MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by clairemiao123 | 2025-08-12 08:23:55+00:00
A Dyson Sphere isn’t sci-fi. We just don’t have the right tech… yet.

Every piece of tech you use today — your phone, the internet, even electricity — exists because someone, somewhere, invented dozens of other things first. It’s a chain reaction of innovation. No steam engine? No industrial revolution. No semiconductors? No modern AI. So here’s the big question: What tech is missing before we can tackle humanity’s wildest dreams — like building a Dyson Sphere? We (Two Berkeley students and Richard Socher) built a project inspired by Civilization that lets you explore and vote on the actual tech tree of human progress — from fire to quantum computing — and debate what needs to come next. If you’ve ever argued about whether fusion or asteroid mining should come first… this is your place.
by bubblyworld | 2025-08-12 08:25:36+00:00
Not sure why everyone is downvoting you as I think you raise a good point - these anthropomorphic words like "reasoning" are useful as shorthands for describing patterns of behaviour, and are generally not meant to be direct comparisons to human cognition. But it goes both ways. You can still criticise the model on the grounds that what we call "reasoning" in the context of LLMs doesn't match the patterns we associate with human "reasoning" very well (such as ability to generalise to novel situations), which is what I think the authors are doing.
by automatic6131 | 2025-08-12 08:26:03+00:00
What you fail to realize is that (nearly) everything you think of as a flaw here is a key feature.

Excel allows norm(al users)ies to scale Mt Impossible from the bottom where they don't care about types, or relationships, and don't want to (because it's too abstract). They want to solve a problem. So they start with simple data given meaning by physical space, and work up from there.

It's genius. It's computing for people that will never care about pointers.
by p1necone | 2025-08-12 08:26:28+00:00
Bit of a tortured example, but imagine if in chess every time you moved your queen you had to put $1 in escrow that you only got back if you won the game - do you think you'd still make exactly the same moves, or would you maybe play a sub optimal game to avoid moving your queen as much?

And if you saw your opponent move their queen would you be more confident that they probably saw a path to victory than you would be otherwise, and would you maybe spend more time analyzing moves that required that queen move instead of what you might have analyzed instead otherwise? (analogous to bluffing in poker).

Basically the fact that there's some external factor you can use to communicate what your move might mean to other players makes the mind games/bluffing/analysis work better than if you were just playing to win. The money isn't just linked to whether you win or lose - it's actually tied to the individual mechanics in a way that affects how each round plays out.
by Ygg2 | 2025-08-12 08:26:34+00:00
> For the last 25 years, Microsoft was known for:

That's true, but there is a catch in your wording. For the last 15 year, Microsoft has:

- Adopted open source/free software and gave contributions to various project (e.g. Linux in 2012 https://www.phoronix.com/news/MTEwNzE)

- Abandoned the worst web browser in existence. That they created :)

- Abandoned ActiveX (29 years ago), Silverlight (4 years ago)

+ Opened .NET to more platform than just Windows. It can now run very well on Linux, Mac, etc.

+ Made many of its locked down stuff open source - .NET, Z3, hell there was that few weeks ago open sourcing of the WinUI framework, etc.

+ Pivoted towards the cloud where OSS software synergizes with their cloud offerings.

Do they do corrupt deals with governments? Well yes, but so does every other big corp. And making cringe hardware isn't a crime in itself.

Do they still do a lot of shady shit? You bet, but they only started getting worse a few years ago. You are thinking it doesn't come in waves and it was all evil, all the time.
by Svip | 2025-08-12 08:27:18+00:00
I wish you a lot of luck; I am basically just waiting on XScreenSaver to be ported to Wayland before I move on from X11.

But jwz (XScreenSaver's creator and maintainer) doesn't give me much hope: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2025/07/xscreensaver-wayland-and-lo...
by jacquesm | 2025-08-12 08:27:50+00:00
I'd say that having terms of service that document your shady behavior whilst at the same time not making this obvious in the UI in any way is a tried and true (corporate) malware pattern.

