MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 1313ed01 | 2025-10-18 14:08:18+00:00
Agree about Emacs, and I used it already in MS-DOS back in the day. You could launch the compiler (or make, more likely) using M-x compile or use C-z to open command.com to run commands on the prompt and then exit from that back to Emacs. Almost like multitasking!

I never really liked any of the typical late-MS-DOS era TUI applications and have no nostalgia for those. I think a small TUI like a OS installer is fine, but I realised it is the command-line I like. Launching into a TUI is not much different from opening a GUI, and both break out of the flow of just typing commands on a prompt. I use DOSbox and FreeDOS all the time, but I almost never spend time in any of the TUI applications.

Despite that, I am currently working on a DOS application running in 40x25 CGA text mode. I guess technically it is a TUI, but at least it does not look much like a typical TUI.
by latexr | 2025-10-18 14:08:37+00:00
And I responded to your hypothetical in detail and followed up with a request for clarification. That’s how discussions progress and it’s what forums such as HN are designed for.

You were clearly advocating for a particular future (“honestly believe (…) it’s a great thing”), so hiding behind it being a hypothetical feels disingenuous. Of course it’s an hypothetical, because it obviously does not describe the current state of the world. That doesn’t mean the idea is beyond criticism or commentary. On the contrary, that’s exactly what hypotheticals are for.
Show HN: Terminal Markdown notes using lockbook's CLI
by parthmehrotra | 2025-10-18 14:09:09+00:00
Put together a video highlighting some of my favorite parts of the lockbook cli. Tldr: lockbook is e2e encrypted, open source, and collaborative note taking platform. I used to take notes in raw vim but it was annoying to edit on my phone, keep secure, and share with people. So once lockbook was stable enough I built a try hard cli client optimizing for convenience and flexibility.

Hope you find it interesting, happy to answer any questions!
by magic_hamster | 2025-10-18 14:09:56+00:00
An MCP server doesn't have to have "simple" tools. Having very powerful and effective tools allows you to create great context for the LLM. I don't see any way Skills are better then this; on the contrary, now the "tool executive" is more dependent on the model, introducing non-deterministic context issues.

In the same vein, tools are also easy to iterate on, they are quite simple to implement, and their description is entirely up to you - you can limit how many tokens this description will consume.

This feels like going in the wrong path in a way, but we'll see how this evolves and what are the use cases.
by tarsius | 2025-10-18 14:10:09+00:00
> The Magit experience is due to the use of the transient package for its UI.

(I'm the author of Magit and Transient. (Though not the original author of Magit.))

The transient menus certainly play an important role but I think other characteristics are equally important.

A few years ago I tried to provide an abstract overview of Magit's "interface concepts": https://emacsair.me/2017/09/01/the-magical-git-interface/. (If it sounds a bit like a sales pitch, that's because it is; I wrote it for the Kickstarter campain.)
by mapontosevenths | 2025-10-18 14:10:44+00:00
> > Serious question: Who in HN is actually looking forward to AGI existing?

I am.

It's he only serious answer to the question of space exploration. Rockets filled with squishy meat were never going to accomplish anything serious, unless we find a way of beating the speed of light.

Further, humanities greatest weakness is that we can't plan anything long-term. Our flesh decays too rapidly and our species is one of perpetual noobs. Fields are becoming too complex to master in a single lifetime. A decent super-intelligence can not only survive indefinitely, it can plan accordingly, and it can master fields that are too complex to fit inside a single human skull.

Sometimes I wonder if humanity wasn't just evolutions way of building AI's.
by arnaudsm | 2025-10-18 14:11:27+00:00
Genuine question : why are hyperscalers like OpenAI and Oracle raising hundreds of billions ? Isn't their current infra enough ?

Naive napkin math : a GB200 NVL72 is 3M$, can serve ~7000 concurrent users of gpt4o (rumored to be 1400B A200B), and ChatGPT has ~10M concurrent peak users. That's only ~4B$ of infra.

