MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tracker1 | 2025-10-15 16:09:59+00:00
I think the hardest part for me, is getting used to using CMD vs CTRL for cut-copy-paste, then when I start to get used to it... in a terminal, it breaks me out with a different key for Ctrl+C. I got used to Ctrl+Shift for terminals in Linux (and Windows) for cut-copy-paste, etc.

It may seem like a small thing, but when you have literal decades of muscle memory working against you, it's not that small.
Ask HN: How do I get excited about technology again?
by qwertyastronaut | 2025-10-15 16:10:06+00:00
I feel like 2013-2020 was a golden age of tech excitement. I loved learning, and every week there was a new exciting product or technology that was going to change the world for the better. When you worked in tech, people thought it was kinda cool and respectable.

Cut to the LLM age and… It seems like most new developments just increase the size of the Dead Internet. Tech influencers are gleefully espousing mass layoffs and the biggest ladder pull in history.

Socially, I’ve noticed a big dropoff in consumer excitement and admiration for technology. I feel like developers are back to being perceived as sociopathic nerds after the brief rockstar era, since developers are the heralds of the “AI will take your job and that’s a good thing i promise” era. LLMs are supposed to make labor cheaper, but goods and services aren’t any less expensive.

Tech innovation today seems to be all about making API calls to ChatGPT and eliminating those pesky white collar jobs. The whole field seems like it’s been flattened overnight.

Can you direct me to something that’s fun to learn and explore that isn’t just begging the stochastic genie to format my JSON?
by catapart | 2025-10-15 16:10:46+00:00
I can't figure out why people who write articles like this seem to be oblivious to the very practical argument about the US second amendment that goes along the lines of "guns don't kill people, people do".

To everyone who wants to pose an argument like this, please consider: We have already internalized that very simple, and very thoughtless argument, and have moved past that facile framing to start asking the more pressing questions like "what are we going to do about how humans are using X to perpetrate Y?"

We don't need the extra step of you making us reframe the question to fit your exact criteria of "good question". "AI is going to kill us" can be understood as: "Humans are going to use AI to kill us". The fact that you want to misunderstand it as a more childish argument is your own failings with semiotics. It's so blatantly silly that in most cases, it's less degrading to assume that you are purposefully trying to misdirect the argument than to assume you actually believe people are worried about the agency of inanimate objects. But then you go and write a whole article to preen "logical" at us about how it's just that "no one's asking the right questions!", which kind of makes it hard to imagine that you don't actually think so little of people.
by racktash | 2025-10-15 16:10:57+00:00
I get where you're coming from. I would be a bit annoyed if, for instance, taxpayer money went to artists painting white-paint-on-white-canvas non-paintings or recording silence as a form of music. The trouble is that it's hard to measure / assess "merit" beyond extreme cases like I've listed. To illustrate: there are plenty of movies that were panned by critics of their time only to later become "cult classics".
by OptionOfT | 2025-10-15 16:11:11+00:00
Isn't

> Now, imagine your request is actuator.rotate(90).

a good example of something that is not idempotent? As it is based on its current position. Actually idempotent would be: `actuator.rotateTo(Degrees(90))` with a predefined frame of reference, or a frame of reference that you can include in the request.

Like the difference between a servomotor vs stepper motor.
by Aerroon | 2025-10-15 16:11:27+00:00
>I'm not buying the whole "AI has no agency" line either; this might be true for now, but this is already being circumvented with current LLMs (by giving them web access etc).

They don't have agency, because they don't have persistent state. They're like a function that you can query and get an answer. During that answer the LLM has state, but once it's done the state is gone.

Humans (and other "agents") have persistent state. If we learn something, we can commit it to long-term memory and have it affect our actions. This can enable us to work towards long-term goals. Modern LLMs don't have this. You can fake long-term memory with large context windows and feed the old context back to it, but it doesn't appear to work (and scale) the same way living things do.
by eptcyka | 2025-10-15 16:12:07+00:00
The ability to run Xcode? Maybe run Linux in a VM (no, emulation does not count). Maybe run nvim with python/node/rust/go/gcc toolchains on the iPad? How about Wireshark? I really liked using Nixdroid on my Pixel, why can't I have something similar on iOS/iPadOS?

Android can run Android Studio. Why can't an iPad run Xcode?
by sigmoid10 | 2025-10-15 16:12:12+00:00
None of those methods are even remotely reliable for filtering out bad code. See e.g. this excellent write up on how many methods there are to infect popular repos and bypass common security approaches [1] (including Github "screening"). The only thing that works nowadays is sandbox, sandbox, sandbox. Assume everything may be compromised one day. The only way to prevent your entire company (or personal life) from being taken over is if that system was never connected to anything it didn't absolutely require for running. That includes network access. And regarding separation, even docker is not really safe [2]. VM separation is a bit better. Bare metal is best.

