MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by h3lp | 2025-07-22 14:54:25+00:00
One large but forgotten effect of the dotcom bubble was an excess fiber capacity, that allowed smooth growth of internet in the following 25 years---average internet speed in the US is 200 Mbps, and a significant number of households is on a gigabit uplink. I take your point that GPU hardware amortizes away faster than fiber, but that's true of all computing hardware: the average lifecycle of a server is around five years.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-07-22 14:54:31+00:00
Thing is, you know it, but for (randomly imagined number) 95% of people, it's convincing enough to be conscious or whatnot. And a lot of the ones that do know this gaslight themselves because it's still useful or profitable to them, or they want to believe.

The ones that are super convinced they know exactly how an LLM works, but still give it prompts to become self-aware are probably the most dangerous ones. They're convinced they can "break the programming".
by clvx | 2025-07-22 14:54:43+00:00
> “Soon, everyone will be a developer”

This is the wrong view. It's more like "Soon, everyone will be able to go from idea to a prototype". IMO, there's a different value perception when people can use concrete things even if they are not perfect. This is what I like about end-to-end vibe coding tools. I don't see a non developer using Claude Code but I can totally see them using Github Spark or any similar tool. After that, the question is how can I ensure this person can keep moving forward with the idea.
by skrebbel | 2025-07-22 14:54:45+00:00
In the context of switching from Chrome? No, I very much did not. On the privacy front, I'm absolutely convinced that switching from Chrome to Firefox is an upgrade even if you don't do stuff like this.

This is my entire point. Yes, you can tweak Firefox to the max and yes you can complain about the more questionable stuff Mozilla has done, but compared to the privacy/goodness you get just from ditching Chrome (or Edge for that matter), all that is pretty marginal.
by daft_pink | 2025-07-22 14:54:45+00:00
I agree, but I’ve found that if I ignore 5 star reviews and use the ratio of 1 star reviews to 4 star reviews and look for an overall stair case of reviews, when trying to find the best provider. My theory is that no one pays for 4 and 3 star reviews and 1-2 star reviews are probably genuine bad experiences. Places I go to that are awesome that I know are awesome generally have a staircase effect, where there are more 5 stars than 4 stars, 3 stars than 2 stars, 2 stars than 1 stars. Places where the reviews are clearly games are polarising and have a ton of 5 stars, second place is one stars, and very few in between. If 1 star reviews are in first or second place, the place is generally terrible even if it has a ton of 5 star reviews. Histograms on review platforms are incedibly useful to compare contractors.
by throwanem | 2025-07-22 14:55:10+00:00
Language and speech comprehension and production is relatively well understood to be heavily localized in the left temporal lobe; if you care to know something whereof you speak (and indeed with what, in a meat sense), then you'll do well to begin your reading with Broca's and Wernicke's areas. Consciousness is in no sense required for these regions to function; an anesthetized and unconscious human may be made to speak or sing, and some have, through direct electrical stimulation of brain tissue in these regions.

I am quite confident in pronouncing first that the internal functioning of large language models is broadly and radically unlike that of humans, and second that, minimally, no behavior produced by current large language models is strongly indicative of consciousness.

In practice, I would go considerably further in saying that, in my estimation, many behaviors point precisely in the direction of LLMs being without qualia or internal experience of a sort recognizable or comparable with human consciousness or self-experience. Interestingly, I've also discussed this in terms of recursion, more specifically of the reflexive self-examination which I consider consciousness probably exists fundamentally to allow, and which LLMs do not reliably simulate. I doubt it means anything that LLMs which get into these spirals with their users tend to bring up themes of "signal" and "recursion" and so on, like how an earlier generation of models really seemed to like the word "delve." But I am curious to see how this tendency of the machine to drive its user into florid psychosis will play out.

