MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Leftium | 2025-09-29 15:49:01+00:00
It's a matter of trade-offs.

In theory, Handy could be developed by hand-rolling assembly. Maybe even binary machine code.

- It would probably be much faster, smaller and use less memory. But...

- It would probably not be cross-platform (Handy works on Linux, MacOS, and Windows)

- It would probably take years or decades to develop (Handy was developed by a single dev in single digit months for the initial version)

- It would probably be more difficult to maintain. Instead of re-using general purpose libraries and frameworks, it would all be custom code with the single purpose of supporting Handy.

- Also, Handy uses an LLM for transcription. LLM's are known to require a lot of RAM to perform well. So most of the RAM is probably being used by the transcription model. An LLM is basically a large auto-complete, so you need a lot of RAM to store all the mappings to inputs and outputs. So the hand-rolled assembly version could still use a lot of RAM...
by JadoJodo | 2025-09-29 15:49:18+00:00
I feel this about all of the AI notetaking bots that everyone is adding to web meetings these days:

“Welcome to the meeting. Your voice is now being recorded and sent to a server somewhere in the world to be processed by an AI and you have zero control over it. If we were to get hacked, it will be impossible to you know if your voice will be synthesized and used to scam, abuse, or any other nefarious purposes between now and the end of time. Happy meeting!”

I’ve seriously been in meetings with 3+ AI bots from different companies I’ve never heard of.
by jcranmer | 2025-09-29 15:50:13+00:00
I think "were" is the correct tense. EA's dictates for SimCity (2013) ended up crashing that franchise entirely, and a decade into The Sims 4, EA has admitted it's planning on endless expansion packs for Sims 4 rather than making a Sims 5, with the community largely debating whether or not the best Sims game is Sims 2 or Sims 3.
by meesles | 2025-09-29 15:50:32+00:00
Let's step through the flow:

1. Write up a detailed spec as a prompt, including a bunch of detail about the actual functionality. Add in some details about wanting to test everything. At this point I did not specifically say "Hey LLM, in my tests, do not mock one of the key idempotency functions in this system". This is obvious to me since 1/4 of the system was concerned with idempotency, and this was super clear in my original spec

2. LLM works for 30 minutes, spits out 2.5K lines

3. I review the product functionality and the test cases at a glance, and then start running tests and iterating on the software.

If I have to mentally split every line of the LLM output and decide whether it's correct or not (remember, I didn't write the rest of the system), then I lose all the productivity gains that the LLM offers. You don't do this, no one does this unless they're modifying a few lines at a time.

My point is that you cannot build robust software from scratch with LLMs right now. They walk right into footguns we've spent decades learning about and building solutions for.
by NickC25 | 2025-09-29 15:50:45+00:00
We should tax opinions like this right out of existence.

This dude has almost half a trillion dollars to his name.

Larry, instead of waxing lyrical about your desire for a police state, how about you bugger off to a private island and establish your own society there, and leave the rest of the world for people who don't clamor for more money after making hundreds of billions of dollars.

Some people just aren't satisfied with having too much. I'm not in favor of a "abolish billionaires" catch-all policy, but from having met a bunch of billionaires, some just need to call it a day and spend more time with their families.
by nathell | 2025-09-29 15:50:46+00:00
Authentic haiku

needn't have seventeen morae

in total, either.

See, e.g., Bashō's crow haiku, arguably one of the genre-defining poems [0]. Plus, English is on average terser than Japanese; I've read somewhere that, in English, 3-5-3 syllables pack roughly the same amount of content as the Japanese 5-7-5.

[0]: https://matsuobashohaiku.home.blog/2020/11/21/upon-a-withere...
by globular-toast | 2025-09-29 15:50:52+00:00
I'm an atheist, but I do wish I could go to church, or at least something like that. I've tried going to other non-religious clubs but it's not really the same. A pottery class just doesn't give that same feeling of "belonging".

The trouble is it just seems a bit too serious every time I've been. I don't believe any of it, and I can't believe anyone with intelligence could believe it either. But unlike, say, WWE-style wrestling, there are way too many people taking it far too seriously. You never hear of atrocities or stupidity happening because someone took wrestling too seriously. Are there churches that are more like wrestling?
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-09-29 15:51:54+00:00
> The issues with ME3's ending were blown way out of proportion and was still a fantastic trilogy.

I did play the game and no they weren't. The issues truly started with ME2, but ME3 was an awful game that was an embarrassment to the standard of quality set by ME1. Dragon Age also went downhill starting with DA2 (which again I did play at least some of it though I didn't bother finishing because I hated it).