[1] https://david-gilbertson.medium.com/im-harvesting-credit-car...

[2] https://blog.qwertysecurity.com/Articles/blog3.html
by MangoToupe | 2025-10-15 16:12:15+00:00
> Because it is evidently always the fault of Americans?

It is when we willingly took hegemony of the world economy for the last 80 years, and we at least pretend like this is representative of the interests of americans.

The fact that we clearly haven't been able to implement at least common-sense regulation of use of plastics in consumer industries is a pretty clear indication we are to blame, IMO. We haven't even been able to make it less shitty of a consumer experience, let alone pretend to care about health.
by masklinn | 2025-10-15 16:12:16+00:00
https://www.apple.com/mac/compare/?modelList=MacBook-Air-M4,...

- m4 -> m5, same core number and distribution, "neural accelerators", higher memory bandwidth

- max storage increased from 2 to 4TB (and probably an extra kidney in price)

Everything else is strictly identical.

The marketing blurb claims 2~3x the performances of the M4 for AI stuff (I assume that's the neural accelerators), 20% for CPU tasks (compiling), 40~80% for GPU tasks (gaming and 3D rendering).
by random3 | 2025-10-15 16:12:44+00:00
I'm not really following through your reasoning. How is breaking the usefulness helping the revenue stream?

Assuming you're an engineer, have you thought about what handing over a "window" from one computer to another actually entails? CRIU can do checkpoint/restore at container/process level - but you actually want it to run on both, no? So you need to split off just the I/O, but at the OS-level per window.

Apple has been doing a lot of work in this direction and they have stuff that actually work (like video calls and to some extent windows. These are processes running on different OS-es with a matrix of hundreds of devices.

It's not something you vibe code over the weekend.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-10-15 16:12:54+00:00
This begs the question of why Rust evangelists keep targeting existing projects instead of focusing writing new, better software. In theory these languages should allow software developers to write programs that they would not, or could not, attempt using languages without automatic memory management

Instead what I see _mostly_ is re-writes and proposed re-writes of existing software, often software that has no networking functions, and/or relatively small, easily audited software that IMHO poses little risk of memory-related bugs

This is concerning to me as an end-user who builds their software from source because the effects on compilation, e.g., increased resource requirements, increased interdependencies, increased program size, decreased compilation speed, are significant
by pmarreck | 2025-10-15 16:12:59+00:00
I would like Linux to be "the" home for gaming. With those other 2 OS'es as "also supported on"'s.

I think it's almost necessary that gaming's home needs to be on an open-source OS, where people make things work because they love to, not (necessarily) because they're paid to.

I have already encountered games that no longer run on Windows but run fine (great even) on Proton.

I wish Apple wasn't locking down their PC platform so much. I mean, Asahi exists, but they are given ZERO assistance except for what is essentially "Apple holding the door open for that and similar projects". Which can close at any time. Which is a serious problem (reminiscent of the ZFS situation with Oracle).
by Timsky | 2025-10-15 16:13:00+00:00
> We don’t need to worry about AI itself, we need to be concerned about what “humans + AI” will do. Humans will do what they’ve always tried to do—gain power, enslave, kill, control, exploit, cheat, or just be lazy and avoid the hard work—but now with new abilities that we couldn’t have dreamed of.

Starting with the AI itself: LLMs sold as AI are the greatest mislead. Text generation using Markov chains is not particularly intelligent, even when it is looped back through itself a thousand times and appears alike an intelligent conversation. What is actually being sold is an enormous matrix trained on terabytes of human-written, high-quality texts, obviously in violation of all imaginable copyright laws.

Here is a gedanken experiment to test if an AI has any intelligence: until the machine starts to determine and resolve contradictions in its own outputs w/o human help, one can sleep tight. Human language is a fuzzy thing that is not quite suitable for a non-contradictory description of the world. Building such a machine would require resolving all the contradictions humanity has ever faced in a unified way. Before it happens, humanity will be drowned in low-quality generated LLM output.
by aydyn | 2025-10-15 16:13:09+00:00
> Was the shooter's motivation more about the political side of things, or some misplaced idea that they were somehow protecting or helping their partner?

I respect the effort you are putting in, but you are answering a question that was not part of this thread: what was his motivation.

The question in this thread was somewhat simpler: was he on the left?

Because the context of this discussion was the twitter thread where people and bots were en masse assigning MAGA affiliation to killers, just like they did in the Charlie Kirk situation.

