skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Some people seem to be taking me saying "you must work on boring code" as a judgement against them as developers, and it isn't. I'm speaking directly from my experience: If I asked it beginner-tier questions about how to do X in Y language, it would get those right quite often. I could see Copilot being very useful if you're breaking into a new language, or just knocking the rust off the gears of one in your head.

And like, even for those who write a lot of boring code, like... cool man. I don't judge people for that. We need all code written and all code is not exciting, novel, or interesting and there's nothing wrong with doing it. Someone's gotta.

I'm just saying that the further up the proverbial complexity chain I went, the less able Copilot was. And once I was quite in the weeds, it seemed utterly perplexed and frankly, not worth the time in asking.
>I've been dipping my toes into the JS ecosystem, and I keep bumping into the fact that using mentally cheap signals of quality (such as stars or DL counts) almost never indicates the quality of the thing itself. Winners seem to be randomly chosen, almost! The only way to assess is to read the code and try integrating it in.

I wish morep people understood the "Kardashian effect" as I like to call it -- the most popular thing is only most popular because it was already popular. I think in almost everything in my life and in every domain, #2 or #3 is better-suited (for my preferences and needs).

A year or two ago on HN I read a short blog post about omitting the word "best" from internet searches and being more specific in your criteria (e.g. "car with best resale value" instead of "best car"), and it has made my life and way of thinking a lot better
Olé! (^..^)
The more sensitive detectors are, the more subject they are to spoofing, I'd think, since less noise is needed to look real.
The Italian bottom bracket threading standard is completely insane. Like, how do you even cut that, and why would anyone come up with that in preference to literally anything else?
Maybe because nobody really asked for these things gemoji and "rewrite my email".

Neural nets are a foundational technology there should be a ecosystem of apps based on it. People pay 1500$ for an iphone because it has apps, not to call and text people. I think its coming and Apple can't just NOT do AI, so I get it, but it will take a little time.
You presume it has to be incredibly long range? I'd be surprised if that is necessarily the case. Could also flat out do cables to many of them at rest.

Is it fool proof? Almost certainly not. It doesn't have to compete with perfect, though. Just with what we have right now.
Interesting, I only have Chase credit cards as well, and they don't take any of my Twilio numbers, or at least, they accept the number but I don't actually receive SMS codes.
But the idea of evolution giving protection against diseases it Lamarkian, surly?
Please explain.
there are workflows where the outputs are "narratives" - an example is customer support. another example is summarization of text. characteristic of these use cases is that there is no one right answer. in these use cases agents fit in well.

issue however, is that the agents cannot be chained. ie, chaining requires deterministic outputs and not narratives.
same goes for webp.
Xiaomi Home Integration for Home Assistant
For me the most interesting case is HeidiSQL. I find it easily the most useful SQL GUI client, but it crashes pretty frequently, but not frequently enough for me to stop using it over the alternatives.

I often wondered how to strike the balance right on these things, since apparently all options can lead to success.
This is what worries me. I'd say that >50% of the time, Copilot-generated summaries of meetings in which I was presenting misinterpret what I said in some important way.

I'd much rather (and do) take a couple minutes to write my own take-aways. It's the golden rule in a business context: I'd prefer to receive three one-sentence bullet points that are actually accurate over a couple pages of AI slop, so that's what I give to my colleagues.

The cross-language factor is an interesting angle I haven't had to contend with, though.
I'm in a large org where Copilot is pushed. What I've heard from upper management is that even a very small average productivity gain, multiplied by the number of developers we have, means that we have "saved" x number of man-hours per year. Man-hours can be translated into "number of employees", so if the Copilot license comes in under that employee salary total, it is a win.
Opinion: Perplexity offers several advantages over Google as a search engine
Looks like a very chaotic school.
Market for lemons. Read it, explains everything.
On this basis it’s difficult to beat Tinkercad, frankly.
Reply: things don't work well for the same reason this very post is so hard to read wall of text.