You're obviously still enjoying their work and that's cool. I'm genuinely glad you still do. But don't act like everyone is just being haters who don't play the games and parrot things that other people say. I did play Bioware's games, and that's why I no longer play them and consider them to be long since dead.
by privatelypublic | 2025-09-29 15:52:22+00:00
Open circuit voltage is _very much_ widely considered to be the maximum. If its not spec'd openly as " at temp X" then it's reasonable to expect it to be invariant.

"Voc 37v @ 25*C"

Vs

"Voc 37v"

Edit: Isc is the same- max current.
by nerdponx | 2025-09-29 15:52:33+00:00
LLMs are next-token prediction models. They "understand" in that, if the previous 1000 tokens are such-and-such, then they emit a best guess at the 1001th token.

It "knows" what rsync is because it has a lot of material about rsync in the training data. However it has no idea about that particular version because it doesn't have much training data where the actual version is stated, and differences are elaborated.

What would probably produce a much better result if you included the man page for the specific version you have on your system. Then you're not relying on the model having "memorized" the relationship relationships among the specific tokens you are trying to get the model to focus on, instead just passing it all in as part of the input sequence to be completed.

It is absolutely astounding that LLMs work at all, but they're not magic, and some understanding of how they actually work can be helpful when it comes to using them effectively.
by starky | 2025-09-29 15:52:35+00:00
>My feeling is there are often factors which are not captured in job market statistics, which is why it's important to listen to the experience of grads seeking jobs.

In aggregate yes, but in an individual sense I'd be very careful. There are a lot of people out there that are just bad at presenting themselves in a way to get hired. While the people that are good at it are likely getting hired pretty quickly and aren't thinking much about it. This can make it hard to get a good sense of how difficult it is to get hired. Additionally, the current general mood about the economy frequently gets ascribed to someone's current experiences.

Not saying today isn't super difficult though. I think the video has quite a few good points, especially around the risk of not hiring junior employees. Its thankless to do that though, as a business you spend a lot of time and money training up someone to be good at their job, and most of them will leave to another job after a few years, and you are hoping someone else has done the same for you to hire someone at a mid level to replace them to keep the team in balance.
by ben_w | 2025-09-29 15:52:44+00:00
> That's obviously tool calls :). I don't get where this assumption comes from, that a computer must be a single, uniform blob of compute? It's probably because people think people are like this, but in fact, even our brains have function-specific hardware components.

In fairness, half the time the Trek computer does something weird, it only makes sense if there's no memory/process isolation and it's all one uniform blob of compute. Made sense in the 60s where Spock's chess app losing to him was useful evidence that the CCTV recordings had been faked, not so sensible in 2025 when the ship stops being able to navigate due to the excess system demand from the experimental holodeck.
by djoldman | 2025-09-29 15:53:04+00:00
> Overcoming friction leads to growth. Comfort leads to stagnation.... I’ve come to believe that with the rise of convenience and comfort, it becomes harder for us to reach our potential.... A certain level of convenience can lead to efficiency gains. Automation is important for a reason. Too much convenience though, that's a killer. When friction was inherent in the system, applying ourselves led to growth as we overcame that friction.

There's some kind of logical flaw in all of this where "growth" is circularly defined as the overcoming of friction.

In a world where one could snap their fingers and magically have everything, would "growth" be impossible?

Conversely, just throw out all your technology and live in the woods and re-implement and re-discover agrarian tools and techniques: amazing growth!

The point is that in my opinion "growth" defined in this way is not a helpful goal.

Building/creating/producing something that is more cheap/efficient/better than an existing tech should be the goal, regardless of whether or not there is friction involved in creating it.

Friction in current technology may or may not be a signal that therein lies opportunity. It's not a given.
by erulabs | 2025-09-29 15:53:26+00:00
From a gamers perspective, anything trying to actually convey a message would be a win against grey-goop slop franchise titles that play it so safe they can barely convey more than “you hero. Kill bad guy”.

That the message is going to be “Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are tier-1 allies / partners / powers” depends on your perspective. Lots of gamers outside the US these days!
by coldtea | 2025-09-29 15:53:36+00:00
>Loneliness increases death risk by 32% but we know how to fix it. Real solutions that cut loneliness in half, from mindfulness to community programs that actually work.

And what, pray tell, works? He goes on:

>Those programs in Barcelona where almost half the people stopped feeling lonely? The mindfulness stuff that works in just two weeks? Even the robot pets for elderly people “it all works”. We’re not talking about maybe or possibly here. This stuff actually works. What gets me is that fixing loneliness doesn’t require some massive revolution. Twenty minutes of mindfulness a day. A weekly volunteer shift.

