MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sp0rk | 2025-10-08 05:20:04+00:00
> Yet when NPR runs non-stop Walmart articles [1], often in a neutral to positive fashion, most are unaware that they've received millions of dollars from the Waltons.

The link your provided has 14 articles written in 2025. Topics covered: listeria outbreak, tariffs raising prices, radioactive shrimp, a stabbing at a store, and a shooting at a store.

Maybe two of the articles could be viewed as mildly positive towards the Walmart corporation, though they are basically just saying that the tariffs weren't impacting prices to the level that many people thought they were, and they were backed up with real-world data. I appreciate you providing an illustrative link to back up your post, but it doesn't really seem to agree with your point.
by asdff | 2025-10-08 05:21:07+00:00
Think less in terms of "this must be inherently better than that" and more in terms of the thermodynamics at play. Dexterous hands probably have some cost. Maybe they aren't as durable as a chimps hands. Maybe they take more calories to run. Maybe they need more brain power dedicated toward the hands and respective energy requirements. I'm not really sure what they may be, but there are usually tradeoffs between any A vs B in an organism.

Now if these costs are indeed less than the fitness advantage of a chimp having more dexterous hands, and that is in biological fitness as in reproductive success not the colloquial 'fitness' as in going to the gym, and that mutation for dexterous hands is present among the breeding population, you will expect to see offspring with that mutation, having higher fitness, to increase in frequency in the population.

There are a lot of potential edge cases to consider as well. Maybe the dexterous hands allele is very close to a very bad allele in chimps, such that through recombination it is likely that these two alleles are inherited together (called linkage). You'd see both these alleles purged from the population over time through purifying selection.

There is the population history aspect to consider. Maybe you don't need dexterous hands if your population is still living in the jungle among plentiful calories like the chimpanzee. Maybe it is more relevant to comparatively more feeble humans that were pushed out of that jungle by physically stronger ape populations into more nutrient poor environments, where suddenly the increased fitness from the advantages dexterous hands might bring now pay for their energy costs.
by toredash | 2025-10-08 05:21:27+00:00
Hi HN,

I wanted to share something I've worked a bit to solve regarding Kubernetes: its scheduler has no awareness of the network topology for external services that workloads communicate with. If a pod talks to a database (e.g AWS RDS), K8s does not know it should schedule it in the same AZ as the database. If placed in the wrong AZ, it leads to unnecessary cross-AZ network traffic, adding latency (and costs $).

I've made a tool I've called "Automatic Zone Placement", which automatically aligns Pod placements with their external dependencies.

Testing shows that placing the pod in the same AZ resulted in a ~175-375% performance increase. Measured with small, frequent SQL requests. It's not really that strange, same AZ latency is much lower than cross-AZ. Lower latency = increased performance.

The tool has two components:

1) A lightweight lookup service: A dependency-free Python service that takes a domain name (e.g., your RDS endpoint) and resolves its IP to a specific AZ.

2 ) A Kyverno mutating webhook: This policy intercepts pod creation requests. If a pod has a specific annotation, the webhook calls the lookup service and injects the required nodeAffinity to schedule the pod onto a node in the correct AZ.

The goal is to make this an automatic process, the alternative is to manually add a nodeAffinity spec to your workloads. But resources moves between AZ, e.g. during maintenance events for RDS instances. I built this with AWS services in mind, the concept is generic enough to be used for on-premise clusters to make scheduling decisions based on rack, row, or data center properties.

I'd love some feedback on this, happy to answer questions :)
by JdeBP | 2025-10-08 05:21:52+00:00
Correct. But you didn't see that the source was one level up in the directory tree from the untrustworthy binary blob?

* https://github.com/kaushikgopal/dotfiles/blob/master/bin/usb...

