MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by burntsushi | 2025-10-18 19:46:38+00:00
Look at ag's issue tracker. There are some very critical bugs. You might be impacted by them and not even know it.

As for perf, it's not hard to witness a 10x improvement that you'll actually feel. On my checkout of the Linux kernel:

$ (time rg -wi '\w+(PM_RESUME|LINK_REQ)') | wc -l real 0.114 user 0.547 sys 0.543 maxmem 29 MB faults 0 444 $ (time ag -wi '\w+(PM_RESUME|LINK_REQ)') | wc -l real 0.949 user 6.618 sys 0.805 maxmem 65 MB faults 0 444

Or even basic queries can have a pretty big difference. In my checkout of the Chromium repository:

$ (time rg Openbox) | wc -l real 0.296 user 1.349 sys 1.950 maxmem 71 MB faults 0 11 $ (time ag Openbox) | wc -l real 1.528 user 1.849 sys 8.285 maxmem 29 MB faults 0 11

Or even more basic. You might search a file that is "too big" for ag:

$ time ag '^\w{42}$' full.txt ERR: Skipping full.txt: pcre_exec() can't handle files larger than 2147483647 bytes.
by dang | 2025-10-18 19:46:52+00:00
Recent and related:

New Alzheimer's Treatment Clears Plaques from Brains of Mice Within Hours - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45600581 - Oct 2025 (113 comments)

New nanotherapy clears amyloid-β, reversing symptoms of Alzheimer's in mice - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45528308 - Oct 2025 (137 comments)
by vanc_cefepime | 2025-10-18 19:47:22+00:00
Scrypted is faster when I tested it a year or so ago.

I almost jumped into their Scypted NVR system (with all the bells and whistles all fully integrated in one app and would cost me $70/yr for 7 cameras) but it seemed like I'm trading one remote access system for another hence why I decided to keep using Homebridge (HB) until the HB project starts becoming stagnant or unless something breaks on my end. You can have Scrypted+HomeKit just like I have Homebridge+HomeKit setup, but Homebridge is pretty fast for me on Apple Silicon hardware so as they say "if it ain't broke, dont fix it."

This is the beauty of open source projects like these. Pick which works for you and just keep it updated and donate a few $ when you can to support the project.
by bgwalter | 2025-10-18 19:47:54+00:00
With that interpretation Marty Haught attempted to incite a federal crime on Oct 3rd, where he tried to trick Arko into doing trial logins:

https://andre.arko.net/2025/10/09/the-rubygems-security-inci...

"Please confirm that you cannot access the Ruby Central AWS root account credentials, either through the console or by access keys."

Alternatively, we could see the whole issue for what it is: a power struggle between political factions of an open source project that is unprofessionally handled by at least one side.
by lukeschlather | 2025-10-18 19:48:03+00:00
I can't speak to LLMs, but one of my first tasks was debugging a race condition in a piece of software. (I had no idea that it was a race condition, or even what part of the code it was in.) I spent months babysitting the service and reading the codebase. When I finally fixed the issue the source turned out to be a comment that said the opposite of what the code actually did. The code was a very convoluted one-line guard involving a ternary if / several || && statements. If the comment hadn't been there I think I would've read the code sooner and realized the issue.

Personally, I remove redundant comments AI adds specifically to demonstrate that I have reviewed the code and believe that the AI's description is accurate. In many cases AIs will even add comments that only make sense as a response to my prompt and don't make any sense in-context.
by westurner | 2025-10-18 19:48:03+00:00
Semantics but the article is describing model "fingerprints" for basically stylometrics; that's a partial not a signature.

These are "signatures":

https://github.com/sigstore/model-transparency

"Model authenticity and transparency with Sigstore" (2025) https://next.redhat.com/2025/04/10/model-authenticity-and-tr...
by rayiner | 2025-10-18 19:48:28+00:00
Americans have shorter commutes: https://www.reddit.com/r/urbanplanning/comments/1bg82kg/amer...

Driving is much more comfortable than taking transit. You’re by yourself and you always have a seat. Anywhere that has transit good enough where it’s frequent and reliable is also a place where you’re probably standing during your commute.
by LaFolle | 2025-10-18 19:49:00+00:00
I think that is where the power of current AI chat interfaces like chatgpt beats other digital interfaces. You ask a question. Get just an answer back in more or less same format or grammer. And no ads. No distractions. Clean.

