MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bitwize | 2025-08-07 05:59:10+00:00
The major thing that put John Carmack at the top of his field, even more than his extreme intelligence, was his unrelenting grindset. He would work days and nights, often taking a weekend and locking himself in a hotel room, to solve a problem. He has said in interviews that unless you work those 12+ hour days you just aren't going to write world-class software.

If you really want to develop on the cutting edge, you need a lot more than smarts. You have to have that dog in you. That fire in your belly that makes you obsessed, consumed with your work and solving the problems you set out to solve. If you don't... you're gonna lose out to someone who does. Go sling Java for a bank or insurance company, then, if you want to punch out at 5.

Scott Wu has that dog in him. It's reasonable for him to expect the same of his employees.
by tdb7893 | 2025-08-07 06:00:28+00:00
"I just found it interesting they think that the majority of Americans elected a candidate who supposedly ran on "authoritarian" ideals to be the leader of the free world." -> I mean it is obviously interesting but it sure as hell is not surprising based on my experience talking to people. I've met a lot of people for who democratic norms are pretty low down on their list of politically important things (you can see this in all the anti-democratic stuff like gerrymandering that is pretty rampant in the US. Americans are often willing to sacrifice some amount of democracy for policy goals).

Specifically for examples, I mean the most classic authoritarian action is to wield authority to try to stay in power (which the fact that it was unsuccessful doesn't make it not authoritarian, especially when the lesson from it seems to have been to further consolidate power as he's done this term), it's pretty hard to get more cut and dry than that. But it's also pretty clear in how Trump has taken control of government funding in the US , by centralizing more funding power under him (especially the ability to arbitrarily cut programs legally funded by Congress). It's not really about the specific policies though, its the general pattern of centralization of authority and entrenchment of that authority that we've been seeing.

P.S. this Federalist Paper highlights why the power of the purse is only in Congress in the US and I think is interesting, especially when talking about budget in regards to authoritarianism (https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Hamilton/01-04-02-02... this paper was written by Madison, who is better known as the primary writer of the Constitution). Relevant excerpt:

"The House of Representatives cannot only refuse, but they alone can propose, the supplies requisite for the support of government. They, in a word, hold the purse that powerful instrument by which we behold, in the history of the British Constitution, an infant and humble representation of the people gradually enlarging the sphere of its activity and importance, and finally reducing, as far as it seems to have wished, all the overgrown prerogatives of the other branches of the government. This power over the purse may, in fact, be regarded as the most complete and effectual weapon with which any constitution can arm the immediate representatives of the people, for obtaining a redress of every grievance, and for carrying into effect every just and salutary measure."
by zozbot234 | 2025-08-07 06:01:14+00:00
> Imagine how many pointers are used in the average program. When we switched over to 64 bits, the memory used by all those pointers instantly doubled.

This is a very real issue (not just on the Windows platform, either) but well-coded software can recover much of that space by using arena allocation and storing indexes instead of general pointers. It would also be nice if we could easily restrict the system allocator to staying within some arbitrary fraction of the program's virtual address space - then we could simply go back to 4-byte general pointers (provided that all library code was updated in due course to support this too) and not even need to mess with arenas.

(We need this anyway to support programs that assume a 48-bit virtual address space on newer systems with 56-bit virtual addresses. Might as well deal with the 32-bit case too.)
by Apocryphon | 2025-08-07 06:01:16+00:00
Gravity is one of the four fundamental interactions (albeit the weakest one), perhaps trying to create it artificially is a bit beyond even hypothetical physics. Sounds like the latest suggestion for it is from 2016:

https://www.sciencealert.com/a-mathematician-has-proposed-a-...

> Now, Füzfa has shown, mathematically speaking, that by stacking large superconducting electromagnets we would be able to produce a very weak gravitational field, and that we'd be able to detect it using highly sensitive interferometers. These interferometers would work by basically superimposing gravitational fields on top of each other so that physicists could obtain information about them.
by LAC-Tech | 2025-08-07 06:01:38+00:00
This such a rabbit hole. I only really knew of multics as 'the thing before unix'. I had no idea it was interesting in its own right. I have to stop myself reading or I'll be downloading the papers (I love old comp sci papers)...

From the front page: "preserve the technical ideas and advances of Multics so others don't need to reinvent them"

Which ideas and advances from multics do we not do anymore?
by baobun | 2025-08-07 06:01:45+00:00
Did you try that? I can't find any confirmation on if it's actually working for classical keys but it's for sure not supported for resident keys on Ledger.

https://www.ledger.com/blog/strengthen-the-security-of-your-...

https://github.com/LedgerHQ/app-security-key/issues/6

https://github.com/LedgerHQ/app-security-key/issues/7

Is Trezor implementation more mature?
by spauldo | 2025-08-07 06:02:04+00:00
Tobacco, and cigarettes in particular, has been used as a medicine for hundreds of years. And it's not just in the distant past - a friend of mine was actually prescribed cigarettes for anxiety about 30 years ago here in the US when he was 14.

