MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dilap | 2025-09-30 16:28:21+00:00
I think having a world (3d maybe, or maybe just 2d) you could talk about in a really simple way might be useful here. Imagine something like "el gato quiere la pelota roja" and you have to carry the red ball to the cat to pass to the next lesson, and there's a cat, and a dog, and capibara and various shapes; something like that...

There's probably the opportunity to have simple stories and personalities come into play too, early on, to add interest. Think about e.g. the Frog and Toad books for children learning to read.
by manifoldgeo | 2025-09-30 16:28:38+00:00
There's a recent book called "Plunder: Private Equity's Plan to Pillage America", and seeing this news makes me want to revisit it. The author outlines the usual tactics used by private equity firms to turn a functioning business into their own short-term profit factory, often driving the business into bankruptcy in the process. EA already has a reputation as a semi-broken company, but things can probably get a lot worse.

One method they use is the consolidation of a bunch of small, related businesses. For example, PE firms buy out all of the local veterinary offices in a tri-city area, cut costs, lay off the most qualified vets and replace with less-qualified ones, increase prices for services, and operate a local monopoly.

Clearly, that particular tactic is much harder to pull on the massive oligopoly that is the gaming industry, but it was the one that stuck with me from the book. There are more baffling ones like selling off all the company's real estate, making them rent it back at a much higher rate than their current mortgages (which may already have been paid off), and then filter revenues out of the company via "consulting fees" paid to themselves and their friends for this bad advice.

The book is a little bit repetitive, and some of the tactics are beyond my grasp, but I'm excited to make a personal bingo card of them and see which ones get used on EA as they drive it into the ground.
by williamDafoe | 2025-09-30 16:28:42+00:00
When last I looked there were three physics faculty in the United States for every two PhD students. That's because there just aren't any industry jobs for physics PhDs. Assuming a 40-year career, that means one job every 13 years for those two PhDs (one graduating every 3 years) to compete for - so a 1 in 4 chance of getting any physics job! Which is completely insane it's a lucky thing there are trillions of computer science jobs for these unemployed physicists to take - and take them they sure do!
by 2snakes | 2025-09-30 16:28:46+00:00
An alternative to abstraction is to use iconic forms and boundary math (containerization and void-based reasoning). See Laws of Form and William Bricken's books recently. Using a unary operator instead of binary (Boolean) does indeed seem simpler, in keeping with Nature. Introduction: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10....
by mehdibl | 2025-09-30 16:29:11+00:00
This is quite convoluted. Not seen in the wild and comments don't trigger prompt injection that easily.

Again you likely use vscode. Are you checking each extension you download? There is already a lot of reported attacks using vscode.

A lot of noise over MCP or tools hypothetical attacks. The attack surface is very narrow, vs what we already run before reaching Claude Code.

Yes Claude Code use curl and I find it quite annoying we can't shut the internal tools to replace them with MCP's that have filters, for better logging & ability to proxy/block action with more in depth analysis.
by michalsustr | 2025-09-30 16:29:12+00:00
I'm working on a python library that allows you to put data on GPU as fast as your network/storage allows you to at the hardware limits. No more clunky DataLoaders that are too slow and have inconsistent perf. I achieved stable throughput numbers >8GiB/s (so saturating my PC's nvme SSD), going to test on networked scenarios soon. Works for any python ML library (torch, tensorflow, jax, etc.), both for training/inference, single/multi GPUs on one node (shared/separate queues for DDP), multiple sources of data, seamless transition between training/validation phase (no significant perf drop), arbitrary shape of tensors and lots of data configurations.

Planning to add (de)compression and on-the-fly data augmentations and releasing it to public.
by captainkrtek | 2025-09-30 16:29:23+00:00
Agreed. Having worked the range of boring backend systems to performance critical embedded systems, only few areas are worth optimizing for, and we always let data inform where to invest additional time.

