MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by saxenaabhi | 2025-10-18 17:16:23+00:00
> Any modern DB with a WAL (write ahead log) is an immutable event system, where the events are the DB primitives (insert, update, delete...).

Agreed, I just wish apart from WAL they also had versioning as first class and their update api required clients to pass the version they have "last seen" to prevent inconsistencies.
by Sohcahtoa82 | 2025-10-18 17:17:03+00:00
Delivery fees vary from $4-10, plus tip.

And while tipping is technically optional, it's de facto required. The driver will see the total pay for a delivery before they accept it, and if it's too low, they'll reject it, and DoorDash will offer the delivery to another driver. If you don't tip, then your delivery will be rejected until it reaches some driver that's gotten desperate. By that time, your food will likely have been already made and sitting and waiting for 30 minutes.
by tharne | 2025-10-18 17:17:06+00:00
Are those $10-20/user/month costs sustainable? As I understand it, a lot of the price tags we're seeing now reflect steep discounts underwritten by massive debt and VC money.

The other thing I wonder about with respect to cost and availability, at least in the U.S., is the fact that our electrical grid is in shambles and there's a ton of deferred maintenance. Even if AI can deliver on its promises, do we even have the infrastructure in place to power it?

These are just two issues; I'm sure there are more, and I imagine Wall Street is taking some of this into account in their analyses.
by willyxdjazz | 2025-10-18 17:17:09+00:00
Thanks for your view! My analogy was intentional—I wanted to talk about revolutionary tools that extend human capabilities, not about the foundational infrastructure itself. Of course, the internet is a fundamental platform like the wheel, but I’m focusing on what’s built on top of that—how new tools like predictive inference change the landscape again. Analogies can work at different layers. I just chose the tool, not the medium.
by vacuity | 2025-10-18 17:17:55+00:00
I trust science; I trust scientists less, and science journalism and its readers even less. Science as a human practice has never been a shining beacon of the truth. Even ignoring results that suit politics, I don't take much stock in psychology findings nowadays. And as someone interested in learning more about psychology, it's unfortunate. Science is valuable, but it should never obscure the truth. Even perfect science is not the sole arbiter of truth.
by madmountaingoat | 2025-10-18 17:17:56+00:00
The standard screen was 80 by 25. There were two addresses you needed to know 0xb000 for monochrome displays and 0xb800 for color. For monochrome you could just blast characters/attributes to the address and everything looked great. For color you had to add a little bit of assembly so writes didn't happen when the monitor was doing certain things (or else you would get some flickering). The little hacks were all well known. Then you could build your own 'windowing' system by just maintaining separate screen buffers and having a little bit of code to combine for buffers when writing the actual hardware. In the early days everyone code was synchronous and code would start listening for keyboard events and react and repaint in a very ad hoc fashion. Mouses made things a bit more complicated as you needed to maintain a persistent model of the UI to process their events. So the UI code was simple and easy to work on, but you had to squeeze these programs into tiny memory footprints so you would spend a lot of time trying to find more memory. One of the bigger projects I worked on had a memory manager that relocated blocks to create contiguous space but since there was no OS support for things that like the code was actually updating pointer in the heap and stack - which was a great source of complicated bugs. Whoa onto anyone that tried to use a linked lists in such an environment. But yeah, it was a fun time.
by nostromo | 2025-10-18 17:18:00+00:00
Here’s my hot take on tinnitus:

First and foremost, ignore it. When you find yourself listening to it, distract yourself and immediately move on.

Secondly, add more white noise into your environment. The best approach I find is just opening a window or adding a little fan or water feature to your desk. White noise generators don’t work as well for me, but they can help in a pinch.

I believe that our modern day indoor environments are honestly just too unnaturally quiet anyway.

I’m not joking when I say that the only time I really get annoyed by my tinnitus is when the monthly “cure” for it gets posted on HN. ;-)
by ahartmetz | 2025-10-18 17:18:49+00:00
In my case, I am still using ag because rg doesn't seem to be better enough to switch. What's the big deal with rg vs ag?

I had a similar thing with bash vs zsh before I learned about oh-my-zsh. Nushell also seems attractive these days... the good stuff from PowerShell in a POSIX-like shell.
by labcomputer | 2025-10-18 17:19:35+00:00
Yes, but you do need a few really good senior people. If your salary table has a hard cap at 150k (and no equity to make up for it), you can’t hire those people.

You also have a hard time hiring good mid-levels because you can’t possibly pay them as much as the top people, right? You also have the problem that some of your SWEs might make more than their managers, and that’s just unconscionable.

