MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by simondotau | 2025-10-18 12:05:21+00:00
> Though I disagree that a toaster can't toast bread.

If a toaster can toast bread, then an Allen key can assemble furniture. Both of them can do these tasks in collaboration with a human. This human supplies the executive decision-making (what when where etc), supplies the tool with compatible parts (bread or bolts) and supplies the motivating force (mains electricity or rotational torque).

The only difference is that it's more obviously ridiculous when it's an inanimate hunk of bent metal. Wait no, that could mean either of them. I mean the Allen key.

> Let's take a step back. At what point is it me making the toast and not the toaster?

I don't know exactly where that point is, but it's certainly not when the toaster is making zero decisions. It begins to be a valid question if you are positing a hypothetical "smart toaster" which has sensors and software capable of achieving toasting perfection regardless of bread or atmospheric variables.

> Is it because I have to press the level? We can automate that.

You might even say automatic beyond belief.
by KPGv2 | 2025-10-18 12:05:58+00:00
If the population shrinks, their capital isn't worth much. Meta, Twitter, etc. all lose value when the user base shrinks, we've literally seen it already. If the population gets smaller by design, naturally this same thing would happen.

Amazon, Uber, owners of apartment complexes, commercial real estate titans, Fox News, etc. What do their powerful owners/managers do? Rupert Murdoch's family doesn't think "if only our viewership dropped by 90% we'd really be doing great!"

Elites are where they are because the current system has benefited them. They wouldn't want to risk that by shaking things up so dramatically.
by somenameforme | 2025-10-18 12:07:19+00:00
The article was specifically and explicitly speaking of potential benefits, not present. The problem with systems made up of people is that you can't just have turtles all the way down. Let's say that retaining sexually explicit media of surveilled individuals is indeed grounds for instant dismissal. Who enforces this? Okay, the person above the people doing surveillance, who's somehow going through the entirety of said surveillance. And what happens when he is the one saving such media? Is it then overviewed by another person above him? And so on.

You can't really have endless redundancies and, at scale, this becomes even more true where the vast amount of data and processing becomes ever less viable to filter. And when you had 24/7 footage of everybody at every moment, that takes scale and ups it to an inconceivably vast level. More generally I think removing thieves from society, with extreme prejudice, is a far more pleasant path forward for everybody than treating everybody like a potential thief.
by il_nets | 2025-10-18 12:07:40+00:00
Hi HN, I'm Sten, one of the creators.

We built this because we wanted 3D experiences without needing a VR headset. The approach: use your webcam to track where you're looking, and adjust the 3D perspective to match.

Demo: https://portality.io/dragoncourtyard/ (Allow camera, move your head left/right)

It creates motion parallax - the same depth cue your brain uses when you look around a real object. Feels like looking through a window instead of at a flat screen.

Known limitations: - Only works for one viewer at a time - Needs decent lighting - Currently WebGL only

We're still figuring out where this is genuinely useful vs just a novelty. Gaming seems promising, also exploring education and product visualization.

Happy to answer questions!
by jasode | 2025-10-18 12:09:02+00:00
>I am also considering using SIP (VOIP) numbers for maximum privacy,

The problem is many services out there using SMS for authentication codes blacklist VOIP numbers and only accept real phone numbers tied to a SIM/eSIM. E.g. In USA, the Social Security website doesn't accept VOIP numbers to verify logins. Also, some software purchase validation schemes (i.e. using phones as a form of "DRM" restriction) reject VOIP numbers.