(I don't think Hoel's "integrated information theory" is really all that supportable, but the surprise minimization stuff doesn't appear novel to him and does intuitively make sense to me, so I don't mind using it.)
by exiguus | 2025-07-22 14:55:12+00:00
My take is that Firefox is not very effective at marketing. For example, Chrome publishes articles like 'Chrome achieves highest score ever on Speedometer' (2024) [1]. I haven't found similar articles or any reliable scores for Firefox. Some computer magazines suggest that Firefox is in second place after Chrome in running Speedometer 3. For me, at least, it's hard to find any specific numbers. Also, it's important to note that Speedometer is a browser benchmark test developed by WebKit, Firefox, and Chrome.

Also, i don't understand why people prefer google over open source. And the sometimes disrespectful and destructive criticism of Mozilla.

[1] https://blog.chromium.org/2025/06/chrome-achieves-highest-sc...
by shadowgovt | 2025-07-22 14:55:21+00:00
Not that this is a topic that I think anyone is still rubed on (in the sense that even those who voted for him thinking he'd be better on Israel / Palestine relations have been disabused of the notion), but did anyone else have "Trump withdraws the US from UNESCO because they support Palestine" on their bingo card?

And, of course, the follow-up question: did anyone have it on a Harris bingo card?
by isoprophlex | 2025-07-22 14:55:27+00:00
We saw and touched a smaller, metallic meteorite fragment last year in a museum. Touching it was an incredible experience. It had a very noticable, distinct smell. I couldnt get enough of running my fingers along the cold, pitted surface of it.

One of my kids still sometimes snickers and offhandedly comments "this metal was once a star" when he sees or handles solid metallic objects.

I'd definitely try to buy something like this if I had "fuck you" amounts of money
by krisoft | 2025-07-22 14:55:31+00:00
> We don't have any sound reasons to believe the next one will be simpler.

Yes and no. I think you are right that the plasma shape is going to remain very complex.

But that's not the only reason why W7-X looks complicated. It has a ton of diagnostics ports on the plasma vessel just for research. Most of those we can probably design out for a production version.

So I would expect a production version of a stelarator to be simpler than W7-X, but still remain very complex.
by kingnothing | 2025-07-22 14:55:48+00:00
This is correct. Once upon a time, I worked for a company doing this type of disposal. They had 18 wheelers full of equipment show up a couple of times per week. Drives were pulled and put in a pile to be shredded. Everything else was tested and either restored to working order and sold in bulk to organizations in need of cheaper computers, parted out on eBay, or scrapped.
by dclowd9901 | 2025-07-22 14:56:00+00:00
I couldn't help but think, reading through this post, how similar of a mindset a person probably is when they receive spiritual awakening with religion as they seem to be when they have "profound" interactions with AI. They are _looking for something_ and there's a perfectly sized shape to fit that hole. I can really see AI becoming incredibly dangerous this way (just as religion can be).
by gtmb | 2025-07-22 14:56:02+00:00
I´m blogging about my journey creating a new video codec. This project is inspired by the story of the QOI image format. Today´s state-of-the-art video codecs is super complicated. And the development for the last years has been just even more complicated optimizations of the same idea. I hope to bring a Forrest Gump approach to it: by being dumb about the subject, and taking a different approach to the task, it might work. Following the blog, your comments and suggestions would be a great motivation to keep the project going.
by Ajedi32 | 2025-07-22 14:56:17+00:00
That's bizarre. I wonder if the use of AI was actually a contributing factor to his psychotic break as the article implies, or if the guy was already developing schizophrenia and the chat bot just controlled what direction he went after that. I'm vaguely reminded of people getting sucked down conspiracy theory rabbit holes, though this seems way more extreme in how unhinged it is.
by bryanlarsen | 2025-07-22 14:56:18+00:00
It's not a coup if you stay in power illegally, it's a self-coup. 2020 was a coup attempt because Trump gave up power and then tried to give it back. He's not going to make that same mistake again. He'll just attempt to stay in power via self-coup.

Unlike coup's which are distinct events, self-coup's are usually shades of grey. They happen through democratic backsliding, which usually consists of a large number of small events. I'm sure we'll see some more before the next election. Will it be enough so that the US is as bad as Russia or Turkey? No. Will it be enough to keep Trump in power illegally? Perhaps.
by Night_Thastus | 2025-07-22 14:56:42+00:00
Neither musicians or authors are going anywhere, and it's kind of bizarre to say so.

