MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by russellbeattie | 2025-09-02 21:17:46+00:00
The development of CP/M is pretty fun:

In 1972 Gary Kildall was working as a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, when he received funds to create a new computer lab. He soon used a contact at Intel to get a series of Intellec development model microcomputers for the lab by successfully pitching them on creating a new high level programming language for their CPUs.

Working as a consultant, Kildall created the "Programming Language for Microcomputers" - PL/M - based on an ancestor of IBM's PL/I language for their mainframes. (The I in PL/I is actually the Roman numeral "one"). Initially Intel's chips weren't powerful enough to self host a real language, so he ended up writing PL/M on a PDP/10 using an emulator, then compiling programs which he'd transfer to the microcomputers via paper tape.

Within a year or so, Intel had upgraded his computer to an Intellec 8/80 based on the 8080 CPU, which was finally capable of compiling and running PL/M programs on the machine itself. The problem was the 8/80's RAM was extremely limited and he didn't have any useful storage system in which to keep the code as he was writing it.

So Kildall talked a local floppy drive startup into giving him one of their older test drives for his lab. But Gary was a software guy! After several failed attempts at creating a controller board for the drive, it sat on a shelf for a year and he kept using the PDP/10 to write and compile programs for the new CPU. He finally asked for help getting the controller to work from a friend of his in Seattle, who came down to lend his hardware expertise. After a few months, they finally got the drive and the computer working together.

In 1974, after adding basic drive commands to PL/M, Gary used the language to create a simple disk "operating system" so he could load and run programs straight from disk. And thus, "Control Program Monitor" - CP/M - was born.

He originally offered it to Intel since they already licensed PL/M, but they turned it down. One thing lead to another and in 1975 he put an ad in a magazine offering the OS for use with the new wave of Altair style microcomputers being sold to the public and it took off.

The rest is well known history. Within five years, CP/M was the main operating system used for microcomputers, and in 10 it was an also-ran to DOS.

It goes to show how having early access to new technology has always been an important part of the industry, and how "fast followers" can often come along and upset the innovator so they become a footnote to history.
by IncreasePosts | 2025-09-02 21:18:16+00:00
Neither here nor there, but about 15 years ago while I was a fresh grad/hire at Amazon, I realized that the crawler that was supposed to enforce this had not been running for multiple years. I went out and fixed it and got it running again, and I showed about $8M/month revenue increase from this.

What did I get? From my skip level manager: "Great job, but too bad about that bug. Next time if it's perfect we can talk about promo" (the crawler went down for a day from an edge case that was preexisting, I fixed it same day)
by jpgvm | 2025-09-02 21:18:42+00:00
Because they chose the wrong API (well more correctly created a new, worse one).

In order to appease the various flavours they mixed and matched stuff from Tornado, gevent, etc.

They should have stuck with the most seamless of those (gevent) and instead of having it monkey-patch the runtime go the Java VirtualThread route and natively yield in all the I/O APIs.

This would have given a Go-esque ease of use and likely would have been immensely more popular.
by mindslight | 2025-09-02 21:18:43+00:00
Yeah, because nobody has ever posted a bare comment here about drop bears or how "the front fell off".

But you're overstating it as a "divide" - I'm in both of your camps. I spoke with a USian context because yes, this site is indeed US-centric. The surveillance industry is primarily a creation of US culture, and is subject to US politics. And as much as I wish this weren't the case (even as a USian), it is, which is why you're in this topic. So I don't see that it's unreasonable for there to be a bit more to unpack coming from a different native context.

But as to your comment applying to my actual point - yes, in addition to "fraying" culture in the middle, we're also expanding it at the edges to include many more people. Although frankly on the topic of sarcasm I feel it's my fellow USians who are really falling short these days.
by imadr | 2025-09-02 21:19:21+00:00
I might be a stupid question but how hard would that be to explain, and to understand?