There are various health benefits to smoking, believe it or not. They're just outweighed by the downsides.
by self_awareness | 2025-08-07 06:02:07+00:00
Eh, that modern web design.

A large photo of some lake, that isn't even named, which contributes nothing to the article -- you need to scroll two pages to get over it, and it's before the first sentence of the article.

Maps that contain text and provide real context to the article's premise -- so small that the page needs to be zoomed in. Original images are slightly bigger, so the website actually makes them even smaller than they are.

It so matches the times we live in today.
by acters | 2025-08-07 06:02:50+00:00
I believe that is exactly the downside of using speculative decoding, which is why it is very important to have the models properly sized between each other by making sure the small use is big enough to be mostly correct while also being exceptionally faster than the larger one. However the larger one has to be fast enough that catching flaws won't introduce too manyrandom delays. Also, if the small one is incorrect then the larger one correcting the mistake is miles better than leaving in incorrect output.

It is about improving quality while allowing for faster speed most of the time. The tradeoff is that you consume more memory from having two models loaded vs one of them exclusively.

If you just focus on one then it would make sense to reduce memory usage by just running the smaller model.
by throwaway4496 | 2025-08-07 06:03:12+00:00
> Software engineers rarely pick what they work on, so in most cases you can only measure how well they meet the objectives they were assigned to work on.

There it goes, your other metric.

> People who think they can accurately measure things like velocity will bring out arguments based on the law of large numbers. But that only works when the number of samples is much larger than the number of variables, which is not the case for software engineering.

You can't accurately measure any coastline, but we don't stop at that.
by cuu508 | 2025-08-07 06:03:29+00:00
If granny forgets her password, she looks it up on the last page of her notebook where it is written down. Granny cannot write down her passkey.

To avoid getting locked out you could add 2-3 passkeys from different providers to each account. And/or use a passkey provider that allows backups, and back up your keys. But I doubt many people will have the discipline to do either of that.
by 9dev | 2025-08-07 06:03:32+00:00
Your answer, and GP's reference to Debian, is highlighting the misunderstanding very precisely: Microsoft is not just an operating system vendor. If they stopped making Windows tomorrow, Microsoft would still exist and do well economically, because it's a hydra with a thousand heads.

Hence my point: The classical concept of "displacement" doesn't apply to corporations at that scale anymore.
by musicale | 2025-08-07 06:06:04+00:00
What do I dislike about ChatGPT? How about... everything? Let's start with:

Lack of permission (or even credit) for its training material.

Competing with human creativity and damaging the market for creative output from real humans, including those whose work was used without permission or compensation to train the system.

People turning off their brains once they start using it.

Idiots who use it for everything (see above.)

Students using it to avoid learning anything.

Acting as if it is human.

Filling the web - and the world - with AI-generated slop.

The resultant, seemingly unavoidable dilution of human culture.

Malicious use by criminals, scammers, advertisers, and everyone else who has it in for you.

AI-driven layoffs and the desire to replace humans with LLMs.

Rubbish chatbots used to replace support staff.

Etc.
by pfych | 2025-08-07 06:06:14+00:00
Whenever I go for a run in the afternoon there's always a big group of teens down fishing at the river with a bunch of lime bikes next too them. Glad it's made it easier for them to all meet up and hang out outdoors.

It's funny when they wrap up though and you watch all of them kickstart the bikes. Riding off down the trail as they beep and click. Haha.
by __rito__ | 2025-08-07 06:08:08+00:00
I have been on the hiring side, too. And the difference between a good enough college and an elite college is the density of really good students.

If you have a fraction:

really good students -------------------- all students in CS

Then this number tends to be much higher in elite colleges than good enough colleges.

This is my personal experience.

(Past) company did hire from non-elite colleges in case-by-case basis, but one time we wanted 4-5 freshers, we did go to the elite college.

All students of elite colleges aren't better than all students of good enough colleges, but the fraction is what is different.

In a a typical CS dept of 50 students, you can find 40-45 really good ones in elite colleges versus 3-8 in good-enough colleges.
by bruce511 | 2025-08-07 06:08:13+00:00
>> The term Open Source was coned because ESR, Bruce Perens and co. didn't like the term "Free Software" - they were afraid it will scare the software business away.

Sure. They didn't completely align with Free Software, so they coined a new term for a new kind of license.

Current companies are free to do the same thing. If they don't like the Open Source or Free software licenses they are free to coin their own term, write their own license. Nobody has any problem with this, and every company is free to write whatever license they like.

