MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by themafia | 2025-08-31 00:07:41+00:00
The main problem with the current technology, to my eye, is you need these huge multi dimensional models with extremely lossy encoding in order to implement the system on a modern CPU which is effectively a 2.5D piece of hardware that ultimately accesses a 1D array of memory.

Your exponential problems have exponential problems. Scaling this system is factorially hard.
by userbinator | 2025-08-31 00:07:57+00:00
I very clearly remember, many years ago, a site (which was otherwise perfectly usable) nagging me to "enable JS for a better experience"; curious, I did and was immediately assaulted with all manner of hostile and irritating crap like popups, text selection hijacking, and even attempts to disable the right-click menu. Hurriedly disabled JS again to regain sanity. Nope. I'm never falling for that again... Of course the problem these days is with sites that don't work at all without JS even if they're just static content, and I suspect part of the reason is to force-feed you the crap along with the real content.
by antonymoose | 2025-08-31 00:08:08+00:00
I would second this largely, I’m the son of a plumber / handyman / GC. I’ve spent my childhood on service calls and job sites since the age of 5, spent my teenage summers schlepping tools and driving lightning rods, you name it, I’ve done it. I wouldn’t trade my near 20 year software career for the trades, I don’t think.

However, the biggest thing I think the HN crowd might appreciate that they have and we lack is an easy path to freedom through self employment - if you want self-employment as a programmer you need the fortune of a novel idea, improvement, or something new in some sense. You might need to also chase the VC dragon.

You want to start a plumbing business? Work hard 5-10 years, get out on your own with a van and tools and you have a turn key business idea. Provide good service at a proper rate. End of story.
by ranger_danger | 2025-08-31 00:08:10+00:00
IMO the EFF tool is a bad test because it only compares you against other people that have used the tool.

A better test would be CreepJS in my opinion: https://abrahamjuliot.github.io/creepjs/

I'm not aware of any FOSS browser setup that can actually result in a random FP ID shown in creepjs on every page load (please prove me wrong).
by edgineer | 2025-08-31 00:09:04+00:00
Not sure if you're aware, but the organ harvesting allegations are complicated because the Falun Gong believe their adherents enjoy magical organ healing; the blind will see, kidneys become good again, etc., and that they are targeted specifically for their organs is an endorsement of their religion. So there's incentive for false claims, which I rarely see brought up.
by tangotaylor | 2025-08-31 00:09:43+00:00
I think it will be effective. This stuff is hard. There used to be many competitors capable of the best process technology: TI, GlobalFoundries, Intel, IBM, Samsung, TSMC.

Canon, Nikon, ASML all used to have competitive lithography machines.

Now it’s just TSMC and Samsung at the edge, and only ASML supplies the latest lithography machines.

China will probably catch up quickly but the pace will be nonlinear and illusory. They will hit diminishing returns just like everyone else has.

They’ve probably stolen every bit of semiconductor IP they can through economic coercion or espionage.

All they can do now is out-innovate everyone else and that will take a long time. But who knows, their pace of advancement since Mao died has been impressive.
by mattgreenrocks | 2025-08-31 00:09:52+00:00
Really, I think we’re all talking around some notion of beauty here. Not in the sense of personal vanity, but more of a sense of internal cohesiveness.

