MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Dwedit | 2025-06-15 14:59:23+00:00
Yes, I know it's just a "retro looking computer" to frame a YouTube video but...

I had to look up the Tandy 1000 RSX, because it seemed very wrong to have 16-color VGA graphics coming out of a computer labeled as "Tandy 1000".

Tandy 1000 RSX was the last model from 1991, and it had Super VGA rather than the famous "Tandy graphics" that originated with the IBM PCJr. It did not come with an Adlib or Sound Blaster card, which is what was depicted in the YouTube video. But the computer did have one ISA slot, and an Adlib or Sound Blaster compatible card could have been installed.

It also had a 386 processor rather than the 286 normally found on Tandy 1000 computers, and 1MB of RAM.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-06-15 15:00:41+00:00
People aren't claiming that they are holding textbooks in their model, that would just be even more evidence of reasoning (the LLM would have to reason what textbook to reference, and then extrapolate from the textbook(s) how to solve the problem at hand - pretty much what students in school do; study the textbook and reason from it to answer new test questions)

People are claiming that the models sit on a vast archive of every answer to every question. i.e. when you ask it 92384 x 333243 = ?, the model is just pulling from where it has seen that before. Anything else would necessitate some level of reasoning.

Also in my own experience, people are stunned when they learn that the models are not exabytes in size.
by username223 | 2025-06-15 15:01:19+00:00
That was a weird turn to AI at the end, but otherwise an interesting reflection. I'm a little too young to have grown up in the era of the Cray-1, but even in the early 90s, processors ran at 90 MHz and hard drives cost $1 per megabyte. Back when personal computers ran at single-digit megahertz and had kilobytes of RAM, a Cray was mind-blowing.

The exciting part back then was that, while computers were never "good enough," they were getting noticeably better every few months. If you were in the market for a computer, you knew you could get a noticeably better one for the same price if you just waited a little while. The next model was exciting, because it was tangibly better. At some point personal computers became "good enough" for most people. Other than compensating for creeping software bloat, there hasn't been much reason for most people to be excited about new computers in a decade or more.
by bagacrap | 2025-06-15 15:01:41+00:00
Investors as a whole began scrutinizing earnings and stock prices of FAANGs and other high growth companies much more closely starting in 2022. While this may amount to an accounting change if you can float the bill for a few years, it should affect the stock price in a regime where investors care about p/e ratios. The stock price is the C-suite's duty to protect, and also affects cost of capital. So leadership will take steps to cut short term costs. This is all theoretical though. I'm curious what the actual measured impact on profitability is for mag7.
by mymanagertech | 2025-06-15 15:02:42+00:00
I'm a solo founder based in the US, building a proprietary binary database system designed for ultra-efficient, deterministic storage, capable of handling massive data workloads with precise disk-based localization and minimal memory usage.

Live benchmark (no tricks): 1,000,000 enterprise-style records (11+ fields)

Full write in 3 seconds with 1.1 GB, in progress to time and memory going down

O(1) read by ID in <30ms

RAM usage: 0.91 MB

No Redis, no external cache, no traditional DB dependencies

Why it matters: Fully deterministic virtual-to-physical mapping

No reliance on in-memory structures

Ready to handle future quantum-state telemetry (pre-collapse qubit mapping)
by alganet | 2025-06-15 15:03:13+00:00
> Reductio ad absurdum.

My dude, you came up with the Wright brothers comparison, not me. If you don't like fallacies, don't use them.

> on any reasonably powerful 90s workstation

https://hal.science/hal-03926082/document

Quoting the paper now:

> In 1989 a recognizer as complex as LeNet-5 would have required several weeks’ training and more data than were available and was therefore not even considered.

Their own words seem to match my assessment.

Training time and data availability determined how much this whole thing could advance, and researchers were aware of those limits.
by johnisgood | 2025-06-15 15:03:15+00:00
I admit I did not go further than the title, because I assume the conclusion is in the title.

Waymo is considerably cheaper in LA (at least in a region) than Uber. I have no clue about Lyft. I know this for a fact, because someone I know has taken Waymos and Ubers between the two identical points, around the same time of day, multiple times, and Waymo has always been way cheaper, considerably so.
by matt_s | 2025-06-15 15:04:49+00:00
With so many generative AI tools out there, picking more obscure or niche languages is a detractor because the AI models won't have as much depth of training to pull from when you ask it to do things.