Though it is tough for ai chat providers to keep it that way for long if revenue from subscriptions / apis does not offset the exorbitant compute costs.
by BurningFrog | 2025-10-18 19:49:25+00:00
Newton pretty much invented several fields of science, like Classical Mechanics, Optics, Calculus, and Gravitational Astronomy.

He started out as a novice in all of them.

That Alchemy failed to pan out as a science doesn't make him a crank in my book. You can't know Alchemy is impossible until you try pretty hard.
by ekjhgkejhgk | 2025-10-18 19:49:45+00:00
To comment on the substance.

It seems that these two people Schimidhuber and Hochreiter were perhaps solving the right problem for the wrong reasons. They thought this was important because they expected that RNNs could hold memory indefinitely. Because of BPTT, you can think of that as a NN with infinitely many layers. At the time I believe nobody worries about vanishing gradient for deep NNs, because the compute power for networks that deep just didn't exist. But nowadays that's exactly how their solution is applied.

That's science for you.
by badsectoracula | 2025-10-18 19:50:38+00:00
IIRC it wasn't VCL but another framework like VCL that was built on Qt.

LCL (Lazarus' equivalent of VCL) took another approach where the base stuff are very Windows-y (due to the VCL heritage) but the backends have to essentially implement not only the backend-specific (Gtk, Qt, etc) widget functionality but also a small subset of the Windows API.

While this makes porting harder for the Lazarus developers, it makes it easier to port stuff between OSes and even port stuff from Delphi to Lazarus (some developers can also use both Delphi and Lazarus - e.g. AFAIK Total Commander uses Delphi for the 32bit builds and Lazarus for the 64bit builds).
by gwern | 2025-10-18 19:50:47+00:00
> Note again that a residual connection is not just an arbitrary shortcut connection or skip connection (e.g., 1988)[LA88][SEG1-3] from one layer to another! No, its weight must be 1.0, like in the 1997 LSTM, or in the 1999 initialized LSTM, or the initialized Highway Net, or the ResNet. If the weight had some other arbitrary real value far from 1.0, then the vanishing/exploding gradient problem[VAN1] would raise its ugly head, unless it was under control by an initially open gate that learns when to keep or temporarily remove the connection's residual property, like in the 1999 initialized LSTM, or the initialized Highway Net.

After reading Lang & Witbrock 1988 https://gwern.net/doc/ai/nn/fully-connected/1988-lang.pdf I'm not sure how convincing I find this explanation.
by godelski | 2025-10-18 19:51:03+00:00
You said the LLMs are intelligent because they do tasks. But the claim is inconsistent with the toaster example.

If a toaster isn't intelligent because I have to give it bread and press the button to start then how's that any different from giving an LLM a prompt and pressing the button to start?

It's never been about the toaster. You're avoiding answering the question. I don't believe you're dumb, so don't act the part. I'm not buying it.
by EvanAnderson | 2025-10-18 19:52:05+00:00
Similar story here. I hear something like CRT whine all the time (except higher than the typical 15Khz NTSC tube whine). When I was a kid I played with the SOUND statement in GW-BASIC and figured out my tinnitus s was between 17 and 18 Khz (listening for bleating interference between my laptop speaker and the tinnitus). Today my hearing tops out between 12 and 13 Khz but I assume the tinnitus whine is still the same old frequency.

My daughter has it, too. My wife doesn't, but my daughter has described it to me.

I haven't felt negative about it except for the time I visited an anechoic chamber exhibit at a local museum (COSI in Columbus, OH) in my early 40s. It really messed with my perception and the tinnitus was much louder than normal for days after. Even thinking about it makes me edgy.
by olelele | 2025-10-18 19:52:07+00:00
There was a car mechanic who lived next to where my dad grew up in rural Sweden. He spent enormous amounts of time on the cars he got in to fix and took out automatic locks and all electric wiring to the point of the car being basically invincible to time and very simple to repair again. Some cars he never managed to finish fixing and they were simply left forever in his front yard... My grandma drives a 25 y o Suzuki Alto that is basically this car. It even has the old school non powered steering. Runs great still, has no issues since she only drives in summer.

