MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Steltek | 2025-10-24 17:29:26+00:00
The idea though is when you don't want to follow the FHS anymore, like systemd is doing.

Systemd frustrates and angers people with Poettering's complete disregard for bug reports, tradition, and basic common courtesy. At the same time, change needed to happen and change is gonna hurt. And big changes can't wait until they're just as stable as the old system: does anyone develop software like that in their own careers? I try not to ship complete crap but "just as stable as v1" is never a goal.
Show HN: Understanding LLM fundamentals without frameworks
by maxtermed | 2025-10-24 17:29:28+00:00
I was using LLM frameworks everywhere but had no idea what was happening inside them. One day I needed to optimize something and realized I couldn't. Hard truth: I didn't understand the fundamentals, just which framework function to call.

So I stripped everything away. No abstractions. Just Python, HTTP requests, and the OpenAI/Anthropic APIs.

What I found was anticlimactic in the best way: there's almost nothing there.

- "AI agents" are just functions the model tells you to call - "Memory" is literally just a list you append to and send back - "RAG" is search, concatenate to prompt, send it off - "Multi-agent systems" are just API calls in sequence

It all clicked after that. Not because the patterns are hard. They're not. In fact, they're trivial. They're just buried under layers of abstraction that make them seem hard.

I created 7 modules showing the basics: API calls, conversation state, tool calling, RAG, streaming, prompt chaining. Each one is heavily commented, nothing fancy. Side-by-side examples for Claude and GPT so you can see they're fundamentally the same thing.

Now when I use frameworks, I actually know if I need them or if I'm just adding bloat.

Repo: https://github.com/jmedia65/learn-ai-right
by porphyra | 2025-10-24 17:29:49+00:00
Mozilla could have had the no-nonsense, high performance browser backend that everyone uses to build their own browsers (like the recent glut of AI browsers), instead of everyone using Chromium/Blink. In the past, Gecko was really the go-to choice for this. They almost had a second shot with Servo. But they kinda really dropped the ball on the technical capability of the browser while continuing to be distracted by all sorts of random gimmicks like Pocket and then this. Sad!
by quotemstr | 2025-10-24 17:30:19+00:00
It's funny how the all-lowercase style started as a Bay Area in-group signifier (especially in AI circles), became an "acrolect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-creole_continuum) after these circles gained clout and profit, and has now diffused through mimicry to such an extent that you see posts written in this style expressing viewpoints anathema to its originators.
by nabla9 | 2025-10-24 17:30:22+00:00
What "AI" means for most people is the software product they see, but only a part of it is the underlying machine learning model. Each foundation model receives additional training from thousands of humans, often very lowly paid, and then many prompts are used to fine-tune it all. It's 90% product development, not ML research.

If you look at AI research papers, most of them are by people trying to earn a PhD so they can get a high-paying job. They demonstrate an ability to understand the current generation of AI and tweak it, they create content for their CVs.

There is actual research going on, but it's tiny share of everything, does not look impressive because it's not a product, or a demo, but an experiment.
by janalsncm | 2025-10-24 17:30:30+00:00
I have a feeling there is more research being done on non-transformer based architectures now, not less. The tsunami of money pouring in to make the next chatbot powered CRM doesn’t care about that though, so it might seem to be less.

I would also just fundamentally disagree with the assertion that a new architecture will be the solution. We need better methods to extract more value from the data that already exists. Ilya Sutskever talked about this recently. You shouldn’t need the whole internet to get to a decent baseline. And that new method may or may not use a transformer, I don’t think that is the problem.
by Mysterise | 2025-10-24 17:30:41+00:00
Thank you for sharing your experience and perspective.

> we'd lose out on the marketplace cut (10% of all sales I think?); we didn't want people grinding the game to earn money from rare drops;

My naive understanding is that by having skins be worth tangible and significant value; this was the primary motivator for players to purchase keys to unbox cases, which was the dominant direct revenue generator for CS.