Also, technology choices for B2B web apps is rarely going to be a sole factor in determining success or failure of any business. As much as this community likes to compare performance metrics, benchmarks, frameworks and everyone has personal tastes on what is "good", all of those discussions are mostly irrelevant. Picking something the team is comfortable with and has depth of knowledge in is a good practice.

So just pick Rails and move on with solving business problems :)
by refulgentis | 2025-06-15 15:04:58+00:00
> Is your comment AI generated?

Are you asking this earnestly, or, is it meant to communicate something else? If so, what? :)

Genuinely, the most interesting part of the comment to me, in that it is does not have 0 meaning, and rings of some form of frustration, yet the rest of your comment stays focused on technical knowledge, and AFAIK you are not the author (who I'd expect would be at least temporarily angry at my contribution)
by sologoub | 2025-06-15 15:06:02+00:00
If you try to make a planting bed in any settlement that’s more than say 100 years old on a site that was continuously lived on, you are guaranteed to come across at least some shards of glass, pots, plates, etc. Even if the spot was never explicitly a trash mound. Things break, people usually try to pick them up and put in trash, but (especially in grass) miss pieces. When kids break stuff you often don’t want them picking up sharp objects. Things get stepped on and pressed into soil. Many many reasons to find pottery shards where they seemingly don’t belong.
by saberience | 2025-06-15 15:06:47+00:00
LLMs do that too though lol.

The Tower of Hanoi problem is terrible example for somehow suggesting humans are superior.

Firstly, there are plenty of humans who can’t solve this problem even for 3 disks, let alone 6 or 7. Secondly, LLMs can both give you general instructions to solve for any case and they can write out exhaustive move lists too.

Anyway, the fact that there are humans who cannot do Tower of Hanoi already rules it out as a good test of general intelligence anyway. We don’t say that a human doesn’t have “general intelligence” if they cannot solve Towers of Hanoi, so why then would it be a good test for LLM general intelligence?
by misja111 | 2025-06-15 15:07:06+00:00
Lol. Before Uber 'destroyed' the functioning taxi market in Amsterdam, getting a taxi after going out meant waiting for sometimes up to 45 minutes. It meant standing in a line and when someone cut the line in front of you, saying something about it could get you in a fight. Taxi drivers often were (former) criminals who cashed in their savings of black money to get a taxi license and a quiet life. Occasionally tourists were robbed or taken on detours, good luck to get your money back in those days. And I'm not even mentioning the outrageous prices yet for a taxi drive in the city in those days.

Uber might not be 100% perfect but it has been a real blessing, a salvation of all the misery that we had to endure in the 'functioning' taxi market.
by akagusu | 2025-06-15 15:08:09+00:00
Sorry, but it is not just LinkedIn, society as a whole became ageist.

One example is retirement: you are supposed to work and save enough money until something from 60 to 70 years old, depending on your country, but if you lose your job after 40 (and you will, not because you are a bad employee, but because they will hire someone younger than you to pay less than pay to you), you won't find another job to earn enough to live and save for retirement.
by snowwrestler | 2025-06-15 15:08:13+00:00
This is less true than it used to be. Email inbox providers return a hard bounce if the email does not exist. Most load images by default, which returns a positive signal.

Same thing with SMS: if the number can’t receive SMS, the system returns an error.

If you’re not sure, using the client-provided unsubscribe link (usually up near the “from” address or subject line) is better than the one in the footer. Inbox providers like Gmail, Microsoft, Yahoo etc log these clicks and use them to adjust their filters.
by VulcanWM | 2025-06-15 15:08:19+00:00
Hi HN – I’m 16 and just finished my GCSEs (UK exams). I’ve been coding and shipping small projects for a while, and wanted to turn this summer into something more focused and fun.

So I started Hustle2Grand — a public challenge to help teens earn their first £1k online. Could be from building something, freelancing, flipping, selling templates… anything. The only rule: post a weekly blog update to stay accountable.

No course. No product. Just a way to build momentum and stay consistent.

