MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gregfjohnson | 2025-09-04 03:36:21+00:00
I hacked up a version of minesweeper that was “forgiving:” if there was no selection that was provably safe, it gave you a safe move. If you picked any square that was not provably a bomb, it would not be a bomb. Typically, as long as you don’t select a number of bombs equal to the number of squares , your first move is safe. I just extended that for the whole game. If you select N-1 bombs, you always win on the first move..
by eadmund | 2025-09-04 03:36:22+00:00
Generating a kWh emits 0.8 pounds of CO2 on average (source: https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=74&t=11); burning a gallon of gasoline in a car emits about 20 pounds of CO2. That means that 800 kWh (= 640 pounds of CO2 emitted) is as bad as using 32 gallons in a year.

It just doesn’t matter much.
by SilverElfin | 2025-09-04 03:36:36+00:00
Searching for things that confirm your view isn’t the way you find answers.

As an example, your first link isn’t even a real study. Hosting some text on a .gov website doesn’t make it correct. And Statpearls is basically a low quality scammy source. But you don’t need to know that about its reputation - just reading your own link’s content would make it obvious that it is REALLY low quality - in this case written by a couple random grad students.

Since we’re cherry picking things, I’ll quote this from your own source, which shows that even when you use very broad definitions, abuse is extremely rare:

> In the United States, Child Protective Services estimated that 9 out of 1000 children are victims of child maltreatment.

Consider what else you're also wrong about.
by igor47 | 2025-09-04 03:38:52+00:00
Struggling to understand what you're saying but it sounds like you're making two points:

* We should dismiss the concerns in TFA because the author is... A good and conscientious student? Who is both unpopular and also the class president?

* The students who are outsourcing their thinking, or at least their work, to LLMs, have good reasons for this and the reasons are not addressed in the piece

The first point is at best a pure ad hominem and at worst a full blown assault on conscientiousness and actually doing the work. I think the class president and good student is a better authority than the cheater. I'm very disturbed by the recent trend on HN and the wider world to justify any shortcut taken for personal advancement. We need people to value substance, not just image...

The second point is irrelevant -- we don't have do both-sideism in every piece. But also even if they do have good reasons to cheat, this creates an instant race to the bottom where now everyone must cheat. This is why they do doping checks in professional sports, except this is much higher stakes
by ars | 2025-09-04 03:38:55+00:00
Consciousness is awareness of yourself, and then the ability to look at yourself and decide to make a change.

Someone conscious is able to choose how they want to behave and then behave that way. For example I can choose to be kind or mean. I can choose to learn to skate or I choose not to.

So free will and consciousness are strongly linked.

I have seen zero evidence that any other being other than humans can do this. All other animals have behaviors that are directly shaped by their environment, physical needs, and genetic temperament, and not at all shaped by choices.

For example a dog that likes to play with children simply likes them, it did not choose to like them. I on the other hand can sit, think, and decide if I like kids or not.

(This does not imply that all choices made by humans are conscious - in fact most are not, it just means that humans can do that.)
by soraminazuki | 2025-09-04 03:40:46+00:00
Why is every discussion about AI like this? We get study after study and example after example showing that AI is unreliable [1], hurts productivity [2], and causes cognitive decline [3]. Yet, time and time again, a group of highly motivated individuals show up and dismiss these findings, not with counter-evidence, but through sheer sophistry. Heck, this is a thread meant to discuss evidence about LLM reliance contributing to cognitive decline. Instead, the conversation quickly derailed into an absurd debate about whether AI coding tools resemble compilers. It's exhausting.

[1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.11817

[2]: https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...

[3]: https://publichealthpolicyjournal.com/mit-study-finds-artifi...
by drujensen | 2025-09-04 03:41:31+00:00
100%.

3 years ago I modified his 6502 breadboard project and added a keyboard, display and then I modified MS Basic to get it to run. Also, I found a way to extend the RAM to 31kb. I called it eater-one.