People make music because they want to. They always have, since the dawn of civilization. Even if we end up somehow making music bots that can generate something OK, people won't magically stop wanting to make music.

And for both cases, it's important to remember that ML/LLM/etc can only re-arrange what's already been created. They're not really capable of generating anything novel - which is important for both of those.
by throw7 | 2025-07-22 14:56:47+00:00
This seems to be a political back and forth (beginning with the admittance of palestine in the past)... (from wikipedia) U.S. (and Israel) left UNESCO in 2018, but the United States rejoined in 2023. I presume U.S. has left again now in 2025.

[edit: kind of surprised this hasn't been flagged, but sadly indicative of HN's bias.]
by ksec | 2025-07-22 14:56:56+00:00
Last time I asked Which site / problems don't work on Firefox ?

>Some forms just break in Firefox for me. I’ve been applying to a lot of tech companies, and roughly 10% of their application forms fail in Firefox but work fine in Chrome. I can’t figure out why it’s inconsistent. Even some CAPTCHA and payment pop‑ups won’t load.

>Most browser games(I play an absolute shit ton) run WAY better on chrome than Firefox, on both macOS and Android. Not sure about Windows where I play full real games.

>Home Depot. They never test against Firefox, so most of their pages are a dumpster fire.

>Memory hog on Linux
by aprilthird2021 | 2025-07-22 14:57:02+00:00
> UNESCO’s decision to admit the “State of Palestine” as a Member State is highly problematic, contrary to U.S. policy, and contributed to the proliferation of anti-Israel rhetoric within the organization.

I asked this when the administration decided to attack funding for research at Harvard University over wild claims, and I ask again, why are we willing to shoot ourselves in the knees for Israel?
Show HN: Giti – Natural Language to Git Commands with Local LLM
by sumit-paul | 2025-07-22 14:57:49+00:00
Hi HN,

I built Giti, a command-line tool that converts plain English into actual Git commands using a fast, local language model (Qwen2.5-Coder, ~1 GB).

Example:

Input: giti "undo last commit"

Output: git reset --soft HEAD~1

No internet required after setup. No API keys. You can also run it in an interactive shell to chain commands naturally.

Key features: - Natural language to Git translation - Local LLM powered by Qwen2.5-Coder in GGUF format - Works fully offline after model download - Dry-run mode to preview commands before running - Interactive shell mode for session-based workflows - Context file support to teach Giti your custom Git habits

Quick install: - Clone the repo - Install llama-cpp-python - Add giti to your PATH - Download the 1GB model from HuggingFace - Run giti "your query."

You can also enhance its accuracy using context files in a simple Q&A format like:

USER: How to start new feature? BOT: git checkout main && git pull && git checkout -b feature/<name>

This lets Giti learn your workflow and generate project-specific Git commands.

Thanks for checking it out.
Show HN: Go Command-streaming lib for distributed systems (3x faster than gRPC)
by ymz_ncnk | 2025-07-22 14:57:50+00:00
I created cmd-stream-go, a high-performance client-server library based on the Command Pattern, where Commands are first-class citizens.

Why build around Commands? As serializable objects, they can be sent over the network and persisted. They also provide a clean way to model distributed transactions through composition, and naturally support features like Undo and Redo. These qualities make them a great fit for implementing consistency patterns like Saga in distributed systems.

On the performance side, sending a Command involves minimal overhead — only its type and data need to be transmitted. In benchmarks focused on raw throughput (measured using 1, 2, 4, 8, and 16 clients in a simple request/response scenario), cmd-stream/MUS (cmd-stream/Protobuf) is about 3x (2.8x) faster than gRPC/Protobuf, where MUS is a serialization format optimized for low byte usage. This kind of speedup can make a real difference in high-throughput systems or when you're trying to squeeze more out of limited resources.

By putting Commands at the transport layer, cmd-stream-go avoids the extra complexity of layering Command logic on top of generic RPC or REST.

The trade-offs: it’s currently Go-only and maintained by a single developer.