What they don't get to do is co-opt the term "Open Source" and then change the meaning of it to something quite different. That's not ok.

I completely agree that Open Source is not necessarily a viable business strategy for most businesses. The solution to that is to not be Open Source.

For some reason, some companies though think this is not ok. They want to use the marketing term "Open Source", as if it means whatever they want it to mean. They want to build on the goodwill generated by decades of Open Source developers, and then bait-and-switch that goodwill at some point. That's no ok.

>> it turns out you no longer can because any software you build in this way will be used by Amazon and they will earn the money, not you.

You make this sound like this is something new. Whereas Open Source has always been used by big companies to make money. MacOS is based on NetBSD. That's over 25 years old now.

So yes, if you want to make a software business, and you plan to sell your product, then releasing it for free and allowing others to use it commercially is probably not a great business strategy. So if releasing it as Open Source is contrary to your business goals then, you know, don't release it as Open Source.
by anywhichway | 2025-08-07 06:08:30+00:00
I noticed one of the cited bluesky posts was all in French, so one might argue that technically it didn't find the English word "mouch", but rather a different French word that happens to be spelled the same. But trying to sort that out seems unrealistically challenging. "Mouch" is only in the dictionary as an alternative spelling to mooch, so probably a pretty rare word to see in English.
by 0xeb | 2025-08-07 06:09:59+00:00
A tale of Reverse Engineering 1001 GPTs: the good, the bad and the ugly

Last year, I spent 5 months reverse engineering custom GPTs from OpenAI.

In this video, I share all the learnings from: prompt engineering, injection, leaks, plagiarism, protection prompts, shady practices and more.

- Repo: https://github.com/0xeb/TheBigPromptLibrary - Video: https://youtu.be/5TFn13QOpU4

LLM devs and prompt engineers, you’ll find this research fun and informative!
Show HN: CodeKeg, Site for Developers
by someONEgit | 2025-08-07 06:10:02+00:00
Hey HN,

I built CodeKeg – a developer network to share tools, code, and documentation. It’s also got blog posts, dev news links, and a community section where contributors can add their own proects via GitHub.

Why? I was tired of endlessly searching for dev tools and wanted a lightweight hub for people to host their dev tools to keep it easily accessible. It’s open-source and ready for contributors at any time (subject to change).

Would love feedback or suggestions! Or submit your own project if you’ve got something cool!

site (in case not seen): https://www.codekeg.dev
by anigbrowl | 2025-08-07 06:12:02+00:00
ancestors of today's AI naysayers

This is dead wrong. People were open to using it as a tool then as they are now, but not all offerings are of equal value. I know a lot of musicians who would be into an AI 'session buddy' who could play along with them or serve as a tutor for advanced concepts. The existing offerings in the music space are at the level of Deepmind when it made everything look like a dog on acid.

As I've written before, proponents of AI music as an infinity jukebox completely miss the point of how music works. In a social context people want a jukebox to provide favorite (or at least famous) sounds that everyone can vibe along to. People listening on their own either replay their nostalgic favorites or iterate on them if they have a strong genre preference. AI could in theory replace a DJ at a nightclub where not everyone needs to know every song if the vibe is good and the beats are tight, but they will still want someone to focus on. Beyond an intimate small group of people, parties where loud music is blasting off a playlist (or DAT or CD changer) with nobody actively DJing don't work because people quickly feel that if the music is changing independently of the dancefloor then the collective connection is broken.
by ishweta | 2025-08-07 06:12:06+00:00
As a web developer, I've seen a lot of starter kits, but Next Kit is a game-changer. I was so tired of the headaches that come with database integration, but this kit makes it so simple to link with SupaBase, MongoDB, and Prisma ORM. Honestly, it's awesome for connecting the backend to the frontend and has saved me so much time.
by somenameforme | 2025-08-07 06:12:17+00:00
I think Trump has made clear that Europe has no meaningful sovereignty. However, the only thing unique about Trump is that he doesn't play the typical games and makes no effort whatsoever to let them save face and pretend to be sovereign. We created a system where Europe is economically and militarily dependent upon the US, which means on issues we truly care about - they have no ability to say no. They're going to do what he says -- they know it, he knows it, and now everybody else also knows it because he loves to gloat about it and make it unambiguously clear that he's imposing his will on them.

The great empires of old, dating back to at least Alexander the Great and almost certainly before, all learned a simple truth. The way you create a stable empire is by giving those under your control so much as freedom as possible to maintain their own ways. We simply took this to the next logical step and created an empire no longer defined by borders.
by acters | 2025-08-07 06:12:21+00:00
Another caveat with this method is that both larger and smaller models need to behave very similar because a lot of the savings come from generating the necessary fluff around each detail such as grammar, formatting and words/letters that transition between each other.

