MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rkagerer | 2025-09-30 12:58:37+00:00
The crucial external document that lesson #3 references (and is all about) is now a dead link. Here's an archive - page 14 is where they point you:

https://web.archive.org/web/20241112015613if_/https://www.cs...

But here's a more succinct explanation of the reason for the memory offset: https://stackoverflow.com/a/51996005
by hnlmorg | 2025-09-30 12:58:46+00:00
I'm not making a philosophical argument about what human-like intelligence is. I'm saying LLMs have many weaknesses that make in incapable of performing basic functions that humans take for granted. Like count and recall.

I go into much more detail here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45422808

Ostensibly, AGI might use LLMs in parts of it's subsystems. But the technology behind LLMs doesn't adapt to all of the problems that AGI would need to solve.

It's a little like how the human brain isn't just one homogeneous grey lump. There's different parts of the brain that specialize on different parts of cognitive processing.

LLMs might work for language processing, but that doesn't mean it would work for maths reasoning -- and in fact we already know it doesn't.

This is why we need tools / MCPs. We need ways of turning problems LLM cannot solve into standalone programs that LLMs can cheat and ask the answers for.
by est | 2025-09-30 12:58:52+00:00
> Would sqlite or Cloudflare's own D1 work as an alternative

They certainly do, but for they same reason why people chose static site generators like Hugo over Wordpress, I'd like complete control of full data.

The good value of static-hosted comments is that you `git clone` for backup and `git push` for redudency.

I also dislike managing DBs. Think of all those mess with backups, migrations, imports, exports, difference between mysql/pg/sqlite/d1. Tons of operating cost just for the sake of few blog comments

It's just a bunch of .jsonl files, the last resort is direct inline those .jsonl into .html files when generating
by kristianc | 2025-09-30 12:59:06+00:00
Soon a capable LLM will have enough training material to spit out LLMs are atrophying coding skills / LLM code is unmaintainable/ LLM code is closing down opportunities for juniors / LLMs do the fun bits of coding pieces on demand.

A lot of these criticisms are valid and I recognise there's a need for people to put their own personal stake in the ground as being one of the "true craftsmen" but we're now at the point where a lot of these articles are not covering any real new ground.

At least some individual war stories about examples where people have tried to apply LLMs would be nice, as well as not pretending that the problem of sloppy code didn't exist before LLMs.
by tkgally | 2025-09-30 13:00:06+00:00
A couple of those articles, in case anyone is interested:

“The Internet? Bah! Hype alert: Why cyberspace isn't, and will never be, nirvana” by Clifford Stoll (1995)

Excerpt: “How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc. At best, it's an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can't tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Internet. Uh, sure.”

https://www.nysaflt.org/workshops/colt/2010/The%20Internet.p...

“Why most economists' predictions are wrong” by Paul Krugman (1998)

Excerpt: “By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's.”

https://web.archive.org/web/19980610100009/http://www.redher...
Human Consistency as a Weakness for AI in Chess and RTS
by Drejci | 2025-09-30 13:00:25+00:00
Introduction

AI dominates areas like chess and real-time strategy (RTS) games due to its ability to calculate deeply, execute precisely, and process actions quickly. Systems like AlphaZero and AlphaStar usually defeat human players because they can calculate better and have higher Actions Per Minute (APM).

However, we can take a different approach. Instead of trying to compete with AI on its own terms, we can find situations where AI assumes humans will make errors and use that to our advantage.

Concept: Zero-Tolerance Cognitive Consistency

The principle I examined is “zero-tolerance cognitive consistency.” This method means acting with strict consistency, removing errors and hesitation completely. Where AI expects mistakes, fatigue, or indecision, this method eliminates those factors.

Practical outcomes include:

- situations where AI makes mistakes based on assumed human errors, - long streaks of wins against both AI and human opponents, - finding logical contradictions when interacting with large language models.

All these cases show the same point: consistent human behavior reveals weaknesses in AI systems that depend on assumptions about statistical randomness or human shortcomings.

