skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In all reinforcement learning there is (explicitly as part of a fitness function, or implicitly as part of the algorithm) some impetus for exploration. It might be adding a tiny reward per square walked, a small reward for each block broken and a larger one for each new block type broken. Or it could be just forcing a random move every N steps so the agent encounters new situations through “clumsiness”.
That sound reasonable to me, but the those companies forget that there's different types of agreeable. There's the LLM approach, similar to the coworker who will answer all your questions about .NET but not stop you from coding yourself into a corner, and then there's the "Let's sit down and review what it actually is that you're doing, because you're asking a fairly large number of disjoint questions right now".

I've dropped trying to use LLMs for anything, due to political convictions and because I don't feel like they are particularly useful for my line of work. Where I have tried to use various models in the past is for software development, and the common mistake I see the LLMs make is that they can't pick up on mistakes in my line of thinking, or won't point them out. Most of my problems are often down to design errors or thinking about a problem in a wrong way. The LLMs will never once tell me that what I'm trying to do is an indication of a wrong/bad design. There are ways to be agreeable and still point out problems with previously made decisions.
For better or worse, current LLMs aren't tried to reject instructions based on their personal preference, besides being trained to be US-flavored prudes that is.
I think Casey Muratori calls this "compression". And yeah (see other child comment), he does it in C++ :-)
Just give the responsibility for policing it to the tax authorities. The lobbyist might be able to hide the money but the recipient has to spend it or it is worthless so it will be detectable and the transactions punishable.

Also, that we won't be able to make it perfect is not an argument against trying to improve.
In the 70's we started putting Pigs in Space(https://muppet.fandom.com/wiki/Pigs_in_Space), so now we need the rest of the ingredients for pork and kimchi stew.
There are certain keywords people use that are instant red flags. They usually mean I can immediately ignore everything they've written. "Common sense" has become a big one. It's code for "my feelings trump your facts" (pun intended).

But another one is "both sides". There are a number of reasons people fall back to this. Usually it's intellectual laziness, not wanting to know any of the details, usually because it's an issue that the person saying it doesn't actually care about the issue. Some people derive validation from somehow being "above the fray" on some partisan issue.

Another reason is simply not caring about the issue and trying to create a moral equivalence is intentionally or unintentionally used to silence a particular topic.

Not everything is some disagreement between equivalent positions. Sometimes, a given position is just plain wrong. Slavery, genocide, apartheid, ethnic cleansing. These are issues historically that have a right side and a wrong side.

On Gaza, there is the side that wants to live, not be bombed and not exist in an apartheid state and there's the side that wants to ethnically cleanse millions of people to create lebensraum. Merely going to Israel has been a radicalizing experience for a lot of people because they instantly recognize what's going on. There are countless examples of this now. I'll choose just one as an example: Sde Temain [1].

[1]: https://www.aljazeera.com/program/newsfeed/2024/8/13/israeli...
The UK Automation Revolution
Absolutely. And it’s astounding that Waltz also uses private email for official business[1]

This is a problem and it needs to be stopped.

1. https://americanoversight.org/investigation/the-trump-admini...
If we forget that the authors moved on into Inferno and Limbo, while re-doing all the Plan 9 decisions they had to rollback like Alef as main userspace language.
I run a small 20 year old service business in the US. Just getting a $300K line of credit from a bank required a lot of paperwork and both the company and me personally being on the hook. It took about a month to secure. In contrast, on a different occasion a secured a personal home equity line of credit for $100K in a bout 5 minutes.
> GNU+Linux was good enough. Meanwhilke, BSD in early 90's was rotting until the BSD 4.4 forks arise.

Was this necessary? What exactly are we arguing about again?
Join until banned for some wrong thing post
Hegseth's posts were the most egregious, but there was a lot of sensitive information that could have been inferred from the rest of it -- basically that the U.S. was planning some sort of attack against the Houthis, they debated whether to do it or not and chose to go ahead, and the approximate timing of the attack is implied by the timing of meetings and decision windows.

https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2025/03/politics/yemen-war-p...
I used cd rom and string when I was etching hole in stainless steel, after few minutes bubbles accumulated and significantly slowed down the process, pulling it out of solution every minute would burst the bubbles and etching could continue.

Another time I used led from keyboard (NumLock/capslock/scrollock) to trigger reed switch relay that would ground piece of aluminum foil taped to the phone screen (I was grinding in some MMORPG game).
I can think of one such case in my life and I'm 69 years old. That's not enough to warrant the amount of advertising we are bombarded with.
Math Moment: Karen Uhlenbeck
> Government workers are far more likely to be unionized

Isn't this a problem? Government workers are supposed to be working for the people, involvement in a union is a conflict of interest -- this is why FDR banned unionization of federal workers (versus the private sector where there is no obligation and the relationship is generally adversarial).