Slop.
by exodust | 2025-09-29 15:54:01+00:00
Not to mention EDM festivals. Remote bush doofs where everyone is off their chops, escaping reality, dancing during the day, exposed in the light.

Being recorded in 4k from different angles including action cams on people's heads on the dance floor, is a far cry from the relative anonymity of festivals of old. I remember when the only people who'd see you all bright eyed and bushy tailed were other participants in the party mayhem, which is how it should be.
by seneca | 2025-09-29 15:54:03+00:00
Having foreign workers filling the jobs for American companies working on US soil and sending the money home is no better for Americans than having them working in their own countries.

Say what you will about this administration, God knows they have flaws. However, they're the only one that has taken steps to actually attempt to help American workers in a generation or more. Every other one has been a revolving door of shipping jobs out or importing cheap foreign labor in.
by Drejci | 2025-09-29 15:54:03+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:

The 1-in-8-Billion Human: My Journey at the Edge of Human-AI Limits
by alain94040 | 2025-09-29 15:54:09+00:00
Instead of just saying: rsync on my system is version 3.2, have you tried copy/pasting rsync --help? In my experience, that would be enough for the AI to figure out what it needs to do and which arguments to use. I don't treat AI like an oracle, I treat it like an eager CS grad. I must give it the right information for the task.
by malchow | 2025-09-29 15:54:17+00:00
In addition to bi-facials starting to work quite well, HNers may be interested in a rising class of ultra-low-mass material that has come out of work at Stanford and Intel in transition-metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) (e.g. for MoS₂, WS₂, WSe₂, etc.).

It turns out these enable a very high specific-power PV cell that adds another even more attractive production curve behind what is happening in vertical bi-facials. See e.g.:

https://ee.stanford.edu/frederick-nitta-koosha-nassiri-nazif...

https://www.arinna.xyz/
by ryandrake | 2025-09-29 15:55:10+00:00
This is one of the things I try to suss out when I interview somewhere. Do you have a product team (or at least someone in leadership) with a stable requirements vision, or do you just haphazardly develop based on whoever your sales team last talked to. Having a stable roadmap is an absolute requirement for me. I may not agree with the roadmap or priorities, but I'd rather have them than not have them.

I've worked in both types of companies, and the ones where sales dictated what we worked on this week were universally awful.
by hs86 | 2025-09-29 15:55:16+00:00
I loved ME1 and was disappointed by ME2 because I loved ME1 so much. I devoured the lore, every codex entry, and even the long elevator rides where you had to listen to news reports about your earlier actions. The world-building was so much better, and all of this was reduced to a minimum in ME2. ME1 was an epic space RPG with action elements, while ME2 was an action game built around a collection of crew side stories with lighter RPG elements.
by webstrand | 2025-09-29 15:55:24+00:00
I figured that "reasonable expectation of privacy" was a given in the scenario. It's a family gathering, the livestreamer is not being obvious about their recording, there's a "reasonable expectation of privacy".

Your ICE protest example is performed in public, its a protest, its not meant to be private, thus fails the test of "reasonable expectation of privacy". Action taken by agents of the state are also public actions, this has been tried many times in court.

Two-party consent is not federal law and varies state-by-state. But again it requires that you actually be a party to consent.

And yes by "US Federal Law" I am referencing the anti-wiretapping laws which prohibit, among other things, interception of oral communication via electronic means unless at least one party consents.
by danielbln | 2025-09-29 15:55:27+00:00
Telling the agent to execute "man rsync" and synthesize the answer from there is probably the cheapest and most efficient option.

Letting some detached LLM fumble around for an hour is never the right way to go, and inversely sifting through the man page of rsync or fmmpeg or (God forbid) jq to figure out some arcane syntax isn't exactly a great use of anyone's time either, all things considered.
by jcalvinowens | 2025-09-29 15:55:36+00:00
I've been using Gentoo for almost twenty years!

Patching libraries is easier than any other distro. Just throw the patch in

/etc/portage/patches/${package}/${name}/

...run one emerge command, and your entire system is now linked to the patched library. For example one of my machines has:

/etc/portage/patches/media-libs/svt-av1/0001-Address-build-warnings-and-CI-failures-from-enabling.patch

...which is a backport to fix a build error with avx512 enabled.

Same for debugging and cflags, I simply have:

{0}[calvinow@sousa ~] cat /etc/portage/env/debug-cflags FEATURES="${FEATURES} nostrip" COMMON_FLAGS="-Og -ggdb3 -fno-omit-frame-pointer -pipe" ...