There is really something to be said for old mechanics and simple electric solutions.

These days _everything_ has an embedded microcontroller and a touchscreen. I'm more on the luddite edge myself...

If anyone is interested I can try to dig up an interview with the car mech on youtube (in swedish) :)
by nosianu | 2025-10-18 19:52:18+00:00
> for basically nothing in return

Basix protection and basic law? Sure, far from an ideal model we would have in mind today, the comparison is against a completely "free" society as in much much longer ago.

> must sharecrop at least some of their land, and on sharecropped land, extraction rates are on the order of 50% (for basically nothing in return).

Uhm... so half of an unknown number? That's also an unknown number then, and the very concrete "50%" means nothing.

I'm only complaining about the TL;DR, the original article is great. After reading it, I think there is no good TL;DR possible. There is too much to consider, actually reading that link seems and unavoidable if one actually wants to know. Would someone in two hundred years looking at average income in the US today as the one or two sentence TL;DR have a useful picture of what life is like in the US today?
by prmoustache | 2025-10-18 19:54:36+00:00
Except for resource usage.

I chose it becaue I don't have access to neovim on my cloud desktop and ideavim is a superior solution to any vim like plugins for vscode. It is struggling with 4 cores and 16GB of ram with only a few projects open at a time. Some of it is due to being win11 with the amount of security malware installed by my company but still vscode doesn't seem to make it suffer that much.
by eikenberry | 2025-10-18 19:54:39+00:00
It's not about needing to live in a teletype world, it is about how language/text is just a better interface for a general use computer. Computers primary feature is that they are programmable and an interface that allows you to take advantage of that is superior to one that doesn't. The programmable GUIs all failed to gain traction (smalltalk and like), that left the shell (and maybe spreadsheets) as the best UI for this. Though as AIs mature we might see a shift here as they could provide a programmable interface that could rival shell scripting.
by ff4 | 2025-10-18 19:54:54+00:00
They already had PostgreSQL (with its strong ACID guarantees) in place, yet the design introduces eventual consistency via MongoDB for reads—without a compelling justification. A DBA could have optimized those PostgreSQL queries to single-digit milliseconds, avoiding the added sync overhead entirely. Instead, it feels like unnecessary complexity was layered onto a proven double-entry ledger approach.
by simonw | 2025-10-18 19:55:56+00:00
I didn't. That would be both grossly unethical and, in the USA, illegal if I didn't disclose it.

See comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45624613

I'm getting accused of paid shilling a lot right now.

(If Anthropic had paid me to write this they would probably have asked me NOT to spend a section of the article pointing out flaws in their MCP specification!)
by badsectoracula | 2025-10-18 19:57:27+00:00
> Glibc is the main reason Linux software is binary non-portable between distros

Linux software is binary portable between distros as long as the binary was compiled using a Glibc version that is either the same or older than the distros you are trying to target. The lack of "portability" is because of symbol versioning so that the library can expose different versions of the same symbol, exactly so that it can preserve backwards compatibility without breaking working programs.

And this is not unique to Glibc, other libraries do the same thing too.

The solution is to build your software in the minimum version of libraries you are supposed to support. Nowadays with docker you can set it up in a matter of minutes (and automate it with a dockerfile) - e.g. you can use -say- Ubuntu 22 to build your program and it'll work in most modern Linux OSes (or at least glibc wont be the problem if it doesn't).
by max_ | 2025-10-18 19:57:55+00:00
I came to know of this guy though Jim Simons.

He once "leaked" the idea that Jim Simon's trading success came from his use of ideas called "gauge theory" and "fibre bundles".

I forgot the exact timestamp, but you will have to watch the entire interview to find that segment — https://youtu.be/zVWlapujbfo
by pwg | 2025-10-18 19:58:21+00:00
Because, in the early days of Unix systems actually being used as multiple, simultaneous, user systems, you might have one group of users collaborating on a project, and they would have a shared directory (via the 'group' owner) where they would store shared items. Each user would create various files, and each file's space consumption was charged to that user, but the shared directory might contain multiple files each owned by different users (but all owned by the shared 'group' identifier, so the group could access them).

