MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by DisabledVeteran | 2025-10-14 11:39:31+00:00
Hi! Thank you for that information. I will point out that my project solves a lot of problems that are not resolved in Kottke's Underscore including the following:

- auto-syncing of your playlists to the server and locally (you can also download your playlists as .json or .txt)

- auto-shuffle is included

- complete support for mobile browsers

- the ability to play the next item (and previous item) without having to reload the page

- you are not limited to what you can listen to with an account

- you can share playlists with others

- access to my media player is 100% FREE, you do not have to pay $30yr - $600/yr as such with Kottke

Also, Underscore gives you a random song on reload whereas my project works exactly like an MP3 player and even leaves off at the exact spot on the item you were just listening to on reload. As stated on that page, it was a vibe coded Claude project which is most likely why they are missing so many features.

These are all things that would drive my crazy if they were not on an MP3 player which is why I made this solution.
by IX-103 | 2025-10-14 11:41:21+00:00
It's pretty good at Rust, but it doesn't understand locking. When I tried it. It just put a lock on everything and then didn't take care to make sure the locks were released as soon as possible. This severely limited the scalability of the system it produced.

But I guess it passed the tests it wrote so win? Though it didn't seem to understand why the test it wrote where the client used TLS and the server didn't wouldn't pass and required a lot of hand holding along the way.
by maplethorpe | 2025-10-14 11:41:34+00:00
By "shape" of the answer, what do you mean? I always visualized token prediction as a vector pointing off into some sort of cloud of related tokens, and if that's a fair way to visualize it, I could understand how you could say, before even emitting the first token of the answer, "we are pointing towards generally the correct place where the answer is found". But when a single token can make or break an answer, I still don't see how you can truly know whether the answer is correct until the very last token is reached. Because of this, I'm still not convinced hallucination can be stopped.

Can you help correct where I'm going wrong?
by 1718627440 | 2025-10-14 11:41:44+00:00
Well the issue I have is that I don't want more than one package manager on my system, and I prefer it to be from the OS, because I already need to trust this by necessity.

In my opinion having multiple package managers only complicates the system and causes more problems then it solves. In fact I think the package manager is the OS. I can swap out the kernel and all the userspace with it, but changing the package manager will be disruptive.
by gyomu | 2025-10-14 11:42:16+00:00
> How is roleplay with this object different than other toys?

Traditional role play is driven by the child and their imagination, and is essentially free of constraints. This is driven by the technology, follows a narrow script, and only allows for a single mode of engagement. Not saying that makes it good or bad, but they're clearly 2 different modes of play.

> If you get lost in a D&D game is that bad because the world isn't real

D&D is fundamentally a social activity (by definition, you can't play D&D alone)...

> Getting lost in Myst

...enjoying a piece of art built by a creative team with an artistic vision...

> making Doom WADs

... an open ended, constructive activity that exercises various skills and that gives you something to share/show for it.

Do you really not see how all of the above are fundamentally different from interacting with this black box that pretends to be something it's not (a human voice), is fundamentally extractive because of the technology it runs on (pay more for more time with it), not to get into the fact that a) the data gets siphoned off to a corporation with its own profit motives and b) there is absolutely 0 guarantee that the simulation can't go off rails?

> These 'LLM Role play' toys have hit a real fun spot with my kids.

Coca-Cola and McDonald's hit a real fun spot with kids as well. This on its own is a weak argument of value.

Clearly playing with this for a bit isn't going to be catastrophic for the child (although $99 for 60 minutes of play, with pay-for-more beyond that point, is a pretty darn steep asking price, if you ask me - and if the child enjoys it, it means they will be begging their parent to cough up more money for more time - a pretty poor success case for a toy. Normally once a toy is bought, infinite time can be spent with it with no further financial transaction).

Is it desirable to build a world where kids spend more time with this category of toy over others (in effect priming them for being an AI girlfriend/boyfriend app subscriber a few years down the line)?
by lproven | 2025-10-14 11:42:48+00:00
Money.

