MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 0xEF | 2025-10-26 13:09:49+00:00
What's aspects of sci-fi or fantasy draw you? I personally go for the weirder sci-fi that seemed to come out of the imaginative (and, well, drug-fueled, probably) 60's and 70's, so my recommendations tend to come from that.

Dune by Frank Herbert - I'll get the obvious one out of the way. Everyone needs to read at least the first book. The world-building is a commentary on our own and none of the movies, series or games will every really capture the books in their entirety. There is just so much more to Dune than the barely-below-the-surface treatments we get with film because they have to appeal to a mass audience that tends to have the relative intelligence of my left shoe.

Candy Man by Vincent King - take PKD's Electric Sheep question of what makes a human a human, then explore the answer in a far-flung future that ends up being a bit of a nightmare circus. Great world-building, here, but King reveals in slow morsels that leave us with questions and fuel turning the page. While his other works are not really that prolific, he hit the nail on the head with this one, bringing some dialect playfulness to the writing that just adds to the immersion. It's a haunting world, unsure of why it exists due to short memories and withholding of information, and unintentionally hints at the modern day disquiet of man as we race toward whatever Singularity we have accidentally or intentionally created.

Colossus by D. F. Jones - a bit like Wargames but more swanky, the US and Russia each create artificial super-intelligence then let them talk to each other, which goes about as well as you can imagine. The story hints at the notion that as soon as politics gets involved with science, things tend to get really cocked up, resulting in hostile takeovers, or worse, annihilation. It's a short read, and should be on the to-do list of anyone experiencing existential dread over the AI race today.

A Canticle For Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller - everyone needs a bit of post-apocalypsia now and then and I always recommend this one to get your fix. Here's an extreme treatment of what happens when anti-intellectualism becomes the modus operendi as we are thrust into a harsh and desolate world brought about by global nuclear war, roaming mobs blaming science (rather that politics, as Simpletons will do) for getting humanity into the mess it's in, going so far as to forbid pretty much any book-learning or education beyond the church. As artifacts from the past (our present, more or less) are uncovered, things get a bit hectic.

I'm also happy to take any recommendations, enjoying other authors like Stanislaw Lem, John Brunner, Robert Heinlein, Vonnegut, Jack Vance, etc. Reading books is probably one of the few things in my life that makes me feel a little less alone.
by myaccountonhn | 2025-10-26 13:10:13+00:00
The cool thing is that once you know how simple it is to self host (I certainly didn't know before, just used github), you learn a skill that you can apply to many different contexts, and understand better what actually goes on in systems you depend on. That's what these "tech should be invisible" people miss, where they tout that you should instead learn SASS solutions where you have zero ownership nor agency, instead of taking the time to learn transferable skills.
by zenmac | 2025-10-26 13:10:56+00:00
Yeah this is the best arguments for GitHub type of web git GUI. Not knowing bare repo seems just like a devs not reading docs. And I'm sorry in this day and age devs needs to keep up and just type git like curl http://...../install.sh type of thing.

However would NEVER trust Github since the MS acquisition. codeberg and https://forgejo.org are perfectly sound FOSS alternative to GitHub and GigLabs nowdays.
by seba_dos1 | 2025-10-26 13:11:00+00:00
The vast majority [0] of developers working with git daily have no mental model of git repos and just do a mental equivalent of copy'n'pasting commands and it's enough to let them do their work (until something breaks at least), so it doesn't seem like a particularly good indicator of whether something is obscure or not. There are many obscure things hiding in git, bare repos aren't one of those :)

[0] Source: pulled out of my arse.
by Trasmatta | 2025-10-26 13:11:21+00:00
> The 25 is there in the name. It's the whole point :).

You're overly attached to the meaning of Advent, but you aren't even aware of the meaning. It doesn't mean exactly 25. This year Advent Sunday is November 30th.