For a group shared directory, assigning the disk space usage of files therein to one single user (ignoring the aspect of "which single user do you pick") is unfair to that user (his/her allowed maximum disk space is consumed) while everyone else is not charged for their actual usage.

This all came about to try to enforce rules to prevent one (or a few) rogue users from using up all disk space on the system for themselves, leaving no one else with any disk space available for their own usage.
by burntsushi | 2025-10-18 19:58:46+00:00
Fewer bugs?

And perf depends on your haystack size. If you have lots of data to search, it's not hard to witness a 10x difference: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45629904

As for features that ripgrep has that ag doesn't:

* Much better Unicode support. (ag's is virtually non-existent.)

* Pluggable preprocessors with --pre.

* Jujutsu support.

* ripgrep can automatically search UTF-16 data.

* ripgrep has PCRE2 support. ag only has PCRE1 (which was EOL'd years ago).

* ripgrep has a `-r/--replace` flag that lets you manipulate the output. I use it a lot instead of `sed` or `awk` (for basic cases) these days.

* ripgrep is maintained.

* ripgrep has multiline search that seemingly works much better.

* ripgrep can search files bigger than 2GB. ag seemingly can't.

* ag has lots of whacky bugs.

e.g.,

$ ag -c '\w{8,} Sherlock Holmes' sixteenth.txt 9 $ rg -c '\w{8,} Sherlock Holmes' sixteenth.txt 9 $ cat sixteenth.txt | rg -c '\w{8,} Sherlock Holmes' 9 $ cat sixteenth.txt | ag -c '\w{8,} Sherlock Holmes' 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1

Or:

$ printf 'foo\nbar\n' | ag 'foo\s+bar' $ printf 'foo\nbar\n' | rg -U 'foo\s+bar' foo bar

Or:

$ ag '\w+ Sherlock Holmes' full.txt ERR: Skipping full.txt: pcre_exec() can't handle files larger than 2147483647 bytes.

There's probably more. But that's what comes to mind.
by sheepscreek | 2025-10-18 19:59:38+00:00
Just the other day I was experimenting with moving over a big chunk of a C# codebase (heavy on allocations) to Rust, and the Rust code quickly became very cluttered. C# reads better but is a bit more verbose. Rust is more compact and sometimes very dense.

To make it easier to scan through long files, I wished for an extension that could make the traits appear a few shades darker. This might be even better. Going to give it a try tonight.
by russdill | 2025-10-18 19:59:46+00:00
The standard model is universally understood to be incomplete, but the problem is that it's perfectly able to predict all known interactions we can measure. We need to go to much higher energies to find violations. And the refinements we have been doing (higgs, etc) have no effect on our understanding of biology.

Penrose claims that violations of the standard model must exist within table top experiments. Not because of any specific objections to the standard model, but because of philosophical objections related to the nature of consciousness. And so it doesn't point to where those violations must be, but instead just a blind search.

As far as I know, professionals are too kind to refer to Penrose as a crank due to his extensive contributions to physics and mathematics. But his claims here are related to neither physics not mathematics but the philosophy of consciousness, an area where he hasn't made any discoveries. Professionals are happy to refer to his ideas as "highly implausible" or even as useful as "pixie-dust in the synapses".
by consumer451 | 2025-10-18 19:59:56+00:00
There is so much to unpack here. Currently on my 3rd re-watch. Biggest take-aways:

1. This is the death knell for the the "AI" investment bubble. Agents that are useful for non-devs are 10 years away.

2. Andrej thinks that GPT5 pro is SOTA for code? Really? As a Sonnet normie.. can anyone please help me understand this?

edit:

3. You can't see any major tech developments on the GDP growth chart? Really? WTF? Have we all been smoking tech crack, this whole time? So GDP didn't grow extra from tech any single tech development, like the Internet? This broke my brain.

