MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by oersted | 2025-07-21 13:20:41+00:00
These things kept happening for 2-3 years with pre-ChatGPT LLM tech demos from Microsoft, Meta and Google.

Not to be an apologist of course, just wanted to point out that it may be a sign of them being behind the curve on some technical aspects, or at least on best practice, likely on purpose. Sure they probably did some ideological meddling too.

For all the (valid) criticism on alignment/censoring, one has to acknowledge the success of the pragmatic approach from OpenAI and Anthropic. As much as we might not want to admit it, bit of censoring is kind of critical to be able to use LLMs seriously to solve real problems.
by jcalx | 2025-07-21 13:20:59+00:00
Not specifically about kings but — I recommend The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England by Ian Mortimer, for a very thorough look at daily life in this era.

More specifically about kings, ACoUP has a great writeup [0] on royal legitimacy and the various purposes of the king's court in the context of my favorite medieval shenanigans simulator, Crusader Kings III.

[0] https://acoup.blog/2022/02/18/miscellanea-thoughts-on-ckiii-...
by nottorp | 2025-07-21 13:21:41+00:00
> Isn't it normal for games to be cross platform on Steam?

It is, unless Apple is involved... take a look at Death Stranding 1, whose Mac port was very promoted by Apple and is only available directly from the app store.

So every time a high profile game gets a Mac port, it's not safe to assume you'll just get it on Steam.
by bayindirh | 2025-07-21 13:21:44+00:00
I read the "USB cart of death" post from Raymond, and I really respected them for that.

I'm sure there are many great engineers, minds and all-round nice people who work at Microsoft, but when the company does what it does and screws people over and over, the act of the whole shadows the acts of individuals. These acts (of Microsoft, the company) doesn't make them bad people, but makes respecting them as a whole a lot harder.
by somenameforme | 2025-07-21 13:21:45+00:00
That's literally a fishing expedition that could be exploited to harvest information on whoever one likes. It's the reason our legal system requires a substantial burden of evidence before one can even think of pursuing a warrant.

I mean seriously think about the implications of your concept here. X is a worldwide service. Should X just be an information broker dealing out the details on users to any country that makes claims as nebulous as 'foreign influence'? It's a term which can be (and often is) whimsically applied to essentially anybody who happens to disagree with some regime in a given country.
by radicalbyte | 2025-07-21 13:21:53+00:00
I had to laugh hard the first time I heard about it, I mean it's a really obvious technique if you've ever done low-level programming on limited machines as it's very close to something we used to do all the time - calculate result tables and use lookups which we built in to our code.

Trades memory for CPU when it's worth it. Dynamic programming takes the same idea but does it at runtime.
by voidUpdate | 2025-07-21 13:22:02+00:00
If it weren't so dangerous, I'd love to pop along to my local tanning salon and get an MRI scan. I've always been quite interested to see an MRI of my brain. Alas, I'm stuck with waiting for some kind of medical testing to need some test subjects to scan, or a university student needing someone to learn to use an MRI on. Or I guess have a head injury serious enough to need an MRI, but that's less desirable
by xdfgh1112 | 2025-07-21 13:22:15+00:00
> To make matters interesting, a leading v on a Perl version, or the presence of 2 or more .'s imply a sort order closer to Gentoos.

This is 100% classic perl: the default is bonkers and unintuitive, but the behaviour also changes in a DWIM manner to throw people off. And of course there are two different ways to represent versions so simply forgetting the v (one character) can cause a litany of bugs.
by graycat | 2025-07-21 13:22:26+00:00
Maybe since the Big Bang I'm the only one, but AM one, to be torqued at what I regard as media low credibility and undefined, obscure terminology.

Sorry guys but I (1) very much DO want solid information about a range of interests and (2) have a STEM field background that places great emphasis on solid evidence.

We don't have to dig into quantum mechanics: Instead there are some common high school standards for term papers that call for claims supported with data with references from credible, hopefully original, sources.

Instead I see various attempts at getting reader attention via emotional appeals.