I’m doing it myself (coding + freelance) and hoping more people will join. Would love any thoughts, feedback, or ideas for helping more young people build and earn online.
by MilnerRoute | 2025-06-15 15:09:27+00:00
Headline is what the front page of CNN showed pointing to this article.

"Seven of Moscow's largest drone attacks in its war on Ukraine have happened in the past four weeks."

As many as 479 drones a night - but it's not just that drone swarms are larger (and more frequent). The swarms are "more concentrated" and also "executed in a way that makes them a lot more difficult to combat, flown at higher altitudes out of reach of machine guns."
by api | 2025-06-15 15:10:59+00:00
I often tried taking taxis after reading about shady practices of Uber and Lyft. I usually came away saying “never again.”

You wait too long to get picked up by a smelly dirty old car and then they pull stuff like pretending the card reader is broken to get you to stop at an ATM so they can avoid taxes.

The worst experiences were in SF. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that these companies started there. Of course SF is uniquely dysfunctional in many ways.

I’ve read many comments online over the years to the effect that people would pay more for Uber and Lyft to destroy the taxi industry.

What’s wrong with the taxi industry is that it’s a cartel, especially in major cities, and everyone knows when you have a monopoly or a cartel everything starts to suck.
by thegrim33 | 2025-06-15 15:11:00+00:00
It just feels like one continuous no true scottsman argument. Oh, you used tech X? Oh no, you gotta use the latest and greatest Y, that's what really makes the difference. 2 weeks go by. You're having all those problems with Y? Oh but that's because you're not using the latest and greatest Z, that makes all the difference, that's where it's really at. Oh, you're not using Z the way I use it? No, you can't do that, you have use it in the special way I use it, that's how it'll work. Oh, that still has problems? That's because you're not using the just-released super-XYZ model, that's really different! Rinse and repeat for many months now.
by saberience | 2025-06-15 15:13:00+00:00
That’s exactly what humans do though lol.

We reason about things based on our training data. We have a hard time or impossible time reasoning about things we haven’t trained on.

Ie: a human with no experience of board games cannot reason about chess moves. A human with no math knowledge cannot reason about math problems.

How would expect an LLM to reason about something with no training data?
by magicalhippo | 2025-06-15 15:14:02+00:00
I've had several revolutionary discoveries during my time programming. In each case, after the euphoria had settled a bit, I asked myself: Why aren't we already doing this? Why isn't this already a thing? What am I missing?

And lo and behold, in each case I did find that it was either not novel at all or it had some major downside I had initially missed.

Still, fun to think about new ways of doing things, so I still go at it.
by runjake | 2025-06-15 15:14:06+00:00
I do some Rails work and I’ve found that Ruby and Rails are one of generative AIs weaker languages. I usually get pretty shoddy output[1].

I generally don’t use AI during Rails stuff, other than as a hint for a Google search or a docs lookup.

Are you having a different experience?

1. Shoddy output with Ruby and Rails knowledge. In general, I would consider myself pretty advanced with “prompt engineering”.
by sjsdaiuasgdia | 2025-06-15 15:14:47+00:00
It's a very "borderline between eras" picture. The 1000 RSX was a late Tandy model. It has a 386 CPU and VGA graphics, which makes it a pretty reasonable Win 3.11 machine. It's a system that could technically run Win 95 but it'd struggle with that CPU and limited RAM capacity. You really wanted a 486 or Pentium for Win 95.

The monitor is the standard Tandy VGA monitor of the system's era. The styling on the speakers feel newer than the RSX's 1991 launch, they're more what I'd expect from the mid to late 90s.

You had to upgrade the VGA chip's BIOS to use Win 95 on it:

> The ACUMOS VGA graphics can be software-updated with Cirrus Logic BIOS (via MS-DOS driver) to allow VESA/SVGA to function in Windows 95, as the Windows 3.xx Tandy VGA drivers are insufficient for Windows 95.

ref: https://gunkies.org/wiki/Tandy_1000_R-Series

I think the background image is probably authentic, it has the feel of a mid-late 90s digital camera picture. It reads to me as the desk of someone who is trying to keep that system alive long past its prime years. Which were arguably over before they started, given 486 systems had been available for a bit when this launched. We end up with an early 90s system with a handful of mid-late 90s peripherals.