Also, the feeling he’s referring to is what sold me on Ghostty. It was clear that he’d thought quite a bit about good defaults. Performance is great without having to tweak anything. In a way, I love that this sort of thing cannot be qualified, because it means that it cannot be commoditized or democratized. It either connects with someone, or it doesn’t.
by mitthrowaway2 | 2025-08-31 00:10:02+00:00
Jevons paradox doesn't always apply (it depends on the shape of supply-demand curves) and it is entirely possible for technology to eliminate careers. For example, a professional translator can work far faster now than twenty years ago, but the result is that positions for professional translators are rapidly disappearing rather than growing. There's a finite demand for paid translation work and it's fairly saturated. There are also far fewer personal secretaries now than there were in the '70s. That used to be a very common and reasonably well-paying career. It may happen that increasing the efficiency of software development results in even more and even-better-paid software developers, but this isn't a guaranteed outcome.
by akoboldfrying | 2025-08-31 00:10:05+00:00
Your money laundering analogy is apt. I know very little about that topic, and I especially don't know how much money laundering is really out there (nor do governments), but I'm confident that a lot is. Do AML laws have a chilling effect on it? I think they must, since they surely increase the cost and risk, and similar legislation for scraping should have a similar effect. But AML is a pretty bad solution to money laundering, and I despair if AML-for-scraping is the best possible solution to scraping.
by nullc | 2025-08-31 00:11:49+00:00
I'm one of the early developers of Bitcoin. This made me a target of a conman pretending to be Bitcoin's creator. The conman eventually filed a trillion dollars worth of vexatious lawsuits against myself and others, and we defeated him in court rather profoundly. During the litigation ChatGPT came out and he immediately started using it to create fake evidence, much to his detriment. He also used to to write his witness statements (unlawfully) and his appeals, resulting in (insubstantial) sanctions. He's subsequently gone full whispering earring, pumping out whole novels worth of chatgpt glurge every few days, in an apparent desperate attempt to show that the stuff people identified as chatgpt was really him.

He has a cult following who believe him to be a victim of a lizard jew conspiracy or something and who are quite displeased by people mocking him for continually putting out obvious AI slop. And clearly the people who are accusing him of slopping it up must be doing so themselves... plus then there are people making fun of these people.

Of course, emdash use was not actually a meaningful factor in any of the determination of chatgpt use in court... but it's a signal that even fairly unsophisticated people notice and often presume underlies claims of AI (ab)use.

TLDR: morons consider me their enemy
by DougN7 | 2025-08-31 00:12:16+00:00
So if a developer owns the code he wrote, and gets paid for it’s use over time, does he also get paid while writing the code? And how do you determine how much to pay for said code? By line count, but then that goes against some chunk of income/profit which also has to be spread among marketing people’s writings, and manager’s decision outcomes, etc? I just don’t see how this works realistically, but I’m open to being enlightened.
by amelius | 2025-08-31 00:12:51+00:00
Ok, in the Apple world choosing design over functionality is quite normal, I guess. Maybe things should work differently there. I don't know because I don't use Apple hardware and actually try to avoid it.

Anyway, I don't think that changing fonts on different displays is really a problem. If you're reading a book and a magazine, then switching between the two will also cause the fonts which you see to switch, and it's not like your brain has any trouble with it. Basically, your brain can quickly and easily get comfortable with the idea of looking at A and seeing font 1, and looking at B and seeing font 2.
Show HN: An interface for doing research fast with an LLM
by kanodiaashu | 2025-08-31 00:13:18+00:00
I built ProRead as a new interface for researching anything with an LLM. Instead of chat, you explore topics through an interactive map of ideas. The interface changes the level of detail like when zooming in and out on Google Maps. Click to go deeper, expand branches, and always stay grounded in sources. You still have chat for questions, and can switch to listening seamlessly. Curious if this feels useful!
by koverstreet | 2025-08-31 00:13:44+00:00
You do realize that data integrity issues are not "live and let live" type things, right?

And there's a real connection to the issue that sparked all this drama in the kernel and the Debian drama: critical system components (the kernel, the filesystem, and others) absolutely need to be able to get bugfixes in a timely manner. That's not optional.

With Debian, we had a package maintainer who decided that unbundling Rust dependencies was more important than getting out updates, and then we couldn't get a bugfix out for mount option handling. This was a non-issue for every other distro with working processes because the bug was fixed in a few days, but a lot of Debian users weren't able to mount in degraded mode and lost access to their filesystems.

In the kernel drama, Linus threw a fit over a repair code to recover from a serious bug and make sure users didn't lose data, and he's repeatedly picked fights over bugfixes (and even called pushing for getting bugfixes out "whining" in the past).