RTS Games as the Next Perimeter

The difficulties of RTS games extend beyond intricate calculations and require quick decisions in a variety of areas. AlphaStar's ability to make decisions quickly demonstrates its strength.

The cognitive bottleneck theory is relevant here too:

- humans base decisions on consistency instead of probabilistic expectations, - maintaining a uniform strategy across broad and detailed choices,

can lead AI to mismanage resources or make strategic errors, even if it is faster.

This approach does not focus on out-clicking AI, but rather emphasizes taking advantage of the structural assumptions that underlie AI decisions.

Research Question for the Community

The question I pose is:

Can we develop a repeatable strategy based on human-driven consistency to exploit AI assumptions in complex, fast-paced situations?

If the answer is yes, it indicates that the human advantage may not come from raw calculation but from consistency, i.e. using disciplined decision-making to get the upper hand in scenarios where AI anticipates mistakes.

Further Reading

I detailed my complete experimental documentation, including chess transcripts, probability analysis, and AI interaction breakdown here:

https://medium.com/@andrejbracun/the-1-in-8-billion-human-my-journey-at-the-edge-of-human-ai-limits-a9188f3e7def
by edent | 2025-09-30 13:00:27+00:00
"Hey buddy! You're right. And so mature for your age!"

The reason OSA puts DMs in scope is because they are out of view of the public. If you start creeping on someone where it is viewable, people will call you out.

If you do it in private it becomes "our little secret".

That's how groomers work. Go talk to any kid blackmailed into doing something they didn't want to do. It often starts with private messages.
by 4Dimensionbeing | 2025-09-30 13:00:58+00:00
Your idea of necessary friction is universal. Friction is not a bug in biology; it’s the feature that keeps systems alive and adaptive. Bones mineralize under load and thin without it; muscles hypertrophy with strain and atrophy in a cast; immune networks calibrate by meeting antigens, not by hiding from them. At the cellular level, survival isn’t guaranteed - deprived of trophic signals or mechanical challenge, many cells default to apoptosis, a programmed self-destruct that enforces “use it or lose it.” In other words, life is written to respond to calibrated challenge: too little challenge invites decay, the right dose drives renewal and growth.

Human learning follows the same logic. Struggle, what educators call “desirable difficulty”, is the stimulus for neuro synaptic remodeling, deeper encoding, and ultimately the capture of knowledge . On the other hand, effortless consumption rarely rewires anything - you just run an existing circuit . The trick lies in the magnitude, you want eustress, not overwhelm. It’s like the Goldilocks portion of resistance that keeps feedback and growth flowing and motivation intact. When we remove all frictions, our minds, just like our muscles will decondition. That’s where we need to incorporate purposeful frictions like you said, in order to strengthen. We are literally coded by our DNA for calibrated struggle. Without it, biological systems will drift toward atrophy and with it, they will evolve.
by majorchord | 2025-09-30 13:01:05+00:00
I would like this too, and it sounds like a good idea in theory...

But what I worry about is that it may presume that the staff themselves already operate in (your interpretation of) good faith, and I don't think that is always the case.

What is a user's recourse when they disagree with the mods? And what says they will comply with any decision reached from said recourse?

You could say "we must allow disagreements", but at some point this becomes a paradox of tolerance and then you risk it devolving into pointless arguments on either side.

I think the whole "good faith" part could only be enforced by a universally trusted party, like maybe a robot. But even then, people will disagree about how it operates... so maybe this problem is impossible to solve.
by simondotau | 2025-09-30 13:01:32+00:00
It may be tempting to frame this in an nefarious way. I think it’s far more likely that support for HomeKit without iCloud was never formally defined. Earlier teams tasked with developing HomeKit probably had some pride in their work and developed it with as few dependencies as possible, whereas I say no evidence of pride in any recent Apple software development.

Right now, I’m typing this on my iPhone in Safari, and the dark keyboard overlay has a rounded edge which is different to the rounded edge of the light grey background (and of the phone screen itself). It looks like amateur hour. I see no evidence of pride in anything Apple has made recently.
by array_key_first | 2025-09-30 13:01:41+00:00
This is, like, the stupidest and most inefficient way for a government to make money.

