skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
At various points in my career, I've had to oversee people creating data export features for research-focused apps. Eventually, I instituted a very simple rule:

As part of code review, the developer of the feature must be able to roundtrip export -> import a realistic test dataset using the same program and workflow that they expect a consumer of the data to use. They have up to one business day to accomplish this task, and are allowed to ask an end user for help. If they don't meet that goal, the PR is sent back to the developer.

What's fascinating about the exercise is that I've bounced as many "clever" hand-rolled CSV exporters (due to edge cases) as other more advanced file formats (due to total incompatibility with every COTS consuming program). All without having to say a word of judgment.

Data export is often a task anchored by humans at one end. Sometimes those humans can work with a better alternative, and it's always worth asking!
It's been a long time, but we manually annotated where the relations should be, and other edits, with the patch sections.
Sadly, the ending doesnt live up to the expectations, at least for me.
I absolutely love Perl. I'm just so sad Python won because Google blessed it as a language and at the time everyone wanted to work for Google.

Perl always gets hate on HN, but I actually wonder of those commenter, who has actually spent over a single hours using Perl after they've read the Camel book.

Honest opinion: if you're going to be spending time in Linux in your career, then you should read the Camel book at least once. Then and only then should you get to have an opinion on Perl!
That's a _long-term_ problem, though. This would be far from the first time that companies prioritise short-term savings over long-term revenue due to perverse incentives.

No-one's getting promoted for "declined to ruin our customer support, thus avoiding loss of X recurring revenue per year over the next decade", but they might get promoted for "reduced cost of customer support by X with AI!!!"

In the long run the invisible hand will dole out rewards and punishments here, but thinking about the short term is just _easier_ than thinking about the long term.
They definitely not, and there is no safe valve for it.

Can't blame them though, this is what Capitalism teaches all of us. I'm short sighted too, but the thing is I won't be able to go wherever I want when SHTF while fund managers can probably do so.
This is not at all weird if you are a HN user with somewhat unpopular opinions. The HN guidelines say flag something if it's egregious. People end up treating flagging as a stronger version of downvotes.

My most recent experience being flagged matches this up: I was presenting an argument that Chrome's manifest V3 is a good thing and it was flagged to death. I have no doubt that some users just flag this kind of opinion reflexively.
eBay backs WunderGraph to build open source GraphQL federation
Congrats on the launch! I think this is totally the right next level abstraction for AI-assisted coding. Don’t generate everything from scratch but make it easy to plug in the tools you care about and make the generation way more accurate. Way to go!
Here in Argentina it's somewhat common to recibe social engineering attacks to steal the WhatsApp account. When they success, they send money request to all the contacts [1]. So once you add your Mom, they only need to convince her to give them access to her account, not the physical device.

[1] I got one 2 weeks ago. More details in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43361556
> This is what the entire public cloud is built on.

Well... The entire public cloud except Azure. They've been caught multiple times for vulnerabilities stemming from the lack of hardware backed isolation between tenants.
> china can innovate just fine on their own now.

If China could turn democratic and open, the World would have such a bright future.

Alas, I think we're headed into some distopian future because China is not going that way but indeed, they're very likely to surpass the USA in every other way.
You should be proud. I am happy to see this achievement. I hope it inspires more people in Botswana to pursue engineering. Thank you for sharing.
Xodon Tools: A bridging utility for seamless transmission between X and Mastodon
> our content policy

This is probably why commercial offering will fail apart from some niches they might be able to fill.

Not that generating people would be something many would use, but the act of lobotomizing the AI will have an effect on any other content they will generate.
Because on net it often saves tons and tons of time and effort if you know how to use it.

Luddism is a strange philosophy for a software engineer.
One out of every two X is an extremely common and perfectly reasonable phrase in english, meaning your complaint about finding 2 Danes who haven't watched it is nonsensical as we know they mean on average.
They were, but ... if you don't know what to look for you probably don't find it!

Apparently it's not something you can simply dissect and point at it easily. (Otherwise people would have found it. Though it still happens from time to time that folks find new ligaments here or there in the complicated joints. But AFAIU the brain is much harder to preserve and prepare.)

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10546208/ -- here the study uses immunohistochemistry
Watchdog Monitors AI Companies Breaking Safety Promises
The governance of the language was borderline ideological, imo.

(There is a very curious but prevalent phenomena where highly intelligent people let a governing ideology do the thinking for them and refuse to countenance ideologically discordant possibilities. (Ancient too, as we see from the ideological reaction of Pythagorean's to existence of √2..))
An Introduction to the Monogenic Signal (2017)
Another point re: grounded experience, good professors/researchers make a point to take sabbaticals to work in industry for that purpose.
I mean safely build vtables. Of course, we can already do everything unsafely.
I just got kicked out of Columbia for taking a stand against LeetCode interviews
That seems a bit overblown. I doubt that most wasn't aware that things like this is going on. Perhaps the scale and the number of people involved is a little more than most would have expected. The worst bit, for me and most of the people I debated the documentary with is how people can be so unapologetic about doing irreparable environmental damage. There's currently a another case where a company have blatantly mismanaged handling of polluted soil, in the name of profit. The fact that these people don't give a shit, and the people working of them just hit a wall if they're trying to alert local government is the most choking, not that there's corruption.

