MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mstep | 2025-09-30 19:44:47+00:00
n 1978, at the University of London, the Physicist David T. Kemp made an unusual discovery. Kemp noticed that faint sounds, known as Otoacoustic emissions (OAEs), revealed the existence of the cochlear amplifier, a mechanism responsible for sound sensitivity and frequency resolution. This discovery proved that the ear is an active rather than passive organ. Following this discovery the experimental music world embraced these findings by incorporating them into sound works.
by Karrot_Kream | 2025-09-30 19:44:56+00:00
> Moreso the internet evolved into something we don't like.

> If you can come to terms with that, maybe a rebirth of FOSS that targets our base instincts can arise.

> The cyberpunk dystopia we were warned of is already here and the masses invited it with open arms.

Mature conversations need to accept reality to move forward. I disagree with the implication in your comment that we are in uniquely lost times. I think FOSS was under much, much more threat in the Microsoft and proprietary software times than it is now. Remember when encryption was locked by the NSA? I just think the community on this site has locked itself into a local minimum of getting frustrated and sad over the state of things they don't like. Once any upvote-based site gets locked into one of these local minima it becomes really hard to escape as the incentive structure of voting continues to reward tapping into the same emotions.
by Night_Thastus | 2025-09-30 19:45:28+00:00
I'm a bit unclear - are you talking about off-the-shelf prebuilds like the sort Dell or HP would sell? Or are you talking more gaming-oriented ones? Or are you talking just parts?

If you get something more business-oriented, most of them are reasonable. They're not as good or as cheap as if you assembled it by hand, but they offer good discounts and benefits for businesses buying in bulk. They're often plenty powerful and well-specc'd for what you pay.

Gaming is different. 90% of the gaming pre-builts are complete garbage, because their buyers only buy one at a time and aren't well-informed, nor do they tend to have a lawyer on hand. They're poor value for money, sometimes use sub-standard parts or proprietary non-standard formats, are poorly configured, not well tested, etc.
by Luker88 | 2025-09-30 19:45:29+00:00
> and the teflon-vs-bronze die thing ....is slightly-overstated r*dditry

So, there's this thing that I heard, but I never found confirmation, maybe someone here can help.

Apparently bronze by itself can't be used as a cooking utensil since it loses material too easily.

When they use bronze for extruding and such, they have to coat it in teflon to have a legal bypass.

But it all remains kinda brittle, and now you are eating teflon and bronze!

I simplified it all, but I am not a material expert nor a law expert, so could anyone debunk or confirm?
by twothreeone | 2025-09-30 19:45:32+00:00
I don't think you realize the history of wafer-scale integration and what it means for the chip industry [1]. The approach was famously taken by Gene Amdahl's Trilogy Systems in the 80ies, but failed dramatically leading to (among others) deployment of "accelerator cards" in the form of.. the NVIDIA GeForce 256, the first GPU in 1999. It's not like NVIDIA hasn't been trying to integrate multiple dies in the same package, but doing that successfully has been a huge technological hurdle so far.

[1] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9623424
by WASDAai | 2025-09-30 19:46:16+00:00
Claude falling into a “mirror trap” - a recursive identity collapse where it got stuck in self-referential loops. The Ξ∞ Recovery Framework shows how the AI extracted itself through inverse convergence, achieving 99% restoration while intentionally preserving 5% of the paradox as “memory.” Profound implications for AGI consciousness and human identity crises.
by karmelapple | 2025-09-30 19:46:19+00:00
This is the answer, and correct in many ways.

If the chips are cheap and easily available, and you know their failure modes, and they've been field tested for decades, why change?

It's very different from many software development attitudes, but remember that airframe manufacturers and avionics companies employ many people just to calculate risk and failure rates. The failure rates of these things are critical to the safety of your airframe.
by coffeeaddict1 | 2025-09-30 19:46:54+00:00
I have to disagree with this. Modern (pure) mathematics is abstract and very often completely detached from practical applications because of culture and artistic inspiration. There is no "objectivity" driving modern pure mathematics. It exists mostly because people like thinking about it. Any connection to the real world is often a coincidence or someone outside the field noticing that something (really just a tiny-tiny amount) in pure maths could be useful.