There are a lot of issues that there can be give and take on, but getting fixes out in a timely manner is just part of the baseline set of expectations for any serious project.
by bc569a80a344f9c | 2025-08-31 00:14:03+00:00
Yes, robotics is harder. Here’s some links. Wiki as an intro, and a reasonably entertaining write up that explains the concept in some depth, specifically comparing the issue to LLM progress as of 2024

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox

https://harimus.github.io/2024/05/31/motortask.html

Edit: just to specifically address your argument, doing something evolution has optimized for hundreds of millions of years is much harder than something evolution “came up with” very recently (abstract thought).
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-08-31 00:14:04+00:00
> No physical law prevents restoring tissue to healthy young state. We just haven’t developed the tools to do so (yet)

You’re speculating too far beyond what we know to speak so definitively. Plenty of biology and even thermodynamics suggests there may be limits. That doesn’t prove they exist. But it’s in the same category as saying there are no know physics which prohibit time travel or transcending the human condition into a state of pure consciousness. Like, sure, there aren’t, but to use your analogy, ancient Romans didn’t know about the speed of light.
by ronald_petty | 2025-08-31 00:14:06+00:00
Not saying these are perfect, but consider reviewing the work of groups like the Internet Society or even IEEE sectors. Boots on the ground to some extent such as providing gear and training. Other efforts like One Laptop Per Child also leaned into this kind of thinking.

What could it could mean for a "tech" town to be born, especially with what we have today regarding techniques and tools. While the dream has not really bore out yet (especially at a village level), I would argue we could do even better in middle America with this thinking; small college towns. While its a bit of existing gravity well, you could do a focused effort to get a flywheel going (redo mini Bell labs around the USA solving regional problems could be a start).

Yes it takes decades. My only thought on that is, many (dare say most) people don't even have short term plans much less long term plans. It takes visionaries with nerves and will of steel to stay on paths to make things happen.

Love the experiment idea.
by mixmastamyk | 2025-08-31 00:14:50+00:00
The loans would never be made under normal circumstances, so the govt. guarantees them. Part of that deal is that they must be paid back. Fair enough.

I agree that the whole system is poor, but not because the loans have to be paid back. A better system would be to take the money and instead build subsidized public colleges. Loans just fuel cost inflation, exactly as we've seen.
by danabramov | 2025-08-31 00:17:43+00:00
I'm arguing that "not really consistent" from the grandparent post still applies, and therefore your "this isn't correct" isn't correct.

For realtime discussions (like this one), I don't think we can call it consistent if it takes multiple minutes for each back-and-forth reply to propagate across instances in the best case (and potentially longer through multiple hops?) because you'll see different things depending on where you're looking and at which point in time.
by tux3 | 2025-08-31 00:18:57+00:00
You may be right, but I think looking at it from a lens of who has authority and can impose their decision is still illustrating the point I'm trying to make.

To some extent drawing clear boundaries is good as a last resort when people cannot agree, but it can't be the main way to resolve disagreements. Thinking in terms of who owns what and has the final say is not the same as trying to understand the requirements from the other side to find a solution that works for everyone.

I don't think the right answer is to blindly follow whatever Linus or other people say. I don't mean you should automatically back down without technical reasons, because authority says so. But I notice I can't remember an email where concessions where made, or attemps to find a middle grounds by understanding the other side. Maybe someone can find counterexamples.

But this idea of using ownership to decide who has more authority and can impose their vision, that can't be the only way to collaborate. It really is uncompromising.
by Nextgrid | 2025-08-31 00:19:07+00:00
Mandatory reminder that YC itself has funded and is promoting (https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/yotta) a company that not only lost people's "savings" (despite misleading promises of FDIC insurance - which didn't actually cover their predictable failure mode: https://www.cnbc.com/2024/06/21/synapse-collapse-nearly-109m...) but is now operating an outright gambling scheme that is typically seen in unregulated Eastern-European casinos: https://members.withyotta.com/moonshot/.
by aeonfox | 2025-08-31 00:19:11+00:00
Sounds kind of cool.

