MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by reify | 2025-09-20 11:24:07+00:00
good for him

He could have waited a few months and used a Quantum enabled laptop.

I have a bet with my only friend, that we will see quantum enabled laptops in the christmas TV scammy advertising runs this year.

They will be able to calculate the first 1000 primes. I, for one am suitably impressed. I will get one for my grand kids. It takes ages with pen and paper.

I only have a £1 bet with her.

I also have another £1 bet with her, that ai will die in a years time.

I'm on to a guarunteed winner. A life enhancing and life changing £2.

I'll invest the £2 in AGI.

2026 is going to be a wonderful year
by peterfirefly | 2025-09-20 11:24:30+00:00
The review doesn't mention branch prediction. Call/ret instructions work really well with branch predictors. Lots of jumps (to continuations) might not work quite as well.

From the review (discussing "practical applications of continuations"):

> Was it influential to the field of computer science?

Call/cc was fairly popular in the North West of the US (maybe California too) among Lisp and Scheme people. Compiling them well on real machines was definitely a topic worth investigating at the time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call-with-current-continuation

Call/cc has since (thankfully) become a lot less popular.

I liked the book a lot when I read it (2-3 decades ago) but it didn't seem relevant in the slightest if you just didn't care about call/cc.
by forgotoldacc | 2025-09-20 11:25:35+00:00
Yep. It's the same reason those tiny oil countries in the Arab Gulf are popular. You can work a few years to save big and go home. There's a underclass of slaves below you that keep the country running, but if you're not a slave yourself, it's easy to ignore that.

America is similar. Ignore the homeless, the people who can't afford basic trips to the doctor, the illegal immigrant underclass, hope the crime problem never affects you, and focus on your own money, and it's fine.
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-09-20 11:26:06+00:00
> What if a company wants to exclusively hire men? What if they want to exclusively hire Christians?

Unfortunately, history has shown that allowing that kind of selectivity ends up with extremely unfair job prospects for people from different ethnic backgrounds. You might be fine if you're a Christian man, but there's a lot of other people in the world so you should learn to get along with them (not intending to imply that you personally have an issue).

> Is it forcing people to use certain pronouns, even if you don't think it aligns with their biological sex, and it feels like lying?

It's not so much forcing as just being polite. If you meet someone and call them "David" and they reply "oh, I prefer Dave", then it'd be kind of odd for you to insist on using "David" because that's the name that was written on their birth certificate. It's about consideration for other people's self image etc.
by input_sh | 2025-09-20 11:26:43+00:00
Except half of it doesn't fucking work.

I click on "show fewer shorts" on the homepage, refresh the page, and still see shorts in the second row. Sometimes I do that 10x in a row to no effect.

I deleted my YouTube history just this week, but my homepage is full of music mixes that start with a song I definitely listened to that are supposedly "deleted" from my history. I would think if I start from a supposedly blank slate that I would at least have to "teach it" that I'm not interested in pop songs that are popular in my corner of the world once again, but no.

My homepage may as well not exist, as YouTube insists of filling it up with like 2-3 niches that I am interested in, but don't want to watch all the time. Nothing new resurfaces there except when one of the people I'm subscribed to happens to make an appearance on someone else's channel.

Scroll to the bottom of the homepage in desperation and instead of showing something new it shows like 3 rows of exactly one channel.

The video recommendations on the side often have nothing to do with the video I'm watching. Listening to music? Here's a political debate. Watching something educational? Here's nothing but two video games.

The "new to you" button isn't at all "new to me", it's "things I've watched but didn't care about it enough to subscribe to".

It's truly fascinating how much I have to fight the product to find something even remotely interesting to watch that's not in my subscription feed.
by esperent | 2025-09-20 11:27:44+00:00
It's understandable why you would need to do that. I'm not against subscriptions in cases like this.

From my side as a customer, here's what I would need to see before supporting you:

1. A one off payment to own the current version of the device. This must include the ability to download all of my data that I generate from using the device. It can be in raw, unporcessed form.