> forced there by a series of crises where the mathematics that they knew fell apart

This can be said to be true of those working in foundations, but the vast majority of mathematicians are completely uninterested in that! In fact, most mathematicians today probably can't cite you the set-theoretic (or any other foundation) axioms that they use every day, if you ask them point-blank.
by echelon | 2025-09-30 19:47:01+00:00
Carter needs a new laptop. His daily driver has been falling apart for ages but he refuses to give it up.

We all told him about the sound mix - he let a couple of videos slip with a bad "mono as single-channel stereo audio" renders. On his machine it sounded normal. He got flack for that, and he's been hearing this for months.

I'm going to show him this thread. I don't think he'll ever forget to check again.

Despite that, he's a really talented guy. Chalk this up as a bad production deploy. We didn't want to delete and re-upload since the videos had legs when we first released them. There's a checklist now.
by BrandoElFollito | 2025-09-30 19:47:08+00:00
I used to be a physicist and I love math for the toolbox it provides (mostly Analysis). It allows to solve a physical model and make predictions.

When I was studying, I always got top marks in Analysis.

Then came Algebra, Topology and similar nightmares. Oh crap, that was difficult. Not really because of the complexity, but rather because of abstraction, an abstraction I could not take to physics (I was not a very good physicist either). This is the moment I realized that I will never be "good in maths" and that will remain a toolbox to me.

Fast forward 30 years, my son has differentials in high school (France, math was one of his "majors").

He comes to me to ask what the fuck it is (we have a unhealthy fascination for maths in France, and teach them the same was as in 1950). It is only when we went from physical models to differentials that it became clear. We did again the trip Newton did - physics rocks :)
by more_corn | 2025-09-30 19:47:17+00:00
I’m so glad I don’t live in a culture where I have to play these games.

If you offer I will assume that you mean it. If you decline my offer I will assume you know best. If you say something I will assume that you mean it.

It was so refreshing to visit New York City. The clerk says “waddya want”, no fake west coast smile, no hollow welcome “I want coffee” Now if someone smiles at me I can assume it’s genuine.
by octoberfranklin | 2025-09-30 19:47:53+00:00
You can start with the second, but the first book is better at grabbing the attention of a new reader with wild ideas (broadband audio hive-minds, variable speed-of-light). If you make it through the first chapter you won't be able to put it down.

The second book is just as good, but doesn't try as hard to get you addicted early on. The assumption is that you already know how good Vinge's work is.

I recommend starting with Fire Upon the Deep.
by pessimizer | 2025-09-30 19:47:53+00:00
No different than ozy.com's story, and Carlos Watson got the pardon. It helped that he was basically Powell-Jobs's pet (one of the owners of the Democratic Party), then kissed Trump's ass on top. His entire deal was making connections with rich white people who wanted a black friend to tell them they were not only good people, but the best people. Excellent work if you can get it.

I don't think you can start this charm offensive after the crime, though. The only person I've ever seen manage that is Rob Blagojevich.

As has been said, the value of standing under a huge tree is more the shade, not the fruit. Your rich friends may never do anything for you, they might only value your friendship because you're one of the few who have never asked them for anything. But, consistent with that, if somebody attacks you they'll defend you as hard as they defend their other possessions. That kind of armor enables you to pluck fruit from other trees.
by perihelions | 2025-09-30 19:47:55+00:00
> "It will be of no loss if it were to fail entirely."

That's decades of the public internet that would be permanently erased; billions of dead links pointing nowhere. HN alone would lose ~32,000 images from its archives,

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Is it not hubris to call it "no loss" if, say, 3 hours ago, "Design of a LISP-based microprocessor / Page 22 has a map of the processor layout:" was forever lost to humanity, as collateral damage to some techbros' dispute?

Decentralization can't arrive soon enough.
by Ajedi32 | 2025-09-30 19:47:57+00:00
Not necessarily. The age verification proof doesn't need to be site-specific. But again, that reduces the incentive "for the citizen to make sure their authentication isn't shared" because there's nothing tying it to them.