Also this type of corruption isn't seen by Danes in our day to day life, so they don't really register on our corruption perception. I still struggle to view it as corruption and not just straight up criminal activity or deliberate environmental damage.
What does this even mean? What do these magical AIs with no interface do?
Do people even believe the numbers anymore after years and years of these statistics based on perfect condition roads with barely any traffic, where they those numbers with human drivers in various weather and traffic conditions? I would look at these numbers with deep deep skepticism.
More accurately, I think it's just confusion about the Law of Large Numbers.

People confuse population-scale average behaviors with guarantees about individuals.

In any country you can find outliers that don't match the country's norms.

The hard part is that the devious ones can leverage their country's (or culture, or state, or relgious affiliation, etc.) norms to disguise their bad behavior. It's easier to scam someone if you pretend to blend in with groups known for being trustworthy.
Amazing how they managed to make a whimsical, yet reasonably legible font with these few pixels.
It may be more fair to compare them to Uber drivers and taxis and at least on that comparison haven't ridden in thousands of Uber and taxis and a couple dozen waymos, it is better than 100%.

Anecdotal of course but within my circle people are becoming Waymo first over other options almost entirely because of the better experience and perceived better driving. And parents in my circle also trust that a waymo won't mow them down in a crosswalk. Which is more than you can say for many drivers in SF.
XAN: A Modern CSV-Centric Data Manipulation Toolkit for the Terminal
yes but the point is to not have to use docker to containerize an app; it would be nice to be able to containerize an app with a built in runtime or something that is just literally not docker. Microsoft could solve so many of its security issues with an equivalent to Snap.

Again, I don't get what the COM hate is. In DirectX, it's basically just become a simple way to manage the life cycle of an object.

And Xaml hate is the hill I'm willing to die on. UI should be defined in either a dom or a winforms-like API, but not a mix between the two. Xaml is just straight up one of the worst things Microsoft has created
I can guarantee you that his victory had nothing to do with “invading Canada” and almost everything to do with choosing the more desirable of two options.
If you do it rightly (softly, no brisk movements) in Spain, the other driver knows this is the way. No honking and no yelling
Existential quantification is type of variable bindings. You can't point to a think that doesn't bind a variable and say it's the same thing.
About Lockdown Mode https://support.apple.com/en-gb/105120

Harden your iPhone from a cyberattack with Lockdown Mode https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/iphone/iph049680987/io...
Great to have my AM library accessible, but falls short for a couple big reasons:

- Some of my best playlists were created using the mobile app, and AM seems to have a hard schism between its mobile and desktop versions (the playlists aren't there and would take a long time to recreate / multiple errors when trying to rebuild them).

- The features I want to use (recording, real-time acapella) aren't available for licensing reasons (understandable but kneecap what I want to actually do).
If you ever have to grab your "go bags", also grab your dirty laundry, because that's the clothes that you actually use.

(Source: We sheltered some friends who had to evacuate the California wildfires. They missed those clothes.)
>Another imperfect solution would be to ... ugh...generate exports in Excel format rather than CSV. I know, I know, but it does solve the problem.

Or you could just use the ISO standard .xlsx, which is a widely supported format that is not Excel specific but has first class support in Excel.
Hmm thought so. They make hardware chips first, right, packing as many cores and transistors as possible in heat efficient manner? They make software like OS, apps, UX on top of the chips? Or is it that they plan the software first and build custom chip that is powerful and efficient enough to support their software vision? Seems unlikely, but just want to know.
This contrived post sets up a false dichotomy singular communication channel. There's a difference between command input and data output. You can whatever mode is suitable for each.
I did mean length-delimited binary formats (rather than ASCII formats).
Funny story, one of my advisors made me play Dr Worm after PhD defense presentation, because I was quite literally now Dr Worm
That's an equivalent demand to expecting the world as a whole to be "governed properly" and thus won't be achieved for exactly the same reasons.
I want to safely build vtables by hand. Of course we can already do everything unsafely with nasty casts.
San Francisco is perfect conditions without traffic? Sure, no snow but plenty of other human hazards.
For me it's more like useful 70% of the time horrible 30% of the time. Overall a big boon but can be frustrating.
China's 'Vivo Vision' Overtly Copies Apple Vision Pro Design
Playing D&D with people regularly is how you turn them from strangers into friends.
I think when talking about university research output it's pretty clear that the objective of university research is to produce output that is much earlier in the stack of productisation than something that comes out of a corporate entity. The vast majority of university research probably won't impact people on a day-to-day basis the way that running a product-led company will, but that's not to say it isn't valuable.