And the creator of Advent of Code can do whatever they want with it, despite the name. They've put an immense amount of effort into this for so long - if that had been me, I would have been incredibly disheartened to see people saying "the whole point is just 25".
by ReptileMan | 2025-10-26 13:11:36+00:00
One of the effects of passing of time is that even some of the greats of yore are now obscure and cultish. Like the whole golden age

I have met very few people under 50 that have read the early Schekley short stories. That are probably one of the sci fi peaks.

But in cult and unknown works - Ticket to tranai. One of the best (anti) utopias written.
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by lcorinst | 2025-10-26 13:12:20+00:00
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by bigstrat2003 | 2025-10-26 13:12:24+00:00
> In a few years at most, all programming will be purely recreational.

That's a bold prediction given how much LLMs suck at programming today (and haven't really improved, either). I'm willing to believe that we will someday invent an AI that can program better than humans. I don't believe it'll be within a few years, because the current architecture shows no signs that it'll ever be able to get the job done.
by timmg | 2025-10-26 13:12:30+00:00
There was a brief period when Google Cloud had support for hosting git on a pay-per-use basis. (I think it was called Google Cloud Repositories.) It had a clunky but usable UI.

I really preferred the idea of just paying for what I used -- rather than being on a "freemium" model with GitHub.

But -- as many things with Google -- it was shutdown. Probably because most other people do prefer the freemium model.

I wonder if this kind of thing will come back in style someday, or if we are stuck with freemium/pro "tiers" for everything.
by CaptainOfCoit | 2025-10-26 13:13:05+00:00
> but the legal implications of trying passwords to try to scrape content behind authentication could pose a barrier

If you're doing something alike to cracking then yeah. But if the credentials are right there on the landing page, and visible to the public, it's not really cracking anymore since you already know the right password before you try it, and the website that put up the basic auth is freely sharing the password, so you aren't really bypassing anything, just using the same access methods as everyone else.

Again, if you're stumbling upon basic auth and you try to crack them, I agree it's at least borderline illegal, but this was not the context in the parent comment.
by skydhash | 2025-10-26 13:13:49+00:00
A repo is as database containing a tree of commits. Then you got the concept of branch, which points to a specific commit. Then there's the special pointer HEAD which is the latest commit for the current worktree.

When you checkout (now switch) a branch, HEAD is now the same as the branch (they point to the same commit). When you do operation like commit, reset, reset,... both the head and the branch are updated. So if a remote node tries to update the local node via a push on its end, that would mess up the local worktree. So you create a bare repo instead which can't contain a local worktree.

Note: A worktree is computed from the initial commit to the commit currently identified by HEAD by following the parent information on each commit.

The staging area is like a stored snapshot of what you would like to commit. You can always create patch between HEAD and the worktree, edit it, and then save the patch as the commit, then apply the leftover to the worktree. The staging just make that easier. It's a WIP patch for the next commit.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-10-26 13:14:15+00:00
If you want to work on the weekend - and occasionally I find myself doing so as a staff level IC consultant who does need to spend an inordinate amount of time mentoring, project management, suppprting sales, interviewing candidates, babysitting clients, etc… - don’t send messages on Slack or email outside of business hours. I schedule messages to go out Monday morning and I never mention I worked on the weekend.

I don’t want to set the expectation that people should work outside of business hours or that I’m willing to.
by CaptainOfCoit | 2025-10-26 13:15:14+00:00
I don't think it'd be illegal for anyone.

The (theoretical) scenario is: There is a website (example.com) that publishes the correct credentials, and tells users to go to example.com/authenticate and put those there.

At no point is a user (or bot) bypassing anything that was meant to stop them, they're following what the website is telling them publicly.
by gjstein | 2025-10-26 13:15:16+00:00
Ursula Le Guin in her preface to The Left Hand of Darkness [1], describes Science Fiction as "descriptive." She invents "elaborately circumstantial lies" as a means of describing what she sees as some truth in our being. The full quote:

> I’m merely observing, in the peculiar, devious, and thought-experimental manner proper to science fiction, that if you look at us at certain odd times of day in certain weathers, we already are. I am not predicting, or prescribing. I am describing. I am describing certain aspects of psychological reality in the novelist’s way, which is by inventing elaborately circumstantial lies.