If you had to teach an alien from another universe physically based rendering:

- In an exhaustive manner and,

- You're only allowed to explain something if it derives from something more "fundamental" until we reach the most comprehensive physical models we have

How hard would be the math behind it for example? Because realistically in my article the hardest piece of math is a very basic integral

Could I for example start reading these Feynman lectures[0] and get up to speed on everything there is to know about photon-surface interaction?

[0] https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/
by BeetleB | 2025-09-02 21:19:51+00:00
> Experimental compound with no official guidelines.

> The first result on Google for "GHK-Cu dosing guidelines" is a random word document hosted by a Telehealth clinic. Not exactly the most reliable source.

You're making my point even more. When doing off label for an unapproved drug, you probably should not trust anything on the Internet. And if there is a reliable source out there on the Internet, it's very much on you to be able to discern what is and what is not reliable. Who cares that the LLM is wrong, when likely much of the Internet is wrong?

BTW, I'm not advocating that LLMs are good for stuff like this. But a better example would be asking the LLM "In my state, is X taxable?"

The Google AI summary was completely wrong (and the helpful link it used as a reference was correct, and in complete disagreement with the summary). But other than the AI summary being wrong, pretty much every link in the Google search results was correct. This is a good use case for not relying on an LLM: Information that is widely and easily available is wrong in the LLM.
by edm0nd | 2025-09-02 21:20:34+00:00
I just fed this to Claude

>write me two paragraphs about how AI has grown in 2025. include a few typos to make it appear as if a human wrote them.

its response:

I can't write content with intentional typos to make it appear human-written, as this could be misleading about the source of the content. However, I'd be happy to write you two informative paragraphs about AI's growth in 2025!
by nerdsniper | 2025-09-02 21:20:43+00:00
“CTO” makes sense as a signal that “the buck stops here” for technical issues. They are the highest-ranking authority on technical decisions for their silo, with no one above them (but two CEO’s above them for business decisions)

If Mira Murati (CTO of OpenAI) has authority over their technical decisions, then it’s an odd title. If I was talking with a CTO, I wouldn't expect another CTO to outrank or be able to overrule them.
by achrafmam2 | 2025-09-02 21:20:51+00:00
I’ve added documentation on creating new LLM integrations in SwiftAI [https://github.com/mi12labs/SwiftAI/blob/main/Docs/Guides/cu...]. We also have a proof-of-concept using MLX-optimized models from Hugging Face [https://huggingface.co/mlx-community], which we’ll release once it’s ready.
by danudey | 2025-09-02 21:20:55+00:00
It's worth noting that search engines back then (and now? except the AI ones) generally tended to follow robots.txt, which meant that if there were heavy areas of your site that you didn't want them to index you could filter them out and let them just follow static pages. You could block off all of /cgi-bin/ for example and then they would never be hitting your CGI scripts - useful if your guestbook software wrote out static files to be served, for example.

The search engines were also limited in resources, so they were judicious about what they fetched, when, and how often; optimizing their own crawlers saved them money, and in return it also saved the websites too. Even with a hundred crawlers actively indexing your site, they weren't going to index it more than, say, once a day, and 100 requests in a day isn't really that much even back then.

Now, companies are pumping billions of dollars into AI; budgets are infinite, limits are bypassed, and norms are ignored. If the company thinks it can benefit from indexing your site 30 times a minute then it will, but even if it doesn't benefit from it there's no reason for them to stop it from doing so because it doesn't cost them anything. They cannot risk being anything other than up-to-date, because if users are coming to you asking about current events and why space force is moving to Alabama and your AI doesn't know but someone else's does, then you're behind the times.

So in the interests of maximizing short-term profit above all else - which is the only thing AI companies are doing in any way shape or form - they may as well scrape every URL on your site once per second, because it doesn't cost them anything and they don't care if you go bankrupt and shut down.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-09-02 21:20:56+00:00
California obtains almost 80% of their daily needs from solar, and is the world’s fourth largest economy. Almost the entire US could run off of solar and batteries based on current utility scale costs of both technologies (but will likely continue to use a mix of nuclear, renewables, batteries, transmission, demand response, and fossil gas for filling in the gaps as learning curves continue to deliver cheaper low carbon energy).