In the early 2000s when VOIP started being offered to consumers, nobody checked for "is it VOIP?" so didn't rejected them. It was as good as a real phone number. But that has changed and more and more places will not accept them. A lot of financial services (trading platforms and KYC reject VOIP numbers).
by TeMPOraL | 2025-10-18 12:09:21+00:00
> Ok but you don’t look at every night sky or every sunset and say “wow that’s beautiful

Exactly - because it's a semantic shorthand. Sunsets are fucking boring, ugly, transient phenomena. Watching a sunset while feeling safe and relaxed, maybe in a company of your love interest who's just as high on endorphins as you are right now - this is what feels beautiful. This is a sunset that's beautiful. But the sunset is just a pointer to the experience, something others can relate to, not actually the source of it.
by microtonal | 2025-10-18 12:10:03+00:00
Or if you want to make them tech capable, another possibility is to give them a cheap Mac (apparently Apple is going to release a MacBook with an A-series SoC soon). You can open a terminal and show how it works, they can explore the filesystem with Finder, but when they need to do school work, they also have access to good DTP applications (Swift Publisher is really affordable and nice for kids), Affinity Designer/Photo, etc.

Our daughter initially had a Linux machine (also for the reasons you outlined). But she quickly ran into issues when doing work for school, collaborating with other kids, etc. So we gave her a Mac Mini M1. It was not very expensive, she can run many common apps (MS Office is a fact of life) and it's more secure (app sandboxing, sealed system volume, etc). But many of her skills are be transferrable to Linux if needed (in contrast to using an iPad or Android tablet).
by KronisLV | 2025-10-18 12:10:42+00:00
> Supposedly the performance of Owen-coder is comparable to the likes of Sonnet4. If I invest in a homelab that can host something like Qwen3 I'll recoup my costs in about 20 months without having to rely on Anthropic.

Presently, look up the Cerebra Coder subscription. It’s cut down my reliance on paying per token by about 80% due to the model being good for most development tasks and the rate limits are such that I never hit them per day, alongside being faster than anything else out there.

Lots of folks also just explore new models on OpenRouter as they come on, albeit they don’t seem to have caching support so it can get expensive.

Aside from that, self-hosting can be worth it but you need lots of memory and beefy compute to have good performance without quantizing things super far. There’s a really big difference between the 30B and 480B versions of Qwen Coder and while the smaller models are getting better, feels like there are diminishing returns there.
by potato3732842 | 2025-10-18 12:11:18+00:00
>The general fear level of the local population seems to be the biggest factor in all of this. I went from a place where people would do the quadruple check car lock routine when walking into the grocery store, to a place where many leave their unlocked vehicles idling in the parking lot. I don't even think about locking my doors at home now. It almost feels silly to do it around here. It's amazing the difference that ~65 miles can make.

It's not even that. The real shitholes full o' crime have scant cameras because you don't need them for "real" investigations of "real" crime. You only need a traffic cameras to establish what you need for a murder investigation or whatever, pair the images with cell time stamps and presto.

Cameras are for making it cheap to enforce the long tail of petty deviance that doesn't actually matter. Karen calls up bitching that some guy did something, normally that would be discarded because it's not worth it. But with a camera system they can query it and maybe fine the guy from their desks. They're not using the system to go after someone for stealing from parked cars except perhaps to walk back in time and add charges to someone they already got (same reason they ask for serial numbers of electronics and the like when doing theft investigations they won't follow up on).
by scotty79 | 2025-10-18 12:12:29+00:00
Program will evolve and documentation will go out of date before it's gonna be read a single time. So a variant of 1)

Personally I don't write documentation because I don't read documentation. It's too often pure garbage, less reliable than 2023 LLM output so I just skip it and go to the source code.

I would read documentation written for AI because I know for a fact that it describes the thing accurately enough if the system works. Human addressed documentation almost always has no verification.
by canto | 2025-10-18 12:14:07+00:00
OVH sells bare metal servers with 6 cores 32 gb ram and 512 nvme disks in raid 1 (!) with *unmetered* 1gbps line, for 70 bucks. 70 united states dollars.

How much of AWS EC2 you can get out for 70 bucks?

Now, this OVH still makes money on it. They make money, despite these servers require actual human being to put them into datacenter, plug network, power, etc. You are literally getting the OG RAW POWER and a slice of a datacenter for 70 bucks and they still make money.