If you’re curious to explore more, you can check out the cmd-stream-go repository (https://github.com/cmd-stream/cmd-stream-go), see performance benchmarks (https://github.com/ymz-ncnk/go-client-server-benchmarks), or read the series of posts on Command Pattern and how it can be applied over the network (https://medium.com/p/f9e53442c85d).

I’d love to hear your thoughts — especially where you think this model could shine, any production concerns, similar patterns or tools you’ve seen in practice.

Feel free to reach me as ymz-ncnk on the Gophers Slack or follow https://x.com/cmdstream_lib for project updates.
by PaulHoule | 2025-07-22 14:57:51+00:00
That article is just way too short to be upvotable -- and I really want to upvote articles that aren't about AI. Also, if you want people to read what you write you should consider a platform other than Medium, Medium pops up a big annoying popup that covers 80% of the screen, do you really want to be that guy?
by pavon | 2025-07-22 14:58:02+00:00
It does look like the gradient descent is paired with a type of genetic algorithm:

> For each local optimization, Urania chooses a target from the pool according to a Boltzmann distribution, which weights better-performing setups in the pool higher and adds a small noise to escape local minima. These choices add a global character to the exploration. When one of the local optimizations of Urania finds a better parameter setting for a setup in the pool, it replaces the old solution with the superior one. Upon convergence, Urania repeats and chooses a new target from the pool. In parallel, Urania simplifies solutions from the pool by probabilistically removing elements whose removal does not impact the overall sensitivity.
by falcor84 | 2025-07-22 14:59:25+00:00
Oh, interesting - it's about failure rate following degradation after prolonged use. I didn't think of that - but my take is that if companies like Google are actually using those components until they 100% exhaust what the components are capable of, then we can argue about whether this use of resources is better than an alternative use of them, but it's by definition not a waste of resources.
by potatolicious | 2025-07-22 14:59:52+00:00
AFAIK not for the program itself. Plenty of ability to page for other runtime memory consumption. I can only assume this is done with a presumption that responsiveness is a greater priority than the ability to accommodate extremely large binaries and suffer cache thrash.

While the process is active the whole binary is loaded (note: may not include dynamically linked libs, which is why that's a good idea - dylibs can be configured to load on-demand).

A triply-good reason why the pattern of "giant ball of statically linked things" is an anti-pattern.
by trashtensor | 2025-07-22 14:59:55+00:00
Even for professional developers I am not buying this argument. I think there is an argument to be made that we actually don't know how to work with these tools effectively and repeatably yet. But as the tools improve and we figure out the processes more that may change. It might not too, but I am leaning more toward it working better when we figure out how to use it than not.

e: Not a q for parent, but maybe for others. Are we supposed to be making a distinction between "vibe coding" and "coding with an AI agent"? What is the difference?
by aprilthird2021 | 2025-07-22 14:59:55+00:00
I don't buy this. Both parties have flaws. The Republicans under Trump don't understand economics, are willing to cut our benefits while still increasing the deficit, are willing to fire disproportionately veterans (who are disproportionately in federal jobs), are willing to let corrupt people walk free and avoid trial, are willing to crypto scam their own supporters, and are willing to make us a pariah state so we can keep supporting Israel.

And Democrats are nauseating about identity politics.

Voters get what they vote for, and they voted for this and now they are suffering. The mental calculus here has to change or it will just get worse
by acaloiar | 2025-07-22 15:00:19+00:00
In Colorado, this is how it's supposed to work.

But then you have companies like Parking Revenue Recovery Services (PRRS), who have already had to settle [1] with the AG once before, and yet the AG refuses to take action on additional complaints, for years.

PRRS sent me a sham parking fee two weeks after their settlement with the AG in 2022.

The AG's response to my complaint

> We have investigated your complaint and based on the information we have received to date, we are taking no further action at this time.

This was three years ago. And Coloradans, faced with an AG that won't do anything for them, have taken to PRRS's non-accredited BBB page to file thousands of complaints [2].

I don't think the BBB would have any effect in this situation either, because PRRS doesn't rely on reputation for its business. They simply rely on having conveniently placed parking lots throughout the city with people needing a place to park.