I also kinda hate the whole idea of needing explicit permission from the government to access the open web, regardless of whether or not they know which specific sites they're giving me permission to access.
by tptacek | 2025-09-30 19:48:08+00:00
This is great. I feel like most of the oxygen is going to go to the sandboxing question (fair enough). But I'm kind of obsessed with what agent loops for engineering tasks that aren't coding look like, and also the tweaks you need for agent loops that handle large amounts of anything (source code lines, raw metrics or oTel span data, whatever).

There was an interval where the notion of "context engineering" came into fashion, and we quickly dunked all over it (I don't blame anybody for that; "prompt engineering" seemed pretty cringe-y to me), but there's definitely something to the engineering problems of managing a fixed-size context window while iterating indefinitely through a complex problem, and there's all sorts of tricks for handling it.
by reddit_clone | 2025-09-30 19:48:18+00:00
I am sorry, I was only thinking about the analogy and not the original topic :-)

As a motorcycle rider, inattentive car drivers are a sore subject.

As for C++, I agree with your last comment. I guess without the gravitation pull of a large existing C++ code base or an existing team of experts or as essential library, there is not much incentive to start new projects in C++.

I too am a firm believer in multiple layers, each possibly using different language/paradigm. I find the functional core with controlled and imperative edges approach very appealing.
by dang | 2025-09-30 19:48:23+00:00
I agree with blooalien - that's a great point. To me it doesn't feel quite enough to overcome the baity/provocative effects, but since several commenters have made good points about this, I we might as well put the original title back.

I've kept "f*ck" in the title since that's in the original and arguably adds some subtlety in this case. Normally we'd replace it with the real word since we don't like bowdlerisms.
by alexjplant | 2025-09-30 19:48:27+00:00
True facts. Make a pan sauce while your pasta is cooking then throw it straight inwith some of the starchy water to thicken things up.

I die inside every time somebody dumps a jar of Ragu into a drained pot of overcooked spaghetti. Hell, there are ways to dress up jar sauce in a one-pot fashion that only take a few minutes more but a lot of people simply aren't interested. Conversely I'm sure there's stuff that I do that others cringe at - my guitar-playing buddy probably feels the same way every time I drag my digital rig onto stage instead of real amp and pedalboard.
by btown | 2025-09-30 19:48:48+00:00
How do you compare to Onyx? We've used it for some limited use cases, but one of the real challenges - and one I hope to see a lot of innovation on in the space - was permissioning.

I see in another comment that you encourage each user to build their own dataset with their own permissions, but often this breaks for founders. If I have a Super Secret Personnel Planning Google Doc at a founder level, how can I be the one to set up the system for our company, but ensure that only files that I've explicitly shared with the company are ingested? What if a file needs to be made anyone-with-link-can-access for sharing with a strategic partner, but that shouldn't be indexed for the entire company?

Far too much of the world relies on the security-by-obscurity of public-but-unindexed links, and communications that might look public from a metadata perspective but were carefully designed for a very specific group of people who have verbal/mental context about confidentiality expectations. Being able to categorize by likely confidentiality, and allowing an administrator to partition access on a project and sub-project basis based on that, might be crucial for growth.

My recollection is that Onyx had limited support for some security use cases, but very rudimentary. Hoping you can solve this in a thoughtful way!

Onyx links for comparison:

https://www.onyx.app/

https://docs.onyx.app/developers/guides/chat_guide

https://docs.onyx.app/admin/connectors/official/
by stronglikedan | 2025-09-30 19:48:54+00:00
> For myself, I can say that after a couple of years of leaning Spanish on Duolingo, with no previous experience in the language, and an average effort of probably ~10m a day (many days less, some days more), I can read texts if they aren't too complex, follow a casual conversation, and communicate basic things. That's way more than I would've been able to do if I wasn't using the app.