Uh, "Breaking news, this just in, experts shocked": Now we have the Internet where before we had news writers with typewriters, typesetters, big rolls of paper, printing plants, distribution trucks, paperboys, etc., twice a day, morning and evening. With the Internet there are lots of sources, cheap means of distribution, ....

E.g., recently saw some news, scary drama, about suddenly too high prices for corn. Okay, HOW high are they? How do they compare historically? Can we have some good graphs of credible NUMERICAL data????

Well a little use of Google gave

https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps /Agricultural_Prices/pricecn.php

with a really nice graph -- numerical data, no drama -- from 2016 to the present. For a fast look at corn prices, nuff said.

Point: Commonly the old media pushes drama and is stuck in the past, and now the Internet offers ways to set aside the old media and get solid information. "Media, fun knowing you."
by smokel | 2025-07-21 13:22:37+00:00
Note that the comment you are replying to is speculating about the (not so distant) future. Be assured that companies will try their best to lock customers in.

One option is to add adverts to the generated output, and making the product cheaper than the competition. Another is to have all your cloud data preprocessed with LLMs in a non-portable way, so that changing will incur a huge cost.
by afiori | 2025-07-21 13:23:00+00:00
> methods are just attributes that are looked up at runtime

At runtime when evaluating a + b no dunder method is looked up and there is no guarantee that a + b === a.__anydunder__(b) https://youtu.be/qCGofLIzX6g

What i mean with weird scoping is

def foo(): e = 'defined' try: raise ValueError except Exception as e: print(e) print(e) # this will error out foo()

I also dislike how local/global scopes work in python but that is more of a personal preference.

I agree that that Javascripts standard library is horrible the jsdate.wtf is an extreme but apt example, IMO most of these are solved with some "defensive programming" but I respect other opinions here.

> And no, nobody is IMX actually simply complaining about NaNs existing

I watched many Javascript WTF! videos on youtube and NaNs and [2] == "2" were usually 90% of the content.
by unsupp0rted | 2025-07-21 13:23:12+00:00
We didn't evolve to have the warning mechanisms for modern life.

Tell a person there's a tarantula or a cobra in the next room and not a second will go by without them being deeply aware of this information.

Tell them it's a 3 tesla magnetic field and they'll run in carrying a piece of sheet metal and a pocket full of ball bearings.
by NL807 | 2025-07-21 13:23:12+00:00
As the circle was about to disappear, the blue-green was super saturated for me and persisted for a good minute if I kept locking onto the white dot. Another thing you can do, is at night time (lights off) look at the red circle like before, and when the timer runs out close your eyes and keep it dark. You will see blue-green glow very strongly.
by sgarland | 2025-07-21 13:23:51+00:00
> no modules

Ish. You can source whatever files you want, so if you split up your functions into logical directories / files, you can get modules (-ish).

> no tests

BATS [0].

[0]: https://github.com/bats-core/bats-core

> I've successfully refactored messy python code in the past, but with bash I've had no idea where to even start.

I say this with all kindness: you probably need to know more bash before you can safely refactor it. It is a very pointy and unforgiving language.
by pjmlp | 2025-07-21 13:24:28+00:00
They are in other ways, like canceling morning flights if not enough passangers are on the flight, like it happened to me from Germany to Switzerland, and by quoting technical failure, usually EasyJet gets away with having to refund a few ones, while those willing to way almost a full day get the evening flight instead, and one less day.

What about Eurowings now offering booking of headspace, so that you can guarantee to have the hand lugagge close to your seat?

If anything, I see other airliners getting the same tatics, and I guess we should all be happy they still care about maintenance.
by ruiseal | 2025-07-21 13:25:01+00:00
I've probably flown on 200 Ryanair flights and think the service is great. They get you from A to B cheap and mostly on time. If you adjust your expectations that they're a bus you'll have a better time. In response to your last paragraph. Their ability to set prices as they see fit has allowed them to offer mostly very cheap prices. Regulate this and say goodbye to those prices.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-07-21 13:25:23+00:00
I wrote a powershell script to run an ffmpeg workflow. I'm confident that this was a better idea than either of the other two approaches that you seem to be advocating for:

(a) instead of writing a shell script to operate a shell-operated tool, write a python script with a bunch of os.system('shell out') commands.