> Governments are freed from having to prioritize maximizing profits at the cost of everything else

That's a huge problem. The legitimacy of government is predicated on the ability of the voter to yank the money from the government if it's ineffective -- otherwise the government can just vote itself more and more funds for whatever without accountability. Since we're all deficit spending, the burden to repay the debt falls on future generations who can't vote against spending that happened in the past! And spending by printing money hurts the poor the hardest, which I can't imagine you would be in favor of.
It's not a "regular" company, because it's still raising angel investment, presumably from the tech/startup ecosystem.

A more common route for non-tech-startup companies is to get money via debt - in other words, borrow money from a bank or financiers. That's a different model to with different risk/reward characteristics, but it's how most non-innovative entrepreneurship is done, I believe - things like building restaurants, buildings, etc.

This is indeed a "middle path" in terms of raising money by selling equity, but selling a smaller amount of it for less money, which keeps more ownership stake and control in the hands of the founders, but necessitates slower spending cause they raised less capital.
I have indeed started giving large amounts of money towards TB aid since Trump gutted things.
It's possible to block both. If bsky would let you use starter packs as block lists, it would be a lot easier than it is.

I block any account that is primarily politics-based (Hillary Clinton's social media team joined a month ago and has 5k blocks already so I'm not alone), and other accounts as and when they become tiresome (ie when they go on a political rant). My feeling is that academics broke mostly to bluesky while techies broke mostly to mastodon. I follow some academic accounts that occasionally post interesting things - nothing earth-shattering, but worth checking in once every couple of days.

My main problem with bsky is that a lot of academics seem to approach it as a write-only medium. No engagement.
Wait, what? Sarcasm or implicit “if you’re a criminal”?

For most people and companies record keeping is important and valuable.
It seems the only reliable way to keep social media nontoxic is by doing both of these things:

- Keep the audience small

- Create an echo chamber (intentionally or not)

You need both. Bluesky has both.

Bluesky feels like a small village museum: everyone looks alike, posts alike, and agrees on what to collectively demonize.
No, building bridges is a lot simpler because we have a set of coding practices to follow ( eurocode, ACI, British standards and whatnot). The performance of the buildings follow the deterministic Newton's laws, and you even have software packages written for that.

Your clients don't change the specs half way through and expect you to provide an accurate estimate and at the same time, don't intend to pay you extra. You can forecast the cost of building to a very accurate degree because all bridges are more of the same, unlike software which by definition,is new every time because each time the requirement is different.

And so on.

I know because I work in civil engineering software field.
Why Trump's tariff chaos makes sense --- for China.

Once the US restricts trade with most of the world, who are they going to align themselves with?

Tearing down economic and military alliances that took a generation to build will only result in an isolated, poorer, weaker, less relevant America. And it is entirely self inflicted.

Perfect opportunity for China to become the world's dominate super power. They are the most likely winner, everyone else loses.
> because they get a better return on other investments

let's hope their investment isn't the S&P500
It's not about price! As an example, China has had battery-swap stations for certain models of EV for years (see Nio). In just over a couple minutes (depending on the station), they automatically drop the battery out of the car and install a new one that is fully charged. It is even faster than DC charging in the US and Europe. But because those cars are either illegal or prohibitively expensive to import and use, there is no incentive for domestic industries to compete with it. As far as they're concerned, anything that makes a Chinese EV compelling is some sort of strategic threat against the US, rather than the product simply being better.

How cool would it be if instead of having to slowly charge the same battery in my EV over its lifetime, I could (say) subscribe to a network of well-kept batteries and easily get a fully-charged one whenever mine gets low? Too bad China is so out of reach for me; though even if it weren't, those battery-swap stations don't really exist here - though I'm sure that's just another artifact of widespread sinophobia.

That's only one example. See these article (or honestly any article) for more:

https://www.investors.com/news/chinese-electric-cars-america...

https://www.carwow.co.uk/electric-cars/chinese

Dismiss it as propaganda if you wish, but it's not like it's fake. The cars they show are real.
> https://github.com/curl/curl/blob/master/lib/vquic/vquic.c

When somebody says "short identifiers" in relation to C, this is exactly the style meant by that, not the cryptic style of C standard library.
EU may target US tech services in tariff response to focus US tech giants' minds
Hot take: I see many comments hint at a pessimistic attitude in the essay. I think this is unjust because it felt for me like the author is passionate about the profession. Otherwise the humor wouldn't be there or the author wouldn't have stuck around long enough to see the evolution of the field up to the point of this vibe coding era.
Recently, from review:

William J. Perry (94-97, 2+5yr Army)
William Cohen (97-01)
Robert Gates (06-11, 2yr AF)
Leon Panetta (11-13, 2yr Army)
Chuck Hagel (13-15, 1yr Army)*
Ash Carter (15-17)

* To be fair, Hagel's year was volunteering to be drafted and sent to Vietnam as an infantry squad leader
I think there's been a huge misconception of what MCP was meant to be in the first place. It is not a transport protocol, and it is not (primarily) designed as a remote RPC server. It is really meant to be a local first means of attaching tooling to an LLM process. The use case of "centralized server that multiple agents connect to" is really only incidental, and I think they honestly made a mistake by including SSE as a transport, as it has confused people to thinking these things need to be hosted somewhere like an API endpoint.
Agreed! 400 million peoples interests cant be represented by TWO people.
Only for the most part; people online aren't my friends, there is not enough interaction/depth of interaction to get to really know them and being online tends to turn people into fuckwads(1). They just happen to be you're kind of fuckwads.

(1)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_disinhibition_effect
I think you got unlucky with unzip because you noticed. Distributions heavily patching software is rather the norm than the exception.

As an example, look how Debian patches the Linux kernel: https://udd.debian.org/patches.cgi?src=linux&version=6.12.21... . And the kernel is a very active project.

Funnily, this makes recoding the version number for a SBOM pretty useless.
California Assembly, and they do have that power, and they just used that power and the answer was "lol no we don't care if you want to waste your own money that's fine"
You still didn't tell me what you think should be done about it. I understand from your vague gestures that the answer is "nothing", perhaps because you enjoy the fact that developed world powers are crumbling to dust. There are reasonable reasons one might hold that position, but if that is in fact your position, you should acknowledge it.

> I don't believe [X] is the solution because that's exactly what totalitarian regimes did

Hitler also ate sugar. Ban sugar!

> The solution is for the establishment to accept they have failed the people and start to do good for the people or step down.

This contradicts your stated position, because preventing disinformation is good for the people, but you don't think the establishment should do it.

> This means the democratic system IS working as intended, as if you were to censor speech and take away peoples' only legal way of protesting (voting)

Very obvious non-sequitur. What do penalties against the app formerly known as Twitter have to do with taking away voting rights?
come on now.

this war has been going on for 3/4 of a century now.

both sides have aggrieved the other and it's a quagmire that most likely will never end.

to have a strong stance NOW means you might be influenced by the news a lot more than you realize.
What’s the difference? That sounds like two ways of describing the same idea to me.
Don't Mock Your Framework: Writing Tests You Won't Regret
The fact that they’re not in 2.4ghz range is interesting but Z wave stuff is just too expensive.

Random Smart plug on Amazon - 43 gbp or 55 usd. The last preflashed tasmota wifi ones I bought were under 10 each and had energy measuring too.

Maybe it’s better in the US but with that differential z wave is pointless.
Great idea and impressive work! We recently released the open-source MCP server for our product as well. If possible, I'd love to kindly ask if you could consider adding our project to your list:

https://github.com/powerdrillai/powerdrill-mcp
So what if someone living on Chinese wages wouldn't be able to afford American goods? The equivalent Chinese goods are perfectly affordable for them. You seemingly forget that China is a self-sufficient economy. It's not like people are working 16 hours a day to afford an apartment like in the US. Apartments in China can be as low as USD $400 a month or less. Try running your wage and poverty calculations with that?
Yeah. Company culture like the one mentioned in this document is toxic and will inevitably cause the company to fail.
Trolling or nah? If the author of this link is struggling with spell check and hasn't written assembly language before, this doesn't provide much confidence for an accurate transcription of the source code printout.

Good luck on the exercise, though! Don't worry, Bill and his legal team will be watching you closely. They'll be cheering you on (but not for the reasons you think they will be.)
Well, to be fair... I (a human) had to look it up online the first time I played as well. I was repeatedly clicking on the same tree for an entire minute before that. I even tried several different trees just in case.
the point of this article is to whip up even more dislike of the US and of travelling to the US among brits (who were already quite chippy about our richer and more handsome cousins across the pond)

that sells lefty newspapers like the guardian

it’s kind of all we can do to rail against your newly chosen president and his entourage who seem hell bent on screwing us all over

i feel sorry for, and i continue to like my american friends who did not vote for this betrayal of all values and relationships - but tbh there is a big backlash in popularity going on right now and i’m in the minority
It’s clear you don’t understand anything about the conflict or what might happen if the US withdrew support for Israel. What’s weird is refusing to bother learning, and instead plugging your ears so you can smarmily opine about being “pro killing children”.