Just because Microsoft did it that doesn't make it a valid defense, in fact it shows the opposite (after all, they too did not have the best interests of their users at heart). The fact that the recipient of the data sits on the other side of the GFW and that clipboards can contain very interesting data you really should wonder about the intentions of the author, they do not get the benefit of the doubt. In fact, open source software that to all intents and purposes looks like it runs locally but pumps your (private) data out without your consent is a very large red flag to me: it gains access to data that otherwise likely would never be found in the wild. At a minimum this is a fairly serious GDPR violation.
by theshrike79 | 2025-08-12 08:28:12+00:00
Just yesterday I gave gemini code a git worktree of the system I'm building at work. (Corp approved yadda yadda).

Can't remember the prompt was "evaluate the codebase and suggest any improvements. specifically on the <nameofsystem> system"

Then I tabbed out and did other stuff

Came back a bit later, checked out its ramblings. It misunderstood the whole system completely and tried to add a recursive system that wasn't even close to what it was supposed to be.

BUT it had detected an error message that just provided an index where parsing failed on some user input like "error at index (10)", which is completely useless for humans. But that's what the parser library gives us, so it's been there for a while.

It suggested a function that grabs the input, modifies it with a marker at the index given by the error message and shows clearly which bit in the input was wrong.

Could I have done this myself? Yes.

Would I have bothered, no I have actual features to add at this point.

Was it useful? Definitely. There was maybe 5 minutes of active work on my part and I got a nice improvement out of it.

And this wasn't the only instance.

Even the misunderstanding could've been avoided by me providing the agent better documentation on what everything does and where they are located.
by bluetomcat | 2025-08-12 08:28:32+00:00
Rust encourages a rather different "high-level" programming style that doesn't suit the domains where C excels. Pattern matching, traits, annotations, generics and functional idioms make the language verbose and semantically-complex. When you follow their best practices, the code ends up more complex than it really needs to be.

C is a different kind of animal that encourages terseness and economy of expression. When you know what you are doing with C pointers, the compiler just doesn't get in the way.
by Lio | 2025-08-12 08:28:46+00:00
Thanks for the work Chris.

For anyone looking for versions patched with Nerd Font glyphs:

https://github.com/E-Vertin/GoogleSansCode-NerdFont

https://www.nerdfonts.com/font-downloads

and here's the preview page for both: https://www.programmingfonts.org/#hack
by account42 | 2025-08-12 08:28:52+00:00
> But for many ESL or non-English users out there, the "translation" is a must.

As an ESL user, I vehemently disagree. You're only going to need translations as long as you keep relying on translations. Like it or not but English is the lingua franca of the computing age and you're doing yourself a disservice if you don't learn it.
by tarruda | 2025-08-12 08:29:26+00:00
> It’s tightly integrated into the token sampling infrastructure, and is what ollama builds upon for their json schema functionality.

Do you mean the functionality of generating ebnf grammar and from a json schema use it for sampling is part of ggml, and all they have to do is use it?

I assumed that this was part of llama.cpp, and another feature they have to re-implement and maintain.
by jacquesm | 2025-08-12 08:29:38+00:00
We're not going to agree on that. The response is clearly there to point to a fig leaf instead of saying 'oh, oops, we will make this more obvious in the UI', the software is working as intended: as a way to gain access to more data.

Note that clipboard data can be just about anything and is a valuable dataset, more so if the source of the data isn't aware of being a source, besides, there is no history so you won't even know what you've lost.
by ivan_gammel | 2025-08-12 08:30:50+00:00
>The welfare states of Europe are unlikely to keep working much longer if too many people start moving there in order to benefit from them.

I'm not proposing everyone to move. :) Besides, immigration crises are costly, but long-term effects of immigration are positive. It's not the migration itself is evil, it's how fast and why people move.

>Socialism demands that you work for others at no benefit to yourself.

Some results of your work will always be owned by others at no benefit to yourself. Socialism is not unique here. It also does not demand that all your work is for others (by definition, working people are supposed to be primary beneficiaries).

