MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by metalman | 2025-08-20 10:00:06+00:00
ya, here in Canada(caniba), nobody much cared what someone smoked or why, as long as they did it down wind and out of sight since forever, and I have heard irrate little ones admonishing adults "your not supposed to do that around us!" and grown adults eye rolling and moving off....now there are certain parks for the weed heads, and various semi legal stores and some government weed outlets, but as it's not called weed for nothing, millions grow the little they want for personal use, and for people wanting it for medical reasons, there is a vast network of people helping people. We went through the whole "certified medical canabis" thing, and it collapsed under overwhelming demand, and the impossibility of scaling the management, where the police and courts flat out refused to try and untangle the "legitimate" and "unligitimate", and we are back to what it was in the past with an informal understanding of ....go down wind and out of sight of the kids,thank you
by Voultapher | 2025-08-20 10:01:56+00:00
This is an ethical question and there will be no simple or clear cut answers, as an engineer myself I know that can be frustrating. Personally I project my experience of the world onto other beings - of course that's fraught with issues. I'd give the chance that bacteria experiences complex emotions like suffering and imprisonment in a similar fashion than I do as very low. But a cow, which is a mammal like us and I've seen show complex emotional reactions first hand, I'd rate that chance much higher. So you're right if we take the idea to its extreme its not very useful anymore. But only because an extreme version of the idea seems ridiculous does not preclude the idea from being valuable in moderation. Reducing some likely suffering is better than doing nothing in my book.
by 317070 | 2025-08-20 10:03:57+00:00
So, one of my favourites is this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Man_Without_Words

Not a good book by any means, but there has been surprisingly little written about people who go from having no language to their first language post-puberty and are asked about their experience of living without language.

Language is extremely important to living as a human, even outside of social relations. Memories don't form well, it is really hard to keep events in order of time, it is hard to order places in space and not get lost. It's even hard to remember people.

It's an engineer take, of course, but I like understanding systems by what happens when they break.
by matheusd | 2025-08-20 10:06:09+00:00
> Choosing what traits one considers exceptional, will by definition select what species one considers exceptional.

/Every/ other species that has /ever/ lived will cease to exist (at the latest, in a billion years or so).

Humans are the only ones (so far, anyway) that have any hope of surviving more than that.

That seems pretty exceptional to me :P

Disclaimer: the fact that we're exceptional doesn't mean we don't do dumb things and we shouldn't improve and do better.
by kotri | 2025-08-20 10:06:16+00:00
> ignore the forged RST+ACK

See <Ignoring the Great Firewall of China> in 2006. That won't work if RST/ACK was injected to both sides.

> Then it would come testing to see if sending a bunch of ACK packets, perhaps with sequence numbers that would when reconstructed could complete the handshake. Trying to send them alongside the SYN+ACK or even before if it can be predicted. Maybe try sending some packets with sequence id 0 as well to see what happens.

This is an interesting approach already being utilized, namely TCB desync. But currently most people tend to buy VPN/proxy services rather than studying this.
by lukaslalinsky | 2025-08-20 10:06:51+00:00
Any universal build system is complex. You can either make the system simple and delegate the complexity to the user, like the early tools, e.g. buildbot. Or you can hide the complexity to the best of your ability, like GitHub actions. Or you expose all the complexity, like jenkins. I'm personally happy for the complexity being hidden and can deal with a few leaky abstractions if I need something non standard.
by Lionga | 2025-08-20 10:07:39+00:00
I am amazed by how many people even on HN think LLMs are persons or have any kind of reasoning and can't see that they are just stochastic next word predictors.

Guess the AI Hypers did the job well, especially with calling things like just feed the stochastic next word prediction back to the stochastic next word predictors "reasoning" to fool the dumbos on HN and the world.
by roryirvine | 2025-08-20 10:08:10+00:00
Some of those have gone through multiple transitions, of course.

Punk: prostitute / catamite -> worthless / degenerate -> confrontational / obnoxious

Nice: silly / foolish -> fussy / fastidious -> pleasant / good

And "nice" is often used sarcastically, so you could see how the common meaning might in future go full circle.
by bamboozled | 2025-08-20 10:09:31+00:00
Well tax the rich a bit more and use that money to build Nuclear plants, why on Earth Jeff Bezos or whatever need a trillion dollars to squat on is beyond me. Once the planet is fucked, they're fucked too, no matter how much they talk about rockets and mars or whatever. I'm starting to think they just tell those stories to keep the plebs hopeful, away from them.
by privacyking | 2025-08-20 10:11:42+00:00
Yes. Facebook was using this trick on Android. Meta's android apps would host a server on localhost, and their sites would communicate with this local server to pass tracking information that would otherwise be blocked by all browser protection methods on Android. I guess it is still fingerprinting, but at the most extreme end.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44169115
by austin-cheney | 2025-08-20 10:13:30+00:00
At most employers product management is far separated from product development. There are several reasons for that:

* management distrust of developers, if your developers need a lot of help to do their jobs management won’t let them near the customers for good reason

* separation of concerns, specialization

* emphasis of productivity, developers should be developing

* assumptions and biases that developers are not people people, which is sometimes completely unfounded and other times strongly reinforced

If you want developers to understand your customers they have to be directly embedded in customer engagement meetings where they can directly see customer wants and reactions the same way your product management learns these things. This can prove very risky due to the personalities involved.