I much prefer a code base that is readable and straightforward (maybe at the expense of some missed perf gains) over code that is highly performant but hard to follow/too clever.
by mgkuhn | 2025-09-30 16:29:37+00:00
Julia is a very powerful and flexible language. With very powerful tools you can get a lot done quickly, including shooting yourself into the foot. Julia's type-system allows you to easily compose different elements of Julia's vast package ecosystem in ways that possibly were never tested or even intended or foreseen by the authors of these packages to be used that way. If you don't do that, you may have a much better experience than the author. My own Julia code generally does not feed the custom type of one package into the algorithms of another package.
by imiric | 2025-09-30 16:29:39+00:00
I'm firmly on the side of "AI" skepticism, but even I have to admit that this is a very good use of the tech. LLMs generally do a great job at summarizing text, which is essentially what this is. The sources could be statically defined in advance, given that they know where they pull the information from, so I don't think the LLM generates that content.

So if this automates the process of fetching the top news from a static list of news sites and summarizing the content in a specific structure, there's not much that can go wrong there. There's a very small chance that the LLM would hallucinate when asked to summarize a relatively short amount of text.
by skeeter2020 | 2025-09-30 16:29:42+00:00
I agree with the GP and you - every company IS desperate to be an AI company today. They've been told three things: 1. this time it's different, 2. AI is disrupting everything, 3. if you don't disrupt yourself someone else will.

# 1 has been said repeatedly before every previous AI winter.

#2 is a lie from people trying to sell you something and the FOMOs parroting the same line.

#3 someone is going to disrupt you regardless, and it's impossible to disrupt yourself (unless you're prepared to stop doing everything that made you successful in the first place)
by buybackoff | 2025-09-30 16:29:53+00:00
I use an extension for arrays, something like:

internal static class ArrayExtensions { [MethodImpl(MethodImplOptions.AggressiveInlining)] public static ref T RefAtUnsafe<T>(this T[] array, nint index) { #if DEBUG return ref array[index]; #else Debug.Assert((uint)index < array.Length, "RefAtUnsafe: (uint)index < array.Length"); return ref Unsafe.Add(ref MemoryMarshal.GetArrayDataReference(array), (nuint)index); #endif } }

then your example turns into:

public static void AddBatch(int[] a, int[] b, int count) { // Storing a reference is often more expensive that re-taking it in a loop, requires benchmarking for (nint i = 0; i < (uint)count; i++) a.RefAtUnsafe(i) += b.RefAtUnsafe(i); }

The JITted assembly: https://sharplab.io/#v2:EYLgxg9gTgpgtADwGwBYA0AXEBDAzgWwB8AB...

I'm convinced C# is so much better for high perf code, because yes it can do everything (including easy-to-use x-arch SIMD), but it lets one not bother about things that do not matter and use safe code. It's so pragmatic.

See also the top comments from a recent thread, I totally agree. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45253012

BTW, do not use [MethodImpl(MethodImplOptions.AggressiveOptimization)], it disables TieredPGO, which is a huge thing for latest .NET versions.
by james_marks | 2025-09-30 16:29:53+00:00
The rise of graphic design tools and digital printing play an interesting role in this.

20 years ago, existing as a brand required an effort and resources threshold. Even to have a logo took some level of commitment and skill. Minimum production runs on trivial things like the box insert meant there were stakes to bringing a product to market.

With those barriers gone, we have more brands than ever, and they mean relatively little.
by thatguy0900 | 2025-09-30 16:30:40+00:00
I mean the reality is that going forward it simply won't be permissable to let foreign governments freely influence your youth with whatever content algorithm they please. It's even open knowledge that China itself doesn't allow TikTok to influence their own children like they allow it to influence American ones. As influencing physchology and personal Ai algorithms get more advanced you simply can't let it be controlled by foreign, hostile powers. This was inevitable, lobbying aside, as long as TikTok has suge huge market share especially with children.
by lordnacho | 2025-09-30 16:30:42+00:00
For all the praise I give to Claude, I still use it as a fast version of what I would do myself:

- Looking at compiler errors and fixing them. Looking at program output and fixing errors.

- Looking for documentation on the internet. This used to be a skill in itself: Do I need the reference work (language spec), a stackoverflow, or an article?