And the answer is unequivocal: Robinson was not MAGA or groyper, he was on the left.
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-10-15 16:13:23+00:00
I know I'm wonderful at parties but I catch so much shit, here but not especially, when I point out the incredible wrongs and the sheer body count of America's colonialist projects here into the modern day.

It really cannot be overstated. The developing world is still developing thanks to it's own institutional issues, to be sure, as everywhere else on the globe struggles with, but America has never had a larger, stronger America come in and just fuck it right up for literally no reason apart from larger geopolitical games.
by dragonwriter | 2025-10-15 16:13:29+00:00
> UBI would basically be a massive transfer of wealth to rich landlords.

No there’s no realistic scenario where that is true; that requires assuming (aside from “landlords capture all marginal income increases, as a first order effect”, which is silly in itself) that (1) the inflationary effect of the additional spending of UBI is offset by taxing money out of the economy (otherwise there is no increase in wealth for landlords to capture), and (2) that tax does not fall more heavily on “rich landlords” than society generally.

> There is no fixed price for housing, it's based on what the market will bear

That's true of essentially all good and services in the economy in the economy under a market system. Its true that some parts of the US have artificial housing supply constraints, but those are also under policy attack.

> If suddenly everyone has X to spend on housing then the landlords will decide that the price is X * 0.3.

A UBI of $X, in any realistic scenario, doesn't mean that everyone has +$X of additional disposable income, the difference from traditional welfare programs is that instead of a rapid clawback creating an area somewhere in the poor to middle income range where additional outside income has little, zero, or sometimes negative impact on program-inclusive income, clawback is shifted into the progressive income tax system where it is never (except maybe at extremely high incomes) consumes the majority of marginal outside incomes, definitely doesn't consume >100% of marginal outside income, and doesn’t kick in any significant way below the middle of the income distribution.

(This also eliminates having a separate mechanisms for income verification and clawback through benefit adjustment, simplifying benefits and rolling that function into changing the numbers in the tax system in a way which doesn't increase the overall work of assessing and collecting, so that you also burn fewer resources on administration.)
by thaw13579 | 2025-10-15 16:13:32+00:00
I dug into it more and found the lab who conducted the study at Georgia Tech published their results in a reputable journal with peer review (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-021-00993-6). The analysis seems fairly evidence-based, consisting of "54 million social media posts, both pre- and post-drills in 114 schools spanning 33 states."
by BoxOfRain | 2025-10-15 16:13:35+00:00
Say we do have a 1:1 representation of the human brain in software. How could we know if we're talking to a conscious simulation of a human being, versus some kind of philosophical zombie which appears conscious but isn't?

Without a solid way to differentiate 'conscious' from 'not conscious' any discussion of machine sentience is unfalsifiable in my opinion.
by tracker1 | 2025-10-15 16:13:40+00:00
I got that as well.. more annoying are comparisons with the last Intel options, which sucked then.

I'm still doing fine with a 16gb M1 Air, I mostly VPN+SSH to my home desktop when I need more oomph anyway. It lasts a full day, all week when you just check email on vacation once a day.
by ipaddr | 2025-10-15 16:14:06+00:00
I have 4 computers setup with different monitors with different projects at different states and when I need to wait for one (llm or build deployment or strategy game) I flip to the next. Each with a separate keyboard. Mouses are on different levels.. two main keyboards one above for straight setup, laptop to the right and a fourth keyboard knee level that goes into the lap.

You only get so much time in a day do everything at once.
by hinkley | 2025-10-15 16:14:09+00:00
Isn’t not that they’re “not perfectly accurate”, it’s that you can find half an order of magnitude of performance after the profiler tells you everything is fine.

That’s perfectly inaccurate.

Most of the people who seem to know how to actually tune code are in gaming, and in engine design in particular. And the fact that they don’t spend all day every day telling us how silly the rest of us are is either a testament to politeness or a shame. I can’t decide which.
by Brschembri | 2025-10-15 16:14:22+00:00
Hi HN,

For years, I've struggled to organize my thoughts for creative projects (i've got such bad ADHD). I'd have ideas scattered across notebooks, various text files, and a mess of browser tabs. The big whiteboard tools felt too complex for my needs, and simple note apps weren't visual enough.

That’s why I built EverCanvas. It's a simple, web-based tool that gives you an infinite canvas (you can have many canvases) to brainstorm and connect ideas. My goal was to create something that gets out of your way and just lets you think visually.

You can create notes, link them together, drop in images, and group related concepts. It’s designed to be fast and minimalist.

It's also free for normal users and there is a monthly fee for power users which I assume most people aren't! There is no credit card required, so i'd love if you could give it a go and give me feedback.

Please note, I built this myself and am not a team so it's still pretty early and needs a little polish!