In my line of work developers are completely on the front lines directly communicating with customers. My line of work, enterprise API management, is highly technical demanding a wide technology background but it’s not that challenging. The customers know what their end state is but not how to express their business requirements or diagnose their challenges. The developers, myself included, often have no idea behind the business goals for interconnecting various business system but have little challenge solving for the communications in the middle. Most areas of software are not like this, by a lot.
by danwills | 2025-08-20 10:13:38+00:00
Yeah @srean gives the example of the different areas of strips at different lattitude, that's a good one - and I think if you imagine wrapping the unit square (2 values randomly between 0 and 1) to a sphere in a lat-long way, the whole top and bottom edges of the square get contracted to single points at the top and bottom latitude locations (respectively) on the sphere.. so if the point density was uniform going into that then it surely won't be afterwards ;)
by kissgyorgy | 2025-08-20 10:16:22+00:00
I was thinking about this too, but the problem is that different models need to be prompted differently for better performance.

Claude is the best model for tool calling, you might need to prompt less reliable models differently. Prompt engineering is really hard, a single context for all models will never be the best IMO.

This is why Claude Code is so much better than any other agentic coding tool, because they know the model very well and there is an insane amount of prompt engineering went into it.

I tried GPT-5 with OpenCode thinking that it will be just as good, but it was terrible.

Model-specific prompt engineering makes a huge difference!
by ACCount37 | 2025-08-20 10:17:59+00:00
We're talking removing all bacteria. And we know it's possible - even if it can't happen in nature.

There are sterile mice made for scientific uses - 100% mouse, completely microorganism free or your money back. They have health issues, but they can survive and reproduce in the right conditions.

Of course, those "right conditions" include sterile housings and sterilized food, because they'll get contaminated otherwise.
by elisemaya31 | 2025-08-20 10:18:21+00:00
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by SnuffBox | 2025-08-20 10:19:13+00:00
It's a shame how there are so many developers detached from reality now; the amount of people perfectly fine with acting like squabbling children is exhausting for anybody with more than a passing interest in open source software.

I know there have always been people detached from reality but it seems that there are more now than ever before, like this brand of online insanity is a more recent phenomenon.
by franga2000 | 2025-08-20 10:19:41+00:00
Requirements are complex too. Even if you don't need to scale at all, you likely do need zero-downtime deployment, easy rollbacks, server fault tolerance, service isolation... If you put your apps into containers and throw them onto Kubernetes, you get a lot of that "for free" and in a well-known and well-tested way. Hand-rolling even one of those things, let alone all of them together, would take far too much effort.
by lan321 | 2025-08-20 10:20:02+00:00
That's kind of the negative take. The positive take is that work should be automated whenever possible. The endgame is having everyone enjoy life and only working when we want the 120-inch instead of the 90-inch TV, or enjoy working.

It's not that simple due to power imbalances with automation and the eternal pursuit of better living standards, but that's kind of the goal. The world chooching away by itself like a Factorio map and people purely consuming.
by fnky | 2025-08-20 10:20:18+00:00
RA3 is where I started my interests in first-person shooters. My family and someo of their friends had a clan, and they would hold LAN parties, playing matches against other clans. Sometimes I was allowed to play a bit, and got instantly hooked.

When I got my first personal computer, I stated playing RA3 a ton–and Unreal Tournament on the side. Later on it became Quake 3 OSP/CPMA (as well as Freeze Tag and InstaGib) and Quake Live Clan Arena, but never really competitively.

At the same time I also discovered CS 1.6. It was sort of a relaxation from all the fast-paced fragging for me. I liked the slower pace and different skill it required. I eventually joined some tournaments and started playing more competitively, hooking up with people in IRC.

I try to seek out games every now and then, but unfortunately there's less and less communities around Q3 and the likes, so it's becoming increasingly harder to find fun matches.
by latexr | 2025-08-20 10:20:18+00:00
> What we’re exceptional at is survival.

Don’t worry, we’re correcting that in record time. Though it would have been nice to not destroy so many species along with us.

> To the point where as few as 1% of our species even needs to think about making food.

And the rest would just die, unable to find food, if left alone in the wilderness.

> What I question about this rhetoric is using human-developed moral frameworks

The idea of exceptionalism is also human-developed, so as soon as you want to go that route no argument in this conversation matters.