Take mRNA vaccines for instance - the initial research began in university environments in the 80s, and it continued to be researched in universities (including in Europe) through the 00s until Moderna and BioNTech were started in the late 00s. All the exploratory work that led to the covid vaccine being possible was driven through universities up to the point where it became corporate. If that research hadn't been done, there would have been nothing to start a company about.

It's the same in computing - The modern wave of LLMs was set off by Attention is All you Need, sure, but the building blocks all came from academia. NNs have been an academic topic since the 80s and 90s.

I suspect that in 2050, there will be plenty of stuff being built on the foundations of work conducted in academia in the 00s and 10s.

I wouldn't expect to see that many groundbreaking innovations being useful in day-to-day life coming out of contemporary university research. You have to wait several decades to see the fruits of the labour.
If I must guess what Netanyahus goal is, it's to stay out of prison. By any means.
Five Things AI Will Not Change
its because people integrated llm based ai into their existing guis as quickly and thoughtlessly as possible. ie. in the form of an annoying hovering element with a speech bubble protruding from it, and once you begin talking to it, you realize the range of topics it will respond to is very shallow. If at the end of your blog post you could type in "what about the stupid chat thing in your own blog" and it would respond intelligently, not gaslight you etc. that would perhaps be something.

The point is OK (ie, a car with no steering wheel just chat) but pretty obvious and seems like the author is a hypocrite in this regard
I had a similar issue, worked fine when I was testing it on my machine, but I had dev tools open to see any potential issues.

Turns out IE8 doesn't define console until the devtools are open. That caused me to pull a few hairs out.
What about a chatbot that can render HTML for you, including forms of which it can read the results when you hit SUBMIT, and a text window where you can add extra clarification that it will read?
Imagine if you weren't working at Google and were trying to convince the Chromium team you found a bug in V8. That'd probably be nigh-impossible.

One thing I notice is that Google has no way whatsoever to actually just ask users "hey, are you having problems?", a definite downside of their approach to software development where there is absolutely no communication between users and developers.
I need to write the up because no one knows what either of these things are. Every single answer here is wrong.
The paradox of mystery, when the mystery is too good that no ending can justify it.
Could be just about anything, from thermostats to CPAP machines to SFP fiber transceivers. Anything that needs to be just a little bit smart (but usually not internet connected) can have one. For hobbyists, the ATMega328P was the go-to for about 15 years, before ESP32 and Pi Pico took over more recently. I'm sure Arduino helped a lot with the AVR's proliferation.

There are no one-time programmable versions of AVR as far as I know, so they can all have their internal Flash reprogrammed.
> The rules are significantly more crunchy, building a character without assistance - both from people, and from software - is virtualy impossible, remembering all of the rules as a new-ish player is difficult, and I would not even want to try running a campaign with all of the rules, conditions, interactions, etc.

This is a mindblowing paragraph to read

Yes, I've been playing D&D a long time

Yes, I used to make 3e characters by hand without any software, which are much more complex than 5e or PF2E

From my perspective, 5e and PF2E are around the same level of complexity

I strongly suspect that if you think 5e doesn't have a similar amount of rule complexity, you are ignoring a ton of 5e rules without even realizing they exist, or playing them wrong

Here's a question:

In 5e, can you drink a potion as a bonus action?

In Baldur's Gate 3, you can

But no. Drinking a potion in 5e is an action

However, you can ready a potion from your pack or belt to drink, as a bonus action, as long as you have a free hand to hold it with

Bet you've been playing that wrong, most people do
My 10 year old daughter went through the popular Blender Donut tutorial.

She also loves to watch some of the short anime made with Blender based on some Roblox games.

Open source is amazing on this aspect.
I want to know why the organ features an image of a man in the instant that his hat falls off his head.
> Their actions, and thus even their usernames, are invisible — lest the HN community discover that it’s steering things about as much as Maggie Simpson is.

If the data is available my guess is that only a very small or minuscule percentage of HN users (virtual cartel/mafia/etc) that are performing the concerted flagging on regular basis, but without data this just a downvote magnet commentary with borderline conspiracy theory.
Maybe…

I dunno, there’s something in the fact that Isaac Newton the imaginary cultural figure was hit on the head by an apple, and then invented calculus.