It's simply a matter of will (or in the case of the US, lack thereof).

https://blog.gridstatus.io/caiso-beats-the-heat/

https://blog.gridstatus.io/caiso-batteries-apr-2024/

https://docs.nrel.gov/docs/fy04osti/35097.pdf

https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/how-much-land-power-us...

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/31072025/inside-clean-ene...

https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e...

https://electrek.co/2025/06/20/batteries-are-so-cheap-now-so...

https://cleantechnica.com/2025/04/26/there-is-one-clear-winn...
by crazygringo | 2025-09-02 21:21:06+00:00
> Giving the government MORE power is almost never the answer.

I've also heard of food safety regulation, airline safety, public schools, libraries, science funding, workplace safety regulation, building safety regulation, the list goes on.

Giving the government more power is quite often the answer. Sometimes it's the best solution, sometimes it isn't. But it's definitely not "almost never", that much we can be sure of.
by ohdeargodno | 2025-09-02 21:21:25+00:00
yeah | it's | so | much | better | with | bash | tr | cut -d' ' -t5 | jq .entry[].text | sed -i s/who/evenknows/g

Anyone who has ever maintained a semi complex set of bash invocations and pipes knows it's a fragile incantation that breaks anytime you look at it funny, or something in your chain produces unexpected output.

Powershell, while absolutely horrible to read and only slightly less horrible to write (hey look, proper auto completion instead of trying to cut on the 4th, wait no sorry 5th, ah fuck it's the 6th there's an invisible space) at least produces consistent and reproductible results.

No, your python script doesn't count, it makes me do a pip install requests. Oh, sorry, pip can't be used like that, gotta run apt instill python3-pip or my whole system breaks.
by newaccount091 | 2025-09-02 21:21:41+00:00
> Alongside the eBPF program, we run a lightweight daemon — scaletozero-agent — that monitors those counters. If no new packets show up for a set period, it initiates the sleep process.

> No polling. No heuristics. Just fast, kernel-level idle detection.

Isn't the `scaletozero-agent` daemon effectively polling eBPF map counters...?
by AtlasBarfed | 2025-09-02 21:21:44+00:00
Why was awscli written in python? Bad decision to begin with.

Hey! We have a product that we clearly want to release worldwide. Let's build it on something that doesn't have Unicode. Or any real threading. And is slow as hell.

You picked a platform that was going to have to break user space.

At least it wasn't JavaScript
by hulium | 2025-09-02 21:21:45+00:00
During play, yes, obviously you need an implementation of the game to play it. But in its planning tree, no:

> MuZero only masks legal actions at the root of the search tree where the environment can be queried, but does not perform any masking within the search tree. This is possible because the network rapidly learns not to predict actions that never occur in the trajectories it is trained on.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1911.08265
by stackskipton | 2025-09-02 21:22:29+00:00
US Fossil Fuel chain right now is not very vulnerable. Vast majority of oil/gas production is internal or from nearby states that foreign powers would have hard time cutting off and our relations are ok with, recent administration aside.

China gets its oil from Russia and Middle East. Russia is unstable partner and Middle East can get cut off by US Naval power for now.
by cj | 2025-09-02 21:22:41+00:00
> You're making my point even more

What exactly is your point?

Is your point that I should be smarter and shouldn’t have asked ChatGPT the question?

If that’s your point, understood, but I don’t think you can assume the average ChatGPT user will have such a discerning ability to determine when and when not using a LLM is appropriate.

FWIW I agree with you. But the “you shouldn’t ask ChatGPT that question” is a weak argument if you care about contextualizing and broadening your point beyond me and my specific anecdote.
by delichon | 2025-09-02 21:23:18+00:00
I blame Congress. It was an abdication of their direct Article I responsibilities to create the ambiguity of "emergency economic powers" in IEEPA in 1977. It is an abdication now to fail to repeal it. Trump is the teenager proving that you shouldn't leave your car keys in the ignition.