> The reality of it is that we are clearly among the most successful species.

Successful at good things and bad things. Including bad for us. You don’t really see other species developing whole profit industries to knowingly market and sell cancer on sticks, for example.

> undermining our own achievements and romanticizing other species

That argument cuts both ways. It’s perfectly fair to say someone with your view is undermining the harm we cause and romanticising our achievements.

> being less successful at surviving

None of us can survive indefinitely under water, or in radiation, or in the vacuum of space. Yet we know of other species who do. Humans are exceptionally frail, considering. After we’re gone, other species will remain. We won’t be so impressive then.
by eadmund | 2025-08-20 10:20:52+00:00
> Because instead of trying to improve GNU/Linux to be a solid alternative to Apple, Google and Microsoft offerings, we have politics with everyone doing their own little village.

The politics are required by the fact that we don’t all agree on what improves GNU and Linux versus what makes them worse.

But at least with GNU/Linux we have the freedom to disagree and ‘[do] our own village.’ On Windows, Microsoft decides and users comply. Don’t like Windows 11? Tough! Don’t like some (mis)features of Windows 11? Tough!
by aurareturn | 2025-08-20 10:20:57+00:00
Some comments:

1. AI bros like Altman, Bezos, Dario, Elon have an incentive to convince the government to ban all Nvidia exports. It slows down China's progress and it gives the AI bros more GPU supply at a lower price due to less competition.

2. China is doing what OpenAI promised to do: opening AI access for all.

3. China has the will, power generation, and the talent to succeed in AI but they're bottlenecked by the most advanced AI chips.

4. Stopping AI chip exports to China is a win for US AI labs as a whole in the short term but could build a stronger China in the long-run as money will flow to local companies. So I'm guessing great for US AI labs in the next 5 years but a more imposing challenger in 2030.

5. I very much dislike the "good" vs "bad", "free" vs "oppressed" talk when it comes to why US should contain China's AI ambitions. Just call it what it is. It's competition that the US wants to find ways to gain an advantage. Stop using some sort of higher moral reason. It's just competition.
by pyman | 2025-08-20 10:21:43+00:00
I remember buying into OpenAI's claim that I had Aristoteles in my pocket, and at first I was amazed. Then one day I realised it wasn't Aristoteles at all, it was my little brother Timmy. From that day on, whenever Timmy says something, I reply with: Nope, No, Again, Wrong Timmy, It doesn't work, and sometimes, Do better Timmy!

Timmy relies on patterns learned from huge amounts of text, so his answers are always relative and unpredictable.

Now AI companies are shifting how they talk about intelligence. They admit LLMs can't truly reason with the current architecture, so intelligence is being sold as the ability to solve problems using learned patterns, not actual reasoning. That's a big downgrade from the original dream of human-level thinking and AGI.

Still, I'm impressed with little Timmy and I know he will keep growing and getting smarter. But I don't see him solving climate change just yet.
by nicbou | 2025-08-20 10:23:52+00:00
It generally means someone translating your information to the format the government employees expect, because each attempt costs multiple weeks of waiting. Basically, if there is a 6-week response time, you want to get it right on the first try.

In other cases, you pay people to save yourself the hassle of fighting for an appointment slot, and to save a trip across town in the middle of a work day. These fixers become the somewhat digital layer to a famously analog bureaucracy.
by selfdb_io | 2025-08-20 10:24:21+00:00
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Anubis lets raw doggers SSH into their VPS to code live and deploy fast. One-time purchase, no subscription. Get it here: https://apps.apple.com/be/app/anubis-ssh-terminal/id67512329... #IndieDev #RawDogDev

Pro tip: Secure your VPS—disable password auth, enable fail2ban, set up UFW. Who's raw dogging their next project?
by LatteLazy | 2025-08-20 10:26:00+00:00
The UK has a bunch of serious issues.

But actually fixing them would require hard decisions.

So our government wants to look like it is frantically working to achieve these things (fix our housing crisis etc). But absolutely not making the changes needed.

So they announce things like the Turing institute to look busy. Then dump weird requirements on it to look like they’re doing things. Then defund it (because it was never meant to be a real thing, just a donkey to pin press releases on).

See also the “Spaceports” we built, our “massive breakthroughs” in fusion energy and SMRs, Heathrow extension etc…
by thicTurtlLverXX | 2025-08-20 10:26:37+00:00
> we showed.. > we aspire... > we were backstabbed... > we are blocked... > we are building... > we have to... > we had to... > we are crazy...

It's not 'we,' it's just your opinion, comrade. If the USA were actually run by people with views the same as yours, it'd be no different from Russia or China. But thankfully, there are still many who get that life is about collaboration and compromise, who don't live in fear nor have the dream of domination.
by adidoit | 2025-08-20 10:27:49+00:00
As AI tools get more powerful, unfortunately, we will see a lot more articles like this because our cognitive superiority is ostensibly being challenged.