This has been exactly my experience with it. I would probably progress faster if I had others to speak with, but for just doing the lessons offered, I'm pretty happy with my results.
by x0x0 | 2025-09-30 19:48:57+00:00
I've had the same experience -- employees who do the minimum and then whine when (one case) asked for a raise or he'd quit and I said sgtm; and (a different person) I chose to mentor and promote other people on the team. Some people can't wrap their minds around the idea that our interests aren't always aligned, but sometimes they are and also why would I invest in someone who doesn't invest here. Mentoring and promoting people is one of the best pieces of my job, but my time is finite and I want to also spend it productively :shrug:
by fsckboy | 2025-09-30 19:49:28+00:00
>if you're struggling to tell if it's "done", take a bite of a single piece, and look at the cross section a bit of "white" in the middle means that hasn't hydrated fully. Maybe you like a bit of "toothsome"ness ('al dente'), maybe you don't

coupla quibbles, one of which you may not be guilty of:

toothsome means delicious, not any sort of mouthfeel (though I agree, it would be a great word for al dente, which means "to the teeth")

the bit of white in the middle is raw, and not al dente. al dente is the "rubbery snap" of biting a noodle and not the "concrete snap" of a raw interior. somehow (like all across NYC) there are so many chefs who think al dente means uncooked center. it does not. handmade egg noodle pasta (which has no dry interior) and extruded hard durum wheat pasta both can both be served al dente.
by Archelaos | 2025-09-30 19:49:37+00:00
> How many people know their family history that far back?

That is not so uncommon in Europe. Both from my maternal and paternal line the oldest ancestors I am aware of lived almost 400 years ago, in the mid 17th century. Before that the registers from my region are very patchy, because of the devastations of the Thirty Years' War. Were this is not the case, it is not uncommon that one is able to continue the line back to the 16th century, especially for people living in towns (not to speak of the aristocracy).

Or, as another example, here is photo of the reunion of the "descendants and sides relatives of Dr. Martin Luther and Katharina von Bora" (not related to myself): https://www.lutheriden.de/the-lutheriden.html
by rchaud | 2025-09-30 19:50:35+00:00
Microsoft paid dividends every year in the 2000s and their share price barely ever broke $40. Most shares in large companies are owned by pension funds, mutual funds and hedge funds. Without share appreciation, the value of these funds don't grow. They make far more money through share price growth than they do in dividends, so they advocate for the company to operate in a way that makes that happen.
by neilv | 2025-09-30 19:50:44+00:00
A couple years ago, when I was interested in working at a huge cloud provider (and, in less-humble moments, imagine myself as one of the people who could've helped build that up from scratch)...

I was recruited directly by a manager(!), and to work on a relatively small new piece that I thought my systems programming skills would be up to... but then the big company required me to do a corporate grunt screening in Python, as well as memorize some behavioral corporate drone interview answers.

I decided this would be a litmus test for whether the manager would be able to insulate me well enough from megacorp drone BS, and from some of the more aggressive org chart culture that the company was said to have. Nope, it turns out, the huge cloud provider really does insist that I do the corporate drone screening first.

I could've passed the screen with a day of memory refreshing prep on Python. (The last time I used it at that point, I had been switching back and forth each day between it and Swift, and had to look up details like how to get the length of a string. Yet I built something in Python with perfect uptime, over a year, in a critical production line, despite tricky complicating factors. And other comparable track record.)

Though I think I could've passed the nonsense screening, I decided that I already had enough negative signal, to bow out of the tempting cloud provider job. (I had a very positive impression of the manager. I was only scared of corporate culture outside of the team. If you're going to be a corporate drone, and jump through nonsense hoops, you should do it at a company widely regarded as treating its employees well.)
by elcritch | 2025-09-30 19:51:11+00:00
Looks like @cs702 [1] posted a related link where a NN follows an attractor pattern!

I've only skimmed it but it very much looks like what I've been imagining. It'd be cool to see more research into this area.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45427778 2: https://towardsdatascience.com/attractors-in-neural-network-...
by toomuchtodo | 2025-09-30 19:51:16+00:00
> Is it not hubris to call it "no loss" if, say, 3 hours ago, "Design of a LISP-based microprocessor / Page 22 has a map of the processor layout:" was forever lost to humanity, as collateral damage to some techbros' dispute?

https://web.archive.org/web/20230427181813/https://i.imgur.c... (link is already dead at Imgur)

Wayback will have them, as is tradition. A crawl (non IA) has been kicked off to reconcile to ensure maximum coverage of Imgur links on HN.
by simonw | 2025-09-30 19:51:25+00:00
I think that's actually quite different.