2. A subscription is acceptable but would pay for cloud based data processing, generating reports etc. Processing and storing my data, in other words

3. A clear privacy policy stating that you will never sell my data in either raw or processed form. But I assume as a medical device that's already in place?
by harimau777 | 2025-09-20 11:27:48+00:00
The elephant in the room is how dismal more and more Americans quality of life is. Home ownership is out of reach. Living in the city at all is often out of reach. They have to work multiple jobs and those jobs often mistreat them.

I can see the argument that a large and super consumerist middle class might not be sustainable. However, for society to function, the alternative still needs to provide people with a decent quality of life.
by weregiraffe | 2025-09-20 11:27:57+00:00
>It's is immensely epistemically arrogant to so confidently opine on this topic when every single day you experience consciousness, which is impossible to explain at all using Physics and likely simply impossible to ever explain within that framework (Edward Witten, the greatest living Physicist, shares this belief).

Look, you asked for it by setting up secularism as the problem. The opposite of secularism is commonly understood to be religion, and religion is self-delusion. The fact that you can't explain consciousness via a materialistic framework, doesn't mean you have to invent an imaginary friend to explain it. It's like saying that since you can't fly an airplane to the Moon, you should take a train (with no wheels).
by pluc | 2025-09-20 11:29:29+00:00
Even if i did i would never post it publicly. And yes i understand that it means i won't be getting thousands of strangers looking at my personal experience, one of whom might want to hire me. I wouldn't post my resume either. I'm just not comfortable giving my data to a company i don't trust and to share it openly on the public web. And yes i'm ok with the consequences.
by cs702 | 2025-09-20 11:30:23+00:00
The winner for Psychology made me think, for a moment, about HN: "Telling people they are intelligent correlates with the feeling of narcissistic uniqueness: The influence of IQ feedback on temporary state narcissism," by Marcin Zajenkowski and Gilles E. Gignac. Link to paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028962... . The entire list is hilarious, and also makes you think. Go read the whole thing!
by seec | 2025-09-20 11:30:53+00:00
I think that's because people don't cook as much as they used to. And when they do it's rarely proper cooking and more assembly of prepared stuff, often just reheating.

In France too, most kitchen are optimized for looks with an island and fully opened to the living room. If you use noisy equipment, it makes both places uncomfortable. But I think that's the point, it doesn't happen that often.

There are not a whole lot of people who actually cook anymore and those who do deal with the annoyance or have their house choice influenced by that requirement.

I think complex home cooking is a vestige of the time when there were middle class housewives with a lot of time to actually do that. Nowadays with both parents working, cooking has been relegated to an activity that has to be fast, easy and efficient; which is why those multifunction cooking appliances are so popular. You never get something great out of it but it works decently enough to have the person responsible take care of some other errands simultaneously.
by xyzzy123 | 2025-09-20 11:31:10+00:00
I have a play project which hits these constraints a lot.

I have been messing around with getting AI to implement novel (to me) data structures from papers. They're not rocket science or anything but there's a lot of detail. Often I do not understand the complex edge cases in the algorithms myself so I can't even "review my way out of it". I'm also working in go which is usually not a very good fit for implementing these things because it doesn't have sum types; lack of sum types oten adds so much interface{} bloat it would render the data structure pointless. Am working around with codegen for now.

What I've had to do is demote "human review" a bit; it's a critical control but it's expensive. Rather, think more holistically about "guard rails" to put where and what the acceptance criteria should be. This means that when I'm reviewing the code I am reasonably confident it's functionally correct, leaving me to focus on whether I like how that is being achieved. This won't work for every domain, but if it's possible to automate controls, it feels like this is the way to go wherever possible.