So what do you do? Have a “secret bonus” program that even most people in HR don’t know about? Hiring becomes tricky: Better make sure you don’t have a live one on the line when the only HR with need-to-know is on vacation.
by uecker | 2025-10-18 17:19:48+00:00
I would say autoconf/automake is not really useful anymore and probably somebody should just establish a new and simplified standardized setup and Makefile for C projects.

And yes, efficient separate and incremental compilation is major advantage of C. I do not understand why people criticize this. It works beautifully. I also think it is good that the language and build system are separate.
by noir_lord | 2025-10-18 17:20:10+00:00
Ublock Origin and Unhook[1]

Lets you remove as much or as little of the "UI/UX" as you want - don't want to see shorts, recommended vids, end cards etc - live comments (who even asked for that) you don't have to.

It collapses YT back to been an intentional thing - I'm looking for a video to watch, I watch it, it suggests nothing and I go on with my day instead of getting distracted by the skinner box.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/youtube-recom...
by more_corn | 2025-10-18 17:21:47+00:00
I like this idea. Here’s how it plays out: Singapore law enforcement gets involved. They send a nasty-gram to AWS. lawyers get involved. AWS lawyers collect facts. Find that the culprit is not you, find that you’ve asked for help, find that they (AWS) failed to remediate, properly fix responsibility on the culprit and secondary responsibility on themselves, punch themselves in the crotch for a minute, and then solve the problem by canceling the account of the offending party.
by fduran | 2025-10-18 17:23:17+00:00
This is similar to our experience migrating a SadServers k8s service; basically Hetzner is way cheaper and more performant than the big cloud providers BUT you have to take into account man-hours for the migration and be careful with missing services or ancillary tooling: https://docs.sadservers.com/blog/migrating-k8s-out-of-cloud-...
by inetknght | 2025-10-18 17:23:26+00:00
> Each program was its own island because its interface was unique to the program. However, they were all so similar in how they looked like—80x25 characters didn’t leave much room for uniqueness—and how they worked that the differences didn’t really get in the way of usability and discoverability. Once you learned that the Alt key opened the menus and that Tab moved across input fields and buttons, you could navigate almost any program with ease.

This is the biggest thing I miss in modern GUIs, especially Windows, macOS, or mobile.

Tabbing across every single possible inputs, with alt or control keys for quick access is insanely powerful compared to "click here, scroll this, click click"
by danans | 2025-10-18 17:23:30+00:00
> We have no idea how much of the world I squirrel understands. We understand LLMs more than squirrels

Based on our understanding of biology and evolution we know that a squirrel brain works more similarly to the way we humans do vs an LLM.

To the extent we understand LLMs, it's because they are strictly less complex than both ours and squirrels' brains, not because they are better model for our intelligence. They are a thin simulation of human language generation capability mediated via text.

We also see that a squirrel, like us, is capable of continuous learning driven by its own goals, all on an energy budget many orders of magnitude lower than LLMs. That last part is a strong empirical indication that suggests that LLMs are a dead end for AGI, given that the real world employs harsh energy constraints on biological intelligences.

Also remember that Sutton is still of an AI maximalist. He isn't saying that AGI isn't possible, just that LLMs can't get us there.
by nick__m | 2025-10-18 17:24:02+00:00
For a featureless program it appears to be quite featurefull !

Opaque and transparencies, at the same time. Use opaque color for impasto, or glazing over with transparencies, any process, any time. Different reflectance behaviour for dense/diluted colors, enjoy the hue shifts as you mix. Allow different light source and exposure control of the image. Node-Based Brush Engine ...
by tptacek | 2025-10-18 17:24:09+00:00
Same, for going on 40 years now. I can sleep without some kind of white noise, but it's really challenging. I have one of those Dohm thingies, which has been relegated to my office; in our bedroom we've got an air purifier and I have a tiny desk fan on my nightstand.

I've found that stuff like this site and therapy approaches like it tend to make me hypervigilant about my tinnitus, which is exactly the opposite of what I want. My tinnitus is moderate-severity (it's loud but never competes with real sound) and just by keeping background noise around I'm at a point where I think about it maybe a couple times a week tops; most of the times I'm persistantly thinking about it, it turns out I have a sinus infection or something.
by shermantanktop | 2025-10-18 17:24:40+00:00
The payoff is the last line: “ If you’ve signed up to offer an attention-luxury good, you undermine it when you also try to make it quick and convenient.”