All of his videos and kits are a must if you never understood how a cpu works. I highly recommend them.

https://github.com/drujensen/eater-one
by anonymousiam | 2025-09-04 03:42:06+00:00
Interesting problem. I did a lot of CP/M BIOS stuff, and implemented I/O redirection in systems that never had it. Of the four CP/M systems I had (two of which were S-100), I never had more than two serial ports, and I never ran MP/M. I did a hardware hack to my IMSAI so it could run at 4MHz, but the front panel would still work, because when halted, it would change the system clock to 1MHz. I also did a hardware hack to my CompuPro Interfacer serial card where I swapped the control interface for baud rate and serial bits and parity settings, so the baud rate was now software programmable and the (formerly software controlled) start/stop/number of bits, and parity were moved to the dip switches that previously controlled the baud rate. This was nice in the era of mixed 300 and 1200 baud BBSs.

On-topic answer: The CompuPro Interfacer III had 8 serial ports, so I would approach the problem by writing an emulator for it, and enumerating two of them, and modifying the MP/M XBIOS to support all the ports. Maybe start with the MITS 2SIO emulator as a baseline for the CompuPro emulator.
by godelski | 2025-09-04 03:43:03+00:00
> this isn't really about whether scaling is "dead"

I think there's a good position paper by Sara Hooker[0] that mentions some of this. Key point being that while the frontier is being pushed by big models with big data there's a very quiet revolution of models using far fewer parameters (still quite big) and data. Maybe "Scale Is All You Need"[1], but that doesn't mean it is practical or even a good approach. It's a shame these research paths have gotten a lot of pushback, especially given today's concerns about inference costs (this pushback still doesn't seem to be decreasing)

> verifiable rewards

There's also a current conversation in the community over world models: is it actually a world model if the model does not recover /a physics/[2]. The argument for why they should recover a physics is that this means a counterfactual model must have been learned (no guarantees on if it is computationally irreducible). A counterfactual model gives far greater opportunities for robust generalization. In fact, you could even argue that the study of physics is the study of compression. In a sense, physics is the study of the computability of our universe[3]. Physics is counterfactual, allowing you to answer counterfactual questions like "What would the force have been if the mass had been 10x greater?" If this were not counterfactual we'd require different algorithms for different cases.

I'm in the recovery camp. Honestly I haven't heard a strong argument against it. Mostly "we just care that things work" which, frankly, isn't that the primary concern of all of us? I'm all for throwing shit at a wall and seeing what sticks, it can be a really efficient method sometimes (especially in early exploratory phases), but I doubt it is the most efficient way forward.

In my experience, having been a person who's created models that require magnitudes fewer resources for equivalent performance, I cannot stress enough the importance of quality over quantity. The tricky part is defining that quality.

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.05694

[1] Personally, I'm unconvinced. Despite success of our LLMs it's difficult to decouple other variables.

[2] The "a" is important here. There's not one physics per-say. There are different models. This is a level of metaphysics most people will not encounter and has many subtleties.

[3] I must stress that there's a huge difference between the universe being computable and the universe being a computation. The universe being computable does not mean we all live in a simulation.
by GarnetFloride | 2025-09-04 03:43:10+00:00
These kinds of discussions remind of those times running a TTRPG and there is a puzzle to solve and 4+ engineering students can't figure out the back-of-the-cereal-box type puzzle.

So there is something going on that makes problem solving in a situation very challenging.

It's like it's hard to concentrate when the lizard brain is playing bongos on the Big Red Danger button it has access too.
by ars | 2025-09-04 03:44:13+00:00
Here's another example: When I look at something I "see" the functionality behind it (for example the pipes in the bathroom), or the chemical reaction, or sometimes even the concept of the atoms that make it up.

An interior designer will see the colors, and the layout and how the things go together or don't. I don't see that, and in turn the designer does not see what I see.

So never mind the physical senses, even on a mental level two people do not see/experience the world the same way.
by bigbadfeline | 2025-09-04 03:44:53+00:00
> You did nothing of the sort: you just seem to genuinely not understand the sentence you quoted.