Are they trying to brute-force AGI with larger models, knowing that gpt4.5 failed at this, and deepseek & qwen3 proved small MoE can reach frontier performance ? Or is my math 2 orders of magnitude off ?
by dsign | 2025-10-18 14:11:54+00:00
I don't think AGI is imminent in a "few months"-inminent, but in a "few decades" imminent. Personally, I don't own stocks in any AI company, though I'll be affected if the bubble bursts because the world economy right now feels fragile.

But I'm hoping something good comes out of the real push to build more compute and to make it cheaper. Maybe a bunch of intrepid aficionados will use it to run biological simulations to make cats immortal, at which point I'll finally get a cat. And then I will be very happy.
by saurik | 2025-10-18 14:12:05+00:00
While those are all "filesystems", they are also (internally) alternatives to MD RAID; like, you could run zfs on top of MD RAID, but it feels like a waste of zfs (and the same largely goes for btrfs and bcachefs). It thereby is not at all clear to me that it is the filesystems that are "immune to this issue" rather than their respective RAID-like behaviors, as it seems to be the latter that the discussion was focussing on (hence the initial mention of potentially adding btrfs to the issue, which did not otherwise mention any filesystem at all). Put another way: if you did do the unusual thing of running zfs on top of MD RAID, I actually bet you are still vulnerable to this scenario.

(Oh, unless you are maybe talking about something orthogonal to the fixes mentioned in the discussion thread, such as some property of the extra checksumming done by these filesystems? And so, even if the disks de-synchronize, maybe zfs will detect an error if it reads "the wrong one" off of the underlying MD RAID, rather than ending up with the other content?)
by barrell | 2025-10-18 14:12:10+00:00
I’m not convinced the current capabilities have impacted all that many people. I think the economy is much more responsible for the lack of jobs than “replacement with AI”, and most businesses have not seen returns on AI.

There is a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of people who I would believe have been seriously impacted by AI.

Most regular people couldn’t care less about it, and the only regular people I know who do care are the ones actively boycotting it.
by buzer | 2025-10-18 14:12:11+00:00
I don't think GDPR violations are normally handled by police. It might be if there is separate a crime (in Finland illicit observation can probably be both GDPR violation and crime though that probably doesn't apply here).

GDPR violations would normally be handled by the national DPA. They can investigate things by their own decision but normally you need to try to exercise your rights (in this case probably ask copies of your data, information regarding processing & recipients of your personal data), get denial from data controller or find issues on their reply and then make complaint to DPA. They will then investigate & give decision. You or data controller can then appeal it to court if either disagrees.
by K0balt | 2025-10-18 14:12:45+00:00
I’m with you on the energy and limitations, and even on the moving of goalposts.

I’d like to add that I think limit definition of AGI has jumped the shark though and is already at ASI, since we expect our machine to exhibit professional level acumen across such a wide range of knowledge that it would be similar to the 0.01 percent top career scholars and engineers, or even above any known human capacity just due to breadth of knowledge. And we also expect it to provide that level of focused interaction to a small city of people all at the same time / provide that knowledge 10,000 times faster than any human can.

I think definitionally that is ASÍ.

But I also think AGI that “we are still chasing” focus-groups a lot better than ASI which is legitimately scary as shit to the average Joe, and which seasoned engineers recognize as a significant threat if controlled by people with misaligned intentions.

PR needs us to be “approaching AGI”, not “closing in on ASI”, or we would be pinned down with prohibitive regulatory straitjackets in no time.
by naasking | 2025-10-18 14:12:55+00:00
> do we have human level computational capacity with some level of real-time learning ability

We don't build airplanes by mimicking birds. AGIs computational capacity won't be directly comparable to human computation capacity that was formed by messy, heuristic evolution.

You're right that there is some core nugget in there that needs to be replicated though, and it will probably be by accident, as with most inventions.

Hardware is still progressing exponentially, and performance improvements from model and algorithmic improvements have been outpacing hardware progress for at least a decade. The idea that AGI will take a century or more is laughable. Now that's borderline deluded.
by deaux | 2025-10-18 14:13:23+00:00
They didn't force anything, they gave them a choice, and Google consciously and actively chose to make this decision.

AP News chooses to still call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of Mexico; a different choice from the outlets that no longer do. The New York Times, NBC News, the Hill and CNN chose to rather have their Pentagon access revoked; a different choice than the one made by New York Post, One America News Network, Breitbart News Network, HuffPost News and others.