Culture is also a luxury good, by this definition. If you read the Wikipedia summary of a Shakespeare play, you can fake a basic understanding of the plot. But you’ve gotten the social proof (e.g. dinner-party survival) without the deeper appreciation of the characters and their motivations.

As far as that goes, empathy seems to be a borderline luxury good at this point.
by tim333 | 2025-10-18 17:24:46+00:00
The post starts good but wanders into some questionable deductions. It makes sense that the guy's a fiction writer as I guess that's what you do in fiction - start from where we are and then let your imagination come up with things.

The first point he loses me a little is mid paragraph four:

>and the insecurity-induced radicalization—is due to an unprecedented civilizational energy transition

I buy insecurity but most of it seems due to globalization, concentration of money in the 1% and big tech. Like in America a lot of blue collar workers got laid off and short of money when the production moved to China and aren't going to get jobs at Google. But none of that is due to an 'energy transition'. I put that in quotes as the world is using more fossil fuel than ever but adding on some solar too.
by throwaway89201 | 2025-10-18 17:25:00+00:00
The herpes zoster vaccine given to the elderly in Wales born after September 1933 [1], which is a live-attenuated vaccine (Zostavax). Recently, a new herpes zoster recombinant subunit vaccine was introduced (Shingrix).

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-08800-x
by ninetyninenine | 2025-10-18 17:25:18+00:00
Do you think a fat pig is beautiful? Like a hairy fat pig that snorts and rolls in the mud… is this animal so beautiful to you that you would want to make love to this animal?

Of course not! Because pigs are intrinsically and universally ugly and sex with a pig is universally disgusting.

But you realize that horny male pigs think this is beautiful right? Horny pigs want to fuck other pigs because horny pigs think fat sweaty female hogs are beautiful.

Beauty is arbitrary. It is not intrinsic. Even among life forms and among humans we all have different opinions on what is beautiful. I guarantee you there are people who think the night sky is ugly af.

Attributes like beauty are not such profound categories that separate an LLM from humanity. These are arbitrary classifications and even though you can’t fully articulate the “experience” you have of “beauty” the LLM can’t fully articulate its “experience” either. You think it’s impossible for the LLM to experience what you experience… but you really have no evidence for this because you have no idea what the LLM experiences internally.

Just like you can’t articulate what the LLM experiences neither can the LLM. These are both black box processes that can’t be described but neither is very profound given the fact that we all have completely different opinions on what is beautiful.
by ctoth | 2025-10-18 17:25:40+00:00
> From the outside the US has shifted to a oligarchy where money buys elections.

The data simply doesn't support that narrative.

Looking at the last 4 presidential elections:

2024: Trump won, Harris outspent him ($1.9B vs $1.6B)

2020: Biden won, Biden outspent Trump ($1.06B vs $785M)

2016: Trump won, Clinton outspent him ($614M vs $368M)

2012: Obama won, Obama outspent Romney (~$1.1B vs ~$1B, essentially tied)

The higher spender won twice and lost twice. 2016 is particularly striking - Clinton outspent Trump by roughly $200-450 million depending on how you count it, yet lost.
by nearbuy | 2025-10-18 17:25:41+00:00
Cherry-picking? You made a completely factually wrong statement. There was no cherry-picking. You said the Turing test was never about AGI. You didn't say it has weaknesses. Even if it were the worst test ever made, it was still about AGI.

Ignoring the entire article including the "Strengths" section and only looking at "Weaknesses" is the only cherry-picking happening.

And if you read the Weaknesses section, you'll see very little of it is relevant to whether the Turing test demonstrates AGI. Only 1 of the 9 subsections is related to this. The other weaknesses listed include that intelligent entities may still fail the Turing test, that if the entity tested remains silent there is no way to evaluate it, and that making AI that imitates humans well may lower wages for humans.
by alganet | 2025-10-18 17:26:36+00:00
Be mindful of cultural trends and retconing your own mind. Nanobots (or nanites, or nano-tech) is a trope that came much later in cinema.

That trend was definitely influenced by some T3 stuff, however, in T3 terms, the Terminatrix is still bound by the more general idea of mimetic polyalloy.

Therefore, we can't say T3 uses nanobots.

Also, be mindful of nuanced representations of technology in movies. What we perceive to be robots, often, are not meant to be taken as that. They instead represent a general concept, often materialized into a character.

For T2, that concept is a clash between counter-culture (represented by the T-800) and state opression (represented by T1000), roughly. In the real world, both movements are artificial inserts into the collective consciousness. It's not as clear cut as I'm explaining, and there are other superimposing representations on top of it, but it should be enough to get the idea.