The psychological aspects of being cognitively surpassed by silicon on many dimensions are already happening.

Demis Hassabis said there's a paucity of philosophers who are helping us understand this moment. I think he's absolutely right. Hopefully, we can come out with a more human-centric viewpoint soon.
by eru | 2025-08-20 10:28:03+00:00
We really only have one example of life (or at least all our examples are interconnected), so I don't expect great definitions.

Just like geology doesn't have a great definition for their subject of study (the earth). They have a definition that works really well, but because they only have one example, the definition ain't stress tested.

Slightly less silly: it took the discovery of lots more bodies inside and outside the solar system (dwarf planets here, exoplanets elsewhere) for astronomers to really nail down the definition of planet.
by 0xEF | 2025-08-20 10:28:23+00:00
> I like understanding systems by what happens when they break.

Same, though I am not an engineer, more a denizen of the adjacent service and repair field, but I have been dabbling in development, lately. Fixing broken things because I grew up in a household that was too poor to think of anything as disposable is how I learned probably 90% of what I know, providing me with an understanding of the fragility of systems and the importance of anticipating maintenance the design process.

I see the forward was written by Oliver Sacks, whom I've read and enjoyed in the past, but from more of a pop-Psychology angle. But what you say about language being related to how we think of time and forming memories strikes me. I once heard that Indigenous Australian cultures had a different concept of time than Western culture does, passed down through the language used in their folklore. I posit that we can some evidence for proof of this happening in Western cultures currently with the way that we talk about decades.

With the advent of the year 2000, we lost the ability colloquially refer to the decade we were presently in. Prior to that, we were living in "the 90's," perhaps being born in "the 60's, 70's or 80's." Each of those decades even evokes a certain composite memory of the styles of clothing people may have worn, or the music we listened to, popular automobiles, etc. The character of the decade coalesced around the colloquial name.

2000 hit, and we didn't know how to refer to it. Some folks tried to make the "aughts" happen, which felt awkward or "the 2000's" which seemed to generalized and not specific enough to be referring to the current decade. Then 2010's, which we didn't really even bother calling "the Teens" as I recall, because by then we'd fallen out of the habit of referring to time by decade.

The result is seeing a movie from 2005 and feeling like that was so very long ago, versus when I watched Star Wars for the billionth time in 1997 and the 20 years that had passed since it's release didn't seem like much time at all; only two decades.

Anyway, getting a ramble on to show agreement, but you get the idea. I might have to look for some science fiction authors who have tried to tackle this, see what sort of thought-experiments we can do when we strip language as we know it from the development of the human mind.
by jadamson | 2025-08-20 10:29:00+00:00
The first shell listing starts with `cd` and `ls`, the former being run in `~`. What does that weird `~` mean? Very strange.

More seriously, their file system is still case-sensitive, and inside /Programs they have `Iptables` and `Fontconfig`, naively capitalized, but also `OpenOffice` and `HTTPD`.

Not to mention that inside each program folder are `man` and `bin` as usual. I'm going to suggest the point of that article is structure and organization, not naming.

Nobody reasonable complains about a three-letter abbreviation you can type with one hand. For a path you're either accessing a lot or never at all, it makes complete sense.
by yamifyafrica | 2025-08-20 10:29:52+00:00
-Infra: Kubernetes + NVIDIA device plugin; 20× Jetson Nano Dev Kits

-Inference: Ollama / llama.cpp (quantized models ≤7B); token streaming (SSE/WebSocket); autoscaler driven by request queue depth + Jetson tegrastats GPU load

-Cold starts: warm-pool containers with pre-loaded quantized models (to avoid long load times on 4 GB memory)

-Networking: Envoy ingress; TLS.

-Observability: Prometheus/Grafana; structured logs; tracing.

-Billing: pay-as-you-go; mobile money (M-Pesa/Airtel); per-token + per-GPU-hour meters.

-Data: in-region storage; encrypted; no training on customer data.

-Limitations: fewer regions vs AWS; GPU supply fluctuates; docs still early.

-Roadmap: more African regions, spot-GPU pricing, fine-tune jobs.

-Ask: brutal feedback on scaling strategy + CLI UX.
by jlaternman | 2025-08-20 10:29:56+00:00
Because it hasn’t resulted in a stable situation or a historical event that stops being relevant to the current moment. No harmony has formed since. It is still essentially an ongoing invasion and erasure and oppression of Tibetan culture and people. See moves related to giant damn building most recently, but it is has been continuous, and there are big concerns among Tibetans about it getting worse still in the future, when the Dalai Lama dies. Only the initial maneuvers of invading are in the past, the rest applies to the current moment, day by day.