How much amazon makes on every single silly vm that they charge for compute, storage, network, ip, network again, oh and credits, cpu credits, startup credits, whatever credits, oh an api calls ;]
by TeMPOraL | 2025-10-18 12:14:27+00:00
FWIW, Karpathy literally says, multiple times, that he thinks we never left the exponential - that all human progress over last 4+ centuries averages out to that smooth ~2% growth rate exponential curve, that electricity and computing and AI are just ways we keep it going, and we'll continue on that curve for the time being.

It's the major point of contention between him and the host (who thinks growth rate will increase).
by whazor | 2025-10-18 12:15:25+00:00
You can have small design up front as-well. You write down one or two pages, let the LLM generate code and tests. Keep iterating. If you believe in 100% LLM coded applications, then it makes sense to manage the English input as specifications. Instead of throwing the prompts away, you neatly organize them. Plus you can add additional constraints when the AI does something you don't like.

But I don't trust LLMs to program anything critical, and only do sandbox/tests/demo's. Things where code quality is less important.
by zmmmmm | 2025-10-18 12:15:40+00:00
It's good to see experts with similar scepticism about agents that I have. I don't doubt they will be useful in some settings, but they lean into all the current weak points of large language models and make them worse. Security, reproducibility, hallucinations, bias, etc etc.

With all these issues already being hard to manage, I just don't believe businesses are going to delegate processes to autonomous agents in a widespread manner. Literally anything that matters is going to get implemented in a crontrolled workflow that strips out all the autonomy with human checkpoint at every step. They may call them agents just to sound cool but it will be completely controlled.

Software people are all fooled by what is really a special case around software development : outcomes are highly verifiable and mistakes (in development) are almost free. This is just not the case out there in the real world.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-10-18 12:15:42+00:00
> That's the crucial part. Lots of people who do business in other countries either want to, or need to, visit the US from time to time.

That doesn't do them any good because the set of people who never intend to set foot in the US is still vastly larger than the number of people required to set up an offshore internet casino.

> On the other hand, I'm not particularly concerned about some tyrannical regime on the other side of the world that doesn't like the kind of content I have on my site. I'll postpone the research until I actually need to fly over their airspace or something.

Most people can't even name every country, much less tell you what their laws are. And then you'll be breaking them without even knowing, and if that's regarded as a legitimate reason to incarcerate someone then what are you supposed to do? Suppose you have to choose between a layover in Egypt or in Hungary, do you even know which one's laws you might have broken at any point in your life?

> Where does the UK currently stand in the spectrum between "country that everyone wants to visit sometime" and "country that nobody gives a fuck about"? It used to be firmly on the former side, but it seems to be drifting away to the latter side every year.

The problem is if you get on a flight to Paris you have no control over whether it might get diverted to London.
by ThreatSystems | 2025-10-18 12:16:11+00:00
Cognisant US pricing for the HP Z Book Ultra was astronomical, within the EU it's on par with standard laptops and to good effect. The only regret I have is ordering on release day and not wanting to wait for the 128gb version; but battery life and power has remain unmatched to any of the pretty large workloads I have thrown at it!

Outside of laptops, Beelink and co. are making NUCs with them which are relatively affordable!

I do agree, the scarcity has limited their opportunity to assess the growth opportunity.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-10-18 12:16:33+00:00
I was unable to get very far into Gravity's Rainbow, although I wanted to. I was younger then and less patient—perhaps I should pick it up again.