- Typing out changes quickly. This goes a little bit deeper than just typing or using traditional "change all instances of this name"-tools, but its essence is that to edit a program, you often have to make a bunch of changes to different documents that preserver referential integrity.

All these things can be amazingly faster due to the agent being able to mix the three legs.

However, it doesn't save you from knowing what needs to be done. If you couldn't in principle type out the whole thing yourself, AI will not help you much. It's very good at confidently suggesting the wrong path and taking you there. It also makes bad choices that you can spot as it is writing out changes, and it's useful to just tell it "hey why'd you do that?" as it writes things. If you don't keep it in line, it veers off.

The benefit for me is the level of thinking it allows me. If I'm working on a high-level change, and I write a low-level bug, I will have to use my attention on figuring this out before coming back to my original context. The window of time during the day where I can attempt a series of low-level edits that satisfy a high-level objective is narrow. With AI, I can steer the AI when I'm doing other things. I can do it late at night, or when I'm on a call. I'm also not stuck "between save points" since I can always make AI finish off whatever it was doing.
by RamblingCTO | 2025-09-30 16:32:10+00:00
I'm working on something completely different, especially for me. After 9 years as a CTO I'm moving on to coach other tech leaders. I just noticed that I didn't like the doing anymore and I'd much rather work with people for people. My biggest takeaway is that the hardest part of building anything is the human side. Emotional baggage, limiting beliefs, social dynamics. All the startups I was part of didn't take off mostly because of this. Pretty interesting to see how our automatic actions driven by unidentified beliefs drive everything we feel, think, and do. So I guess I'm moving into hacking on humans now for a living. Feels exciting.

I'm still very early in building the website but you can say hi or read more about my approach or story here: https://trueselfcto.com/ I'm always open to chat about just anything, so please feel free to share your thoughts or say hi!
by saithound | 2025-09-30 16:32:16+00:00
Your point, that many people don't produce their magnun opus until later in life, is definitely at odds with a lot of current SV rhetoric. And it's a good point.

If the article had tried to make your point, it would have been a much better article.

Instead, it made a different, much less true point, and had to contort Vonnegut's biography to make it.

"His career looked like a sequence of failures until it suddenly wasn't" is just not true of Vonnegut, not true of Galilei, not true of any of the other "examples in all fields" cites in the article. All of them are people who consistently produced great work from early on, well before their 40s, and then produced a magnum opus that really stood the test of time.
by PaulHoule | 2025-09-30 16:32:18+00:00
It's been that way a long time with other media. I used to work out a lot during the day and would wind up watching TV in the daypart aimed at people who don't have their own money to spend on things and there were ads running for about a decade that were obviously a scam.

https://oig.hhs.gov/fraud/consumer-alerts/fraud-alert-nation...

When you heard the vocal equivalent of large type text every real person knew that it was time to get grandma away from the TV but... the people at the TV network didn't, law enforcement didn't, your congressman didn't, anybody in a position of power didn't. And no wonder people feel cynical, hate the media, distrust the cops, distrust politicians, feel "the game is rigged", etc.
by captainkrtek | 2025-09-30 16:32:41+00:00
It’s even worse because the solution an LLM produces is not obvious as to whether it was inherently chosen by the user and favored over a different approach for any reason, or it was just what happened to be output and “works”.