That might be the case, there's no point in arguing about details which depend on definitions that aren't necessarily shared. Besides, we're using money in a very vague sense that includes wealth - not a good foundation for detailed analysis.

As I originally wrote, can money-in-general exist without power is a minor nitpick, I can readily accept both answers, more so given that money as it exists today can definitely grant power under certain conditions.

The real problem here is the lack of awareness about it, the lack of anything approaching a clear formulation of it and the absence of that topic from education and public discourse in general.

I would love to see the proponents of "more power to money" approach go public and explain their ideas while emphasizing that foundation.
by MBCook | 2025-09-04 03:44:59+00:00
What I’ve found works well, going along with the author’s “everything is a log”, is append only tables in PG with date ranges on them.

So you have a pet table with an ID, birth date, type, name, whatever, and ‘valid_range’.

That last column is a date_range column. Combined with the ID it serves as a unique key for the table. Records are inserted with a date grange from now() to infinity.

To update a record, you call a stored procedure. It creates the new record with that same date range, and updates the old record to be valid up to (but not including) now(). The SP ensures the process is done correctly.

You can use the same date range in join tables for the same reason.

This makes it possible to see the full state of any record kept like this at any point in time, see when it was created, or last changed. An audit table records who changed it by holding the ID and timestamp of the change. There is no real deletion, you’d do soft deletion by setting a status.

I suspect this wouldn’t work well for very high volume tables without sharping or something. But for CRUD tables that don’t change a lot it’s fantastic.

The only thing that’s not smooth is future updates. If you need a new non-null column, it ends up added to all records. So you can either set a default and just deal with the fact that it’s now set on all old records, leave it as nullable and enforce non-null in code, or enforce it only on insert in a trigger or the SP I described.

I’ve found it much easier to use than some sort of ‘updates’ table storing JSON changes or EAV style updates or whatever.
by StanislavPetrov | 2025-09-04 03:45:12+00:00
>Do you really think that companies were hiring that many unqualified people for DEI reasons?

Depending on what industry you are in, absolutely. I can offer one anecdote that I can personally attest actually occurred. (though I was not the protagonist).

There was an opening for a new, salaried, full-time faculty member after the unfortunate death of the previous position holder. During the hiring discussion at a staff meeting at this (private) NYC college the Dean stated, "we aren't hiring or promoting any more straight white men". They said this openly, and without shame, in front of a room full of people including a well-credentialed adjunct (who happened to be a straight, white man) who had worked there for several years, without an annual contract or any of the accompanying benefits. And, in fact, they ended up hiring a completely unqualified black, LGBTQ woman for that position. The woman was so unqualified and out of her depth that she stopped showing up entirely just a month into the semester. The passed-over adjunct tried to file an EEOC complaint but was told (rightly or wrongly) that since he wasn't part of a protected class he didn't qualify. For the next several years, of the ~10 people that were hired or promoted at this NYC college, none were straight white men.
by LocalH | 2025-09-04 03:45:27+00:00
They're easy to find if you want them. If you ever owned any of the relevant machines, then I'd say you're even morally in the correct. Feel free to send Commodore or Cloanto some cash for your use if you feel so inclined. Cloanto even offer packages for both C64 and Amiga that include the most relevant ROMs (and Workbenches, in the case of the Amiga).
by jonjacky | 2025-09-04 03:45:59+00:00
In the CPython reference interpreter, that VM can be found at

https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/main/Python/ceval.c

It's 3619 lines. It's explained in this 515 line file:

https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/main/InternalDocs/

For comparison, there is a pure Python bytecode interpreter, its VM is here:

https://github.com/nedbat/byterun/blob/master/byterun/pyvm2....

It's 1043 lines.
by lelandbatey | 2025-09-04 03:46:26+00:00
Nah: going back on a somewhat ethical and REMOTELY fair deal made by folks who are even close to equal in power, that's not OK. Also, most of these sites make no requirement that you read and agree to anything; I can open YouTube and watch videos in an incognito tab right now, no EULA/TOS necessary, so how are you to say I am breaking any agreement at all?