The bigger problem to me is this sounds like MIDI played back on a sound card with FM synthesis. The 1000 RSX had the poorly supported Tandy 3 tones + DAC sound hardware. You could install an AdLib, Sound Blaster, or other card to give it MIDI FM synth capability, but the base system can't do it. Alas, we can't see the back to see if it has such an upgrade...
by Viliam1234 | 2025-06-15 15:15:03+00:00
I think the traditional word for the "super-natural number" is "nonstandard integer".

You correctly notice that in case of nonstandard integer, the recursive definition alone is ambiguous, because while the standard integers are connected to zero by a finite chain of successor operations, the nonstandard integers are only chained to each other in infinite chains unconnected to zero. So you could have multiple implementations of a recursive function, each of them giving the same value for the standard integers, but different values for the nonstandard ones.

But there is one extra constraint that I think you didn't take into account. Peano axioms contain the "axiom of induction", which... if you look at it from a certain perspective, says: "whatever (first-order statement) is true for standard integers, it must also be true for nonstandard integers". Well, it doesn't say that directly; it's more like "whatever is true/false for some integers, there must be a smallest integer for which it is true/false".

This further constrains the possibilities for the "+" operation. If you can e.g. prove for the standard integers that "a+b = b+a", then according to this axiom, the same must also be true for nonstandard integers. So if "nonstandard + standard" is defined unambiguously, then so is also "standard + nonstandard".

But this still leaves some space for ambiguity in defining "nonstandard + nonstandard".
by linsomniac | 2025-06-15 15:15:15+00:00
Agreed. Gmail has a handy "block and report as spam", but if there's a "unsubscribe" link it will often ask if you are SURE you don't want to just unsubscribe.

A nice feature because I've seen all too many times over the decades people report spam on messages from lists I'm quite confident they signed up for.
by snowwrestler | 2025-06-15 15:17:07+00:00
The one-click policy is actually about sending the list-unsubscribe header so the email client can render an opt-out button.

An unsubscribe link in the body of an email can have a confirm step.

In fact if you are serving a B2B audience it is essential that you do, since an increasing number of security services like Barracuda, Fortra, etc. auto-click every link in the email body to check for phishing. If you have one-click unsubscribe links in your email body, those people will be constantly unsubscribed without their knowledge.
by can16358p | 2025-06-15 15:18:26+00:00
Nice work!

Though I have one question: once 2 bits/channel are used with Meow-specific data thus leaving 6bits/channel, I doubt how it can still retain perfect image quality when either: (if everything's re-encoded) dynamic range is reduced by 75% or LSB changes introduce noise to the original image. Not too much noise, but still.
by iJohnDoe | 2025-06-15 15:18:38+00:00
I have no expertise in LLMs. I do think the article poses an interesting question. How do you get the models recent information without ingesting information that has been generated by AI. I’m sure it’s possible, but not without a certain level of uncertainty.

Humanity now lives in a world where any text has most likely been influenced by AI, even if it’s by multiple degrees of separation.
by vikingerik | 2025-06-15 15:19:06+00:00
VGA on a Tandy 1000 wasn't all that unusual. Most if not all of the earlier Tandy 1000 models that had ISA slots could take a VGA card in them. The hardware worked fine (it's just memory bus accesses under 1mb and I/O port instructions), it just depended on software support to do anything with it. Tandy's magazine PCM often listed and rated add-in VGA cards. I remember reading of a later version of DeskMate that supported VGA resolution.
by lioeters | 2025-06-15 15:19:22+00:00
When I think about a system that makes zero assumptions, I imagine it would have a large number of configuration points, where every single aspect of behavior and interaction must be specified explicitly instead of implicit and assumed. That sounds complex.