>Socialism seeks to force the costs of it upon everyone whether they want it or not, turning it into a burden

It is not unique property of socialism. Only in anarchy this is not happening, all other systems with a government do that. You pay taxes no matter what.

>Are landlords not responsible for the maintenance of the property?

They are incentivized to spend as less as possible on it to maximize profits and they won't spend more than you pay, so effectively they are just redistributing some share of your money towards maintenance.
by kashunstva | 2025-08-12 08:31:06+00:00
> makes a terrible impression being covered with homeless encampments.

If only there were ways of working with unhoused people rather than have the NG disappear them…

> Democrats, more than anyone else, should want Trump to flood D.C. with police and turn it into Disney Land.

Do Democrats have a special affinity for theme parks that their Republican counterparts do not?

Were I to travel to D.C. for leisure, I would expect to see unhoused people because it’s a city. But I’d be exceedingly put-off by military personnel patrolling the streets.
by FerretFred | 2025-08-12 08:31:08+00:00
I went through a phase a couple of years ago where I was setting up my Linux Thinkpad T480 with every accessory I could find. My heart leapt with joy when I found an affordable USB-modem dongle and was excited to try it out. TBH the only service I could find was a US-based fax service but that worked really well. Sadly, all the BBSs I'd hoped to try out had long since converted to Telnet, but hey, it was cool to think that if I ever needed to dialup anything I could actually do it
by dirkc | 2025-08-12 08:33:12+00:00
Maybe local models can address this, but for me the issue is that relying on LLMs for coding introduces gatekeepers.

> Uh oh. We're getting blocked again and I've heard Anthropic has a reputation for shutting down even paid accounts with very few or no warnings.

I'm in the slack community where the author shared their experiment with the autonomous startup and what stuck out to me is that they stopped the experiment out of fear of being suspended.

Something that is fun should not go hand-in-hand with fear of being cut off!
by ViewTrick1002 | 2025-08-12 08:33:40+00:00
> I also hear that Async Rust is very bad.

Not sure where this is coming from.

Async rust is amazing as long as you only mix in one more hard concept. Be it traits, generics or whatever. You can confidently write and refactor heavily multithreaded code without being deathly afraid of race conditions etc. and it is extremely empowering.

The problem comes when trying to write async generic traits in a multithreaded environment.

Then just throwing stuff at the wall and hoping something sticks will quickly lead you into despair.
by EvanAnderson | 2025-08-12 08:34:22+00:00
You triggered a memory.

I modified the WMA file that played during the XP OOBE on an image that was rolling out to one of my Customers. I knew who would be deploying most of the PCs. At a point about halfway thru the piece, when it gets kind of quiet and the melodic instruments fall away (right before the chanting bit, if I remember correctly) I mixed my voice quietly whispering the deployment person's name a couple of times. Sadly, I never heard of they noticed their name in the music or not. People moved on and I never got a chance to ask before they left.
by bayindirh | 2025-08-12 08:35:11+00:00
I don't expect average user to read an entire dependency tree. However, apt and aptitude does a relatively good job of explaining their actions' reasons.

Let me rephrase:

1. Installation of recommended packages is a good default for the average user, because it provides functionality they expect. 2. If the user is not happy with what's happening, changing defaults are not hard.

IOW, if you don't like how your system behaves, read the documents. Otherwise, I argue, current defaults is good for the benefit of the newcomer and average Linux user. If you are at a point where you are caring which package is doing what, you're leaving "average user / beginner" realm.

In the case of StarDict, as I noted elsewhere, I think the developer's answer is fishy, or ill-informed at least.
by lupusreal | 2025-08-12 08:35:29+00:00
The "Chinese values" excuse doesn't fly. We're not talking about a random Chinese person, we're talking about a Debian packager. Debian packagers should have values in line with the Debian project's ethos. It's difficult to imagine how somebody to whom Debian's values are alien could even accidentally stumble their way into the position of being a Debian packager.
by benchly | 2025-08-12 08:35:40+00:00
I remember the same. As I approach 50, I do notice that I feel much more tired and mentally foggy when I fail to remember my daily water bottles. I've had to develop specific routines that help me remember to fill/drink my water bottle which goes pretty much everywhere with me. For being such a necessity, it sure is an oddly hard thing to remember to do.