I find it deeply ironic that the author can't even produce readable text, while complaining about other, much more complex tasks not working.

The author refuses to take minimal, common-sense measures to make the text more readable.
I think the point isn't that they're trying to hide the fact that it's a Chinese company, but that they control the algorithms that can be used to push undeclared foreign state-sponsored content.
Cost saving as in...? Hopefully not saving through making human employees redundant.
IMO "Agents" are a marketing term, they are simply software that use LLMs somewhere in the backend. Often daisy chained into a series of operations that may involve additional LLM calls or calls to other internal/external services.

One we've been using for meeting notes + action items works quite well https://fireflies.ai
Cashier or Smartphone: Which Will Prevail?
I like that--generally I agree that LLMs inflating text is not adding value, but it is a great point that LLMs can help bridge language barriers.
Seems like this incents net-new legislation, and should also reward either removing or updating legislation.
Buster?
iirc there were some benchmarks for quic vs standard http1/2 and the quic was essentially on par. the only thing it provided was faster something(really don't remember) but overall there was no difference to the client.
I had no idea it was at this fine-grained a level.
This really touches on it. I'm a big advocate of these tools, but they author approximately zero lines of my code, yet I still find them invaluable and a wonderful tool to leverage, and do so constantly. Particularly in challenging projects and needs.

I suspect many who find them useless and decry them were sold an exaggerated utility and then were disappointed when they tried to generate libraries or even functions, then feeling deceived when there are errors or flaws, etc.
X is a fine example of a platform tuned to push propaganda, which helped get Trump elected. I wouldn't be shocked if X gets banned on EU for example, hopefully, they will set the example.
Well, even in a server-side PHP app, you have some client-side stuff for better interactivity and a smoother experience. Custom elements let you encapsulate this stuff. It's really not necessary, but if you want to reuse or redistribute them, they are pretty nice and self-contained (mostly).
I can confirm that at least the V4K43M-08 and the V4K50M-08 don't do that.

(It kind of implies you need to continue and update, but you can just go to HDMI and it doesn't bother you anymore.)
The thing is, how do you know which research is good or not? Is trusting a website good enough? I really doubt. BTW I do agree that we need to do some research beforehand, but with a lot of products it's difficult or impossible.
From the article:

> It's really hard to have an accurate model for why change is so hard in large bureaucratic institutions, and specifically for public sector ones, where the differences in governance really do matter.

From the discussion of organization types by Mintzberg, it seems a natural consequence. Bureaucracies are the efficient, right answer to stable circumstances - you make a stable organization, figure out the right answers and make everyone follow these answers. Non-compliance is a problem - the culture you aim for is "what's our accepted answer to this". When you think about it, what is change but non-compliance with the previously accepted rules?

(Software development is in the opposite category. The bread and butter is change and chaos.)
I used to be able to tell Siri "Turn off the lights."

Sometimes in 2017 or 2018 they "updated" it and now it replies "Which room?" Followed by slowly listing out the 6 or 7 options including "everywhere."

I haven't been able to reprogram myself to say "Turn off all the lights" which works as before. Hearing that reply is the equivalent of hitting your toe on a wardrobe.

This update didn't fix this. The functionality is the same as before.

Basic stuff, but no way to fix it.
Germany government collapses at a perilous time for Europe
There are some correlations. But I agree that you can be extroverted (whatever that means exactly) but most sales and marketing roles (which vary quite a bit) just don't appeal.
An American Family (TV show, 1970)
Achieve EU Dora Compliance: A Clear Path for SMEs
People vs. AI" – A Must-Have Gift for Tech Leaders (Free for 2 Days)
Hey HN,

If your boss or co-founder is into tech, AI Agents, or just loves a thought-provoking read, you’ve got to check out People vs AI on Amazon. It’s the ultimate Christmas gift – a deep dive into how AI is reshaping businesses, job roles, and decision-making.