(b) instead of just invoking ffmpeg to do the things you want done, install an ffmpeg development library, and call the functions that ffmpeg itself calls to do those things.

What would be the argument for either of those?
by sameerds | 2025-07-21 13:27:06+00:00
I am in that trap myself. I am doing work that I like, at a pay that I like but "something" has been missing for a long time. Two decades ago, back in my grad school days, I used to have a blog and was part of communities like livejournal. Now my blog is replaced with a blank page because I have nothing to share with my friends about my daily life.
by fancyfredbot | 2025-07-21 13:27:17+00:00
You seem to be saying AMD GPUs can run PyTorch but can't run GEMM? Can you explain? I thought PyTorch used GEMM extensively.

I also don't understand the comment on "whatever ROCm can't do doesn't seem to be important because no-one has articulated why they need it in my line of sight". Isn't the problem with ROCm the lack of support? It's only officially supported on a tiny proportion of AMD's product line?
by dbuxton | 2025-07-21 13:27:20+00:00
Fundamentally, we are at a point in time where models are already very capable, but not very reliable.

This is very interesting finding about how to improve capability.

I don't see reliability expressly addressed here, but my assumption is that these alloys will be less rather than more reliable - stronger, but more brittle, to extend the alloy metaphor.

Unfortunately for many if not most B2B use cases this reliability is the primary constraint! Would love to see similar ideas in the reliability space.
by smokel | 2025-07-21 13:27:37+00:00
> Programming used to be (and still is, to a large extent) an activity that can be done with open and free tools.

This was largely not the case before 2000, and may not be the case after, say 2030. It may well be that we are living in extraordinary times.

Before 2000 one had to buy expensive compilers and hardware to do serious programming. The rise of the commercial internet has made desktop computers cheaper, and the free software movement (again mostly by means of commercial companies enjoying the benefits) has made a lot of free software available.

However, we now have mostly smartphones, and serious security risks to deal with.
by sam_lowry_ | 2025-07-21 13:27:39+00:00
I admire 1.1. It is elegant as poetry is compared to prose.

You really had to bend your mind to do things with it.

Like... grouping had to be invented by Steve(?) Muench before anyone could do it. This is why it was called Muenchian grouping.

OTOH, later XSLT versions are just badly designed programming languages with a weird syntax. No wonder none wants to use them.

Funnily only one guy kind of succeeded to implement them, the editor of the spec and the author of Saxon himself ))

I am sure he earned many millions since then on obscure contracts with the likes of SAP and Oracle.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-07-21 13:28:00+00:00
> freedom of speech is above everything.

No it is not. I have the freedom to call you all kinds of insults, but I will get banned (if I'm not already, I wouldn't know lol). It's the paradox of intolerance.

> in a few years we will have social points like china and those who disagree with left-leaning ideas and government interventionism will be reduced to silence or even jailed.

This is a slippery slope fallacy. Besides, the current powers-that-be are actively suppressing free speech already, banning books, teachings, erasing LGBTQ+ and Black history. You don't get freedom of speech either on platforms like Twitter, where for example the word "cisgender" gets actively suppressed. That's known, what isn't known is how certain topics get boosted or suppressed by their algorithms, which is why there should be transparency.

If you're afraid of the slippery slope from "the left", wake up and see what's actually happening right now. People in the US get disappeared while following the proper immigration processes. The media and speech is actively being suppressed (see the sudden cancellation of The Late Show).
by nullc | 2025-07-21 13:28:25+00:00
not sure I agree. UB has the benefit that there are a lot of tools like valgrind, memcheck, and various compiler features to detect it both statically and at runtime. And when you hit UB it is certainly an error.

Non-UB errors have no such powerful tools, only what application specific tests or assertions you create.