For anyone wondering about Pynchon, I can say that The Crying of Lot 49 I did find approachable and it has made quite a lasting impression. It's not too long or too dense. And you may find a reference or two that have been subsumed by our greater culture. (As an example, I understood the reference when I saw Radiohead's fan club was called W.A.S.T.E..)
by microtonal | 2025-10-18 12:16:58+00:00
MacOS treats the user like a child

Sorry, but this is just nonsense. I used Linux on the desktop from 1994 to 2007 (lucky enough to start using Linux when I was 12). I have used macOS as my main desktop since 2007, but I also have a ThinkPad with NixOS and a Linux workstation (currently used headless though). I feel like I'm able to make a fair comparison.

macOS for me feels like a much more mature version of the Linux desktop, on more mature hardware, with applications that are not available on Linux. macOS is rarely getting in my way. The primary reason I also use Linux (and contribute in various ways) is that I find FLOSS morally preferable and hope for that reason that the Linux desktop wins in the long term.

Though having been around for many 'Linux is soon ready for the desktop'-moments since around 2000 (anyone remember Corel Linux?), I don't hold high hopes. As long as basic things like waking sleep results in a kernel panic because waking your Thunderbolt display puts the kernel in a weird state (and the 999 other paper cuts), Linux on the desktop won't happen.
by dogmayor | 2025-10-18 12:17:15+00:00
Short-term deflation can be beneficial for some, but sustained deflation leads to a downward spiral that harms all. A lower cost of goods is great until it causes reduced aggregate investment and demand, which in turn can lead to wage reductions and layoffs. It's also harder to navigate out of a deflationary environment. Deflation isn't desirable in the long run.
by potato3732842 | 2025-10-18 12:17:22+00:00
> Why was this person upset with kids selling candies?

Because they didn't "follow the rules" or whatever. You see this personality type all up and down HN but usually not so extreme as to call the city about a lemonade stand or whatever.

The city clerk is also the same type of evil. They should have told that person there weren't resources available to enforce or some other lie.
by chao- | 2025-10-18 12:18:18+00:00
There is a bit of personal preference in what "applies to a number", but I see what you mean.

As a slight correction, a block is indeed an object! They are received by methods as an instance of the Proc class:

def inspects_block(&block) puts block puts block.class end inspects_block { "foo" } # => #<Proc:0x0000000000000000> # => Proc

You can even add a 'repeat' method to these in the way that you specified, although you will need to add '->' to declare the block (as a lambda, which is also just an instance of Proc) before you call #repeat on it:

class Proc def repeat(n) n.times { self.call } end end ->{ puts("foo") }.repeat(3) # => foo # => foo # => foo
by subscribed | 2025-10-18 12:18:46+00:00
Desolate rolling hills devoid of life (except sheep).

This is heartbreaking for anyone who saw similar countryside in literally any other country. Teeming with life, diverse, high in live and potential.

Take a look here https://www.mossy.earth/rewilding-knowledge/a-review-of-geor... and maybe go visit Balkans for the similar but alive environments.
by randallsquared | 2025-10-18 12:19:06+00:00
> Peak oil was never about "oil runing out",

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil will help, here.

Until recently when it had to be redefined to remain a relevant concern, this was the point of "peak oil": that we would run out of reserves that could be economically extracted for fuel usage, due to rising costs for extraction of increasingly marginal sources. However, given that proven (economically extractable) reserves have steadily trended higher, "peak oil" is now about when other energy source costs fall enough to make oil uneconomical by comparison, which is not politically concerning except to fossil fuel industry lobbyists.

This kind of concept creep is very common where technology or science reduces problems that were previously seized upon by political activists.
by man8alexd | 2025-10-18 12:19:28+00:00
The irony is that the majority of docker images are built from the same packages and break all the same. But in your eyes, `apt install package` is bad but `RUN apt install package` inside a `Dockerfile` somehow makes it reproducible. I suspect you are confusing "having an artifact" with "reproducible builds" [1]. Having a docker image as an artifact is the same as having tar/zip with your application and its dependencies or having a filesystem snapshot or having VM image like AMI/OVM/VMDK. You can even have a deb file with all your dependencies vendored in.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reproducible_builds
by itsme0000 | 2025-10-18 12:20:18+00:00
Market forces will ensure this system isn’t utilized regardless of how good it is. Ruby is simply to similar to Python to consider training people solely in that.