This book is perfect for anyone budgeting for AI Agents in 2025 or just curious about how AI will impact their industry. Whether they’re an exec, a founder, or just someone fascinated by AI’s potential, this book delivers insights they’ll appreciate.

Here’s the kicker: the Kindle version is FREE for the next two days (yes, free!). If you’re like me and love the feel of a real book, the paperback is just $19.99. A thoughtful and affordable gift for any tech enthusiast—or even yourself (because why not?).

Grab it here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DPN1YHFW

Merry Christmas, HN!
super cool post!!
The edited scene with the cloaked obstruction during the orgy is the only known censor, but what we don't know is what was cut/removed as there are no comparisons and no comments possible from the Director/Writer. I guess we could ask Frederic Raphael but he is 93
I've seen this same problem with many so-called low-code/no-code application creation tools (e.g. Betty Blocks). In their quest to cover every use case, they cover none of them well, forcing compromises and creating more real-code work for the actual application developers whose systems have to be accessed by these tools.

It would have been quicker and cheaper if the company just hired more actual developers to integrate properly with existing systems (and resulted in more featureful, less buggy applications), but the prospect of paying lower salaries for less qualified people to do the same end result (as promised by the slopware vendors) seems to be a siren song of sorts to management.
When I was an Apple intern, Tim told us that technology only has an impact when it changes behaviors. Otherwise it’s a “gimmick.”

I wonder which behaviors Tim has changed from using Apple Intelligence?
Can-openers. 99% of them are utter trash. The one that works is a copy of a 60 year old model.
You get similar ones from alibaba from around $175 : https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Fresh-Air-Ventilation...
Here's the link to the book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DPN1YHFW
Oof, too relatable! I once saw a shortcut somebody shared that would turn your URL (really any text you shared to the shortcut) into a screen-sized edit box. I didn't grab it at the time, but it shouldn't be too difficult to recreate.
Yup, and that's another reason it works so well.

Now, it does break down somewhat when the core discussion is over or if someone is a bit disruptive (which has happened recently).

As a sibling comment to yours wrote, it DOES help that the topic is understood among everyone present, there is a clear intent to the gathering, and everyone has approximately the same motives.
Graph DBs are generalized relationship stores. SQL can work for querying graphs, but graph DB DSLs like Cypher become very powerful when you're trying to match across multiple relationship hops.

For example, to find all friend of a friend or friends of a friend of a friend:
`MATCH (user:User {username: "amanj41"})-[:KNOWS*2..3]->(foaf) WHERE NOT((user)-[:KNOWS]->(foaf)) RETURN user, foaf`
That may be a great solution for you. But if you want anything larger than 24 inches or so the cost is going to be astronomical compared to a TV.
Ok, I'll bite. How do you fund EoL care w/o the federal government involved?
>characteristic of these use cases is that there is no one right answer

I think what you mean is that they work best in cases where it's very hard to measure how well they are working.
What? A majority of New Yorkers don't own cars, and besides that the city government isn't exactly in a position to do much of anything to you if you challenge its "authoritarian regime".
> governments should go and ban selling goods of any kind below-cost

This is called "dumping" and is usually already illegal based on anti-competitive grounds, though mostly seems to only be enforced for international trade.
I haven't personally used it and I believe it's still relatively early in development, but it provides a pyspark compatible python API, so the idea is you should be able to migrate your Spark/Databricks workloads easily. Arroyo seems to be focused on Streaming. Lake Sail targets streaming and batch workloads.
The crucial bit for Vec::drain is in these two lines of code, which the article lists but does not discuss:

// set self.vec length's to start, to be safe in case Drain is leaked
self.set_len(start);