This was three years ago, and here we are in 2025 and Denver is still dealing with this situation [3] and as far as I know, the AG still hasn't done anything about it.

/vent

[1] https://coag.gov/press-releases/attorney-general-phil-weiser... [2] https://www.bbb.org/us/co/englewood/profile/parking-attendan... [3] https://www.9news.com/article/money/consumer/steve-on-your-s...
by MostlyStable | 2025-07-22 15:00:41+00:00
Again, knowing that consciousness isn't required for language is not the same thing as knowing what consciousness is. We don't know what consciousness is in humans. We don't know what causes it. We don't even know how human brains do the things they do (knowing what region is mostly responsible for language is not at all the same as knowing how that region does is).

But also, claiming that because a human is anesthetized means they are not conscious is a claim that I think we don't understand consciousness well enough to make confidently. They don't remember it afterwards, but does that mean they weren't conscious? That seems like a claim that would require a more mechanistic understanding of consciousness than we actually have and is in part assuming the conclusion and/or mixing up different definitions of the word "conscious". (the fact that there are various definitions that mean things like "is a awake and aware" and "has an internal state/qualia" is part of the problem in these discussions.)
by ceejayoz | 2025-07-22 15:00:50+00:00
> This is what happens when your neighbours wall you off because they don't want you in their countries…

Ah, so now context matters.

> keep training your children to hate them

As do Israeli settlers.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/clip-of-israeli... "An Israeli organization calling itself The Civil Front has sparked controversy on social media by producing a song in which children fete the “destruction” in Gaza and say “nothing will be left there” in a year’s time."

> you deliberately fight using civilians as human shields

"How Israel’s Army Uses Palestinians as Human Shields in Gaza": https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/14/world/middleeast/israel-g...

> Is this your explanation for them calling it only one of the religion's holy places?

Is that actually what happened?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_World_Heritage_Sites_i... says things like "UNESCO listed it with no attribution to any state".

https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/ is the list. Let's discuss a specific one. https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/148, for example, says "a holy city for Judaism, Christianity and Islam".
by mpyne | 2025-07-22 15:01:02+00:00
I think `git add -p` and its friends are another thing I'd point to for this.

I've never really struggled too hard to get git commits into different branches for review, but if you've put unrelated changes into the same working dir, you'll want `git add -p` to sort them out into multiple commits.

Note there are corresponding `-p` flags for things like git-restore and git-reset as well.
by Brian_K_White | 2025-07-22 15:01:05+00:00
You act as though the sales pitch for dynamically loaded shared libs is the whole story.

Obviously everything has some reason it was ever invented, and so there is a reason dynamic linking was invented too, and so congratulations, you have recited that reason.

A trivial and immediate counter example though is that a hacker is able to replace your awesome updated library just as easily with their own holed one, because it is loaded on the fly at run-time and the loading mechanism has lots of configurability and lots of attack surface. It actually enables attacks that wouldn't otherwise exist.

And a self contained object is inherently more portable than one with dependencies that might be either missing or incorrect at run time.

There is no simple single best idea for anything. There are various ideas with their various advantages and disadvantages, and you use whichever best services your priorities of the moment. The advantages of dynamic libs and the advantages of static both exist and sometimes you want one and sometimes you want the other.
by elktown | 2025-07-22 15:01:14+00:00
I guess I expect higher standards than the kind of confident extrapolation you find in pseudo-science. And "vision of the future" is your euphemistic rewrite. If that's clearly stated I obviously have no problem with people's fanciful speculation. But these are claims in the format: "X will be replaced in a couple of years, how should we adapt as a society?" etc etc.
by baby_souffle | 2025-07-22 15:01:26+00:00
> That is assuming nobody has a phone that is also connected to the network

A buddy of mine has horror stories about what happens when an office full of iPhones all download the same 1+ gig iOS update at the same time.

> Imagine what we could have if we had 100 gigabit or 1 terabit

Exactly my point. I'd rather we not let large ISPs be the ones that decide what is innovative and "fast enough" for us. I want somebody with the power to push them... pushing them to be faster and better.