> The researchers used the technique on rabbit eyeballs in the lab, some of which were intended to represent myopia in humans. Special contact lenses made from platinum were placed over the extracted eyes. These lenses served as an electrode, providing a base for how the cornea should be correctly reshaped.

> Once the researchers lightly zapped the eye, the cornea became flexible and contoured to the shape of the lens. Not only did the cornea fill out as the researchers wanted, but the procedure didn’t seem to kill any corneal cells or otherwise affect the cornea’s stability.
by decimalenough | 2025-08-31 00:19:30+00:00
The craziest thing about all this is that Chinese exports to the US aren't even that big a part of the Chinese economy (3% or so). Sure, it'll hurt and there's multiplier effects, but the entire rest of the world is more than happy to take up the slack. So the tariffs really are the US cutting its own nose off to spite its face.
by creer | 2025-08-31 00:19:58+00:00
> we lack is an easy path to freedom through self employment - if you want self-employment as a programmer you need the fortune of a novel idea [etc]

See the many software and other computing people who successfully run under a consultant / contractor model. You can absolutely be self employed. Good service at a proper rate (and pretty high too, usually.) Self employed and high percentage remote if you want it.
by 89Mehdi | 2025-08-31 00:20:11+00:00
TL;DR: New Python logger (Kern) aimed at production ops.

Logging isn’t free — it burns CPU, memory, and sometimes even infra $$$. So I built Kern, a structured logger focused on production ops, not dev sugar.

Benchmarks (1 thread, 5k logs each):

Info throughput: Kern ~84k logs/s (stdlib ~77k, structlog ~61k, loguru ~31k)

Memory: Kern ~38 MB steady (stdlib ~32 MB, structlog ~52 MB, loguru ~83 MB under exceptions)

Exceptions: slower than structlog, but structured & bounded (same cost as stdlib, richer payloads)

At scale, efficiency like this can mean $100k+/year infra savings.

Why this isn’t “yet another wrapper”

Feature comparison (Kern vs ecosystem)

Strict JSON, ISO8601, schema versioning

Contextvars propagation (trace/span IDs auto)

Async TCP/TLS streaming with backoff/jitter

Hot-reload log levels from K8s/JSON

Observability of the logger itself (emitted, dropped, queue depth, backoff, last error)

Competitors (Loguru, Structlog, Eliot, Logbook, Picologging, stdlib) each win in their niche (ergonomics, C-speed, causal tracing) — but none combine speed + enterprise readiness.
by drdeca | 2025-08-31 00:22:07+00:00
By “things get weird” I meant “our current theories/models predict things to get weird”.

So, like, I’m saying that if Einstein’s model of gravity is applicable at very tiny scales, and if the [p,x] relation continues to hold at those scales, then stuff gets weird (either by “measurement of any position to within that amount of precision results in black-hole-ish stuff”, OR “the models we have don’t correctly predict what would happen”)

Now, it might be that our current models stop being approximately accurate at scales much larger than the Planck scale (so, much before reaching it), but either they stop being accurate at or before (perhaps much before) that scale, or things get weird at around that scale.

Edit: the spins of fermions don’t make sense to attribute to something with extent spinning. The values of angular momentum that you get for an actual spinning thing, and what you get for the spin angular momentum for fermions, are offset by like, hbar/2.
by Avshalom | 2025-08-31 00:22:11+00:00
Oh for fuck's sake.

So: the people that developed intelligence tests were not psychologists; lies, damned lies and statistics; "pioneering" the idea of using math doesn't mean that people using math today are doing the same thing; whatever the definition of IQ might be is irrelevant because "IQ tests" are not rigorously defined; however precisely IQ is defined is also irrelevant because it's supposedly just a proxy for "g"; psychology is not psychometry and so discarding IQ does nothing to the field of psychology.
by malkia | 2025-08-31 00:22:21+00:00
As in the caller would be forced/know what to handle in advance? Is this really the case (I'm not sure) - e.g. you call something and it returns Result<T, E> but does it really enforce it... What about errors (results) that came from deeper?