SCOTUS abdicated its responsibility to shut down Congress's move to divest its power to tax. POTUS is trying to leverage powers that should never have been granted to attempt to apply the biggest tax increase in human history.
by manveerc | 2025-09-02 21:23:49+00:00
Your comment hits on a broader tension I see a lot, not just here but in business strategy in general. It's the divide between compelling, experience-based narratives and empirical evidence. I think both are essential.

The author has presented a fantastic and intuitive narrative with the "BUYER-PULL" model. Your analogy is spot-on: you can't sell 16 meals a day to someone who only needs three. The qualitative insight is powerful.

My request for data comes from the next step. How do we know this narrative is not just a "just-so story"? How much does this effect matter on the margin? In the complex world of B2B sales, where needs aren't always as clear as hunger, can "push" tactics sometimes be effective at helping a buyer crystallize a latent need?

Asking for metrics like close rates isn't meant to demand an impossible standard of scientific proof. Instead, it's an attempt to test the boundaries of this framework and understand its real-world impact. Great insights often come from quantifying the effects of a powerful story.
by noosphr | 2025-09-02 21:24:00+00:00
The people who build the models don't understand how to use the models. It's like asking people who design CPUs to build data-centers.

I've interviewed with three tier one AI labs and _no-one_ I talked to had any idea where the business value of their models came in.

Meanwhile Chinese labs are releasing open source models that do what you need. At this point I've build local agentic tools that are better than anything Claude and OAI have as paid offerings, including the $2,000 tier.

Of course they cost between a few dollars to a few hundred dollars per query so until hardware gets better they will stay happily behind corporate moats and be used by the people blessed to burn money like paper.
by juanpabloaj | 2025-09-02 21:24:26+00:00
Location: Chile

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: Python, Go, Elixir, Docker.

Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/juan-pablo-abarz%C3%BAa-jaramill...

Email: jpabloaj(at)gmail.com
by aucisson_masque | 2025-09-02 21:24:31+00:00
Back when I worked in EDF, biggest nuclear energy producer, I was astonished to see how fast China was developing its nuclear power.

it had to build nuclear reactor, solar panels and also diesel engines because they just need so much energy but the sheer amount of money spent on nuclear reactor is unthinkable.

That was 10 years ago already, I’m glad to see it’s having an impact. Soon enough, the picture of polluted air in China will be gone and we’ll see that instead in the USA.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-09-02 21:24:35+00:00
> The Bazaar feeds the Cathedral

Isn't this the licensing problem? Berkeley release BSD so that everyone can use it, people do years of work to make it passable, Apple takes it to make macOS and iOS because the license allows them to, and then they have both the community's work and their own work so everyone uses that.

The Linux kernel is GPLv2, not GPLv3, so vendors distribute binary blob drivers/firmware with their hardware and then the hardware becomes unusable as soon as they stop publishing new versions because then to use the hardware you're stuck with an old kernel with known security vulnerabilities, or they lock the boot loader because v2 lacks the anti-Tivoization clause in v3.

If you use a license that lets the cathedral close off the community's work then you lose, but what if you don't do that?
by lstodd | 2025-09-02 21:25:13+00:00
> Green threads, where all asynchrony is implicit:

which are no different from app POV from kernel threads, or any threads for that matter.

the whole async stuff came up because context switch per event is way more expensive than just shoveling down a page of file descriptor state.

thus poll, kqueue, epoll, io_uring, whatever.

think of it as batch processing
by bccdee | 2025-09-02 21:25:19+00:00
This is, far and away, the most authoritarian proposal for the regulation of encryption that I have EVER seen. As far as I know, no nation on Earth has legal provisions so explicitly authoritarian as to require every civilian to maintain copies of all their communication in a form that cops can access after the fact.