I know it's fun and all to circle jerk about how greedy those darn bureaucrats are - but we're all aware they control the budget, right? They could just raise taxes.

I don't think they're fining companies... sigh... 10,000 dollars as some sort of sneaky "haha gotcha!" scam they're running.
by nswizzle31 | 2025-09-30 13:01:52+00:00
Really appreciate the feedback. The idea right now is that you set up a club and attendees pay a small amount for each event, and then we take a small (~10%) fee for selecting the venues, doing the matching, and handling payments for you.

But I do love your idea and it's something I'm pursuing. We are matching people to meet at venues (restaurants, golf courses, etc) and it makes sense for venues to pay to be selected. That money would go to organizers and the events could be free. It's just a harder B2B problem to convince companies to sponsor communities.

Ultimately, clubs will have the flexibility to be run in multiple ways - from free, to business-sponsored or attendee-funded, to even onthetown-sponsored as you suggest.
by rob74 | 2025-09-30 13:02:03+00:00
I think Asimov wrote something along those lines in one of his robots cycle novels (which leads us back nicely to "iRobot", er, "I, Robot"): why build a vacuum robot, a window-cleaner robot, a robot lawnmower, a robot car etc. etc. when you can build a humanoid robot which can operate all the devices designed for humans? Ok, currently it's "if you could build" rather than "when you can build", but looking at it from the science fiction writer's perspective, it makes sense...
by AndrewDavis | 2025-09-30 13:05:25+00:00
That's all a matter of perspective.

Is moving a symbol from EXPORT_SYMBOL(some_fun) to EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL(some_func) actually changing the API? Nope, the API is exactly the same as it was before, it's just changed who is allowed to use it.

From the perspective of an out of tree module that isn't GPL you have removed stuff.

I'm honestly not sure how one outside the kernel community could construe that as not removing something.
by delfinom | 2025-09-30 13:05:40+00:00
Don't worry, I assume BNPL service integration will come and it will become the default payment method.

The capitalists want people to spend spend spend spend spend.

Consequently, its why we have the term lifestyle creep and people having fucktons of debts (not all cases of course). People are convinced by endless marketing they have to have the same luxuries as everyone else.
by edent | 2025-09-30 13:05:49+00:00
I don't think that's quite accurate.

Most age verification services use either government providers or 3rd party providers. I show my passport (or whatever) to the third-party. They relay to the site "this user is / isn't over 18". They don't send the DoB, address, photo etc.

So the online service only receives a binary yes/no and nothing else. I don't lose any privacy there.

The third-party knows that you wanted to be verified on service xyz, but not what you do there. Depending on the service I'm using, I may or may not care that they know.

Handing over a passport / licence to get into a bar leaks more information than that.
by array_key_first | 2025-09-30 13:07:48+00:00
These type of comments are so annoying.

"Everything is the same as everything" as an argumentative tactic and mindset is just incredibly intellectually lazy.

As soon as anyone tries to do anything about anything, ever, anywhere, people like you come out of the wood work and go "well what about this perfectly normal thing? Is that illegal now too???"

Why bother making bombs illegal? I mean, I think stairs kill more people yearly har har har! What, now it's illegal to have a two story house?

Also, elephant in the room: lawnmowers absolutely fucking do contain warning and research on their safety. If you develop a lawnmower, YES you have to research it's safety. YES that's perfectly reasonable. NO that's not an undue burden. And YES everyone is already doing that.
by osigurdson | 2025-09-30 13:08:08+00:00
What they are saying is the stackalloc approach causes no GC pressure. You can run that in a tight / infinite loop with essentially no downside. Using a regular heap allocated array in the same situation will hammer the GC.

C# doesn't do escape analysis and automatically put things on the stack like (for example) Go does. However the stack size is limited in C# so I wouldn't suggest going too crazy with stackalloc and deep stacks / recursion. You don't want a stack overflow!
by mnau | 2025-09-30 13:08:12+00:00
Quite reasonable policy. Add a second line too:

> Sun explicitly did not want their code to work on Linux, so why would we do extra work to get their code to work properly?