Presumably there is a sensible way to do this in go by calling an API and getting the original machine-readable data rather than shelling out to run an entire sub-process for a command-line command and parsing its human-readable (even JSON) output. Especially as it turns out that the command-line command itself runs another command-line command in its turn. StackExchange hints at looking to see what API the reporter tool under /System/Library/SystemProfiler actually queries.
by wing-_-nuts | 2025-10-08 05:22:03+00:00
Oh man, don't even get me started. My first computer had a whopping 24 mb of memory. That computer browsed the web, with javascript. Now just my browser winds up eating ~ 3 gb of ram on a regular basis, with just youtube easily eating 600 mb of ram. That's more ram than I put in my first gaming pc back in 2003!

I built a AI / ML / gaming desktop last year, and I just said 'to heck with it, 64gb of ram!' Hopefully that'll hold me for a while
by reflexe | 2025-10-08 05:22:12+00:00
Hopefully it will make Qualcomm behave more like Arduino and not the opposite. Qualcomm is one of the worse companies I have had the pleasure to work with.

Their support model is hellish and they provide very little information and documentation, so usually you’ll end up doing a lot of guessing and reverse engineering. They will tell you to sign a contract with one of their “design partners”, but even they can’t get answers for basic questions.

Seriously, if they want more small cap companies working with them they have to treat them better, I worked with them as a small company and as a larger company and in both cases their support was basically non existent even if we were buying chips from them for more than 10m$ a year.
by Woodi | 2025-10-08 05:22:15+00:00
No, but it is equivalent of autoexec.bat like functionality. You can use it for many many things like viruses propagation, content control and even it is helpful for users ! ;)

It's just like giving external users self-modifing code access - asm, lisp, js - let's they upload it and we execute ;)

#DONOTSENDCODE Manifesto, where ?
by 999900000999 | 2025-10-08 05:22:29+00:00
Ok, so America is great for billionaires.

The vast majority of us are a bad year away from sleeping on the streets. Just decoupling healthcare from employment would be amazing.

It happens all the time. Any serious illness will stop you from working. You then have no way to pay for treatment, and then your stuck.

Not to mention Europe is much safer by several orders of magnitude. Both the UK and France are very diverse and safe.

Cars are expensive. Try affording healthcare insurance, a car, car insurance and out of pocket medical expenses on an average income. People just skip things, drive around without insurance and ignore easily treatable illnesses.

Eventually it all falls apart.

It's a horrible system for almost everyone, but billionaires.

Like I said, America is a casino. It's fun when your winning, but very few come out ahead.
by helterskelter | 2025-10-08 05:22:52+00:00
You do if you plan your estate. It's not just for assets, it's stuff like an advanced health directive (ie, what do you want if you're in a coma for a year?), and power of attorney (who calls the shots while you're incapacitated?). You want this stuff even if you're married -- perhaps especially if you're married, it could save your spouse a lot of trouble during a very difficult time. If you ever make a big transaction, or sign something that deals with $100,000 or more, you want an attorney to look it over first.

You don't need to pay them every month...just have them do estate documents and touch base with them once or twice a year so they remember who you are. You'll get their cell number.

Important to call your attorney instead of family because you might only get N number of calls before the jail cuts you off, even if nobody answers. Your family might be asleep or have lost their phone or whatever, but if you call your attorney they'll make sure to get ahold of somebody that can bail you out. (IIRC your attorney cannot bail you out themselves)
by hagbard_c | 2025-10-08 05:22:53+00:00
> accurate summary of the best sources available.

You mean accurate summary of the best sources available _which support the desired narrative_ - and therein lies the rub. WP had been infiltrated by a Nomenklatura which makes sure things published on the site follow the Party line and one of the tools used to enforce this is the so-canned list of perennial sources which bans or warns against the use of sources which do not fit the desired narrative, usually under claims of 'inaccuracy' or 'bias' which would be just as applicable to the narrative-amplifying sites they explicitly allow as being 'factual'.
by admiralrohan | 2025-10-08 05:23:24+00:00
I believe the core challenge in AI robotics is: Can we transfer the cultural knowledge inherent in human bodies and memories?

It's very difficult. Hard to transfer norms, rituals, and intuitive social cues passed organically drives human actions and evolution by enabling adaptive cooperation, empathy, and innovation in diverse societies.