Meanwhile Isaac Newton the actual guy (recalling from memory so feel free to correct) was a bit eccentric (dabbled in alchemy and other mystic arts), had some academic posts, some government jobs, and built Calculus on work that was ongoing in the academic community…

The imaginary Isaac Newton and the imaginary Elon Musk look sort of similar. Because we ignore the boring work that Newton did and the fact that Musk just bought his way around it—their real versions look very different of course! But if you want the actual day to day experience of being Isaac Newton, you can, just go be a professor and make some quirky friends.
Trying to make them in Simpson style results in possible copyright infringement. I gave up after waiting for many minutes and seeing constant rejections.
That thing looks nothing like an Apple product lol
I don't read your blog because your analyses ring true. I read your blog because you are an impactful pundit who I can stomach. Thoughtful people with large followings bore unspoken biases throughout the past and present, and it is my purposeful exercise to engage with the content of one who's alive mainly talks about Apple.

I suspect you have many readers like me. I don't mean that we all disagree with you the exact same way— that would be absurd. I mean that we'll read something sincere but misguided, because that's a valuable element of discourse.

Your Harrison Bergeron allusion wasn't apt, it was memorably cringey, a local extremum. It was ridiculous on its face. We can't know what Vonnegut would think of it, but he might have chosen to write you into Cat's Cradle.
> Can we agree that the ternary operator in C provides a way to write if-statements with different syntax?

I can neither agree or disagree because I don't know, but we are not talking about C and my code example didn't use a ternary operator either, so from my POV it doesn't matter.

> async/await was a better example. That moves something to a higher level of abstraction. However, it is not clear how to make that generalize

It is clear. Just not to you. Check Haskels do-notation or Scala for-comprehension or F#'s do!-notation and how they work. They all generalize over what async/await does (all with slightly different syntax though)
This looks great, but there's a bug on the "Remix" page that prevents me from actually customizing my own bot. Whenever there's a new API request to "/remix" (GET or POST), the form elements reset to their original value, making the changes impossible to save. At least in Firefox.
it's clearly a preference I feel strongly about. I've been programming for over 30 years btw - I can manually do this. It's a new tool I'm trying to learn.

I was personally clocking in about 1% of the openrouter token count last year every day. openrouter has grown quite a bit, but I realize I'm certainly in the minority/on the edge here.
Of course that generation would park themselves in front of the TV for hours every night while warning you about the hazards of living in a fantasy world.
Asahi Linux dropped the Hacker News ban
I worked for one of a few "game playing AI as a service" startups for several years, and we did in fact leverage the strong programming skills of LLMs to play games. When we pivoted from training directly on human gameplay data to simply having the LLM write modular code to play the game, we managed to solve many long-standing problems in our demo levels. Even on unseen games this works well, since LLMs already have a good understanding of how video games work generally.
They are a much faster, more convenient experience than standing in line waiting for a cashier lane, scanning items after picking.

I'll have to start shopping in your town.

At every supermarket in my city, there is a long line of people waiting to use the self checkouts. I keep an eye on the last person in that line, and I'm almost always done first by using a human cashier.

People just buy into the "tech=better" meme without even thinking.
Yes. The demand for increasing control, driven by the "taxpayer's money!" lot evident in this thread, strangles almost all state-funded research because it demands to know up front what the outcome will be. Which instantly forces everyone to pick only sure-bet research projects, while trying to sneak off to do actual blue-sky research in the background on "stolen" fractions of the funding. Like TBL inventing the WWW at CERN: that wasn't in his research brief, I'm sure it wasn't something that was funded in advance specifically for him to do.

Mind you, it was evident to me even twenty years ago when briefly considering a PhD that CS research not focused on applying itself to users would .. not be applied and languish uselessly in a paper that nobody reads.

I don't have a good answer to this.

(also, there is no way universities are going to come up with something which requires LLM like levels of capital investment: you need $100M of GPUs? You're going to spend a decade getting that funding. $10bn? Forget it. OpenAI cost only about half of what the UK is spending on its nuclear weapons programme!)
Yeah there's definitely more that can be done in this regard. Right now I have fairly limited statistics on the rate of change of the domains. There's probably improvements to be made by making more informed choices based on that sort of data.
Attempting to use Intel Real sense cameras on anything but Microsoft Windows has been a fools errand for me. The driver situation is awful and the SDK is annoying too.
You are using Firefox because it does not support PWAs like Chromium does? So what alternatives are left on the table for you? Lynx?
How to Build Hot Module Replacement in Python
I am inclined to agree, but I was saying a similar thing in 2023 when the job market started to tank. Now we are 2 years later and it is similar, maybe a little better but definitely not a return to pre-2022 levels. It might end up being a 5+ year slow period by the time interest rates come back down and things start heating up.
Europe's response to the Signalgate reflects a major shift in transatlantic ties
It does however share a lot of visual features with the Vision Pro
JWST reveals exoplanet composition with unprecedented clarity
Remember Dietrich Bonhöffer, Lutheran pastor who considered stupidity a greater threat to good than malice.

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=bonhoeffer
DNS Tunneling: how DNS can be (ab)used by malicious actors
But why?!?! You must give context.