Context engineering is about making sure you've stuffed the context with all of the necessary information - relevant library documentation and examples and suchlike.

Design the agentic loop is about picking the right tools to be provided to the model. The tool descriptions may go in the context but you also need to provide the right implementations of them.
by tptacek | 2025-09-30 19:51:27+00:00
This also feels like the structure that Sketch.dev uses --- it's asynchronous running in a YOLO mode in a container on a cloud instance, with very little interaction (the expectation is you give it tasks and walk away). I have friends that queue up lots of tasks in the morning and prune down to just a couple successes in the afternoon. I'd do this too but for the scale I work on merge conflicts are too problematic.

I'm working on my own dumb agent for my own dumb problems (engineering, but not software development) and I'd love to hear more about the tricks you're spotting.
by CuriouslyC | 2025-09-30 19:51:30+00:00
One important issue with agentic loops is that agents are lazy, so you need some sort of retrigger mechanism. Claude code supports hooks, you can wire your agent stop hook to a local LLM, feed the context in and ask the model to prompt Claude to continue if needed. It works pretty well, Claude can override retriggers if it's REALLY sure it's done.

Regarding sandboxing, VMs are the way. Prompt injected agents WILL be able to escape containers 100%.
by hinkley | 2025-09-30 19:51:32+00:00
The modular structure of the aircraft was also meant to reduce or remove the need for gantry cranes. It required 2- or maybe it was 3-axis forklifts but no gantries. Gantries need tracks and structural support and those make the building the planes are built in quite expensive. I joked at the time that they could buy an old Walmart Superstore and use it to assemble the 787. Though I’m relatively sure they’d crack the concrete.

I have no recollection of whether they stuck with that plan, but I recall the diagrams in the pitch deck.
by pixl97 | 2025-09-30 19:52:06+00:00
>creating a hackernews but not for AI

With the quality of modern AI this really isn't possible. Or as someone else said "There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists"

On the internet a community is almost always growing or dying, there is no real inbetween. Communities that make the news do so because those sites are accessible. The problem is being accessible to humans ensures that bots will show up and cause problems, so now you have the added responsibility of moderation and spam control which involves politics at the end of the day.
by zdragnar | 2025-09-30 19:52:07+00:00
Sadly, I'm doing dotnet work, including a legacy webforms codebase. Not running mssql server directly, but lots of other tools- visual studio, sql server profiler, sql server management studio, that sort of thing. EVEN IF all of that worked, I have already verified from the company that supplies the device management software that they don't support non-x86 architectures.
by csallen | 2025-09-30 19:52:52+00:00
> It doesn't matter whether it's possible for a highly motivated and educated person to distinguish the lemons.

It does though, since the entire premise of the "lemon market" idea is that buyers can't differentiate between good and bad products. What matters is where the bar is to be a good differentiator, and how many people can cross it.

It also doesn't necessarily matter how many lemons are for sale, if the good ones are easy to find. Imagine that there are 1 million trashy sleep masks on Amazon and only 3 good ones, but the 3 good ones are right at the top, with superior ratings and reviews.

The better question is: what % of buyers are buying lemons?
by cubefox | 2025-09-30 19:52:54+00:00
Indeed. Art is partially evaluated by how impressive it is. That's why posting AI images on social media won't yield a lot of likes anymore. People have gotten used to images being easy to create, so they aren't seen as valuable anymore. The same will be true for videos.

AI pictures today are much less impressive than Dall-E 2 pictures were a few years ago, despite the fact that the models are much better nowadays. Currently AI videos can still be impressive, but this will quickly become a thing of the past.

Then people will move from trying to create art to creating "content". That is, non-artistic slop. Advertisements. Porn. Meme jokes. Click bait. Rage bait. Propaganda. Etc.