Containers were around for a decade or more on FreeBSD and Solaris. They let you divvy up expensive big Unix iron.

Same as VMs were around on mainframes from the late 1960s and expensive Unix RISC servers from the late 1980s.

Linux didn't need it because it was cheap. So Linux replaced that older more expensive stuff, on cheap COTS hardware: x86.

Once everything was commoditised and cost-cut, suddenly, efficiency started to matter, so VMware thrived and was copied and VMs were everywhere.

Then the low usage and inefficiency of resource sharing of VMs made them look expensive, so they started to get displaced by the cheaper easier tech of containers, making "it works on my machine, so let's ship my machine" scale to production.
by rudolph9 | 2025-10-14 11:43:42+00:00
Best I can tell, it’s resulting in less churn, which isn’t the same as work getting done faster. Maybe it’s a phenomenon unique to engineering, but what I’m observing isn’t necessarily work getting done faster — it’s that a smaller number of people are able to manage a much larger footprint because AI tools have gotten really good at relaying existing knowledge.

Little things that historically would get me stuck as I switch between database work, front-end, and infrastructure are no longer impeding me, because the AI tools are so good at conveying the existing knowledge of each discipline. So now, with a flat org, things just get done — there’s no need for sprint masters, knowledge-sharing sessions, or waiting on PR reviews. More people means more coordination, which ultimately takes time. In some situations that’s unavoidable, but in software engineering, most of the patterns, tools, and practices are well established; it’s just a matter of using them effectively without making your head explode.

I think this relay of knowledge is especially evident when I can’t tell an AI comment from a human one in a technical discussion — a kind of modern Turing Test, or Imitation Game.
by wongarsu | 2025-10-14 11:43:46+00:00
Computing hardware has always been on 3-5 year depreciation schedules. Not because it doesn't last, most of it will last decades, but because the next generation is so much better that your total costs for the next three years are lower if you buy new gear and throw the old stuff away.

And that's not just because of the rapid advances, but also because servers are expensive to run relative to their purchase price, and setup costs are cheap. For machining tools setup costs can be substantial, and the cost of keeping an old machine around is small
by benibela | 2025-10-14 11:43:53+00:00
I've received over 100 emails this year from these dubious mailing lists. And each mail I checked has a "X-Google-Group-Id" header. I hardly get the spam, but mostly notifications from strange email servers. "Thank you for your message," or "I'm currently out of the office," or "This email address is no longer valid.". and the servers respond to each other "Thank you for your message titled 'I am out of office'"...

a) Are they really sent by Google Groups?

b) Why does Google allow any person to create an google groups mailing list and add my email address to it without my consent?

c) Are there really still people who have configured their autoresponders to automatically respond to autoresponders through email lists in 2025?
by mitthrowaway2 | 2025-10-14 11:43:53+00:00
Right, but pertinent to the pencil example, there can indeed be a single company that makes everything from the brass ferrules and the machines that stamp them, to the rubber and the graphite and the wood, coordinating all of the people involved, with the market mechanisms only acting at the periphery. And often this ends up being a cheaper and more efficient way to coordinate the people involved in pencilmaking than rival ferrule-salesmen independently pitching their brass ferrules in a market, and soliciting unaffiliated day-laborers to run their presses, because of the significant savings on transaction costs.
by happymellon | 2025-10-14 11:44:20+00:00
There are two minds of thought.

1. Like yours, KDE is similar to Windows so it's less scary for new users.

2. KDE is similar to Windows so will confuse users when it doesn't run Windows software or doesn't quite behave in the same way. Macs don't look the same and people don't get scared or expect their Windows software to run on it.