The "principled" way to do this would be to use provers etc, but being more of an engineer I have resorted to ruthless guard rails. Bench tests that automatically fail if the runtime doesn't meet requirements (e.g. is O(n) instead of O(log n)) or overall memory efficiency is too low - and enforcing 100% code coverage from both unit tests AND fuzzing. Sometimes the cli agent is running for hours chasing indexes or weird bugs; the two main tasks are preventing it from giving up, and stopping it from "punting" (wait, this isn't working, let me first create a 100% correct O(n) version...) or cheating. Also reminding it to check AGAIN for slice sharing bugs which crop up a surprising % of the time.

The other "interesting" part of my workflow right now is that I have to manually shuffle a lot between "deep research" (which goes and reads all the papers and blogs about the data structure) and the cli agent which finds the practical bugs etc but often doesn't have the "firepower" to recognise when it's stuck in a local maximum or going around in circles. Have been thinking about an MCP that lets the cli agent call out to "deep research" when it gets really stuck.
by lumb63 | 2025-09-20 11:31:13+00:00
I can’t comment on the nostalgia aspect, because I wasn’t alive back then, but I can say that there are several aspects of the statistic you used that make it not reflective of the experience people have.

One issue is median real income does not tell you anything about the distribution of income. It can be used to show that the top 50% of people have had “real income growth”, but can hide a lot at both extremes; the poor and rich have had vastly different experiences [1]. The metric on that page looks at “share of national income”, so it has issues as well (not anchored to any objective measures), but it illustrates my point just as well.

The bigger issue I find is the way that “real income” is measured. There are a slew of issues, IMO (hedonic adjustment, for instance), but the biggest is the way that asset prices are treated in CPI - that is to say, they are not! Shelter prices reflect “owner equivalent rent”, not the price to actually buy a home, which has ballooned massively in the last few decades, especially the past five years, relative to income [2]. The same applies to other assets such as stocks; they are nowhere in the CPI metric, but have a direct impact on our lives; higher-priced stocks impeded the purchasing ability of people with respect to stocks, costing them returns over time (couple this with the larger cost of other assets over time and it is clear retirement age will have to go up). So, yes, maybe real income has increased, but substitutions are being made and tricks are being played; more people are renting longer because of home prices. Future returns on investments will be lower because of a giant asset bubble.

Also, future liabilities are nowhere to be seen in the real income metrics. The national debt that the US has saddled its current and future citizens with is shameful and will inevitably cause financial drag in the future (could be higher tax rates, but my personal bet is persistently higher inflation over time; you can already see the Fed giving up on its 2% target).

[1]: https://wid.world/country/usa/

[2]: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/median-house-prices-vs-inco...
by ranguna | 2025-09-20 11:32:01+00:00
People everywhere saying ecma script is a bad name feels like oracle hired people to hate on the best alternative so that demo keeps "fighting the fight" and make oracle lawyers more rich.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with sound of ecma script (maybe it's just a bit difficult on the tongue?). And not, it doesn't read like eczema, there's absolutely nothing related with that name other than the first two and last characters, reading one and the other they are completely different. It doesn't make sense to say they are similar. Stop with the astroturfing.

Everyone I see hating on ecma script simply say it's a bad name without argumenting or say it's similar to eczema, are we 12 now?

Potentially it could cause confusion between the spec and the language. But tbh I think the mistake was to create that differentiation in the first place. Let's just join these two together and there'll be no more head scratching of what is what.
by pjmlp | 2025-09-20 11:33:11+00:00
Since Android 5 that ART uses AOT, and nowadays it is a mix of JIT and AOT with PGO metadata shared via PlayStore.

Additionally, Java and Kotlin are quite usable outside Android, instead of flourishing in a single vendor ecosystem.

Swift outside Apple ecosystem is as interesting as using Objective-C with GNUStep.
by ozim | 2025-09-20 11:33:20+00:00
Example of Poland and guys that Sam.A. Gave shout out.

Their talents would be simply wasted in Poland. There simply is not enough capital and academic resources are not going to best people but to ones gaming the system.

I bet a lot of talented people move to US because they would have to fight uphill battles in their home countries with lack of funding, nepotism, corruption, caste systems you name it.