I think adults tell kid-me to drink more water was a way of trying to get me to just develop a habit with it, since they understood the seemingly paradoxical struggle of keeping hydrated at their age.
by torginus | 2025-08-12 08:35:48+00:00
It's weird how analog the entire field of aerospace has been - I remember reading articles in the 2000s (and before), of how computational simulations a are going to unlock crazy new never before seen designs, controllable via novel control surfaces only possible thanks to novel control surfaces whose position is determined via literal supercomputers onboard the plane. And how X-planes are going to become unnecessary, because everything a wind tunnel test could tell you can be predicted via simulation.

Fast forward to today, there's been no aerodynamically novel aircraft developed in the past decades, and from what I read, wind tunnel and glider tests are still necessary to validate aerodynamics during complex conditions, like manuevering.
by felurx | 2025-08-12 08:35:54+00:00
He did make a "sequel" addressing that: https://youtube.com/watch?v=SkL9vzW7nY0

You usually can't do much against anti-repair or anti-consumer stuff alone (especially in organizations), and that people often feel like they're the only ones who care in a five mile radius. The idea is that the clippy pics activate people to actually do something, because they feel like that precondition of others also caring and wanting to do something is fulfilled.
by kazinator | 2025-08-12 08:37:57+00:00
Undefined behavior only means that ISO C doesn't give requirements, not that nobody gives requirements. Many useful extensions are instances where undefined behavior is documented by an implementation.

Including a header that is not in the program, and not in ISO C, is undefined behavior. So is calling a function that is not in ISO C and not in the program. (If the function is not anywhere, the program won't link. But if it is somewhere, then ISO C has nothing to say about its behavior.)

Correct, portable POSIX C programs have undefined behavior in ISO C; only if we interpret them via IEEE 1003 are they defined by that document.

If you invent a new platform with a C compiler, you can have it such that #include <windows.h> reformats all the attached storage devices. ISO C allows this because it doesn't specify what happens if #include <windows.h> successfully resolves to a file and includes its contents. Those contents could be anything, including some compile-time instruction to do harm.

Even if a compiler's documentationd doesn't grant that a certain instance of undefined behavior is a documented extension, the existence of a de facto extension can be inferred empirically through numerous experiments: compiling test code and reverse engineering the object code.

Moreover, the source code for a compiler may be available; the behavior of something can be inferred from studying the code. The code could change in the next version. But so could the documentation; documentation can take away a documented extension the same way as a compiler code change can take away a de facto extension.

Speaking of object code: if you follow a programming paradigm of verifying the object code, then undefined behavior becomes moot, to an extent. You don't trust the compiler anyway. If the machine code has the behavior which implements the requirements that your project expects of the source code, then the necessary thing has been somehow obtained.
by happymellon | 2025-08-12 08:38:50+00:00
Well yes, thats the point.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/exclusiv...

Exclusive means to make it unavailable to others, quality and craftsmanship is implied as the reason, but neither of those are the bit that make it exclusive. Like Audi's.

And as such you attract self absorbed bellends.
by JdeBP | 2025-08-12 08:39:12+00:00
An interesting observation. It prompts the thought of how far away this simulator is from an actual ZX81, and how much it has been pulled away from a ZX81 by dint of training data where simulated retrocomputers of other types all boot into copyright messages. I wonder how often the spicy autocomplete engine tried to make it put up a "READY" or "OK" prompt.

One ZX81 clone actually did have a "READY" prompt, I read. Actual intelligence was doing the same in the 1980s. (-:
Ask HN: Why don't LLMs replace bosses instead of engineers?
by fzeindl | 2025-08-12 08:40:12+00:00
I asked myself why all the talk goes into augmenting or replacing engineers instead of the bosses and let ChatGPT formulate my thoughts:

1. Engineers vs. LLMs: low tolerance for mistakes

Engineering reality: If a developer pushes code that’s subtly wrong, you can crash a service, corrupt data, or introduce security flaws.