I can see both arguments, and I've definitely seen internet complaints about both KDE and Gnome being either too similar or not similar enough and they are confused.
by scotty79 | 2025-10-14 11:44:30+00:00
Currently, after going through the wave of inflation, that swept the world and originated with overprinted pandemic dollars, euro is pretty much back to its historically more or less stable inflation of ~2% per year on average. It doesn't seem that significant, but sure, gold might also be a good indicator for trying to understand where we are. Although, you can't think of it as a unit of value no more than you can think about bitcoin this way. Gold also appreciates like crazy similarly to bitcoin. Especially now, when people feel like recession is basically ensured so they roll back their investments in more risky assets.
by Ukv | 2025-10-14 11:44:32+00:00
> in other words corporate interests cant develop a tech that works reliably so they take over a public chattel

To my understanding the idea of the white light is that self-driving cars will at some point be able to coordinate well enough between each other that standard traffic control at intersections would be unecessarily inefficient - not a crutch to assist self driving cars' reliability in some way (it'd be a more challenging navigation scenario than just waiting). Don't think it'd work out in practice any time soon, though.
by clarionbell | 2025-10-14 11:44:42+00:00
Reading this discussion, I can't help but feel a somewhat odd narrative:

"This is hypocrisy! How dare they do to chinese what they criticize chinese for?"

Followed by:

"They always did that. The west was always trying to subvert rules they didn't like!"

And finally:

"The west made these rules to work for them and them only!"

That repeats in various variations, over and over.

Here is my take. The only conclusion from this, is that everyone was dishonest, everyone is dishonest, and we should stop trying to even pretend that we could be more honest. All wrongs are equal, there is no difference between a dictator and inept president. There is no difference in intent, purpose or long term goal. Freedom is just a word, it doesn't exist. Truth is abstract concept, without meaning.

I don't know about you, but I don't think I can subscribe to that.

Instead, I would side with NL government on this. Because there is such a thing as lesser evil. Call me a hypocrite, if you'd like, but at least I'm consistent.
by tclancy | 2025-10-14 11:45:16+00:00
There is a really interesting generation gap issue in the replies to your comment. What I perceive as younger people are horrified at the idea of fifty year old tools while the older folks are thinking (I imagine) “if the tools have lasted that long they must be well-honed and very good”.

Of course, this could simply be the perspective of someone turning 50 this year.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-10-14 11:45:50+00:00
If a domestic industry is only surviving because of tariffs then it will lobby to keep the tariffs high and for the tariffs to be effective in sustaining the domestic industry they'll have to be enough to deter domestic consumers from patronizing foreign competitors when domestic producers are lacking. That means domestic customers get screwed and domestic companies don't have the incentive to improve as long as they can successfully lobby for continued tariffs.

If you only provide subsidies then consumer prices go down rather than up because the mechanism of operation is for the subsidies to make the domestic supplier more attractive rather than for tariffs to make foreign suppliers less attractive. Meanwhile the subsidy is paid by the government and then the legislators will be trying to keep it down rather than raise it because it reduces the money they have to spend on other things rather than increasing tariffs which do the opposite.
by kakacik | 2025-10-14 11:45:58+00:00
> The one thing that could break the dam is a public release of the Epstein files.

It won't. Grabbing pussies, bribes, clear lies everywhere, cheating, felonies re taxes, attempt to overthrow government. Nothing, absolutely nothing.

Some added hebephilia charges wont convince anybody to change their mind. And that relationship is pretty clear, they were very good friends.

What you can do - start calling staunch supporters pedophilles supporters. You family, friends, colleagues, en masse. Change may come from the bottom, its still a toxic word that nobody wants to be associated with, even transitively. Nothing changes from the top.

I am not holding my breath, this is new bottom since we abandoned kings and warlords.
by whitehexagon | 2025-10-14 11:46:09+00:00
I think my 2001 MBP M1 Pro is ~200GB/s memory bandwidth, but it handles qwen3:32b quite nicely, albeit maxed out at ~70W.

I somehow expected the Spark to be the 'God in a Box' moment for local AI, but it feels like they went for trying to sell multiple units instead.

I'd be more tempted by a 2nd hand 128GB M2 ultra at ~800GB/s but the prices here are still high, and I'm not sure the Spark is going to convince people to part with those, unless we see some M5 glutenous RAM boxes soon. An easy way for Apple to catch up again.
by Rochus | 2025-10-14 11:46:22+00:00
Niklaus Wirth designed Pascal (1970) with explicit pedagogical and human factors goals documented in his seminal paper "On the Design of Programming Languages". Wirth explicitly stated his belief that "insights gained from educational considerations could benefit programming language design in general, and that the simplicity and clarity he was striving for should be a guiding principle for all language design, serving equally pedagogical and development purposes". But - as with Ada - I'm not aware of any notable human factors engineering studies to validate design decisions.

