | 2026-01-08 12:51:23+00:00
I really don't think this should be a registry-level issue. As in, the friction shouldn't be introduced into _publishing_ workflows, it should be introduced into _subscription_ workflows where there is an easy fix. Just stop supporting auto-update (through wildcard patch or minor versions) by default... Make the default behaviour to install whatever version you load at install time (like `npm ci` does)
by simne | 2026-01-08 12:52:07+00:00
Amateurs in USSR 50 years ago made wireless and powerless headphones, which use wire lay on perimeter of room to transfer sound and power.

In headphones there is tiny coil.

It really work and very reliable, but result coil (size of room) have very large reactive resistance, so it is nearly impossible to transfer even high frequencies, only low (bass) and medium, so it workable for speech but music is heavily distorted.
by stvltvs | 2026-01-08 12:52:45+00:00
> Rejecting federal solutions now is not the answer. The answer is to let them solve the problem and insist that things go back to normal afterward.

If those federal solutions are not intended to solve unauthorized residency but instead to put us in a permanent authoritarian state where we don't have an afterward where we have the power to insist on things?

That's the greater threat than "illegals" at the moment IMHO.
by MohskiBroskiAI | 2026-01-08 12:53:08+00:00
You've just demonstrated exactly why this matters.

You didn't check the code. You couldn't find errors in the formalization,
so you shifted to questioning my competence. This is a classic epistemic
defense mechanism—when you can't engage substance, you attack the
questioner instead of the question.

Let me explain what you're actually looking at, so you understand what
you dismissed:

THE PROBLEM:
P=NP requires that for every NP-complete problem, there exists a polynomial-time
algorithm. Computationally, this translates to maintaining a polynomial spectral
gap (Δ ~ n^-k) across the solution landscape.

THE PHYSICS:
Witten-Helffer-Sjöstrand (1982) proved that multi-well potentials (landscapes
with multiple local minima separated by barriers) enforce exponential spectral
gaps (Δ ~ e^-n) due to quantum tunneling effects. This is standard spectral
geometry—proven, published, non-controversial.

THE MAPPING:
3-SAT instances naturally map to multi-well potentials. Each satisfying assignment
is a local minimum. Each nonsatisfying assignment is a barrier. The energy
landscape of a 3-SAT instance IS a multi-well potential by construction.

THE CONTRADICTION:
For large n, n^-k ≤ e^-n is *logically impossible*. A polynomial gap cannot
satisfy an exponential gap constraint. This isn't opinion—it's mathematics.

Lean 4 verifies this logical inconsistency. The compiler doesn't care about
my credentials or your skepticism. It checks the axioms and the logic.

You asked me to "roast my axioms." I did. You're welcome to:
1. Check src/Impossibility.lean and identify a non-standard axiom
2. Show where the 3-SAT → multi-well mapping breaks down
3. Explain how n^-k can satisfy e^-n for large n

Or you can continue questioning my understanding. That's the easier route.

But here's what's interesting: When Dr. Rudolph Tanzi (Harvard) validated
our Alzheimer's work ("Matched Harvard's screening over 10 years"), he didn't
question whether I understood my own research. He checked it. He validated it.
Clinical trials are underway.

Same methodology. Same rigor. Different results.

This thread will be archived. When this proof is validated—by Avigad, Buzzard,
or whoever—people will come back to this exchange. They'll see you didn't check
the work. They'll see you questioned my competence instead.

And they'll understand: You couldn't engage the substance because you didn't
understand it. That's not your fault. P≠NP is hard. Spectral geometry is hard.

But don't pretend you roasted the axioms when you only questioned the author.

The formalization speaks for itself. Run the compiler. Then we'll talk.