I would guess that the revenue generated from keys (and cases, from the market cut) eclipses the potential market cut revenue from limiting the value of items to the marketplace limit (now $2k I believe), as the consequence of that is significantly less demand in keys and skins as a whole.

Without the prospect of extremely expensive chase items, the $2.50 + ${case} slot machine pull loses its jackpot. With a knife being dropped once every 400~ unboxes, the EV of a knife would be $1000 + 400*${case}. Obviously the actual EV would be lower in practice, but the point I'm trying to understand is how the monetization model works if skins are any less expensive than they were.
by agentcoops | 2025-10-24 17:30:45+00:00
Yeah, I mean the stock market is made to either pay passive income if you have millions or to slowly accumulate value through compound interest—expecting anything else is just gambling. If you’re living paycheck to paycheck, neither of the first two are particularly helpful even medium term — and it’s not… entirely irrational to go all in on option (C). I’d be really curious to actually know the scale of how many people became millionaires from crypto — I have no intuition for what order of magnitude it is. Regardless, there’s clearly a growing belief that the world is now full of such moonshots.
by palmotea | 2025-10-24 17:30:49+00:00
Even then, I think you're going to have massive distances between tiny probes moving very fast relative to each other. Maybe not 1.65 light years, but communication over Voyager's 0.00266 light years or even a much smaller distance (e.g. Earth to moon) seems insurmountable for two 1g probes.

Also, the probes are in deep space, right? No solar power. Where are they going to get the energy?
by daxfohl | 2025-10-24 17:31:44+00:00
Assuming you mean cloud platforms in general, I don't even think it's that tangential. In fact it may cut to the heart of the matter: if React-over-REST-over-SQL-plus-some-background-jobs was all we needed, cloud platform innovation would've stopped at Heroku and Rails 20 years ago, and AI could probably make a run on replacing SWE jobs entirely.

But as it's played out, there are a ton of use cases that don't fit neatly into that model, and each year the cloud platforms offer new tools that fit some of those use cases. AI will probably be able to string together existing tools as IaaS providers offer them, perhaps without even involving an engineer, but for use cases that are still outside cloud platform offerings, seem like things that require some ingenuity and creativity that AI wouldn't be able to grok.
by anthonypasq | 2025-10-24 17:31:49+00:00
This is why writing is important. it gives you the time to actually thinking about the best words to represent what is in your head. you may still fail, but it will usually be better than whatever comes dribbling out of your mouth.

unfortunately, if knowledge isnt written down in some form, (code, english etc) then it doesnt really exist in a civilization sense, so you need to get good at writing.

see all Paul Grahams essays on writing.
by AAAAaccountAAAA | 2025-10-24 17:31:50+00:00
One of my biggest grievances with typst is that it still does not natively support locale-aware decimal separator formatting[1], and thus requires various kludges to present decimal numbers properly in non-English languages. Not that LaTeX is any better in that, though.

I think this should be solved quicker, because if it requires some sort of changes to syntax, we will have problems if the "legacy" syntax becomes entrenched, so this sort of decisions are better to be made sooner than later.

However, most my experiences with typst have been highly positive. It is much, much faster than LaTeX, and way easier. I am looking forward to see it to become more common.

1) https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/1093
by prerok | 2025-10-24 17:32:26+00:00
That has not been my experience at all. Whenever I tried asking the AI to do something, it took an inordinate amount of time and thought to go through its changes.

The mistakes were subtle but critical. Like copying a mutex by value. Now, if I would be writing the code, I would not make the mistake. But when reviewing, it almost slipped by.

And that's where the issue is: you have to review the code as if it's written by a clueless junior dev. So, building up the mental model when reviewing, going through all the cases and thinking of the mistakes that could possibly have happened... sorry, no help.

Maybe 10% of typing it out but when I think about it, it's taking more time because I have to create the mental model in my mind then create the mental model out of the thing that AI typed out and then have to compare the two. This latter is much more time consuming than creating the model in my mind and typing it out.
by zone411 | 2025-10-24 17:32:30+00:00
You got many answers already, but a couple more points:

Poker doesn't require lying or table talk. Bluffing is rule-legal strategic deception expressed through betting. More like a feint in sports than cheating.