It's important to keep repeating this. Companies, organizations and individuals all have choices. Not every one of them makes the same choice given the same situation - in fact, they make opposite choices.
by aik | 2025-10-18 14:13:24+00:00
I have no idea if OpenAI’s valuation is reasonable. All I’m saying is I’m convinced the demand is there, even without AGI around the corner. You do not need AGI to transform countless industries.

And we are profitable on our AI efforts while adding massive value to our clients.

I know less about OpenAI’s economics, I know there are questions on whether their model is sustainable/for how long. I am guessing they are thinking about it and have a plan?
by jghn | 2025-10-18 14:14:43+00:00
Same. It's shifted from an escapist fantasy about getting away from it all to a more literal definition of "escapist fantasy". if it weren't for family & friend ties binding us to our geographical area it'd already be a lot more serious. We're not *that* far from a low end FIRE situation, so a move to a more LCOL country could make a ton of sense and escape ... all of this.
by getnormality | 2025-10-18 14:15:15+00:00
One of the most brilliant AI minds on the planet, and he's focused on education. How to make all the innovation of the last decade accessible so the next generation can build what we don't know how to do today.

No magical thinking here. No empty blather about how AI is going to make us obsolete with the details all handwaved away. Karpathy sees that, for now, better humans are the only way forward.

Also, speculation as to why AI coders are "mortally terrified of exceptions": it's the same thing OpenAI recently wrote about, trying to get an answer at all costs to boost some accuracy metric. An exception is a signal of uncertainty indicating that you need to learn more about your problem. But that doesn't get you points. Only a "correct answer" gets you points.

Frontier AI research seems to have yet to operationalize a concept of progress without a final correct answer or victory condition. That's why AI is still so bad at Pokemon. To complete open-ended long-running tasks like Pokemon, you need to be motivated to get interesting things to happen, have some minimal sense of what kind of thing is interesting, and have the ability to adjust your sense of what is interesting as you learn more.
by mindslight | 2025-10-18 14:15:23+00:00
Think again. Imagine a scheme where the car won't start (or only operates in limp mode) if it has not been able to connect to the network (and therefore backhaul surveillance logs) in say 30 or 90 days. And this kind of scheme actually seems likely to arise from standard corporate incentives like wanting to make sure critical safety recalls actually get fixed.
by mikeodds | 2025-10-18 14:16:21+00:00
That’s cumulative liquidity available on the right hand side.

i.e the ~13k shown at 99c and ~12k show at 98c aren’t independent. If the 12k is taken at 98c, only 1k would be left avail at 99c.

You’re right if you wanted to hold the price there it would cost you more, however if there isn’t a straight arb, maybe not instantly, and (some) smart bettors might be wary of such a market going to near 100%
by Aurornis | 2025-10-18 14:16:43+00:00
With parenting it’s not a case where you have 100% airtight control over everything with no possible leaks. It’s a spectrum where you impose expectations combined with some controls.

The parents I’ve seen who give up and make no efforts because they think it’s impossible to perfect control everything don’t have great outcomes. This applies to everything from internet to drinking alcohol and more.
by dogma1138 | 2025-10-18 14:16:52+00:00
Symbolic AI didn’t die tho, it was just merged with deep learning either as complementary from the get go e.g. AlphaGo which uses Symbolic AI to feed a deep neural network or now as a post processing / interventionary technique for guiding and optimizing outputs of LLM, human in the loop and MoR are very much Symbolic AI techniques.
by card_zero | 2025-10-18 14:17:03+00:00
I don't agree with the point about "perpetual noobs". Fields that are too broad to fit in a single mind in a lifetime need to be made deeper, that is, better explained. If a field only gets more expansive and intricate, we're doing it wrong.

Still, 130+ years of wisdom would have to be worth something, I can't say I dislike the prospect.
by ben_w | 2025-10-18 14:17:08+00:00
Disagree. AI that displaces workers is worth spending anything up to that worker's salary on, and this can have a devastating impact on energy prices for everyone.