Unsurprisingly gpt-oss has both larger and smaller models that work very similarly! Both model sizes are so similar that even if getting a few wrong would not be slowing down the performance enough to equal the speed of the larger model(which is the worst case with this setup). We want the speed of the smaller model as much as possible. That is all
by motorest | 2025-08-07 06:12:55+00:00
> (...) so we eventually end up with two divergent implementations of Widgetness.

That means they were never the same implementation to begin with.

> Then somewhat later, Jolene Developer joins the project and is asked to fix an intermittent bug in CatWidget. The bug turns out to be partly due to the original Widget implementation, and partly due to Joe's changes (...)

Irrelevant. It means you have two components that are buggy. Create two big tickets and tackle them whenever the team has capacity.

How many months or years have passed since your hypothetical initial refactoring?

That's the problem with mindless fundamentalisme involving DRY. Throwing complexity around and tightly coupling components that in practice have no relationship other than superficial similarities are mistakes that only create technical debt in the long run.

> As far as I know there is again no hard and fast rule - it's a heuristic that we develop over the course of our careers: "is this likely to change in the future, and in what ways?"

That's the mistake you're making: fooling yourself into believing that mindlessly throwing complexity around prevents issues and future proofs implementations. It doesn't. You are only increasing the burden to maintain a project without bringing in any tangible positive tradeoff. YAGNI is a battle-tested guideline, which you're violating. Even in your example the introduction of a new widget meant bugs affecting it were either only affecting it, thus lower in risk profile, or already in the original component, which means low risk as no one stopped them. Why are you choosing to make your life harder?
by DataVader | 2025-08-07 06:13:23+00:00
I recently launched stocksavvy.ai to help make SEC filings easier to work with. It’s a free tool that analyzes new filings (10-Ks, 10-Qs, 8-Ks, etc.) as they’re released and breaks them down into a consistent format.

Instead of just summarizing, it extracts sections like sentiment, positives, negatives, risks, future outlook, industry context, potential next steps, legal proceedings, etc. The idea is to surface the most relevant information quickly without losing important nuance or detail. It has filings since January 2024.

I originally built it for myself as a buy and hold investor who wanted a better way to keep up with filings.

I was thinking about monetizing via ads and access to the API - the filing is available in JSON format. I don't think many would pay for access to a tool like this, but I’d really appreciate feedback on usability and monetizing (what would access to the API be worth?).
by jlaternman | 2025-08-07 06:14:16+00:00
Clean drinking water is actually de facto a finite resource. It does recycle through nature, but large reservoirs and water tables are slow to recharge, often taking millennia to form, so there’s a lossiness in that sense — our usage and loss of potable water can’t be higher than the overall recharge rate. So it’s something we could exhaust without big technical breakthroughs (converting salt water quicker than nature does in large quantities, etc). We rely on maintaining a sustainable rate of consumption to avoid setting up future generations for potential catastrophe, basically. Not saying data centre water usage could alone be the difference, but it’s not implausible if it increases exponentially. Another factor is existing reserves can be contaminated and made undrinkable, adding an unpredictable factor into calculations. It’s an interesting topic to read about.
by perching_aix | 2025-08-07 06:14:38+00:00
I'm pretty okay with semaglutide and I understand its prospective benefits, both on a personal and societal level. My point was that the father of this person clearly has that oh-so-superior and elusive brain chemistry you suppose I have based on the account shared, so it was both immensely asinine to write what you did, as well as straight up false. That you could have went through all these other points without being an asshole about it, from the get-go. That there's a person on the other side of the screen too, and maybe, just maybe, they weren't meaning unwell, and didn't deserve a fucking brainwash about how they're actually torturing their loved one - you know, just like how people don't deserve one about how they can totally lose weight unassisted and are just being "weak willed" or whatever. That you escalated, and that thinking you're justified in doing so doesn't actually make it any fucking better.
by raphman | 2025-08-07 06:18:05+00:00
Thanks a lot for the explanation and link. I had read the original papers a long time ago, and was not aware of the more recent discussions. That said, I just read a few of the critical papers, and it seems that even Gignac and others do not dispute that the effect is observable. They just don't believe that unskilled people are inherently worse than skilled people in estimating their own skill but that all people overestimate their skill (better-than-average effect).

This is still very much compatible with my claim that unskilled people profit from being reminded (repeatedly, not just in the exam at the end of the semester) that they know less than they think. I will avoid conflating this with the Dunning-Kruger effect in the future (Thanks!).

An recent study found that medical students' estimate of their own intelligence gets lower right after taking an IQ test (confirming the better-than-average effect). But one week later, their self-estimated intelligence returns back to their pre-test levels. To me this suggests that students (and all others) will overestimate their abilities - and invest less time in learning - if they are not constantly given feedback.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01918...