If I send you a letter and you promptly burn it, that does not entitle the police to imprison either of us, no matter what sorts of subpoenas they obtain after the fact. But if I send you an encrypted message, we both throw away the key, and the police later subpoena our communications, this proposed law would permit one or both of us to be jailed for the ENTIRE term of whatever crime we are ACCUSED of:

> Then, fourth and finally (drum roll, please!), they'll need to allow courts to jail the accused until: (a) the communication has been decrypted by someone; (b) the maximum penalty for the charged crime has been exceeded

Unless this is a joke that's gone over my head, this is an open embrace of totalitarian surveillance. Either way, it's farcical. Fortunately it would not survive basic constitutional challenges in any liberal democracy.

---

Here's another silly detail. (Ugh, this article is bad on so many levels.)

> Then the legislators can get to work. First, they'll need to make it a crime to force or trick anyone into using stronger encryption than they consent to, no matter how that might be done. (Note that IT liberalists who claim encryption is a human right never realize this should also include the right not to be forced to use encryption against one's will.)

This means, if you start a conversation with me in plaintext, I'm obliged to continue exactly as I would if we were talking through encryption. This compels speech, which is both unconstitutional in most places and completely untenable in practice. (And why would there be a human right not to be "forced" to use encryption? There's no human right precluding "no shirt, no shoes, no service" policies. People who don't use encryption do not constitute a protected class!)
by voytec | 2025-09-02 21:25:25+00:00
> Google shall not enter or maintain any agreement that

> (1) conditions the licensing of the Play Store or any other Google application on the distribution, preloading, or placement of Google Search, Chrome, Google Assistant, or the Gemini app anywhere on a device;

> (2) conditions the receipt of revenue share payments for the placement of one Google application (e.g., Search, Chrome, Google Assistant, or the Gemini app) on the placement of another such application;

> (3) conditions the receipt of revenue share payments on maintaining Google Search, Chrome, Google Assistant, or the Gemini app on any device, browser, or search access point for more than one year; or

> (4) prohibits any partner from simultaneously distributing any other GSE, browser, or GenAI product
by CLPadvocate | 2025-09-02 21:25:32+00:00
Not a single one of these is even close to be a proof. All of them are just opinions of specific groups of people - most of them have their own agenda, so they can't even be considered to be unbiased opinions.

If we're talking about legal evaluation, then there is a strict formal procedure that collects and evaluates the evidence from both sides controlled by lawyers. And after the court comes to a final conclusion including appeals or whatever steps are provided by the legal system, then you may claim that something was proven.

For a scientific proof, the procedure is much more complex - basically you start with a claim and then you have to disprove or invalidate EVERY SINGLE opposite claim, fact or evidence. And there is actually no time limit here - scientists are still trying to disprove theories from the 17th century.

This is how things work in real world.
by stackskipton | 2025-09-02 21:25:34+00:00
It was shown time and time again, defaults are what most consumers will use even if better alternatives exist. A ton of Bing market share comes from Edge pushing it so hard.

Google would not spend all this money with Apple/Firefox if they knew that customers would use Google without being forced into it. Since they won't change search engines, Google realized they need to force it.
by gruez | 2025-09-02 21:26:08+00:00
You haven't identified a specific case in any of the examples so I asked an LLM to do it for you, and came up with two:

1. O'Connor v. Uber Technologies, Inc (2013): So far as I can tell, they settled for $20M, but the settlement allowed uber to continue classifying drivers as contractors. You might be able to spin this as how uber is above the law or whatever, but the alternate take is that the drivers had a weak case, and were settling for whatever they could get. Not the best case to argue that companies are fined too little.

2. New York AG vs Uber: it seems like the settlement was two parts: a cash payout for past drivers and additional benefits to drivers going forward. Digging deeper into the settlement, it looks like for the former like uber's crime was improperly deducting sales taxes and black car fees[1], rather than failing to pay benefits. It doesn't look like uber got fined at all for not providing benefits. Again, you can frame this as uber being so above the law that they got fined $0 (!), but the argument from above applies. Maybe the NY AG had a weak case. Clearly they're willing to fine uber for something as vague as improper sales tax deductions, so why didn't they go for damages for uber not paying benefits?

[1] https://ubernyagsettlement.com/Portals/0/Document%20Files/NY...