This is how I think about both science fiction and fantasy. Elements of world building are different, even within each sub-genre, but this element of incorporating elements that are inconsistent with our world to tell stories is common to both. It's also why the term "speculative fiction" persists: a category that subsumes sci-fi and fantasy.

[1] Read that full preface here: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/342990/the-left-hand...
by perihelions | 2025-10-26 13:16:12+00:00
> "...we had to abruptly go out to sea because we couldn’t let the (minimal) fallout contaminate the reactor spaces and make it impossible to monitor the reactor itself properly."

There are numerous anecdotes from the USS Reagan that contradict that prosaic interpretation (of the reason it was abruptly moved),

https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/seven-years-on-sai... ("7 Years on, Sailors Exposed to Fukushima Radiation Seek Their Day in Court" (2018))

E.g.,

"He was issued iodine tablets—which are used to block radioactive iodine, a common byproduct of uranium fission, from being absorbed by the thyroid gland—and fitted for an NBC (nuclear, biological, chemical) suit. He was also told not to drink water from the ship’s desalination system. [...] Torres, the senior petty officer, recounted, “One of the scariest things I’ve heard in my career was when the commanding officer came over the loudspeaker, and she said, ‘We’ve detected high levels of radiation in the drinking water; I’m securing all the water.’” That included making showers off limits."
by carlosjobim | 2025-10-26 13:16:22+00:00
Companies sell for the highest price they can without losing more sales than it's worth, exactly as you say. I thought it was such common knowledge as not needing to be mentioned.

Adding tariffs means that you might have to lower your profit margins to remain competitive or that you will have to stop exporting to that nation completely, or start manufacturing in that nation. Which is the purpose of tariffs.
by 1718627440 | 2025-10-26 13:16:37+00:00
> To me, the docs indicate that it's possible (albeit unlikely) for a program that compiles under -std=c* to fail to compile under -std=gnu* due to one of those extensions that "conflict with the [C/C++] standard" and/or "change the meaning of the base standard".

That's correct. There are not much of those, but they do exist. These generally mean that the GNU dialect gave syntax a meaning, back when it was still forbidden in standard C. Then standard C adopted that feature due to it being implemented in a compiler (that's how language evolution should work), but gave it slightly different semantics. Now GCC has the choice between breaking old existing programs, or not exposing standard semantics by default. They solve that by letting the user choose the language version.

An example of that are arrays of size 0 at the end of a structure. This used to be used for specifying arrays whose size can be arbitrary large, but became obsolete with the introduction of flexible array members in C99. Now if GCC would only implement standard C, then the correct semantics for any array with a declared size that is accessed with an index larger than that size, would be undefined behaviour, but since GCC gave that the semantics, that now flexible array members have, before flexible array members existed, it chooses to implement these semantics instead, unless you tell it, which C standard you want to use.

Actually due to the use in popular codebases, such as the Linux kernel, this semantic is even assigned (based on a heuristic) with array sizes larger than zero.

From https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Zero-Length.html :

> In the absence of the zero-length array extension, in ISO C90 the contents array in the example above would typically be declared to have a single element. Unlike a zero-length array which only contributes to the size of the enclosing structure for the purposes of alignment, a one-element array always occupies at least as much space as a single object of the type. Although using one-element arrays this way is discouraged, GCC handles accesses to trailing one-element array members analogously to zero-length arrays.

(With GNU projects when you have questions, the best source are the official docs themself. They are stellar and are even completely available offline on your computer in the interactive documentation system Info.)

The other extensions are in the sibling chapters, e.g. https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Syntax-Extensions.html or https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Semantic-Extensions.html . A one that I quite like is https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Unnamed-Fields.html .
by lm28469 | 2025-10-26 13:17:15+00:00
For every employee using LLM for productivity you have 50 who use it to bullshit their way up the ladder, generate overly verbose emails, reports, bug reports, &c.