So I don’t think it would make much difference for the countries if they don’t have society set in ways to benefit from those talents.
by sothatsit | 2025-09-20 11:33:28+00:00
TypeScript with NextJS. I've also used AI tools with C and Zig, and AI is much better at writing TS. But even though TS works much better, it's still not that great. This is largely because the quality of the code that AI writes is not good enough, so then I have to spend a decent chunk of time fixing it.

Everyone I know trying to use AI in large codebases has had similar experiences. AI is not good enough at following the rules of your codebase yet (i.e., following structure, code style, library usage, re-using code, refactoring, etc...). This makes it far less useful for writing code changes and additions. It can still be useful for small changes, or for writing first drafts of functions/classes/interfaces, but for more meaningful changes it often fails.

That is why I believe that right now, if you want to maintain a large codebase, and maintain a high bar for quality, AI tools are just not good enough at writing most code for you yet. The solution to this is not to get AI to write even more code for you to review and throw out and iterate upon in a frustrating cycle. Instead, I believe it is to notice where AI is helpful and focus on those use-cases, and avoid it when it is not.

That said, AI labs seem to be focusing a lot of effort on improving AI for coding right now, so I expect a lot of progress will be made on these issues in the next few years.
by chmod775 | 2025-09-20 11:34:52+00:00
Most places this would have caused amusement among those present and... Yeah, no. That's it.

I'm strongly considering to take some aesthetically pleasing images of nude humans and strategically insert them into everything I touch - just to mess with prudes and maybe as a form of "exposure therapy".

Maybe a David or a Venus as a hero image for a README? You get the idea.
by burakemir | 2025-09-20 11:35:35+00:00
I will quote (approximately) Simon Peyton Jones: "writing programs is not hard. Specifying what a program should do is hard."

Prove what? The author is well versed in the problem of specifications as the aliens-demand-gcc-correctness-or-else post. I also enjoyed the other post where they say "no one cares about correctness" and "people care about compliance".

It is safe to say, most people are not experts and will never become experts.

Being proficient in the business of coming up with suitable specification that can be implemented and getting assurance that an implementation meets the spec will most likely need all the kind of formal training for humans that the AI hype industry assures us is no longer necessary.

So it doesn't much help that LLMs are good at manipulating the tokens when used by experts, at least not in a big way. It can be hoped that they change cost-benefit balance in good ways, but the bigger problems of the industry will simply persist.

What would need to change for a more fundamental shift is getting a lot more people to understand the value of specifications. This is an education problem and paradoxically I could see AI helping a lot... if only there was enough interest in using AI to help humans become experts.
by jwrallie | 2025-09-20 11:35:38+00:00
I think I’m working at lower levels, but usually my flow is:

- I start to build or refactor the code structure by myself creating the basic interfaces or skip to the next step when they already exist. I’ll use LLMs as autocomplete here.

- I write down the requirements and tell which files are the entry point for the changes.

- I do not tell the agent my final objective, only one step that gets me closer to it, and one at a time.

- I watch carefully and interrupt the agent as soon as I see something going wrong. At this point I either start over if my requirement assumptions were wrong or just correct the course of action of the agent if it was wrong.

Most of the issues I had in the past were from when I write down a broad objective that requires too many steps at the beginning. Agents cannot judge correctly when they finished something.
by perching_aix | 2025-09-20 11:36:05+00:00
> Lol. That is not possible.

It is possible, both under the conservative interpretation of the word (like how AACS is continuously updated as security holes are found and compromises happen, with the keys being rotated each time), and on a theoretical level (FHE). The latter is not being done because it is not nearly performant enough, and the former is an ongoing cat and mouse game that is once again irrelevant to what we were discussing here.

With FHE, the "take the machine apart and analyze what it does to get the original bitstream" would be cryptographically hard, so good luck with that. With the usual DRM schemes it isn't, so they are pretty much always cracked in a few months or a few years, but until that point they are both sound and effective.

> Regarding the analog hole, with a properly calibrated professional video camera recording in RAW, with both camera and monitor genlocked and color calibrated, and the proper postprocessing, you can capure the original pixel values exactly.