For example, which books to read and whom to trust. You often make decisions on gut feeling which is hard to transfer.

The product looks promising. Hoping for the best.
by creer | 2025-10-08 05:24:08+00:00
What budget ever gets justified with exact numbers? What fantasy is this?

You get a fixed-price quote, you pay a fixed price amount, sure. But only because the vendor was planning to and is absorbing the uncertainty. Except if it was not really fixed price, then they send you a nice report explaining why it will cost you more in the end.

The future is great - so many estimates you can pick from!

> almost always for reasons beyond the engineer's responsibility

Now, you are touching to a different issue: If the project owner really wants to fund it, they will pick one estimate (or one end of the estimate). And if they really don't want to fund it, they will pick the other estimate (or the other end of the estimate). Either way, the issue will NOT be that the engineer couldn't cook up exact numbers. Even then, if by some sorcery you really need an exact number, just find a vendor willing to quote you a (very high) fixed price.
by godelski | 2025-10-08 05:25:02+00:00
I'm sorry, but you didn't make a case for bundling together and why finer grain control is would not make sense.

I have no doubt that the problems you guys solve are incredibly complex. There is no question about that.

But does bundling really make sense? I'm not sure why being subject to a 2G downgrade attack is relevant to my threat model including message attachments or FaceTime.

For example, going to a concert, protest, or any large gathering greatly increases my chance of being subject to a 2G downgrade attack but I'm unconvinced it increases my chances of multimedia or FaceTime based attacks.

These fall together in an high enough level but doesn't all security issues? A step down in abstraction and I don't think these are linked.

But you're the expert here. I'll trust you over me, but would like to better understand what I'm missing. This is Hacker News. We can expect everyone here to be familiar with programming and basic security here. So get technical with me
by ragequittah | 2025-10-08 05:25:42+00:00
The idea that you can't both use AI heavily and use thinking, make choices, and use experience is the part I think I disagree with. People sometimes use AI to make thoughtless slop, that doesn't mean everyone does.

I think we're going to come into contact with brilliant projects that people have spent years making and there would just be no way they could've done them without AI. It will be a human thinking it through making thousands of choices just like the OP said about Jurassic Park. You can and basically have to guide the AI like crazy to get any output worthwhile.
by dpacmittal | 2025-10-08 05:26:55+00:00
I can relate with you. I love programming and building things, gives a different kind of rush when you finally figure out something. I've done vibe coding and don't enjoy it at all. I always thought my love for coding gives me an edge over other engineers who just want to get the job done. Now it's holding me back and I'm not sure if I should continue working in this field or if start doing wood working or something.
by the_hoffa | 2025-10-08 05:27:16+00:00
I don't know if it's really that remarkable .. I don't think we can really attribute losing one specific type of memory over an entire civilization in about one generation such a "bad" thing.

The phone wasn't a household staple for pretty much the whole of humanity. It's really only been about a single generation (well, maybe 2 generations at this point) that the telephone to which you had to remember phone numbers was an important thing. Even in the early 1900's you would pick up the phone and an operator would answer and you had to ask them to connect you to a specific place/person.

And given that there 21 year olds alive today who never had a land-line (or even cable television) in their house or have even seen a dial phone, across the world, and that's only increased, it's not that surprising that we don't choose to actively remember phone numbers anymore .. it's just not "built in" to our core abilities yet because it was never something we needed to do on any type of evolutionary or generational scale.

I don't necessarily disagree that, on a whole, many people rely on technology so much that it has made them blind to the world around them (like so many who can't even read the map on their phone without blue lines telling them where to go). But I do think that not remembering every single phone number isn't something to really be concerned with at the human level .. not to say we shouldn't be teaching the importance of remembering certain numbers for emergency purposes though.
by otabdeveloper4 | 2025-10-08 05:29:15+00:00
> That evidence strongly points to chimps, gorillas, humans etc all coming from the same place.

No. Non-African humans have genetic lineages that do not occur anywhere in Africa.

This doesn't mean OOA is necessarily false, but does makes it much less likely.