My wife's team spent 20+ man hours analyzing and trying to fufil the requests of one of their biggest customer, in the end it turned out to be a fully llm generated feature request email from someone who didn't quite understand the product in the first place...

When you save one hour on a coding task somewhere someone spends two hours trying to parse some bullshit email or report. I'm convinced it's a net negative overall
by DrewADesign | 2025-10-26 13:17:31+00:00
The people in the mad dash to AGI are either driven by religious conviction, or pure nihilism. Nobody doing this seriously considers the law a valid impediment. They justify (earnestly or not) companies doing things like scraping independent artist’s bread and butter work to create commercial services that tank their market with garbage knockoffs by claiming we’re moving into a post-work society. Meanwhile, the US government is moving at a breakneck pace to dismantle the already insufficient safety nets we do have. None of them care. Ethical roadblocks seem to be a solved problem in tech, now.
by razodactyl | 2025-10-26 13:18:36+00:00
You approach it from a data-science perspective and ensure more signal in the direction of the new discovery. Eg saturating / fine-tuning with biased data in the new direction.

The "thinking" paradigm might also be a way of combatting this issue, ensuring the model is primed to say "wait a minute" - but this to me is cheating in a way, it's likely that it works because real thought is full of backtracking and recalling or "gut feelings" that something isn't entirely correct.

The models don't "know". They're just more likely to say one thing over another which is closer to recall of information.

These "databases" that talk back are an interesting illusion but the inconsistency is what you seem to be trying to nail here.

They have all the information encoded inside but don't layer that information logically and instead surface it based on "vibes".
by skydhash | 2025-10-26 13:19:51+00:00
Git is distributed, so there's no least power and all that. Everyone has full power over their own copy. What you want is one copy being the source of truth. You can always use HTTP for read-only access to that copy with a limited set of people having write access to update the copy. Patches can be shared via anything (git has built-in support for email).
by montebicyclelo | 2025-10-26 13:20:51+00:00
Incorrect Pytorch gradients with Apple MPS backend...

Yep this kind of thing can happen. I found and reported incorrect gradients for Apple's Metal-backed tensorflow conv2d in 2021 [1].

(Pretty sure I've seen incorrect gradients with another Pytorch backend, but that was a few years ago and I don't seem to have raised an issue to refer to... )

One might think this class of errors would be caught by a test suite. Autodiff can be tested quite comprehensively against numerical differentiation [2]. (Although this example is from a much simpler lib than Pytorch, so I could be missing something.)

[1] https://github.com/apple/tensorflow_macos/issues/230

[2] https://github.com/sradc/SmallPebble/blob/2cd915c4ba72bf2d92...
by Haeuserschlucht | 2025-10-26 13:20:53+00:00
What happens when you watch someone else live the life you wish you had — without lifting a finger? In this episode, we explore how parasocial relationships with influencers, celebrities, and digital lives can become a form of emotional escape. It's not just about envy — it's about the comfort of knowing you don’t have to do the work. We dive into why so many of us are content to stay where we are, even when the world seems to be moving faster. Is it fear? Guilt? Or simply the realization that the effort might not be worth the outcome?

This isn’t a call to stop dreaming — it’s a reflection on how we choose to engage with the world, and whether the lives we admire are really worth the price we pay to chase them.
by CaptainOfCoit | 2025-10-26 13:21:11+00:00
Only slightly related, but how common are bugs in GPUs and/or CUDA? I'm currently on Day 5 of trying to debug why my GPT-OSS implementation (not using PyTorch) I've made from scratch isn't working correctly, and while I have it somewhat working with some naive and slow methods, I'm now doing an implementation of the tensor cores and have been just stuck for 2-3 days because of some small numerical difference I can't understand why it's happening.

Every day I'm getting closer to believing this is some sort of hardware bug in Blackwell or in CUDA itself, but as we know, the bug is (almost) never in the compiler or in the hardware. Until it is...
by saagarjha | 2025-10-26 13:22:01+00:00
> If "the year of Linux desktop" would ever happen, they need to either do an Android and change the definition of what a software package is, or split Glibc into 3 parts: syscalls, dynamic loader and the actual C library.