Also Alan Kay and the Xerox PARC team designed Smalltalk (as Papert did before with Logo) with profound human-centered considerations, and they even "tested" their early concepts with children.

Also some other languages explicitly state human-centered design goals (e.g. Python, Eiffel), but as with Pascal or Ada the approach was more based on expert judgment, formal analysis, and established principles, not practical studies.
by andsoitis | 2025-10-14 11:46:55+00:00
China’s foreign investment framework is formally open (especially after WTO accession), but:

- Certain industries are restricted or prohibited for foreign investors.

- The “Negative List for Foreign Investment” explicitly bans or limits foreign participation in many areas (e.g., media, education, data services, telecoms, mining). - Some sectors require a Chinese joint venture (you can’t have 100% ownership).

So even though the law allows foreign entry, policy barriers and regulatory discretion make it hard in practice.

To use your example of Volkswagen, their ownership in China is structured around several joint ventures, where it shares ownership with Chinese companies like SAIC Motor, FAW Group, and JAC Group. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAIC_Volkswagen
by oftenwrong | 2025-10-14 11:47:09+00:00
It's less complicated than you might think. A Java Development Kit (JDK) is a filesystem directory, and includes everything necessary to run a Java program. Most of the mysterious installers and version managers are managing a collection of these JDK directories in some fixed location on disk. You can download a JDK directory (tarball), and use the `java` binary within it directly.

There is also a convention of using the `JAVA_HOME` environment variable to allow tools to locate the correct JDK directory. For example, in a unix shell, add `$JAVA_HOME/bin` to your `PATH`.
by EasyMark | 2025-10-14 11:47:11+00:00
that's not a problem if the people who will be interacting with fork lifts stay in designated areas as do the forklift operators. Nothing is ever going to b 0% chance of an accident but simply adhering to basic rules should keep people on an assembly line listening to spotify from taking a forklift to the knee. Have you ever worked on a factory floor at all? Sure some positions would be impossible but not for 80-90% of them.
by tclancy | 2025-10-14 11:47:40+00:00
Well, I would suggest if a thing is around that long and still does the job, it’s close enough to done. Something going missing in the pushback here is this is a physical machine shop. My grandfather was the shop foreman for a jewelry maker and he was intensely proud of the fact he was the one person on the floor who still had all his fingers. Intact. Different jobs have different ideas about good Developer Experience.
by lxgr | 2025-10-14 11:47:41+00:00
Really depends on what the satellite does, and even for purely "dumb pipe" satellites you'll need some telemetry for stationkeeping, repositioning etc.

Practically, you'll also want to be able to reconfigure spot beam to backhaul mappings or even cross-connect some spot beams to cut satphone-to-satphone voice latency in half etc.

That's not even considering constellations like Iridium that do actual packet switching in space.
by Zababa | 2025-10-14 11:47:47+00:00
Most of the issues you listed are moral and not technical. Especially "power hungriness in a time where humanity should look at how to decrease emissions", this may be what you think humanity should do but that is just that, what you think.

I derive a lot of business value from them, many of my colleagues do too. Many programmers that were good at writing code by hand are having lots of success with them, for example Thorsten Ball, Simon Willison, Mitchell Hashimoto. A recent example from Mitchell Hashimoto: https://mitchellh.com/writing/non-trivial-vibing.

>Its puzzling to me how people actually think this is a net benefit to humanity.

I've used them personally to quickly spin up a microblog where I could post my travel pictures and thoughts. The idea of making the interface like twitter (since that's what I use and know) was from me, not wanting to expose my family and friends to any specific predatory platform like twitter, instagram, etc was also from me, supabase as the backend was from a colleague (helped a lot!), the code was all Claude. The result is that they were able to enjoy my website, including my grandparents that just had to paste an URL on the website. I like to think of it a a perhaps very small but net benefit for a very small part of humanity.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-10-14 11:47:49+00:00
> it shows that even if models are plateauing,

The models aren't plateauing (see below).