I’ve had to give feedback to some junior devs who used quite a bit of LLM created code in a PR, but didn’t stop to question if we really wanted that code to be “ours” versus using a library. It was apparent they didn’t consider alternatives and just went with what it made.
by Sohcahtoa82 | 2025-09-30 16:32:45+00:00
100%. Easily verified by doing Google image searches for "SNES game ad". Most games were in the $50-70 range (Note that you'll see some images with prices up to $95, but that's Canadian dollars). It was only as the SNES generation was ending that you started seeing some games around $30-40.
by throwaway9917 | 2025-09-30 16:32:57+00:00
My experience with a CoC at a meetup was that one day a bunch of people piled on the mailing list for the meetup demanding that the meetup adopt a CoC. The majority of these people were people that either only infrequently showed up, or hadn't ever shown up to the meetup. The CoC they demanded had a bunch of social justice language. When questioned on the mailing list as to the events that had precipitated the demand, one person said they had attended a meeting and had "felt uncomfortable." However, the organizer of the meetup actually took attendance, and it turned out that the complainer had not attended that day. The whole thing seemed like a ploy to turn the meetup from people who all used the same programming language into some sort of social activism group. This was at the height of #MeToo, and it appeared that this was being weaponized to take over successful technical groups through sympathy for women.
by OkayPhysicist | 2025-09-30 16:33:43+00:00
Different contexts have different threat models. If my goal is to have a secure, private conversation with someone, I'll use Signal. If my goal is to communicate some less-than-sensitive information with someone, but the content isn't relevant to anybody else, then an unencrypted DM is fine.

In the context of public-broadcast social media, the service's ability to moderate abusive uses of a DM system is probably more important to me than the ability to have absolute control over who reads my messages.
by bcrl | 2025-09-30 16:33:58+00:00
That's not something I can agree with.

Take image generation trained on a bunch of copyrighted photographs and artwork. What is the intent behind creating such a tool?

Yes, there is a stage where the software developer is building the software to do this purely operating on a "this is a cool hack" kind of mentality, but the point at which you make it available to other people, especially for payment, is when the liability becomes real.

Having worked on open source software for most of my life, I have always had to be aware of the issues surrounding copyright. That other software developers will write software and use copyright to proect it while ignoring the copyrights of others is deeply concerning. Copyright of software is no more or less important than copyrights applied to images and artwork.

Engineers are liable for their mistakes. At some point the same mechanisms may well need to be applied to software.
by pfexec | 2025-09-30 16:33:59+00:00
Because every time btrfs is mentioned, 5 more people come out of the woodwork saying that it irreparably lost all their data. Sorry but there's just too many stories for it to be mere coincidences.

Your statement is misleading. No one is using btrfs on servers. Debian and Ubuntu use ext4 by default. RHEL removed support for btrfs long ago, and it's not coming back:

> Red Hat will not be moving Btrfs to a fully supported feature. It was fully removed in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.
by GuinansEyebrows | 2025-09-30 16:34:13+00:00
Cool Zone Media podcasts kinda famously get farmed ads that run counter to their content. they claim they do what they can to influence that (ahem... Washington State Highway Patrol and all the gold scams come to mind) but i wonder if signing their souls away to ihm removed a lot of their agency in that regard.

and if you've ever listened to one of Robert's (CZM executive producer and host of some of their flagships) other podcasts you might understand why companies don't want him doing ad reads.
by TimorousBestie | 2025-09-30 16:34:14+00:00
Python also suffers from such problems. For example, here’s scipy’s issue tracker, filtered for bugs only:

https://github.com/scipy/scipy/issues?q=is%3Aissue%20state%3...

Scrolling through this list, it’s clear that many are “correctness issues.”

I do not link this to argue that scipy bugs are more serious or more frequent. I don’t think that kind of statistical comparison is meaningful.

However, I think a motivated reasoner could write a very similar blog post to the OP, but about $arb_python_lib instead of $arb_julia_lib.

I suppose my position is closer to “only Kahan, Boyd and Higham write correct numerical algorithms” (a hyperbole, but illustrative of the difficulty level).
by cpmsmith | 2025-09-30 16:34:26+00:00
I don't think any of that means the benchmarks shouldn't be taken seriously. GP didn't say they expect Bcachefs to perform like EXT4/XFS, they said they expected more like Btrfs or ZFS, to which it has more similar features.

On the the configuration stuff, these benchmarks intentionally only ever use the default configuration – they're not interested in the limits of what's possible with the filesystems, just what they do "out of the box", since that's what the overwhelming majority of users will experience.
by Analemma_ | 2025-09-30 16:34:34+00:00
The standard you are proposing here ultimately boils down to "you can do business in a country without being subject to its laws, as long as your commercial transactions with the customers in that country are laundered through a sufficiently convoluted network of international companies like payment processors and ad exchanges". I don't think it should be terribly surprising that states don't subscribe to this view of sovereignty and jurisdiction.
by pixl97 | 2025-09-30 16:34:37+00:00
>One can liberate people from big tech

A very small portion of the population, yes.