Also, lumping in primates is a red herring. The resolution of our gene clade knowledge doesn't go that far back. Dreaming about some hypothetical ape ancestor is a vibe, not a science.
by jmspring | 2025-10-08 05:29:29+00:00
I need to read through this some more, but there has been another genetic coding paradigm referred to as spec driven development.

I’ll find the link in the morning, but I kinda joke - it’s vibe coding for people who know how to define a problem and iterate on it.

I’ve got a project reimplementing a service I want to make more uniform. Claude has produced a lot of stuff that would have taken me weeks to do.
by amccollum | 2025-10-08 05:29:34+00:00
They're not, at least not really. From Wikipedia:

In April 2016, Rovi acquired TiVo for $1.1 billion.[8] In December 2019, it was announced that TiVo would merge with Xperi Corporation. The merger completed in May 2020.[9]

Xperi itself also split apart in 2022, so it's effectively 3 companies removed from its original roots. Basically at this point it is only valuable for the vague nostalgia consumers have for the brand.
by mrwh | 2025-10-08 05:30:31+00:00
And yet, imagine it's 100 million jobs, at 100K per job. That's 10 trillion dollars a year, well worth the investment! Except that it won't be 100K per job that AI companies will capture, it'll be 2K. So that's not 10 trillion dollars a year, it's 200 billion. Which is about what a big tech company makes in advertising already.
by justlikereddit | 2025-10-08 05:32:45+00:00
If one can easily reach parity with a motivated undergrad by leveraging LLMs I will still consider it impressive.

While the 5-minutes model will never be useful in itself it lays the groundwork for amateurs and small groups to getting into developing small models. There's at the moment another HN headline hyping up a tiny model that scores impressively at the arc-agi benchmarks so it's clearly not a dead end to explore what is "household-affordable" models.

Though an approach that doesn't lean on the authors $200/month OAI sub would've been more interesting to follow.
by tennysont | 2025-10-08 05:32:47+00:00
Put another way: price is determined by need and supply (aka, demand curve meets supply curve).

I would pay anything for air if I needed it, but I will gladly sell air in my yard for $1/m^3 because that air is worthless to me.

Is air priceless or worthless?

That is why price != value as most people think of it.
by simonw | 2025-10-08 05:33:13+00:00
I had a fascinating conversation about this the other day. An engineer was telling me about his LLM process, which is effectively this:

1. Collaborate on a detailed spec

2. Have it implement that spec

3. Spend a lot of time on review and QA - is the code good? Does the feature work well?

4. Take lessons from that process and write them down for the LLM to use next time - using CLAUDE.md or similar

That last step is the interesting one. You're right: humans improve, LLMs don't... but that means it's on us as their users to manage the improvement cycle by using every feature iteration as as opportunity to improve how they work.

I've heard similar things from a few people now: by constantly iterating on their CLAUDE.md - adding extra instructions every time the bot makes a mistake, telling it to do things like always write the tests first, run the linter, reuse the BaseView class when building a new application view, etc - they get wildly better results over time.
by jonathanlydall | 2025-10-08 05:33:26+00:00
A router is connected to multiple networks and for networks running on Ethernet, yes, each device on those networks has a MAC address its interface connected to it.

The headers of IP packets wouldn’t be affected by MAC addresses, Ethernet packets carry IP packets as their payload and would have their own headers as appropriate.

A router’s job is essentially to “pass on” or relay IP packets based on its routing tables, they are what connect networks together.
by wferrell | 2025-10-08 05:33:59+00:00
@simonw

Great post. I've thought about what I want for better Vibe Engineering:

Each agent needs to deliver a fully working App/URL/Build so the functionality can be tested & verified.

Today AI IDEs deliver the diff + an explanation. Excellent. But give me the full build, a build I can share. A build that represents what it would be like shipped. When it comes to user facing functionality, a real build is how product owners verify a feature is complete.