Furthermore, these "use the service or not" agreements is like saying "accept a government or leave the country". Being handed an ultimatum saying "agree or you can't participate with your peers culturally, and potentially can't even access other local services such as government announcements", that's basically not a deal as there is no negotiation, that's being informed by greater powers of the pound of flesh they expect to extract.

Yes, yes I know the law says if you don't agree then you should simply not use the Internet, simple as that. That's clearly not even a possibility to be a functioning member of society at this point, but I guess it'll take some time for the law to catch up.
Show HN: Chat with Claude Code on iMessage with Instaline
by xdotli | 2025-09-04 03:46:44+00:00
We've been wanting to give agents a phone number for sms / WhatsApp chats for very long, and today we finally built it. Dm me if you want to test it out -- we are still working on the infra / backend to generate more numbers. And if you have experiences building telecommunication infra or happen to be wanting the same thing I'd love a chat. Appreciated!
by zer00eyz | 2025-09-04 03:47:14+00:00
> 10+ years ago I expected we would get AI that would impact blue collar work long before AI that impacted white collar work. Not sure exactly where I got the impression, but I remember some "rising tide of AI" analogy and graphic that had artists and scientists positioned on the high ground.

The moment you strip away the magical thinking, the humanization (bugs not hallucinations) what you realize is that this is just progress. Ford in the 1960's putting in the first robot arms vs auto manufacturing today. The phone: from switch board operators, to mechanical switching to digital to... (I think phone is in some odd hybrid era with text but only time will tell). Draftsmen in the 1970's all replaced by autocad by the 90's. GO further back to 1920, 30 percent of Americans were farmers, today thats less than 2.

Humans, on very human scales are very good at finding all new ways of making ourselves "busy" and "productive".
by xboxnolifes | 2025-09-04 03:47:17+00:00
Reverse classrooms (take home lectures/readings with in-class exercises) aren't that new of a concept. The idea is that instead of valuable classroom time being spent on a teacher spending most of the class time lecturing, they can spend more time working with students on hands-on work.

I personally had some teachers apply this 10 or so years ago, and I assume the idea existed prior to them. Though, I'm not sure exactly what age range this would work best with.
by fsckboy | 2025-09-04 03:47:59+00:00
"what does it feel like to be a bat" means what you think you are telling me. it does not mean "what would it feel like to become a bat"

"what does it feel like to be blind from birth?" can you, a sighted person near-sighted though you may be for this example, even/ever comprehend it no matter how extensively described. can someone who has never seen actually describe it to you?
by kens | 2025-09-04 03:48:11+00:00
The article discusses Boltzmann's formula exp(-E/kT). I was recently looking at the same formula in the context of semiconductors and I realized that Boltzmann's constant k is only needed because temperature uses bad units. If we measured temperature in energy instead of degrees, then Boltzmann's constant drops out. For instance, you could express room temperature as 25 meV (milli electron volts) or 2444 joules/mole and the constant disappears. Likewise, the constant in the ideal gas law disappears if you measure temperature as energy rather than degrees Kelvin. In other words, degrees Kelvin is a made-up unit that should be abandoned. (I'm not sure I believe this, but I don't see a flaw.)
by barkerja | 2025-09-04 03:48:30+00:00
For me, the editor is still the most important component of my tooling. The AI features are secondary to my needs/wants when it comes to an editor.

Zed is hitting all the checkboxes when it comes to performance and user experience (yeah, I care about that in my editor).

I'm not a hardcore user of AI, but I do make use of Zed's inline suggestions and occasional use of Opus 4.1 through my Zed subscription.
by 3RTB297 | 2025-09-04 03:50:39+00:00
Most of the "testimonials" I'm seeing are actually negative.

>I used nuclear and had a horrible experience with it. It looks bad, you wait for 1 minute to play a 3 minute song, it's slow as fuck. Probably it's because of Electron, but it is used by so many people that I started cringing.