Worked example, but this is a massive oversimplification in several different ways all at once:

Global electricity supply was around 31,153 TWh in 2024. The world's economy is about $117e12/year. Any AI* that is economically useful enough to handle 33% that, $38.6e12/year, is economically worthwhile to spend anything up to $38.6e12/year to keep that AI running.

If you spend $38.6e12 (per year) to buy all of those 31,153 TWh of electricity (per year), the global average electricity market price is now $1.239/kWh, and a lot of people start to wonder what the point of automating everything was if nobody can afford to keep their heating/AC (delete as appropriate) switched on. Or even the fridge/freezer, for a lot of people.

* I don't care what definition you're using for AGI, this is just about "economically useful"
by strken | 2025-10-18 14:17:10+00:00
It's a diplomatic bellwether. It doesn't matter in itself, but it's an interesting indicator of who is the most friendly nation. Note that Singapore leads the list; consider what you know about their foreign policy approach.

Is it in the interests of the US to play nice? Is that even morally correct? Regardless, this is a sign that it's no longer doing so.
by DisabledVeteran | 2025-10-18 14:17:18+00:00
Hey, first comment here. I'm wondering if you're interested in working together as I have a product that fills in a lot of the blanks that Underscore is missing.

Here's the backstory -- I was trying to find a decent MP3 player for the iPhone and Android because the stock media players were horrible. I downloaded a bunch of apps but couldn't find a good one that just did what a normal MP3 player would do. I even ordered the top 15 MP3 players from Amazon and all of them had some type of annoying quirks. I said well ... I just have to create one myself! I decided to go the browser route as that meant I would not have to deal with the headaches of the Play Store or the Apple Store and I could still use my phone as the media player or run it on any device.

Here are some of the features my media player allows you to do:

- Create all-in-one playlists from content on YouTube, Spotify, Twitch, Instagram, Vimeo, SoundCloud, Rumble, WSHH, Facebook and X/Twitter (in other words you can jump directly between content from different platforms without reloading the page)

- Auto-sync your playlists to our server or locally in the browser

- Download your playlists as .json or .txt files

- Shareable playlist URL's

- Focus button to automatically dim the rest of the page

- Multiple playlists

- Auto-shuffle tracks, repeat track & repeat playlist

- Organize your playlists however you like

- Complete support for mobile browsers

- Play the next item and previous item without having to reload the page

- Access to the media player is free

- Search in real-time for content using lyrics or titles (think of it like an updated version of YTInstant by Feross Aboukhadijeh of Stanford University)

The site is called https://plasas.com

For performance and security reasons I did not use any platforms such as Next.js, Node.js, Vue.js, WordPress, React, etc. (although I am looking into using Erlang / OTP / BEAM for future editions) Everything is written only using HTML, CSS, jQuery/JavaScript, Linux, NGINX, MariaDB & PHP. Let me know your thoughts!
by goncalomb | 2025-10-18 14:17:24+00:00
Cool project, but I also noticed the weird choice of #:~$ as a prompt, it uses almost half the width of the clock screen. And isn't # normally used to denote root shells? I don't think I ever saw it together with $.

My favorite prompt is >: as a callback to the Swan computer in the TV show Lost (not sure if it's also used in early Apple computers).
by mellosouls | 2025-10-18 14:17:25+00:00
As somebody who used to link to the occasional Marcus essay, this is a really poor "article" by a writer who has really declined to the point of boorishness. The contents here are just a list of talking points already mostly discussed on HN, so nothing new, and his over-familiar soapbox proclamations add nothing to the discourse.

Its not that he's wrong, I probably still have a great deal of sympathy with his position, but his approach is more suited to social media echo chambers than intelligent discussion.

I think it would be useful for him to take an extended break, and perhaps we could also do the same from him here.
by 1313ed01 | 2025-10-18 14:17:27+00:00
Came here to share this mandatory link on this subject, Dadgm's Things That Turbo Pascal is Smaller Than: https://prog21.dadgum.com/116.html

I used Turbo Pascal 2 as late as 1991, if not later, because that was the version we had. It was really fast on a 386 40 MHz or whatever exact type of PC we had then. A bit limiting perhaps that it only came with a library for CGA graphics, but on the other hand it made everything simpler and it was good for learning.