Learn from Vercel -

A key part of Vercel’s magic is the automatic deployments for each branch. When working on a project with per branch vercel deployments - a team gets the immediate value of:

Shareable work - now others can see/test/give feedback on the great new feature you’ve developed - and their only work is to click a link (not git pull a branch and attempt to run locally)

No more “it works on my machine”. It either works or it doesn’t.

Confidence that if released, you know exactly what the user will experience. Give me automatic deployments for each agent, for each PR. And keep them available to spin up / re-use later.

I want to be able to re-launch it 3 months later and it just works. The reason we don’t do this today is the cost of the engineering - but with docker et al + AI agents, the cost of the eng work drops 99%

Deliver the deployment in such a way that immediate feedback to the AI could be given. This way minor tweaks can be executed immediately by the AI meaning that I can just wait for the minor tweak, review and then merge. This means the PR gets shipped NOW.
by monegator | 2025-10-08 05:35:01+00:00
peripherals are a dumpster fire. I usually have to resort to bit-bang if i want to use the peripherals in a slightly different way than intended. Way easier than figuring out all the "drivers" thing to see if it's actually possible. Also, the couldn't make a decent ADC if their life depended on that. I use them for projects that require radio and GPIO, or slow PWM, or low accuracy ADC, or screens (but only with the preapproved screen controllers)
by slg | 2025-10-08 05:36:32+00:00
>It's brand advertising itself...

It's interesting that this is the label you give for that behavior. A more optimistic take is this is just journalistic ethics. I guess it all depends on how much you trust NPR, but like you said "some 54% trust in them, contrasted against 28% for the media at large". The nature of your description suggests you might be in the 46% and almost certainly in that 72%.
by kingstnap | 2025-10-08 05:36:52+00:00
I doubt it would ever be period 3.

Not a formal proof, but there is this fun theorem called period 3 implies chaos that my gut instinct says applies here.

Basically if you have a continuous mapping from [a,b] -> [a,b] and there exists a 3 cycle then that implies every other cycle length exists.

Which in this case would kinda say that if you are bouncing between three values on the y axis (and the bouncing is a continuous function which admittedly the gradient of a relu is not) you are probably in a chaotic system

Now that requires assuming that the behaviour of y is largely a function of just y. But their derivation seems to imply that it is the case.
by phatskat | 2025-10-08 05:37:08+00:00
> you can’t make me learn new things, damn you

With regex, I won’t. I rarely include much in terms of regex in my PRs, usually small filters for text inputs for example. More complex regexes are saved for my own use to either parse out oddly formatted data, or as vim find/replace commands (or both!).

When I do use a complex regex, I document it thoroughly - not only for those unfamiliar, but also for my future self so I have a head-start when I come back to it. Usually when I get called out on it in a PR, it’s one of two things:

- “Does this _need_ to be a regex?” I’m fine to justify it, and it’s a question I ask teammates especially if it’s a sufficiently complex expression I see - “What’s that do?” This is rarely coming from an “I don’t know regex” situation, and more from an “I’m unfamiliar with this specific part of regex” eg back references.

I think the former is 100% valid - it’s easy to use too much regex, or to use it where there are better methods that may not have been the first place one goes: need to ensure a text field always displays numbers? Use a type=number input; need to ensure a phone number is a valid NANP number? Regex, baby!

The latter is of course valid too, and I try to approach any question about why a regex was used, or what it does, with a link to a regex web interface and an explanation of my thinking. I’ve had coworkers occasionally start using more regex in daily tasks as a result, and that’s great! It can really speed up things tasks that would otherwise be crummy to do by hand or when finagling with a parser.

Bonus: some of my favorite regex adventures:

- Parsing out a heavily customizable theme’s ACF data stuffed into custom fields in a Wordpress database, only to shove them into a new database with a new and %better% ACF structure - Taking PDF bank statements in Gmail, copying the text, and using a handful of painstakingly written find/replace vim regexes to parse the goop into a CSV format because why would banks ever provide structured data?? - Copy/pasting all of the Music League votes and winners from a like 20-person season into a text doc and converting it to a JSON format via regex that I could use to create a visualization of stats. - Not parsing HTML (again, anyways)