If "sitting at a table following rules" is the issue, that's true of most games. And formats vary: many are short and cash games are leave-anytime.
by breakpointalpha | 2025-10-24 17:33:07+00:00
Or they were raised with terrible and predatory culture. Screwing other people to get ahead is something that is frequently taught in childhood by parents and older role models that were also taught that mentality. We've all seen the Mafia movies and shows, these are family organizations where everyone's Aunts, Cousins, etc. is somehow "connected". There's a big uphill battle for a kid to come up in that environment and turn out like a model citizen. No excuses...
by pengaru | 2025-10-24 17:33:43+00:00
Wow, talk about making a mountain of a mole hill.

Letting upstream systemd single-handedly define what directories exist with what modes in your distro has never been the intended Modus Operandi.

Debian has a huge selection of packages available for it and clearly is going to have more headaches when it comes to preserving compatibility with all that software.

This is a trivial matter for Debian to handle appropriately, while systemd stays focused on its current priorities. I'm surprised this is being talked about at all outside the appropriate mailing lists... slow week for linux news?
by system2 | 2025-10-24 17:33:54+00:00
I totally agree with this post. The AI only helped the scammers who sell courses, claiming they made so much money from their crappy mobile apps or their other types of web apps. It is just a social media hype. Can a newbie without any understanding of database structures or modular design create a perfect flow? With the current technology, it is not possible. People are so impatient to understand what it takes to make a functioning app, to create a structured app flow, so the vibe coding project gets messy in a few prompts. It is just a hype, at least for coding, and people will soon realize it.

Suno and image generators are totally different and riding the AI wave at the moment. YouTube turned into crap, and Instagram content as well. AI fatigue is here.
by danans | 2025-10-24 17:34:25+00:00
Source? The top decile of the US income distribution starts at $170000/yr.

The top decile of the wealth distribution is around $1M net worth.

The people doing the borrow-for-spending-against-non-housing-assets-as-collateral are beyond the top .01%. While they are also spending whales, they are able to negotiate far more favorable rates than the rest of the top 10%, whose spending is mostly income-driven.
by agentcoops | 2025-10-24 17:34:51+00:00
I think the big issue with design is the ux to LLMs at the moment: it’s really hard to iterate on a design, see the output, make changes etc. I’ve had terrible luck getting good design from ChatGPT/Codex, but V0 is probably one of the most impressive AI UX experiences I’ve encountered — I often show it to non-technical friends who are ai skeptical.
by bitpush | 2025-10-24 17:35:05+00:00
> Mozilla could have had the no-nonsense, high performance browser backend that everyone uses to build their own browsers

I agree with the sentiment, but you underestimate the level of engineering, coordination, design work, testing it is to do this.

It is admirable that they even have a half-decent browser, but to compete at the top you need soooo much money and motivation.
by stronglikedan | 2025-10-24 17:35:39+00:00
I used to want to kill them all, regardless of where they were, until I watched this excellent SciShow video[0] titled "What If We Killed All the Wasps?". (but ticks can still go fuck themselves to death)

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GO5unZIbSFY
by Forgeties79 | 2025-10-24 17:35:53+00:00
> In that situation, there's very little difference from asking him to pull the trigger himself. You might not like the decision, but you have to acknowledge that it's not an easy one.

That’s not really my issue though - I’m saying “who wants to trust Elon musk’s finger on a trigger, let alone such an important one?”