...and then rebuilding any package with debug cflags is one vim+emerge away:

{0}[calvinow@sousa ~] cat /etc/portage/package.env/20debug media-libs/x264 debug-cflags media-libs/x265 debug-cflags media-video/ffmpeg debug-cflags
by Someone | 2025-09-29 15:55:36+00:00
> When the strong refCount went to zero but there were weak references remaining, the object was deinitialised but not deallocated: it stuck around in a “zombie” state.

[…]

> Surprise, surprise, unowned references are basically implemented the same way as pre-Swift-4 weak references.

I see a possible improvement there: instead of not freeing the memory of an object, tell the memory allocator “you can take back all of this allocation, except for the first headersize bytes” (a realloc to a smaller size that guarantees to not move the object).

That would require extending the API of the memory allocator, and thus, make it impossible to swap in a different C(++)-style allocator, but would decrease the size of those zombie object remnants that hang around (probably to 16 bytes, on 64-bit systems)
by gjm11 | 2025-09-29 15:55:41+00:00
The following is perfectly compatible with everything in the article being correct and important (though I share the suspicion that there may be some reverse-causality going on), but the author seems to be extremely fishy in some ways.

He's posting about two substantial (~10-30 pages) papers per week to the arXiv, in various areas of mathematics. He claims to have developed "Alpay Algebra: A recursive language for thought" and what he's written about it looks to me like (1) it was actually written by an LLM and (2) it's basically word/symbol salad. (He has some papers about it on the arXiv. The first isn't particularly bullshitty, but uses a great deal of formalism to say almost nothing. Later ones look like grandiose AI-written slop. And he has some web pages that are just grandiose AI-written slop.)

I repeat: none of this needs to cast any particular doubt on what he writes about loneliness. He might be an AI-driven mathematical crank who also has wise thoughts about loneliness. I might just be wrong about his being an AI-driven mathematical crank, though I'd be pretty surprised. Or, for that matter, his post about loneliness might be AI-written but none the less correct. (It's the kind of thing I would expect an LLM to be able to write something reasonable about -- though in that case it would be advisable to double-check the references.) But it doesn't inspire confidence.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-09-29 15:55:55+00:00
ME2 was not particularly good. The characters were good, but the gameplay was severely dumbed down and the main story was flat out bad. I don't know who at Bioware thought it was a good idea to force the player to work for Cerberus (basically space Nazis, for anyone who hasn't played Mass Effect), but it wasn't a good idea. You can't just railroad the player into working for bad guys in a game that is supposed to celebrate player choice. Not only that but they mishandled the villains, and the entire Collector plot was a waste of time that didn't contribute to the overall story. ME2 was the beginning of the decline in Bioware's quality and it never stopped after.
by pdonis | 2025-09-29 15:56:10+00:00
How many of those lines of code would have benefited from being able to express that type constraint, if the language made it possible?

You have no idea, and nor does anyone else. But that's what you would need "factual and objective" evidence about to support the claim you made.

By your argument, anything that programming languages don't currently support, must be an "esoteric limitation" because billions if not trillions of lines of code have been written without it. Which would mean programming languages would never add new features at all. But it's certainly "factual and objective" that programming languages add new features all the time. Maybe this is another feature that at some point a language will add, and programmers will find it useful. You don't even seem to be considering such a possibility.
by brycewray | 2025-09-29 15:56:45+00:00
I was the one who filed the original webcompat issue :-) ...

https://github.com/webcompat/web-bugs/issues/168913

Although the form result made it sound like a macOS-only issue, I actually have observed (and continue to observe) it on both macOS and Fedora.

EDIT: In the thread, am seeing the reference to how Firefox-on-QUIC works if one has IPv6. My ISP (Frontier FiOS) infamously doesn't support IPv6, so I'm out of luck there where Firefox is concerned.
by balderdash | 2025-09-29 15:56:48+00:00
leverage increases the disparity of returns (so some companies are definitely out of business because the of the leverage put on them) but by far the vast majority of LBO’s are at least moderately successful.

This give you some idea of the volume https://www.ropesgray.com/en/insights/alerts/2025/07/us-pe-m...
by mikemarsh | 2025-09-29 15:57:07+00:00
Talk to any right-leaning young man who's actively engaged in a church community (even better if they're actually pursuing Christ, and not just chasing an abstract ideal of "community") and you won't hear very much about the "loneliness epidemic", except maybe in reference to their peers.

It may be hard to find them online in order to "talk" to them though, and of course that's the whole point :-) Selection bias at work.