I've seen plenty of cases where people went and turned signed types into unsigned because signed overflow is undefined, but it had the real effect of turning easily detected and diagnosed issues into much harder to find bugs.
by bluGill | 2025-07-21 13:28:42+00:00
75 years ago someone in my position would have had a secretary - she (sexism intended) would have covered about 4 others. My boss would have had a personal secretary. Today Outlook (or similar programs) do the majority of what she would have done and they do it better. I can book an airline ticket myself in the time it would take to explain what I really want to the secretary.
by lastcat743 | 2025-07-21 13:29:17+00:00
The loudest voices will prevail.

Blame Americans. Blame America. Don’t blame the “psychopaths”, blame yourself for not understanding yourselves.

Good people want to prosper, enjoy their lives, their families and loved ones. Good people in their primes are always ineffectual in matters of power. Those exceptions you can see why they are so, and such tenacity of will and rebounding spirit can only be said compulsive. More psychosis to set you straight.

Without “principle and devotion”, that translate to lives on the line, your ideas are mass delusion and cognitive dissonance.

Power is made of people not societal assurances, this generation is one of sweet lies over bitter truths, and the opportunists and fanatics have every advantage.

* “loudest voices”, most persistent and invasive into the mind.
by latexr | 2025-07-21 13:29:38+00:00
> OK, but isn't jq just an example of a favorite scripting environment with a multi-meg install and a dependency system?

No? jq is a single binary a little over half a MB with no runtime dependencies. You can simply download it and use it. And you only need that if it’s not already included in whatever system you’re using, which it likely is. It even comes with macOS these days, which is more than what you can say for Python.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44408432

> Neither curl nor jq is a builtin operation.

Pretty sure they meant it as in builtin with the system, not the language. As per their first paragraph:

> Even a minimal image like busybox will have enough to do serious work.
by notarobot123 | 2025-07-21 13:30:04+00:00
I'm starting to think that marketing products as open-source introduces a liability:

> Open-Source Myth: Despite being marketed as open-source, Ghost restricts open discussion in forums, often editing or removing user posts, and provides no clarity on upcoming releases or feature development...

OSS has come to be associated with an incredibly high-bar of community engagement and an expectation for open and transparent participation. Maybe the term has just gathered too much baggage at this point to be worth shouting about when talking to the general public.
by kindkang2024 | 2025-07-21 13:30:17+00:00
The Dao that can be spoken is not the eternal Dao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name. The nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth. The named is the mother of the ten thousand things. — Laozi , Dao De Jing, ~6th Century BCE

With today’s breakthroughs in AI and neuroscience, are we approaching the essence of the Dao—something beyond naming/language?

Language in all its forms—spoken, typed —is ultimately a tool to manifest wills. Humans express their inner intentions by naming and symbolizing the world around them. Large Language Models (LLMs) learn from this symbolic data, absorbing the embedded patterns of human thought and intention much like humans do. In this way, LLM begins to mirror the human mind—bringing the idea of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) closer to reality.

Now, brain-computer interface (BCI) technologies like Neuralink are pushing this even further. Paraplegic patients have already been able to control computers directly through their minds. This suggests it’s possible to decode the brain’s internal “language”—its biological signals—into digital commands. Even more fascinating, Neuralink’s future goals include restoring vision by sending data directly to the brain. If the brain can receive and interpret artificial input,that below things extraordinary becomes clear:

There is indeed something within the brain — deep within you and me — that can be encoded, decoded, and shared. Let’s call it Will — not in the ordinary sense, but in the philosophical sense, as in Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, or simply, the Dao.

Could we one day bypass the representations of the Will — language, vision, voice — and communicate more directly, mind to mind? Not by speaking or typing, but by translating thought into entirely new forms? If so, Neuralink and similar technologies may represent the next great leap. A big step closer to understanding not only the architecture of the human mind, but the essence of the Dao itself — beyond what can be named, beyond what can be spoken.