I think we can all agree that he has a pretty “unpredictable” way of operating. If he holds those keys, whether or not it is a “difficult decision,” that could make a government rightfully nervous. His politics and erratic behavior are a serious problem. It’s not just a polite ideological disagreement that doesn’t impact his actions/how he runs his companies. Quite the opposite.
by wewtyflakes | 2025-10-24 17:36:18+00:00
It seems reasonable that someone would want to go beyond just installing software; they are presumably doing so in order to use it for its purpose. Being pedantic about the nature of the complaint (i.e. "He complained about the difficulty of installing an application. He didn’t complain about...") seems to miss the point. All of the additional steps you lay out also have their own steps to get done or decisions to be made, and when it is all said and done, it seems reasonable to imagine that things could get quite complicated.
by didibus | 2025-10-24 17:36:35+00:00
With zero-knowledge proofs and a trusted decentralized ledger, you can prevent double-counting and make the vote untraceable back to the voter. You can also guarantee that the voter was authorized to vote as per the authority, but the authority cannot know which specific vote was theirs.

As for coercion, there are really two types: coercing someone into voting a certain way, and coercing them afterward to reveal how they voted.

I don’t think the second one is much of a problem, because you can just delete your keys after using them if you don’t want to be coerced. It might suck if the coercer doesn’t believe you and you really did delete them, but at that point thugs beating you up is kind of its own separate problem. Similar to if they asked you to take a photo or video at the poll booth and if you didn't they might beat you up.

If the coercion is about making you vote a particular way, some schemes let you vote multiple times and only count the last one, so you can just vote again after the coercer leaves.

And even then, I believe some schemes actually make it impossible to show proof of your vote.

Here's two papers that are promising in all those areas for example:

- https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/zkVoting-%3A-Zero-know...

- https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/SmartphoneDemocracy%3A...
by happytoexplain | 2025-10-24 17:36:56+00:00
I was raised in the Friends culture, and find this characterization skewed. "Honesty", yes. "Even if uncomfortable", sure, often, but only literally speaking. But I've never heard a Quaker in my life extol "uncomfortable truth" in those words. Because, realistically speaking, "telling the uncomfortable truth" when declared as a principle is 99% of the time just a wordplay excuse to be an asshole or to be petty (which I assume is why I never heard the Quakers in my life use that phrase, since they tend to be not only honest, but also kind and pragmatic).
by il_nets | 2025-10-24 17:37:16+00:00
Good ideas - we've considered these as well actually!

The intertia-idea wouldn't be too difficult to implement, but its usefulness would probably depend on the application area.

Yep exactly. Usually it locks onto one person's face but it can also jump around, so there are still optimizations we can do there - but generally it's supposed to be for one person. If you compare to VR headsets, two people can't wear the same VR headset anyway!
by Marshferm | 2025-10-24 17:37:59+00:00
Causes are impossible to find and verify, yet there are correlations here that would never have existed in the absence of AI.

I agree money or the dispute in a dispute over money that leads to murder aren't the causes of the murder, though the news story that writes about it strongly implies they are the reason.

However in this case, a machine pretends it is human, and ideates in a user the idea of suicide by inference. Whether we like this or not, these bots listed here are predators, and the most basic animal exchange pattern on the planet is between predators and prey. A reality is invaded by fiction/narrative/mythology. Why or how would coders choose a prey/predation interaction as a clear goal of usage? To claim these are endemic in fiction and other media forms is unsupportable. How is predation fundamental to AI? These are not normal exchanges for a 14 year old boy, whose cog mapping system and prefrontal cortex are still developing: an S&M teacher fronting role-play, and finally a hypersexual role-play with a GoT character. That his still developing Theory of Mind simulation of other's mental states in his PfC was driven by an automated machine and not another human is highly damaging, even deranged from a mental health POV. This is unnatural on so many levels.

These bots are likely attracting those less comfortable with human interaction, and instead of raising the bar from humans and guiding them back into a balance of human and machine interface, they lower the bar into dysmorphic exchanges that either perpetuate or increase the interaction that segregates the user from their wetware surroundings. The software appears to be designed to extract these weakened Theory of Mind participants from their ecological and psychological places.
by buzer | 2025-10-24 17:38:09+00:00
In recent case I quoted the actual law & caselaw and the response I got was that I need to contact the marketing carrier and they will stop responding now. Funnily enough, the carrier I was in contact with was the marketing carrier (as background, codeshare flight was cancelled almost month earlier but I was never informed & I only discovered it when I went to airport).