disclaimer: On the daily, I use LLM dev tools to add amazing LLM-enabled features to my pre-money SaaS. It's really cool and users love the features.
by tbossanova | 2025-10-18 20:00:50+00:00
You can get earplugs that only lower the sound quality a tiny bit these days. I bought some from the drum shop and they’re great. As you say, $20 or so to avoid lifetime ear damage is a very very good investment. I feel like concerts aren’t quite so loud these days too, maybe audio gear quality is better and the sound engineers don’t feel the need to turn it up quite so loud.
by cryptoegorophy | 2025-10-18 20:02:12+00:00
Whoever is suffering with tinnitus, try this - firmly press on your jaw muscles - if your tinnitus amplifies then it is related to your clenched jaw muscles! A therapy on these muscles will either reduce the tinnitus or will completely make it go away! Wish my doctor told me that years ago instead of doing useless ct scans and hearing checks. Wish you all silent nights!
by pwdisswordfishs | 2025-10-18 20:02:34+00:00
> A Birkin bag is a luxury good, and so is reading an entire non-fiction book, listening to a public radio broadcast

The latter two items statement make this more of a self-report* than anything else. I have never read more more books nor listened to more podcasts than the year when I was homeless.

* the author doesn't actually enjoy those two things and considers their value to lie in signaling ("sending a message")
by ACCount37 | 2025-10-18 20:02:44+00:00
There are some base models available to the public today. Not on "end of 2025 frontier run" scale, but a few of them are definitely larger and better than GPT-3. There are some uses for things like that.

Not that the limits of GPT-3 were well understood at the time.

We really had no good grasp of how dangerous or safe something like that would - and whether there are some subtle tipping point that could propel something like GPT-3 all the way to AGI and beyond.

Knowing what we know now? Yeah, they could have released GPT-3 base model and nothing bad would have happened. But they didn't know that back then.
by _wire_ | 2025-10-18 20:03:08+00:00
Without maternal instinct we never would have got here.

As to relationship of sound to babies' needs, the nature of the instinct is to pay attention to the cry.

It is not necessary to regard a cry as a language to be decoded. Try being a parent and you will discover that rhythm and routine help organize the seeming chaos of instinct. With routine you can make predictions.

You will also discover that as children develop, they respond well to some routine, which should be surprising in the same sense that we respond instinctively to the diurnal cycle, and are at least highly sensitive to the lunar and seasonal cycles, and the cycles of life. Look no further than human language to see the significance of instinctive cycles in human affairs, and notice that we learn and teach these cycles reflexively.

The sensitively to detect cycles and modulate responses constitute the meaning of the term "instinct" in this article.

The cry, which due to instinct is both manifest and cannot be ignored, primes and sustains the maternal attention from which parental care cycles emerge.

Sadly, in this era of hyper rationality and verbalization of everything in a perverse reason-as-first-principle for every feature of life, obsessive compulsive imposition of plans over nature may cause some new parents to think babies cry in some arcane jargon that can be deciphered by expertise into clear declarations of their needs. Cries don't work like this, but you can learn a routine.
by otherme123 | 2025-10-18 20:03:30+00:00
AFAIK, Behringer received some threats, and they redesigned the case. But if you order the new redesign "Centara" they will mix your order somehow and send you the first almost exact copy they made.

The functional distribution of knobs are the one that use Boss pedals and others: common case size, knobs at top, switch under a big cover. The wide format with a naked switch offset that the Centaurs have (both original Klon and Behringer clone) is functionally pointless.
by em-bee | 2025-10-18 20:03:57+00:00
i don't remember confusion. i find it's mostly understanding the data model and in particular the branches and references/reflog. when i am worried i might break something then i tag the the checkout where i am at and i know i can always revert to that. i also compare the original with the new state. i usually know what that diff should look like, and even if the operations in between are confusing, if the diff looks like what i expect then i know it went all right. trust the process but verify the results.

the big thing i am missing from it is a branch history. a record for every commit to which branch it once belonged to. no improved interface can fix that. that would have to be added to the core of git.
by nick__m | 2025-10-18 20:05:37+00:00
I should probably have used the word efficiency instead of effectiveness because I had in mind the ratio benefits/(costs+risk).

from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S227458072...

Our review of the trial publications found high quality evidence of statistically significant group differences, but also recognized that there are mixed views on the clinical relevance of the observed differences and the value of therapy for individual patients. ... If patients are treated, then confirmation of AD by positron emission tomography or cerebrospinal fluid analysis and monitoring for risk of amyloid-related imaging abnormalities was recommended, as done in the clinical trials, although it would strain Canadian resource capacity.