The dynamic loader used to be its own library, FWIW. It got merged into the main one recently.
by donavanm | 2025-10-26 13:22:18+00:00
I don't know if this comment is one of ignorance, or juvenile "well actually", but it is tragically misinformed. From an Australian perspective all of the big players, CSR, John Mansviille, & James Hardy, knew asbestos was a significant hazard by _at least_ the 40s. There were early epidemiological studies of cancers around asbestos work sites, and workers, in the 50s here in NSW. Unions and gov health departments start to push back on exposure and seek meaningful damages in the 60s and 70s. There were _public_ campaigns about the dangers in the 70s and 80s. It wasnt meaningfully restricted, _and continued to be commonly used_, through the 80s. A complete ban, primarily workplaces IIRC, wasnt introduced until 2003. The randian wank fantasy of "the informed consumer knows best" has been repudiated innumerable times.

And, as others have pointed out, this is not an individual choice. The families who got asbestosis from washing their fathers work clothes didnt make a choice. The bloom of cancers for residential suburbs miles around james hardy in camellia didnt have a choice. There is no expiration date on the dangers of friable asbestos. It remains hidden in the common environment forever, until someone else stumbles on it.
by ProllyInfamous | 2025-10-26 13:22:30+00:00
Best wishes to your pyloric valve, Ignatius J. Reilly [0]

[0] Main charachter in A Confederacy of Dunces; fired from hot dog vending because he mindlessly consumes them.

----

>"So... how many hot dogs would you say you eat every day?!" -WKUK [1]

[1] https://www.yout-ube.com/watch?v=vaAF_GAc3Mk
by makeitdouble | 2025-10-26 13:22:46+00:00
I spend half of my life on a legacy codebase, and the past PRs are my go to to understand anything mildly tricky in there.

My biggest realization was that the code comments were meaningless and borderline deceptive compared to the actual discussions and the target specs in the MRs. There's such a gap between what people want to explain or think will be useful, and the info actually needed. And I don't blame them, I'm not sure I'd do better.

My favorite is threads like "This name makes no sense" -> "Sure, give me a better name for X doing Y to Z" -> "Nevermind", which completely explains some of the insane naming, what they actually meant by it, and would never be left in any half official documentation.
by simonsquiff | 2025-10-26 13:23:24+00:00
I had my first at 42, second at 45, and about to have my third at 48. Honestly it’s been fine - thinking that people might find this unimaginable is so far from my reality. It really feels like I’ve had the same experience as those in their 30s.

Part of this might be that 40s life is a bit more chill anyhow - I no longer go and get smashed every weekend, or even have the FOMO that I’m not doing that. And work life, whilst more junior, was ultimately more extreme in my 20s and 30s. So any physical drop is probably balanced by a slight drop in general burning the candle at both ends. But yeah, don’t think 40s parenting is a no go. Go for it!
by auntienomen | 2025-10-26 13:24:06+00:00
If you like these books -- early classics of the genres -- it's going to be well worth your time to check out Fantasy Masterworks collection (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantasy_Masterworks). It's a set of reissued sci-fi and fantasy novels, chosen by the British publisher Millennium for their quality and influence on later writers.

3/5 of the books in the linked article are included.

It's not perfect-- it's missing War for the Oaks, for example, and doesn't have any Iain M Banks. But there's an awful lot of good material in there.
by ghtbircshotbe | 2025-10-26 13:24:43+00:00
I think the dominant attitude in the US is to stick your head in the sand. Tons of older homes have asbestos yet almost zero of them report it in their listing or their disclosure report. If you test it and find it you have to report it. If the buyer tests it and finds it, the seller doesn't want to know because then they'd have to report it. Somehow knowing the house has asbestos lowers it's value significantly more than willfully not knowing + almost certainly having it anyways.