Uh.....what? I get trying to lean into being edgy, but a bad user experience? No thanks.
by al_borland | 2025-09-04 03:51:10+00:00
Cards still have magstripes, but we generally use chip + signature or tap-to-pay now. I haven’t actually swiped my card in a couple years.

Visiting Europe, I really like that the transaction is done right in front of you. The pain point is that my card is chip + signature, when everything there is chip + pin. When I last visited London I would stop into the store and went to the self-scan. I had to wait for the attendant to print out a physical receipt for me to sign, which always took a while. In the US we can sign on the electronic pad. It’s all a formality anyway, since no one checks and everyone just scribbles whatever.
by mrandish | 2025-09-04 03:51:45+00:00
P2000 appears to be at least partially emulated in MAME: https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/Philips_P2000_e...

Here's a video of it running: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUa9Ktmsxww

The ROM seems to be available via the usual unofficial sources for MAME-supported ROMS: https://wowroms.com/en/roms/mame/download-philips-p2000t/974...

I'd suggest leveraging the MAME distribution model (distributing emulators separately from copyrighted ROMS). You could also contribute the abandonware software titles you've preserved to the MAME Software-List: https://docs.mamedev.org/contributing/softlist.html. There's no sense in re-inventing the processes and standards the preservation community has already established. Plus once you start the ball rolling, the active community of people trying to preserve cassette-based software from niche 8-bit platforms can join in.

Of course, getting ROM distribution officially blessed by the corporate owner of record would be lovely but it rarely happens because of the legal complexities involved. Obviously, there's zero commercial value anymore but it's still much easier for a corporation to tacitly look the other way than to grant express permission.
by manwe150 | 2025-09-04 03:51:52+00:00
Ask it to write tests, then let it run until the tests pass (preferably in a sandbox, far from your git credentials). It is quite good at developing hypotheses and tests for them, if that is what you explicitly ask for. It doesn’t have (much) ego, so it doesn’t care if it is proven wrong and will accept any outcome fairly if it is testable. Although sometimes it comes to the wrong conclusion and doubles down that the fact should be true so it prepares to write and publish a library to make it true
by BugsJustFindMe | 2025-09-04 03:53:13+00:00
> > In the United States, Child Protective Services estimated that 9 out of 1000 children are victims of child maltreatment.

That's in literally just the one year (2012) and just within cases reported to CPS that year. There's an absolutely massive difference between that and the actually relevant statistic which covers the span of childhood and also isn't limited to just CPS referrals which the CDC calls out as likely underrepresentative.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210204022708/https://www.cdc.g...

https://acf.gov/sites/default/files/documents/cm2012_0.pdf
by anon-3988 | 2025-09-04 03:53:34+00:00
> "what does it feel like to be blind from birth?" can you, a sighted person near-sighted though you may be for this example, even/ever comprehend it no matter how extensively described

I am saying that it is not possible. It is entirely possible that you can "see" but not comprehend anything, hence effectively being blind. Is my red your red? Is my hotness your hotness? Is the universe upside down? Is your 3d the same as my 3d? Even all of this imaginations and hypothesis is coming purely from my sense of experience.

I don't even know that you exist, you might simply be a figment of reality, there could be nothing behind this post. I wouldn't know.
by limagnolia | 2025-09-04 03:54:51+00:00
A few years ago, while I was in Japan visiting, they ran out of SUICA cards and visitors arriving couldn't get them. Left a lot of folks in a real bind. Fortunately I had already had cards for my family- and when we left we returned them for the deposit so they could be re-used, but they had a shortage for a few years! They should have used standard NFC, but being an early adopter has its downsides I guess.
by dangus | 2025-09-04 03:54:58+00:00
And relevant to the summary of this paper, LLM incremental improvement doesn't really seem to include the described wall.

If work produced by LLMs forever has to be checked for accuracy, the applicability will be limited.

This is perhaps analogous to all the "self-driving cars" that still have to be monitored by humans, and in that case the self-driving system might as well not exist at all.