The percentage of the population that is going to run things on their own is comparatively tiny. Mass adoption isn't going to happen because convenience and support is what most people want. Again, these things have been discussed for decades, and yet we keep seeing tighter and tighter centralization of data and services. In phones it's pretty much dead. You have apple (totally locked) and Google (on their way to totally locked).
by paloblanco | 2025-09-30 16:34:38+00:00
As someone who is 12 years out from completing a PHD in chemical engineering, this hurts to read today. Because it's so true.

I was a great student who became a middling researcher. I come from a privileged background - my younger sibling has already achieved greater success than I ever will, largely from choosing to follow the family business. I've poured tons of extra time outside work into honing my software and ml skills. While I do like what I do, and I am respected at work, that doesn't translate into promotions, success, or justification for dragging my poor wife all over the country. What a fool I was.

Ugh. I didn't need to read this today.
by leakycap | 2025-09-30 16:34:45+00:00
News Minimalist with the cute turtle header has become my daily "newspaper"

> Both use AI, with the former ranking news based on importance

I like this! If I'm in a rush, I check for very high priority stories. Usually there are 3 or even none. Done!

On days I want to sit back and read, it provides nice sources.
by brandall10 | 2025-09-30 16:34:47+00:00
You can do this with the "free dialog" option from the beginning. The only issue with this is you do have to reference the actual lesson material to that point, so it's more of a review piece.

That said, my impression is getting to functional in a language quickly requires referencing a source language that is fully understandable by the user to build vocab and comprehension - ie. explaining a new concept in the target language using the target language for a B1 student is going to be inefficient and not expressive enough. Otherwise you're fortifying what you already know vs. actually building more knowledge. Things like comprehensible input are great but seemingly more indirect and less efficient.

If you have an option to get from zero to B2 fairly quickly, you are functional enough in the target language to use a myriad of options to fluency, including doing nothing other than conversing with others.
by hagbard_c | 2025-09-30 16:35:14+00:00
Nextcloud News works just fine, is free, is as biased as the feeds you configure and no more, does not (yet...) introduce/intrude LLM slop, is free software (beer/freedom) and has been around for a long long time. You can configure it any way you want, the default update interval is 5 minutes which should be enough for even the most FOMO-affected 'news' junkie. Of course the actual updates depend on the RSS sources but if you configure a number of active feeds you'll get updates every few minutes.

https://github.com/nextcloud/news
Show HN: Sculptor – A UI for Claude Code
by thejash | 2025-09-30 16:35:16+00:00
Hey, I'm Josh, cofounder of Imbue. We built Sculptor because we wanted a great UI for parallel coding agents.

We love Claude Code, but wanted to solve some of the problems that come from running multiple agents in parallel (ex: merge conflicts with multiple agents, reinstalling dependencies with git worktrees, Claude Code could deleting your home directory, etc).

Sculptor is a desktop app that lets you safely run Claude Code agents by putting them in separate docker containers. This lets you use Claude without having to compromise on security or deal with annoying tool permission prompts. Then you can just tell Claude to keep running the code until it actually works.

To help you easily work with containerized agents, we created “Pairing Mode”: bidirectionally sync the agent’s code into your IDE and test/edit together in real time. You can also simply pull and push manually if you want.

We have some more cool features planned on our roadmap that are enabled by this approach, like the ability to “fork” conversations (and the entire state of the container), or roll back to a previous state.

It’s still very early, but we would love your feedback.

Sculptor itself is free to use, so please try it out and let us know what you think!
by metalman | 2025-09-30 16:35:30+00:00
people should expend no effort trying to figure what is talking to them, and focus very sharply what is bieng said,refuse to answer any ,ANY, questions and ask a bunch of pointy questions of there own. A real honest person will play along in an understanding fashion as bonifieds are established, as we are all faceing a wave of scamster and fraudsters.