> invention of MCP was a lot more instrumental [...] than model upgrades proper

Not clear. The folks at hf showed that a minimal "agentic loop" in 100 LoC [1] that gives the agent "just bash access" still got very close to SotA with all the bells and whistles (and surpassed last year models w/ handcrafted harnesses).

[1] - https://github.com/SWE-agent/mini-swe-agent
by redox99 | 2025-10-14 11:48:41+00:00
It's something I heard through the grapevine. But there's only a few big enough competitive games where toxicity is such a big deal, so it's not hard to guess.

Character level helps with players disguising insults.

Compute wise it's basically the same, but multiply token count by 4. Which doesn't really matter for short chat in video games.
by em-bee | 2025-10-14 11:48:59+00:00
with the same argument i used to reject syntax highlighting in general. all the information should already be in the code. if i can't read that, then the syntax of the language is bad. syntax highlighting would just make me lazy. i have since decided that i like being lazy so i do like to use it, but you make a good point, if the use of colors makes you not write something in the code that you would otherwise, then that's not good. i can see that with syntax highlighting too, where the colors help me read code even if it is badly formatted, so i am less inclined to format for readability.
by wvbdmp | 2025-10-14 11:49:24+00:00
I keep telling people they’re not going to get owned just by booting a Windows 10 machine after october 14. Most people visit Google, Amazon, Youtube, Pinterest and Netflix and not much else. If you run sketchy stuff and click sketchy links, you could get owned under support, too. And if the NSA wants to spy on you specifically, Windows 11 isn’t going to stop them. The most pressing (non-compliance) reason to upgrade from Windows 10 is always just going to be that newer software versions may stop working. Perhaps most importantly games and Microsoft’s own stuff.
Show HN: 16-year-old built a NASA-grade AI ensemble detecting real exoplanets
by infernusreal | 2025-10-14 11:49:51+00:00
I’m a 16-year-old independent engineer from Pakistan. I built *Council of Lords*, an AI ensemble that detected every confirmed exoplanet in the real Kepler & TESS datasets with zero false positives.

It was my NASA Space Apps 2025 submission — now I’m releasing the public version for testing, feedback, and collaboration.

*Live Project:* https://www.infernusreal.com/projects/council-of-lords *Join our R&D Discord:* https://discord.gg/n7KAd8MCc2

Would love thoughts from AI engineers, astrophysicists, and founders on scaling, visualization, and real-time detection pipelines.
by crossroadsguy | 2025-10-14 11:50:13+00:00
I did all of this and it has served me well — as far as distractions and unwanted comms go. The problem is, now whenever I get that isolated spam (still happens daily or few times a week — just a little) it gets on my nerves, almost like a rage. Because it feels like a violation. For others I see, they don’t even register it.
by ponkpanda | 2025-10-14 11:50:24+00:00
Except FPGA chips/boards aren't free from malware either: https://www.iacr.org/archive/ches2012/74280019/74280019.pdf

Nor will you be immune from AMD Vitis/Vivado sideloading crap into the bitstream.

Sadly, you have to fab your own chips using sovereign facilities if you want security. Individuals simply cannot access genuinely high assurance product and there's no major government in the world with the slightest interest in changing their stance on this policy. There are simply too many governments long on SIGINT to go down such a route.
by fuzztester | 2025-10-14 11:51:29+00:00
Perl is one obvious one, as anyone will realize, if one has read some of Larry Wall's articles about his (and later the team's) motivations for the (syntax and semantics) design decisions they made about the language. For example, in his annual State of The Onion talks, he often discusses these points.

They may not have used standards such as the gp comment mentions, but they definitely considered human factors a lot.

E.g. TIMTOWTDI - There Is More Than One Way To Do It.

But that's not the only area in which they applied it.