You cannot rely on Drop alone for safety, you need a fallback strategy in case of a leak (mem::forget or Rc cycle).
Rust lifetimes only ensure that there is no use after free; there is no guarantee that Drop is called before the end of the lifetime. It's possible to mutably access the original Vec after leaking a Drain.
Is this feature somehow different than what Google has had with lens and what Apple has had with the info button in regular photos for a while now?
They are quite accurate but the problem is that they sometimes leave out a critical piece of information said in the meeting that doesn't have a lot of repetition but that turns out to be like a crucial factor in the meeting and the LLMs completely miss that.
Might depend on the quality of crashes. Losing hours or days of work would quickly sour me. HP RGS crashes, twice or thrice daily are just 'meh' - reconnect and nothing - but 15 seconds and typing auth tokens - is lost - maybe 'flow' but I've become resilient there.
This is where the value of a second or third opinion can become apparent.
I think it depends. In the context of a discussion class, it makes sense, because you don't want to deviate too far from the purpose of the study. As someone else pointed out, it doesn't work as well for unstructured conversation.
Because making things that work well is not what modern markets are optimizing for. They're efficiently pursuing other agendas because they can get away with making things that work sorta.
Yep! Eventually you might just give up and pick a medium cost one that seems to be OK. Top quality products are like lottery nowadays.

I paid $100+ for a Logitech mouse and thought it is a good enough price, but it broke down in just a few months. Fortunately they gave me a second one, but I don't know how long it lives!
Having used it in the work. My 2 cts about the not free version: KEEP AWAY. RUN! Cannot do much more than any free SPICE, complex licensing, buggy. Is just like the LabVIEW of simulations.

I haven't used the free Version though.
My utterly cynical take is that the way to win with software is to put as much money and effort into marketing and sales as possible and as little as possible into the actual product. Especially B2B seems to do this a lot in practice because that software is bought based on checklist items and demos by salespeople.
I don't know why you got downvoted, but this is probably the ONLY one metrics that makes some sense.
Totally agree with you and you didn’t even count their insanely great M chips that even have the interest of people running Linux and servers.

Those chips are leading the industry in performance per watt and other metrics, and are fascinating as chips, not just Apple or ARM chips. Their laptops were “fixed” and many, including myself think they’re the best laptops we’ve ever owned.

I feel the butterfly keyboard laptop era was when they were lost in the woods. But now they killing it. Even Apple Maps is great.
We use LLM agents to do proofreading and editing of transcripts after they are edited by people. They are good at applying our customer's specific requirements (e.g. capitalization, formatting, etc.) without us having our folks worry about any of that. We use https://transcriberai.com or https://otter.ai/ (there are a bunch) to create the first transcript for our transcriptionists.
It does. You can still get commercial displays. They just tend to cost a lot more than a consumer grade TV.
Why Ultraprocessed Foods Aren't Always Bad
> Trump said he won't touch medicare or medicaid. Said he wants to increase military spending and not touch social security.

Whenever you see a definitive-sounding Trump quote, take a moment to see if he's also said the exact opposite before you make any conclusions. Here's a good overview of this particular topic: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/donald-trump-m.... He's said he definitely won't cut entitlements, but also that he might, and he tried to make cuts when he was in office but didn't try that hard.

If you're trying to predict what he's going to do you can look at past actions, or what personnel he has put in place. Just reading what he says is useless.
Physicists find particle that only has mass when moving in one direction
Yeah. An agentic workflow is nothing but implementation of execution of a bunch of tasks and each task takes a little bit of help from the LLM. Honestly I believe this is applicable to companies that have workflows having a lot of manual tasks and automation of these workflows could be easier with the help of LLM agents.
Linux just sucks at deploying proprietary software in a reliable manner.
Nice work. Like to learn more about this new technology
If you are looking for LLM agents that go off and do a bunch of
work on their own, you will be supremely underwhelmed. Anyone who went straight to building agents without a human in some large loop found that they were trying to make the LLM do things it was extremely bad at.

The right approach to build toward agents is to start with something that gives pretty good responses to prompts and build up an agentic mode to let it do more and more in response to each prompt. It should be thought of as extending how much you get per prompt, and doing so by chaining together components you've already worked at making to good at.