On the flip side, a counter-example comes to mind: automatic imports ("autoloading") in some languages, which makes things apparently simple but gets gnarly when things break unexpectedly. It makes a lot of assumptions about your intention, which is simpler when it works the way you expect. I'd prefer explicit imports every time, even if it's verbose (some might call "complex") because it makes no assumptions - every import is visible so it's actually simpler to understand.
by throwawaymaths | 2025-06-15 15:19:46+00:00
It's a matter of taste, but i found Ruby syntax to be annoyingly inconsistent, and do |..| ... end being something that isn't quite a lambda a huge source of confusion.

also activerecord doing "trust me bro" things behind the scenes (like pluralization) drove me up the wall.

to be fair ecto does a small bit of this too, but at least it doesn't change spellings (so you can global search an identifier).
by andrekandre | 2025-06-15 15:21:50+00:00
> a time they spent money and time on watching people use stuff and figured out how to improve

yes, definitely.

i'm reminded of parc with smalltalk and the early lisa/mac design prototypes being based on actually learning how people think about problem solving and its relations to ui/ux (with the goal of improving usability, discovery and reducing cognitive load etc)
by cobbzilla | 2025-06-15 15:22:07+00:00
I primarily use a @duck.com alias that forwards to my gmail account.

It's easy to generate random new @duck.com aliases for the primary.

I have a browser plugin (mobile and desktop) that recognizes email form fields and offers to generate a new random @duck.com alias for the field.

When an alias starts to receive spam, I disable it.
by ostif-derek | 2025-06-15 15:22:57+00:00
Hey there everyone!

Some friends just notified us that this is trending.

Let me know if you have any questions/comments/feedback about the work! It was a great project, I wish we had more budget so that we could spend some time with ruzzy and the C extensions as there's probably some things to be unearthed there with ASAN and UBSAN.

As for the comments on Spring/Elixir/Django/Phoenix, they're on our wish list every year but we're always limited by funding. It's about what the communities, foundations, and agencies can and will support. We are always working toward getting larger grants where we can work fully independently on whatever we want, but so far that hasn't materialized.

We'll keep trying!
by refulgentis | 2025-06-15 15:23:04+00:00
There's a false equivalence there, between being not-even-wrong and "you have a bunch of UNIX commands followed by a Windows batch file execution."

Note we both agree on that, you seem to assume I claimed something else, like, cd doesn't exist on windows.

Let's say I instead said "this doesn't work on Windows"

I spent probably...8 hours? on Windows this week doing dev, and I'm about 70% sure all of those commands will work on Windows, with dev mode switched on, with WSL on, prereqs installed...

Let's steelman this to the max: any possible prerequisite that could block it, doesn't mean its actually blocked. Dev mode on, WSL, prerequisites wrestled with and installed, can download source and edit then compile, but can only patch build errors, not add new functionality.

Are you 100% sure those commands will work?

(separately, you misunderstand the quote re: glass houses. It would apply if I had used AI to write not-even-wrong claims and then submitted to HN. This misunderstanding leads to a conclusion that it is impermissible to comment on the correctness of anything if you may be incorrect, which we can both recognize leads to absurdities that would lead to 0 communication ever.)
by rednafi | 2025-06-15 15:23:10+00:00
I used to feel similar when I’d write Python. It was a beautiful language in its primordial days, and you’d feel like a hipster renegade if you could sneak it into an enterprise environment where C#, Java, and C++ were the norms. Even just whipping up a tiny script that didn’t require compilation and could do some stuff felt like magic.

These days I mostly write Go for work, and as I’ve gotten older, I no longer find the act of programming profound. I take more joy in hiking and kayaking than programming, since LLMs have commoditized something that used to be gatekept to the teeth.

I’m glad that AI tools have trivialized many parts of the act and let people focus on the result rather than the process. Kind of like how good linters completely killed off the bike shedding around code aesthetics.

That said, nowadays I appreciate tools that last. Languages that take backward compatibility seriously and don’t break user code on a whim. Languages that don’t support ten ways of doing the same thing. Languages that don’t require any external dependency managers or build tools. Languages that are fast, have less syntactic noise, and let me do my stuff without much fuss. So to my eyes, those useful languages are the most beautiful.

So Python, with its bolted-on type system, no built-in dependency manager (uv doesn’t count; there will be more unless they put it in the standard toolchain), and a terrible type checker, doesn’t really appeal to me anymore.

I’m sure anyone could write a beautiful ode to any language of their choice and make something profound out of it. If I could, I’d probably write an ode to Go.