LLMs today: Great at producing plausible-looking code, but still prone to logical gaps or hidden bugs that might not be obvious until production.

Result: You’d need heavy human oversight anyway — turning the “replacement” into more of a “babysitting” scenario, which could be more costly than just having good engineers write it themselves.

2. CEOs vs. LLMs: higher tolerance for ambiguity

CEO reality: Decisions are often based on incomplete data, lots of gut feeling, and persuasive narrative. There’s more wiggle room — a “wrong” call can sometimes be spun as “strategic” or “visionary” until results catch up.

LLMs today: Excellent at synthesizing multiple data sources, spotting patterns, and generating strategic options — all without bias toward personal ego or politics (well… except whatever biases the training data has).

Result: They could produce coherent, well-justified strategies quickly, and humans could still be the ones to communicate and enact them.

3. Why this actually makes sense

If you think of error cost:

Engineer error = immediate, measurable, costly (bug in production).

CEO error = slower to surface, more subjective, sometimes recoverable with spin.

If you think of data integration skills:

LLMs have superhuman recall and synthesis capabilities.

CEOs need exactly that skill for market intelligence, competitor analysis, and high-level decision frameworks.

So yes — in this framing, replacing CEO-level strategy generation with an LLM and keeping engineers human might actually be more practical right now. Humans would still need to do the “face work” (investor relations, internal morale), but the strategic brain could be an LLM fed with all relevant business data.
by philipallstar | 2025-08-12 08:40:32+00:00
> And if the people around the table happen to be my friends - why would I ever wish to victimize them, or ruin their image in my mind by watching them victimize others?

No one is being victimised. Everyone's signing up to potentially lose their money. It doesn't have to be very much money to make it work well, but it generally needs to be some money.
by drcongo | 2025-08-12 08:41:13+00:00
This is a perfect summing up. I do wonder though, how much of this is to do with something unique to the American psyche - the US seems to have one mass-delusional panic after another - satan worshipers, clowns, antifa, AI. I say this as a brit, where we only have two mass-delusional panics on rotation - immigrants and house prices. Three if you count immigration's effect on house prices.
by Jolter | 2025-08-12 08:41:48+00:00
I would say that what you wrote in the first two paragraphs is all equally true of a system with proportional representation. But you’d avoid a lot of problems:

- people in ”safe” constituencies being permanently represented by an MP from an opposing party, with no recourse except for moving

- policies that constantly pander to voters in ”swing” constituencies

- the two major parties constantly triangulating their policies around the center, rather than voters moving their votes to the party representing their opinions, which ensures that government is always centrist or near-centrist

Etc — these are just my pet peeves about the US and UK systems, I know there are more.

Plus, I think it’s good if a system is more robust against loss of trust that you mentioned. You could argue that in the UK, society hasn’t yet been broken, but looking at the US, don’t you think it’s better not to have that vulnerability?
by Ygg2 | 2025-08-12 08:42:09+00:00
> Oh, come on, you’re smart enough to understand that a few minutes every few months may not be exactly $0, but it’s such an insignificant value that it can be treated as $0.

You're smart enough to know that just because you sum small things, you can aggregate them over many people and a long time (circa 50 years) to get to massive numbers.

> Well, you can choose your trade offs, and you can let others choose theirs. So I guess you use Ada for everything? or maybe you use Coq to prove everything? Of course you don’t, you’re also making trade offs, just different ones.

Ada doesn't give you full memory safety. I think you need Ada.Spark. I can't find as much teaching material on it, but definitely on my radar. Also, I'm more of a Lean guy myself, but it has a different purpose than Rust. I.e. proving things.

And proofs aren't everything.
Ask HN: A real life dating app
by momoelz | 2025-08-12 08:42:19+00:00
What do you think of a dating app which works in real life, while you commute from place to place work out or hang out somewhere. This is how it works:

1. Set up your profile and preferences

2. Live, and wait for notifications that somewhere nearby a possible match is there

3. Go to your possible match and talk to him/her

so what do you think?