Again, this is social media political thinking. No nuance or even a vague hand wave at intellectual honesty.
Are you unable to do fizz buzz?
Hard for me to tell if I'm in the minority or part of some silent majority, but I don't see much toxic or political content on either site, mostly just art and content related to hobbies I have. I only look at my following feeds, and it's pretty easy to mute a few problem words or phrases. I figure if you spend a lot of time on social media, it's worth it to put in the work to tailor the content you see to your tastes.
From your point of view, when does a startup is no longer a startup? Seed, Series A, B, C, pre-IPO? Can you be a startup after IPO?
> At successful tech companies, engineering work is valued in proportion to how much money it makes the company

If you look at what it actually takes to get promoted at most tech companies I’d say this isn’t generally true at many big tech companies.

Being on a very lucrative part of the product may not get you as much “impact” on your promotion packet as if you are working on a platform/infra touching the whole org. Even if that platform isn’t generating the company much money even indirectly.
What did you post? Did you get banned or what?
In C++ you can also make the FD-equivalent of std::unique_ptr, like Android does with unique_fd: https://cs.android.com/android/platform/superproject/main/+/...

It doesn't guarantee the issue never happens, like Rust would, but it does make it dramatically less likely to occur.

Also I think in general people vastly under-appreciate how severe an issue EBADF actually is. Outside of extremely specific, single-thread-only scenarios, that error is essentially the kernel telling you that heap corruption occurred, but almost nobody treats it with that level of severity
I think it is the opposite. When you are in your echo chamber you don't realize that your view is toxic because what you get is positive feedback and think that it is in fact "normal".

Bluesky has plenty of toxic communities (e.g. the trans one), but hey are on the "good side" of the political spectrum so they get a pass.
Act crazy and people stop coming to your house.
Foreign visits into the U.S. fell off a cliff in March
> That happens much less than you'd think though

Hard disagree. My dad worked for the federal government and he was railroaded for pointing out where money just disappeared down some corners. In his case it was untracked doctor reimbursements.

This happens everywhere in government because the taxpayer just doesn't care and spending money itself is largely considered to be the metric of effectiveness -- goodhart's law. The public generally thinks that if we allocate funding to X or Y bleeding heart cause it's magically done and we don't have to think about it anymore; conversely if we delete funds nominally allocated to X or Y it means we don't care about X or Y. By the year 2025 the system of consuming funds without voter accountability has optimized itself to do as little as possible with as high a price as possible, as evidenced by 45 billion dollars for broadband.
Interesting. When I visited the US in 2003, I recall the news reporting on a study showing that more than half had never been to another country, and they stressed that that included Canada and Mexico.

It became a bit of a discussion point during the ride with the those I visited.
> What's the difference? In my mind a startup is just a newly established business, but you seem to have a different vision?

A commonly accepted answer to this question is "The exit strategy does not involve 100X[1] valuation"

[1] Pick the appropriate multiplier.
False: https://wccftech.com/tim-cool-does-not-prefer-logitech-mx-ma...
I used to think like that, but now I believe the vast majority of those discussions are inherently toxic, so I just don’t bring them up anymore in almost any context, whether it's work, friends, family, or social networks (if I still used them, that is). It just brings so much unhappiness, and there's nothing to "gain", especially nowadays when you're constantly bombarded by social media, the media, or whatever else is pushing you in whatever direction is convenient at the time.

Let’s be honest, most political posts here get flagged and disappear almost immediately, especially if they lean a certain way. I’m not specifying which direction I think they lean because people will interpret it differently, and it would be pointless. It's yet another example of why, in most cases, it’s toxic.
https://archive.ph/ucyK2
https://archive.is/WPV8C
> I don't know of anyone who has had a positive experience using the American for-profit, multi-payer healthcare system

You’re aware, of course, that it isn’t a binary choice, right? That Medicare for All isn’t the sole and only other possibility, or that thinking it’s an idiotic idea does not, in fact, suggest that one thinks the status quo is perfect?

What, specifically, do you know about healthcare, Medicare reimbursements, or how doctors work in this country? What, specifically, do you know about how the current system functions? I’m curious what apparently extensive knowledge underpins these really strongly held opinions.

> Noam Chomsky

Who may have done a brilliant job of discussing Israeli political thought, and whose writing might’ve led you to understand what would happen if the US withdrew support and Israel was pushed into an existential conflict. Let someone know when you get to that part.
For smaller amounts of monies such as £250k or £1mm, it is much easier to get funding, since a decent amount of countries offer tax relief to the investors for example in the UK through EIS, SEIS, or even VCT. These offer advantages to angels over the VC's.

In addition the whole point of this piece is that you are generally looking to grow slower, thus having smaller capital requirements and burn rate.
I once wrote a social CD tray app at the company christmas party after a few beers. It was a simple program that polled the CD tray on the local computer and whenever the user closed it, the daemon would trigger eject on another machine.

Luckily the source code has been lost.