Cursor (the LLM powered VS Code fork) has an agentic mode and they are doing this the right way. The normal chat window is good at producing changes to your code, and at applying them, at looking at lints, at suggesting terminal commands, at doing directory listings or RAG on your codebase. Agentic mode is tying those together to do more of the work you want with fewer prompts from you.
I've found Copliot to be really good at generating funny memes and haikus for specific issues/tasks where I work. The productivity gains come from me not having to use Photoshop and have more time to browse websites like this one.
Such an exaggeration. >92% of the area is served with 5G. Calls are available in 98%-99% of the area (though sometimes just from one of the operators). Some trains were built in a way that blocks reception, though those have had repeaters or wifi for a while. I know plenty of people who work from the train every day.

Sources:

https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/SharedDocs/Pressemitteilung...

https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/SharedDocs/Pressemitteilung...

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrain-Repeater

https://www.heise.de/en/news/Mobile-communications-for-rail-...
Nice work. AI will enhance this technology
In a field like this the self-doubt of "surely it wouldn't be this broken, I must just be holding it wrong" is strong.
An engine for playing and solving the Input(tm) board game
Excellent write up! I have an older ThinkPad 760E (1995) that these notes could be really helpful for, since the hardware is fairly similar. I had pretty good success with OpenBSD but haven't tried NetBSD yet.

> The most viable player is mpg123. It manages to play an online low-fi radio stream with only slight stuttering when other CPU-heavy tasks are running.

I want to try this. Such a cool way to fully utilize the system (network, sound, display) while working on code or in a terminal.

> Despite having a USB port, the 380Z doesn't support USB boot.

If you'd like to try something, I found Plop Boot Manager can sometimes add bootable USB support on hardware that doesn't otherwise allow it. I love having Plop installed on all my retro hardware as it provides good support for booting from floppy, CD, USB, etc., plus it has a neat retro/hacker vibe.

https://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager/download.html
I am using an iPhone 13 Mini, which will need to be pried from my cold, dead, hands.

The new "intelligence" hasn't made any difference that I can note, other than a couple of buttons, and Siri seems a bit less dense.

On my Mac, the Xcode auto-fill has improved quite a bit. It is now useful enough for me to use (but I still need to check its work, as it hallucinates weird API calls).
Generally speaking, if a corporation is controlled by the finance and sales people, instead of buy the engineering people, the products it makes will suffer from things like planned obsolescence. Monopolistic control of markets makes this worse, as there's little if any competition to turn to. Boeing is the poster child for this problem in the USA - Boeing relied on monopolistic control of the airplane market, and cut R & D to increase shareholder and executive profits, and was then blindsided by Airbus developments in fuel efficiency, and their response was to try to rush a low-cost development project with disastrous results.

Investment capitalism naturally gravitates towards such behavior; this is why the most disastrous thing SpaceX (compare to Boeing) could do is go public and let big shareholder conglomerates like Vanguard/Blackrock/StateStreet/FMR etc. control the makeup of the corporate board and thus, engineering decisions.
Corporate quality standards only work if a company is MBA-proof. Something no western company can withstand. Sooner or later, a financial genius will point out the margins that can be made on white label products and it snowballs.
I'm going to shamelessly borrow your phrasing, because what you've described is exactly what happens: It's a rotation through other participants so neither the study leader nor other individuals have to "[carry] the conversation." It's really interesting, because it fosters conversation that can lead to interesting questions, observations, or other information that might not otherwise come to light. There are some significant deficiencies, of course, but I think works fairly well depending on the group.

Where it breaks down is if one person starts to dominate the conversation for the duration of the class and carries it off-topic, or if someone becomes combative. So, the group composition and personalities can influence the relative success.
> And how could it be otherwise?

A great many countries use "civil law" where court decisions don't create a binding precedent.

Some other "common law" countries - like Canada and the UK - have a parliamentary system with first-past-the-post elections. So they don't get any nonsense like "government shut-downs" because of "deadlock" - and if the legislature wants to change the laws, nothing stops them.