A few years ago I wanted to run my old Turbo Pascal games and decided to port to Free Pascal. Sadly Free Pascal turned out to only ship with the graphics library introduced in Turbo Pascal 4, but on the other hand I got a few hours of fun figuring out how to implement the Turbo Pascal 1-3 graphics API using inclined assembler to draw CGA graphics, and then my games worked (not very fun games to be honest; more fun to implement that API).
by pjmlp | 2025-10-18 14:17:47+00:00
Back in the day I had to use XEmacs as it was more advanced as plain Emacs.

After IDEs finally started being a common thing in UNIX systems, I left Emacs behind back to IDEs.

Still I have almost a decade where Emacs variants and vi were the only option, ignoring stuff like joe, nano, ed, even more limited.
Show HN: Silly Morse code chat app using WebSockets
by noamikotamir | 2025-10-18 14:18:03+00:00
My dad just bought a new printer. I joked and asked if it also had fax and a scanner. He said yes, not realizing I was making fun of him, so I asked if it also supported Morse code. That made it clear :) Anyway, I decided to take the joke too far and build a silly Morse code chat app for fun.
by carlosjobim | 2025-10-18 14:18:12+00:00
That's one perspective on it. The other perspective is that these online platforms are the only ones open for the public to be creators on, and some of them even pay creators.

Compare that to the gate-keepers that were before: Movie, TV and Music production companies, as well as book publishers. Those were severely limiting free speech according to their own policies, as well as mostly only accepting creators from wealthy and well connected families, or people who they could rip-off financially or sexually abuse. And this was when creativity was severely regulated.

So with all their flaws, YouTube and friends are still a million times better than the regulated creator economy of the past. Even though they've done absurd things like co-ordinated banning the president of the United States, and much more.
by lairv | 2025-10-18 14:18:36+00:00
https://nautil.us/deep-learning-is-hitting-a-wall-238440/

Gary Marcus said that Deep Learning was hitting a wall 1 month before the release of DALLE 2, 6 months before the release of ChatGPT and 1 year before GPT4, arguably 3 of the biggest milestones in Deep Learning
by ACCount37 | 2025-10-18 14:19:19+00:00
As a rule: inference is very profitable, frontier R&D is the money pit.

They need the money to keep pushing the envelope and building better AIs. And the better their AIs get, the more infra they'll need to keep up with the inference demand.

GPT-4.5's issue was that it wasn't deployable at scale - unlike the more experimental reasoning models, which delivered better task-specific performance without demanding that much more compute.

Scale is inevitable though - we'll see production AIs reach the scale of GPT-4.5 pretty soon. Newer hardware like GB200 enables that kind of thing.
by Noaidi | 2025-10-18 14:19:56+00:00
There are a lot of hopeful assumptions in the statement. Who’s to say that if AGI is achieved that it would want us to know how to go faster than the speed of light? you’re assuming that your wisdom and your plans would be AGI’s wisdom and plans. It might end up, just locking us here down on earth, sending us back to a more balanced primitive life, and killing off a mass amount of humans in order to achieve ecological balance on the Earth so humanity can survive without having to leave the planet.. Note that that’s not something I am advocating. I’m just saying it’s a possibility.
by weinzierl | 2025-10-18 14:20:44+00:00
Linus very much opposed O_DIRECT from the start. If I remember correctly he only introduced it at the pressure from the "database people" i.e. his beloved Oracle.

No wonder O_DIRECT never saw much love.

"I hope some day we can just rip the damn disaster out."

-- Linus Torvalds, 2007

https://lkml.org/lkml/2007/1/10/235
by erichocean | 2025-10-18 14:20:50+00:00
If by AGI you mean "can do any economic task humans currently do", that is within the range of a "few months," though the rollout will be incremental since each economic task has to be independently taught, there are supply chain issues, and AI-first companients will need to be developed to take best advantage of it, etc.

But all of this is much closer than people seem to realize.
by dardeaup | 2025-10-18 14:21:07+00:00
A few others not mentioned:

DOS: FoxPro 2.x, dBASE III Plus, dBASE IV, Turbo Pascal 5.5/6.0 was probably the pinnacle for me

OS/2: Watcom VX-REXX - extremely powerful and productive

Windows: Delphi before .NET