Why would you accommodate someone who explicitly went out of their way to not accommodate you?

It took many conflicts with bcachefs developer to reach this state. Olive branch has been extended again and again...
by k33n | 2025-09-30 13:08:14+00:00
Just say your name and people will call you by that name. Politely request pronoun use if you must, but don't expect everyone to remember or even care -- especially if you're using anything but she/her or he/him.

If we accept either side's definition of who the "real abusers" are, then politics will continue to hobble projects. If you are starved of people to discuss your political views with, it's the wrong thing to do to vomit those out in a programming thread. Go make some real friends if you're looking to do that. Not everyone will see the world the way you do.
by kentonv | 2025-09-30 13:10:10+00:00
Hey it's super-cool that you've implemented Cap'n Web in Rust! Nice!

But would you mind renaming the packages to make it clear they aren't official, before too many people depend on them? Prefix with your name or "currentspace" or something?

I'd just hate for it to be a big mess later if we ever decide to release an official implementation (and if it's not based on yours).
by seec | 2025-09-30 13:11:40+00:00
I kind of understand them. There is a meme of Microsoft being bad / making bad software but the reality is that they actually make pretty good software with a lot of functionalities that others fail to properly replicate / implement correctly.

The office suite is very strong. You may not see it like that, but for some it doesn't really have any proper equivalent, a lot like some Adobe software. Some get close, but still come up short in many ways.

And Microsoft is pricing their stuff very well. I think that's actually the problem, they can use their hegemony that gives them insane volumes and allows them to set prices at a level so competitive no young outsider can meaningfully compete.

Network effects in computing/software are really nasty since there is a very real lock in effect. We can force format standardization (we dit that!) but that's only one part of the equation. One still has to build the software and that requires a lot of upfront capital cost (to pay the devs) before you can even sell your first unit.

And if we look at what Apple has done with their own Office suite, it's not even close. It's "pretty" but nowhere near a true replacement. It's actually sad that with all the cash Apple has, they are unwilling/unable to really invest in a proper competitive alternative.
by gyulai | 2025-09-30 13:11:52+00:00
You mention IDEs besides VS Code, Linux, and ricing as “green flags”. Those are not proxies for “being a good programmer” and they are not proxies for “being enthusiastic about programming”. They're just selecting for programmers who share your subjective preferences on matters that are the equivalent of “vi vs. emacs”.

The only workplaces that realistically allow people to use Linux desktops are academia and top-5%-sexiness-factor startups. The other 95% of us have to use what our boss tells us to use (and he got told by the insurance company that scammed him into cybersecurity insurance). Those of us who have families, don't spend our leisure time staring into yet another desktop computer that isn't our work machine, so how, on earth, would we be using Linux desktops?

Conversely: Imagine someone has spent an 8-hour-workday setting up their tiling window manager, so they can “improve their productivity” because now they don't need to spend 2 minutes painting all their windows into the right positions in the morning. That's an investment of time that takes (8*60)/2 = 240 days, so roughly one work-year, to amortize. What does that tell you about the time management skills of that person?

I don't say that to knock tiling window managers: If you're into it, be my guest. It's perfectly fine for reasonable people to reasonably disagree on those kinds of subjective preferences. That's what subjectivity is all about. And that's why it's valuable to hire a diverse range of people who have different viewpoints on these kinds of things.

EDIT: ...and that's what I mean by "diversity": To include both family-people and people without families. Young and old. People with an academic background and people without one. Vi-people and emacs-people. Please don't strawman me by bringing up disabled people and work permits and whatnot.
by mike_hearn | 2025-09-30 13:12:02+00:00
That's not the "API" that's powered the AI boom though. What you're talking about is supervised learning. Generative AI is mostly unsupervised. It's "bunch of data -> similar data conditioned on some input". This goalless nature is one of its strengths.