What are your thoughts on this? Could technology evolve to enable mind-to-mind connection — and if so, would it bring us closer to the truth, and blur the very divisions that naming creates?
by abeppu | 2025-07-21 13:30:38+00:00
> As the probes twinkle on and off, computational models estimate exactly where each molecule is located — and reconstruct a high-resolution image of the sample.

How do time and motion fit in with these techniques? I'm dimly aware that the molecular machinery inside cells moves pretty fast, and that a lot of things move around randomly. In normal size ranges that kind of thing would naturally make it hard to get a clear picture. Do these imaging techniques require that stuff be frozen or specially prepared? Or do the techniques themselves work so fast that they can get a snapshot regardless?
by sgarland | 2025-07-21 13:30:43+00:00
Same. It’s mostly because if I have a shell script, while I’ll add some comments for tricky bits if needed, and maybe a `-h` function, that’s about it. In Python, though, I use the language’s features to make it as readable and safe as possible. Types, docstrings, argparse, etc. My thinking is that if I’m going to take the time to use a “proper” language, then I should make it bulletproof, otherwise I’d just stick with shell.

My personal decision matrix for when to switch to Python usually involves the relative comfort of the rest of my team in both languages, the likelihood that future maintenance or development of the script will be necessary, and whether or not I’m dealing with inputs may change (e.g. API responses, since sadly versioning isn’t always a guarantee).
by freeone3000 | 2025-07-21 13:30:43+00:00
This is possibly the first HN AI article that actually matches my experience - where the models are good enough for small pieces other people have done once, or for where you might otherwise write a macro, but for anything beyond the scope of a single file write shitty code; and regardless, always have to be hand-held.

It’s a far cry away from “vibe code everything”, “this will eliminate jobs” that the current hype train is pushing, despite clearly using the agentic approach with large context provieee by Opus.
by uludag | 2025-07-21 13:30:57+00:00
Emacs is a great outlet for a bored developer. Any time at work when things aren't moving along fast I try to build some useful tool or try to port some internal tool to Emacs Lisp. I always learn a lot and have a blast doing it. Plus I feel it's a much healthier outlet then trying to bring in each and every tech fad to the companies stack.
by artyom | 2025-07-21 13:31:01+00:00
"The web" is full of ads. Google search is unusable. Ad-blocking is fought against. Content is tailored to be as long as possible to render more ad impressions. Mobile views have 3% content and the rest is ads. 27 compliance popups about cookies and tracking and offers would show on top of the information that you're looking for, all of them rigged so you click the option that they want.

Is that the web you want to save? Let it die.

Because this romantic view of the web as this "ocean of free information" has been dead for a very long time.

I wonder why someone would even be surprised that people just moves naturally to something better? Something that's not even remotely so hostile to the user?

And yes: when VC capital dries up, AI will become equally hostile.

Then people will move to the better thing and we'll have articles about "Better thing is killing AI".
by patchymcnoodles | 2025-07-21 13:31:10+00:00
I think what he means is the same issue I have. I also fly a lot in Europe and the only choice I have is Ryanair. I don't have a problem that Ryanair exists, rather having an issue, that they cut out every other carrier. I would be happy to pay a higher price for better service, reliability and the most: more space on the seat. The problem is not Ryanair directly, the problem is the lack of choice.
by ramses0 | 2025-07-21 13:31:33+00:00
I've made it a hobby to compare my current standards of living to "When would this be kingly?" We've traded down so much on quality of products (and sometimes: quality of life) but making a conscious decision to "live like a king" in a lot of cases isn't that hard.

Simplest example? Indoor plumbing: Boom, 15th century king.

Silly example? I got my wife seven silk pillow cases one year as a Christmas gift. A bit spendy, but instantly "living like a king".

We don't have "the royal kitchens", but do have Door-Dash. We took a tour of a castle somewhere in Canada (probably Craigdarroch) and they had a bunch of sitting rooms and reading nooks with extra lights and stuff... Steal Those Ideas! You too can live like a king, you just have to rewind a century or two, and be strategic about the luxuries you pick.