Yes, that's what I'm suggesting too...

> And worst case, you can then brute force which parameters the original encode used to re-encode your data without generation loss.

Can you? I mean in practice, in a practical amount of time. And is that actually done?
by ranguna | 2025-09-20 11:37:08+00:00
Why waste money here instead of justing calling it ecma script or js?

Who cares about java?

Let's just move on. I think it would be a much peittier sight to behold seeing a whole community as a whole change the way they call their language instead of paying 100s of 1000s to some lawyers to fight over a name that's pretty bad in the first place (see the history behind the name, they just wanted to piggyback ride on java as a buzzword).

(please don't astroturf saying ecma script is a bad name, if you don't like it, argument why, don't be 12 saying it looks like eczema, it does not and never did)
by dsjoerg | 2025-09-20 11:37:08+00:00
Ǎ ăẫẩǡǎắặȧ ǎạ a ăẵaậậặẩẳặ áặằẫȧặ ạẵặ ảẵẫậặ ẵȁầaẩ ȧaăặ! Aẩắ Ǎ aǎẩ'ạ ẳẫẩẩa ậẫǡặ.....
by badlibrarian | 2025-09-20 11:37:47+00:00
Music Modernization Act (2018). A long overdue tiny step into common sense copyright reform.

https://www.copyright.gov/music-modernization/pre1972-soundr...

"The legislation also establishes a process for lawfully engaging in noncommercial uses of Pre-1972 Sound Recordings that are not being commercially exploited. To qualify for this exemption, a user must file a notice of noncommercial use after conducting a good faith, reasonable search, and the rights owner of the sound recording must not object to the use within 90 days."

Basically Internet Archive could've sent a spreadsheet of works to the Copyright Office and anyone claiming commercial use of these old records had to respond within 90 days. In the lawsuit Brewster is quoted saying that it makes pre-1972 works "Library Fair Use."

The law does not allow people to make commercial use of these recordings (take three seconds to consider why). But they could've archived old recordings all day and then made the ones that cleared the list immediately available for unlimited download. And provided excerpts of the others for research purposes.

Instead they managed to get sued for $696 million. For a side project that nobody cared about (40,000+ downloads) that managed to put the whole org (and several participants' personal assets) at risk for two years.

As an aside, 78 RPM records are not particularly fragile. As a consumer product, yes. By preservation standards, no.

"With proper care and storage, this durable resource can last for centuries" https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1300/J116v08n02_04
by DengistKhan | 2025-09-20 11:38:20+00:00
The actual definition of woke is the general awareness that we live in a white supremacist society, which is the primary reason the far right dropped the term SJW.

As such, using the term "anti-woke" to describe oneself is essentially self-identifying as White Supremacist.

This is an intentional decision by the far right, and if you're not in on it, then yes, you've been tricked. Therefore it is completely reasonable for someone to think you are a fascist, if you use terminology that self-identifies yourself as fascist.

And you can't claim I'm changing the rules on you or anything like that. Woke is a word coined by anti-racists. You're using our word to self-identify as a bad person. It literally is that simple.

However, that slippery slope about randomly getting punched for vague ????? is total nonsense and irrational on your part.
by deadbabe | 2025-09-20 11:40:41+00:00
It literally doesn’t matter, it’s not illegal to be racist or sexist. You are free to not interact with those people, but it’s not illegal.

You may not be able to practice discrimination legally, but in your heart and mind you can be whatever you want.

When you take that away from people, they no longer feel free, and they will retaliate like a caged animal.
by harimau777 | 2025-09-20 11:40:43+00:00
IMHO The ability to choose to live in a high income region (or more specifically a cosmopolitan city) is one of the core characteristics of what it means to be middle class.

Partially, that's because increased self determination is part of being middle class. Partionally, that's because the ability to participate in culture (art, music, education, multiculturalism, etc.) is part of being middle class; and those opportunities are highly concentrated in the cities.