The sort of questions you're talking about are primarily popular in academia. Run some MLRs against some random dataset you found, publish a paper, maybe do a press release and sell a story to some gullible journalist. It doesn't have huge value. But generative AI isn't like that.
by doe88 | 2025-09-30 13:12:07+00:00
My mental representation of this phenomenon is like inverted Russian dolls: you start by learning the inner layers, the basics, and as you mature, you work your way into more abstractions, more unified theories, more structures, adding layers as you learn more and more. Adding difficulty but this extreme refinement is also very beautiful. When studying mathematics I like to think of all these steps, all the people, and centuries of trial and errors, refinements it took to arrive where we are now.
by lioeters | 2025-09-30 13:12:56+00:00
> theory building

That's insightful how you connected the "comprehension debt" of LLM-generated code with the idea of programming as theory building.

I think this goes deeper than the activity of programming, and applies in general to the process of thinking and understanding.

LLM-generated content - writing and visual art also - is equivalent to the code, it's what people see on the surface as the end result. But unless a person is engaged in the production, to build the theory of what it means and how it works, to go through the details and bring it all into a whole, there is only superficial understanding.

Even when LLMs evolve to become more sophisticated so that it can perform this "theory building" by itself, what use is such artificial understanding without a human being in the loop? Well, it could be very useful and valuable, but eventually people may start losing the skill of understanding when it's more convenient to let the machine do the thinking.
by jqpabc123 | 2025-09-30 13:13:03+00:00
The USA is ruled by lawyers and sales people and most recently by blatant liars and con artists.

China is ruled by engineers. And their leadership has correctly identified the weaknesses of our approach and are working to exploit them and demonstrating significant success at doing so.

In 64 critical technology driven areas, China now leads the USA is all but 7. The data is available for all to see and from multiple sources. And unfortunately, name calling and denial won't change it.

https://itif.org/publications/2025/09/23/how-china-is-outper...

https://www.techspot.com/news/97802-china-leads-us-37-out-44...
by notpachet | 2025-09-30 13:13:19+00:00
> It's amazing how fast the code goes when you know exactly what you want.

To quote Russ Ackoff[1]:

> Improving a system requires knowing what you could do if you could do whatever you wanted to. Because if you don't know what you would do if you could do whatever you wanted to, how on earth are you going to know what you can do under constraints?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqEeIG8aPPk
Show HN: An interactive Qiskit Playground with in-browser circuit visualization
by accelerationa | 2025-09-30 13:13:31+00:00
Hi HN,

I've been looking for a way to quickly prototype simple Qiskit circuits without the friction of a local Python setup, so I decided to build a tool for it.

This is a browser-based playground that not only runs your Qiskit code but helps you truly understand what it's doing through visualization.

The key features are the interactive simulations:

- Step-by-step animations: You can watch exactly how the statevector evolves as each gate in your circuit is applied.

- Customizable inputs: Instantly change the initial state (e.g., from |00⟩ to |10⟩) and re-run the simulation to see how it affects the outcome.

- “X-Ray" inspection: Click on any point between gates to inspect the statevector in the middle of the computation, not just at the end.

This is very much an alpha preview. To get it out quickly for feedback, it only supports a limited set of the most common gates (H, X, CNOT, measure, etc.). My goal right now isn't perfection, but to validate if a tool like this is useful for the community.

The backend runs the Python code in a secure sandboxed environment, executes it with the Qiskit library, and then sends the circuit data and simulation results back to the frontend for visualization.

I would be incredibly grateful for your feedback. Is a tool like this useful? What are the most important Qiskit features or gates you'd need for it to be part of your workflow?
by Herring | 2025-09-30 13:13:41+00:00
> You … become a bottleneck (defeats the point)

It's better if the bottleneck is just reviewing, instead of both coding and reviewing, right?

We've developed plenty of tools for this (linting, fuzzing, testing, etc). I think what's going on is people who are bad at architecting entire projects and quickly reading/analyzing code are having to get much better at that and they're complaining. I personally enjoy that kind of work. They'll adapt, it's not that hard.