So in my case the next step is to find lawyer.
by walkabout | 2025-10-24 17:38:36+00:00
Yeah, I think you nailed it. A ban on playing against "the house" would do it. Taking a fixed amount from each pot (as at poker tables) for play among patrons would still be allowed, but slot machines wouldn't. Your solution's much better than a full ban because it wouldn't drive as much illegal betting (a problem no only because it circumvents the law, but because for gambling in particular but for any black market, really, it tends to become connected with other criminal activity)
by dijit | 2025-10-24 17:39:10+00:00
Apparently yes, since the parent to your comment has been flagged.

Personally I find an interesting observation, and microsoft contributing to linux in any way should be met with skepticism based on the entire last 30 years.

People are so quick to wipe away any wrongdoing from Microsoft as soon as they get thrown a bone, there's some interesting psychology here.
by bsimpson | 2025-10-24 17:39:41+00:00
I literally had to sprint across LIS airport (past the tax-free refund counter I had business at) to make an alternate flight, after waiting in line for 3 hours.

If I didn't run, I would have missed the alternate, and Airfrance would have owed me like 700EUR plus an overnight stay with meals. I did them a favor. I requested reimbursement for my missed tax refund (which was <100EUR); some guy in India told me they weren't legally obligated to reimburse me, and closed the ticket.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-10-24 17:39:42+00:00
And then there’s battery life and sleep drain. Only a handful of competitors come close, and those have caveats like significantly reduced peak performance and the usual papercuts so common in the x86 laptop world.

It’s such a problem that if I were to switch away from Apple, I’d try to find a way to go desktop-exclusive and not use a laptop at all, because everything else on the market is so compromise-ridden as to not be worth the trouble. And I say this as the owner of an X series ThinkPad, which are among the better options in that world.

It’s as if most laptop manufacturers can’t be arsed to take their products seriously. So frustrating.
by coliveira | 2025-10-24 17:39:52+00:00
The US has a severe brain drain issue in the tech industry. American companies don't pay good salaries for people who specialize in well tested technologies, like the ones you mention from 2015. These same companies prefer to throw tons of money at shiny new things, like blockchain, AI, or whatever the next buzzword will be. Engineers in stablished tech areas will either have to move with the crowd or retire, and never be replaced. New engineers will by necessity have to learn the new shining tech. So the answer is that, yes, we could do these things with 2015 tech, but we cannot because they won't pay experienced people to do this.
by pengaru | 2025-10-24 17:39:58+00:00
Hate to break it to you but before the term "hackintosh" existed there was an army of folks making linux work well on cheap commodity x86 hardware, the success of which ushered in the dot-com booms - filling datacenters across the globe with cheap x86 hardware running linux. A reality persisting to this day, though with far fewer players thanks to decades of consolidation.

The hackintosh is a far smaller and more ephemeral niche hardly qualifying as ever orienting the proverbial table.
by epistasis | 2025-10-24 17:40:00+00:00
> think the valuable idea is probabilistic graphical models- of which transformers is an example- combining probability with sequences, or with trees and graphs- is likely to continue to be a valuable area for research exploration for the foreseeable future.

As somebody who was a biiiiig user of probabilistic graphical models, and felt kind of left behind in this brave new world of stacked nets, I would love for my prior knowledge and experience to become valuable for a broader set of problem domains. However, I don't see it yet. Hope you are right!
by ivape | 2025-10-24 17:40:15+00:00
Sans money, it's arrogant because we know talent is god-given. You are basically betting again that your natural given trajectory has more leg room for more incredible output. It's not a bad bet at all, but it is a bet. Some talent is so incredible that it takes a while for the ego to accept its limits. Jordan tried to come back at 40 and Einstein fought quantum mechanics unto death. Accepting the limits has nothing to do with mediocrity, and everything to do with humility. You can still have an incredible trajectory beyond belief (which I believe this person has and will have).