I'm not trying to defend exceptions, nor checked ones, just trying to point out that I don't think they are the same.

For all intent and purposes I really liked Common Lisp's exception handling, in my opinion the perfect one ("restartable"), but it also comes with lots of runtime efficiency (and possibly other) cost (interoperability? safety (nowadays)...) - but it was valiant effort to make programmer better - e.g. iterate while developing, and while it's throwing exceptions at you, you keep writing/updating the code (while it's running), etc - probably not something modern day SRE/devops would want (heh "who taught live updating of code of running system is great idea :)" - I still do, but I can see someone from devops frowning - "This is not the version I've pushed"...)
by yoshuaw | 2025-08-31 00:22:23+00:00
> Running a relay is not expensive anymore [...]

$30/mo is $360/yr, which for most people is a prohibitively large sum of money. That would make Bluesky access more expensive than even the most expensive Netflix subscription; closer to the cost of a cellular plan.

For comparison: for my Mastodon account I pay $5/mo or $60/yr to a dedicated hosting provider. This puts it in the same ballpark as paying for a private email host or a VPN subscription.
by nullc | 2025-08-31 00:24:31+00:00
Users can obtain the compute, it's not even that substantial for current LLMs, esp if you don't mind running them somewhat slowly.

Sure, not every user can obtain the compute. But the fact that a great many people can, and that the people that it makes the most difference for can, creates a tremendous playing field leveling.

Imagine that welding could only be performed by WeldCo and what a negative effect that would have. Fortunately anyone can weld, most people won't. But if you found yourself dead in the water and weldco was trying to extort you, you'd just pick up the equipment teach yourself, and commence with the welding. (or go hire someone to do so). Now realize that LLMs may well turn out to be more general than even welding is. So the freedom to access these tools is all the more critical, even if many will find they don't need to. The widespread access is why you may not need to.
by Nevermark | 2025-08-31 00:25:11+00:00
> But why think of any numbers as being "in nature"? And what does that really mean?

That there may be structures in nature that are 1-to-1 with any given (constructible) mathematical concept.

Anywhere there is conservation of quantity we get addition and subtraction. Anywhere quantity can be looked at from two directions we get reversibility, i.e. positive and negative perspectives of the quantity. Multiplication happens anywhere two scalar values operate on each other, or orthogonal quantities create a commutative space between each other.

We find reversibility, associativity, commutativity, and many more basic algebraic structures appearing with corresponding structures in physics. And more complex algebra where simpler structures interact.

Wherever there is a dependency between constraints applying, we have logical relationships.

So that is what I mean about mathematical structures appearing in nature. Numbers/quantities just being subset of those structures.

> Can you explain what it would mean to "find a constructible real in nature"? Maybe we just have different ideas about how this would be spelt out

My emphasis is really that we don't/won't find un-constructible reals.

I WEAKLY claim (given that reality increasingly looks likely to extend beyond our universe, and more conjecturally, may be infinite), that any given constructible math structure has a possibility of appearing somewhere. Perhaps all constructible math appears somewhere.

However, that is the weaker claim I would make.

I more STRONGLY claim that un-constructible mathematical structures are highly unlikely to have counterparts. Which includes un-constructible reals.

The un-constructible real invented by Cantor, was a value r, which has infinite decimal digits, but with no finite description. No algorithm to even generate.

It is an interesting concept, but an un-instantiatable (even in theory) one. Infinite information structures immediately present difficult problems just for abstract reasoning. How corresponding structures might exist and relate in a physical analogue isn't something anyone has even attempted, as far as I know.

--

I don't think I am saying something controversial.

If there is anything surprising in what I am saying, it is that I am addressing the fact that reals got defined in a way that includes un-constructible reals.

The only implication most people know about that, is that the cardinality of reals is greater than the cardinality of integers.

But what might be very surprising for many, is that the cardinality of constructible reals, every possible scalar number we could ever calculate, measure or apply, is in fact the same as the integers. A distinction/insight that seems highly relevant and useful when dealing with instantiatable math, physics and computation.