It’s a hard reality because I’m sure Ruby is better according to some criteria, but be realistic their share of the market is going to shrink until it’s not really an option of most large companies.

I know people will disagree with me, but I wish I knew earlier in my Carr how little this sort of thing matters.
by gilfoy | 2025-10-18 12:20:29+00:00
One time the city wanted my neighbor to pay for a new trash can, but I had a video of the trash truck swallowing it lol.

It’s mostly just convenience though. Neighbor kid rings my doorbell and it tells me who is there. Tells me when I have a package. Helped me recover my cat that escaped. One time a huge buck came on my porch to eat some flowers that was pretty cool, bro had no business being that far from the woods lol. My kids can talk to their friends through it if they ring the bell when we’re not home.
by tannhaeuser | 2025-10-18 12:20:32+00:00
Unfortunately the Linux desktop is in its worst state it has been since two decades with containerized apps/frameworks/browsers updating when they feel like it all the time and the related unsolvable permission and layering problems on top of the usual WLAN, touchpad, and power management issues unsolved for nearly 30 years as a growing number of second system effect frameworks bring new issues with ungooglable solutions so Linux users themselves flock to Mac OS.
by Yohvee7u | 2025-10-18 12:21:08+00:00
Ah, the issues you mentioned are the top 3 nvidia issues :P

- wake from suspend - laptop power consumption - poor wayland support - sudden desktop restarts - hidpi, external monitors, virtualization

Nvidia's proprietary crap has always worked badly, the re-implement everything and put all their development effort into NIH syndrome instead of playing along with the already existing open source stack.
by constantcrying | 2025-10-18 12:22:20+00:00
>If worked fine in the em early 2000 for cars with service plans or recalls.

If you are telling customers today that their car will not receive updates or that the only way to receive updates is with an appointment at a dealership, they will not buy your car.

It is not the early 2000s anymore, customers expect and want software support for their vehicles.
by sixthDot | 2025-10-18 12:22:26+00:00
I cannot reply on the blog but to answer the author about other languages, here is the D version, using a single template:

auto ref T max(T)(auto ref T u, auto ref T v) => u > v ? u : v; void main() { int a = 1; int b = 0; int x; static assert(__traits(compiles, &max(a,b) == &a), "should have selected the lvalue version"); static assert(__traits(compiles, x = max(1,0)), "should have selected the rvalue version"); static assert(__traits(compiles, x = max(a,0)), "should have selected the rvalue version"); static assert(__traits(compiles, x = max(1,0)), "should have selected the rvalue version"); }
by dep_b | 2025-10-18 12:22:37+00:00
XLR is balanced, meaning you can transport a voltage accurately over a longer distance.

There is a mirror voltage on a second line that is mirrored and summed with the first again at the receiving end.

All noise picked up underway will affect both lines fairly equally, so the reversed line has the same noise as the normal line.

The noise will be inverted and summed with the regular noise, theoretically nullifying it completely.
by mrob | 2025-10-18 12:22:39+00:00
Those synths are famous and expensive because they're an important part of musical culture. E.g. if you want to make dance music it's likely you want 808- or 909-style drums. You could use samples or software simulations, but I think the hardware UI makes a difference. It's easier to follow the idioms of a genre when you're working in a similar way to the originators of the genre.
by tjpnz | 2025-10-18 12:24:01+00:00
Trusting your livelihood to platforms like YouTube already puts you in an incredibly precarious position, even if you are playing by the rules. The Adocalypse comes to mind, as do random algorithm changes and flawed automation leading to videos getting demonetized. It's no wonder most of the creators I follow are hedging their bets on paid promotions and crowd funding platforms (which all have the same problems). I couldn't imagine the stress in relying on all that to pay off a mortgage.