The site is: EverCanvas.app

Thank you all so much!!
by adornKey | 2025-10-15 16:14:44+00:00
I don't think it's that accurate. Evil people are rare - and lazy people usually don't cause problems. The most real damage comes from human stupidity - from the mass of people that just want to help and do something good. Stupid People blindly believe anything they're told. And they do a lot of really bad things not because they're evil and lazy, but because they want to help achieve even the most stupid goal. Usually even nasty propagandists leaders aren't that evil - often they're just an intellectual failure - or have some mental issues. Themselves they don't do much practical evil - the mob of nice stupid people does the dirty work, because they just want to help.
by techtalksweekly | 2025-10-15 16:15:28+00:00
I'm working on Tech Talks Weekly newsletter (https://www.techtalksweekly.io/) where I send a weekly email that includes all the talk recordings published in the past 7 days from nearly every software engineering conference.

Each issue includes: - Featured talks of the week highlighting the must-watch talks of the week. It includes a short human-written video summary. - New talks including the complete list of all the talks that have been uploaded in the past week. These are grouped by conference and ordered by view count.

From time to time, I build talk compilations, for example: - https://www.techtalksweekly.io/p/50-most-watched-software-en... - https://www.techtalksweekly.io/p/100-most-watched-software-e..., which made it to the HN front page.
by paxys | 2025-10-15 16:15:31+00:00
M5 is 4-6x more powerful than M4, which was 5x more powerful than M3, which was 4x more powerful than M2, which was 4x more powerful than M1, which itself was 6x faster than an equivalent Intel processor. Great!

Looking at my Macbook though, I can say with utmost certainty that it isn't 4000x faster than the Intel one I had 5 years ago.

So, where is the disconnect here? Why is actual user experience not able to keep up with benchmarks and marketing?
by ratelimitsteve | 2025-10-15 16:16:07+00:00
so many hard drives in so many landfills where we thought "hell, it's only $20 in btc, hardly worth reclaiming"

I'm proud to say that I was able to acquire about $100 worth of product from the dark web using only what would turn out to be several hundred thousand dollars in bitcoin, so at least mine are still in circulation
by legitster | 2025-10-15 16:16:11+00:00
> I don't blame you, because you can't really know unless you've spent time in these landscapes, and have the inclination to observe them.

I've actually spent a lot of time in Nevada and the SW. You're right that it's gorgeous and has its own ecology. But out of all the places that someone could say "not in my backyard", rural Nevada has probably some of the least claim as anywhere on this earth. It's vast, the wildlife is literally some of the most resilient on earth, and thanks to global warming, it's one of the few bioregions that's actually growing.

Also, BLM land is specifically not nature preserve. Public lands are set aside for everything from forestry to mining to military testing to 4x4 racing. These are not actually pristine wildernesses being destroyed.
by Capricorn2481 | 2025-10-15 16:16:22+00:00
I'm not totally following the cost analysis from some of these comments. I agree that there's no reason to make your architecture overly complicated, especially if it will cost dev time. I'm not saying this as someone that does cloud very much. We normally do a single server. More as an outsider looking in.

If you load balance 4 smaller ec2 instances vs a larger one, it's significantly cheaper. There is overhead when you run the same app on 4 machines, but not as much as people think. An idle system uses 300-600mb of ram, leaving roughly 3.5gb vram usable, per machine.

4 t3.medium instances are about $119/mo, vs. an equivalent t3.2xlarge which is $238/mo.

Also people will often say Digital Ocean is cheaper, but they compare it to non-equivalent AWS services. A Digital Ocean VPS compared to an equivalent EC2 is about the same.

So I understand when people argue about complicating architecture or optimizing prematurely, but I don't think the math on actual server cost really checks out. I would prefer to do dedicated hosting, but Hetzner doesn't have that in the U.S.
by yieldcrv | 2025-10-15 16:16:50+00:00
It's kind of a myth though, Mac has many flagship games and everything in between

If you identify as a "gamer" and are in those communities, then you'll see communities talking about things you can't natively play

but if you leave niches you already have everything

and with microtransactions, Apple ecosystem users are the whales. again, not something that people who identify as "gamers" wants to admit being actually okay with, but those people are not the revenue of game production.

so I would say it is a missed opportunity for developers that are operating on antiquated calculations of MacOS deployment
by zdw | 2025-10-15 16:16:54+00:00
From Apple's support docs:

https://support.apple.com/guide/deployment/wi-fi-ethernet-sp...

No devices support 320Mhz bandwidths, and only supports 160Mhz on 6GHz band on MacBooks and iPads. Some iPhones support 160Mhz on 5GHz as well.