---

The impression I get, is that you're waiting for me to explain that T3 is actually a story of us running into disaster, and you have some sort of expectation in regards to how I would do that. If that's the case, I'm sorry to disappoint you!
by OutOfHere | 2025-10-18 17:26:40+00:00
You misunderstand completely. I said nothing at all about that being acceptable. It just has nothing whatsoever to do with what I said. If you cannot orthoganalize concerns while thinking about them, that's suggestive of a poor education. Furthermore, when you attempt to disallow others from orthogonalizing them, meaning from thinking and speaking about separate concerns separately, then you're a grave detriment to society. The deceit that you showed by accusing someone of something they didn't do or say is more a sign of sociopathy. Between you and the person with the mental illness, the greater hazard looks to be you. I urge you to never partake in a jury because an objective unemotional understanding is not your strong suit, but a witch-hunt is.
by umanwizard | 2025-10-18 17:27:11+00:00
Semver advocates hijacked the very common and pre-existing format of versions specified by dot-separated numbers, and then declared a specific meaning for it.

That’s nice for people who want to use that specific meaning, but it doesn’t mean that every instance of dot-separated version numbers is “semver”, nor that everyone who chooses not to follow these rules is “doing semver wrong”.
by marssaxman | 2025-10-18 17:27:49+00:00
It's possible I might once have given emacs a try, if the way people talk about it did not sound like such baffling moon-language: when I encounter stuff like "so I C-x C-f’d into my init.el, M-x eval-buffer’d, then C-c C-c’d an org-babel block before C-x k’ing the scratch buffer" I just want to back away slowly and leave them to it, whatever it is they're doing. Y'all have fun with your C-r X-wing mork-butterfly porg fluffers, I'm going to edit some code over here, using a text editor, that edits text files.
by FloorEgg | 2025-10-18 17:27:58+00:00
That's a segue into an important and rich philosophical space...

What is truth? Can it be attained, or only approached?

Can truth be approached (progress made towards truth) without interacting with reality?

The only shared truth seeking algorithm I know is the scientific method, which breaks down truth into two categories (my words here):

1) truth about what happened (controlled documented experiments) And 2) truth about how reality works (predictive powers)

In contrast to something like Karl friston free energy principle, which is more of a single unit truth seeking (more like predictive capability seeking) model.

So it seems like truth isn't an input to AI so much as it's an output, and it can't be attained, only approached.

But maybe you don't mean truth so much as a capability to definitively prove, in which case I agree and I think that's worth adding. Somehow integrating formal theorem proving algorithms into the architecture would probably be part of what enables AI to dramatically exceed human capabilities.
by andrepd | 2025-10-18 17:29:13+00:00
> the combustion engine revolution, which brought us urbanization, made democracy widespread (virtually eliminating monarchy), created the urban proletariat, ended slavery, made humans literally fly, lit the cities at night, obliterated most of the world's cultures through colonialism

Almost none of this really tracks. ICE => democracy? I don't see the link. Most of the things you speak of came with the industrial revolution, not with oil.
by tharne | 2025-10-18 17:29:38+00:00
The potential for trolling and general idiocy is high here, so I'll tread carefully. I think this is an uncomfortable truth that the Democratic party has yet to effectively internalize and address; and they will continue to struggle and frustrate themselves until they do. There is very little in current left-wing philosophy that provides any sort of meaningful place or role for masculinity as it is commonly understood. Then, when Democrats or other left wing political parties struggle to win over men, they resort to name calling and try to right off masculinity writ large, causally throwing around phrases like "toxic masculinity".

As much as it has gone out of fashion, the masculine and feminine are ever-present parts of the human psyche and human experience, which is why they can be found and understood across cultures, space, and time. Carl Jung and others who explore archetypes and symbols understood this well. You can't ignore a fundamental component of the human experience and expect your philosophy/worldview/politics succeed long term.
by chuckadams | 2025-10-18 17:29:41+00:00
I'd call it a trade-off. I've done event sourcing for systems that didn't really need it, and the ability to fix things retroactively by just replaying the log through the corrected pipeline of processors was marvelous. It lends itself to functional programming with effects instead of banging on global state wherever and whenever, and that pays dividends. But there's no free lunch, and pipelines could get complex by needing to track "epochs" and keeping bug-compatible behavior for old messages that would be patched downstream. Since the system just built persisted state at the end, I could checkpoint it at a new state and retire the older epochs. Doubtful that would that pass a rigorous audit, but if that's not one of your requirements, you really can do event sourcing halfway and still reap a lot of the benefits.
by jancsika | 2025-10-18 17:30:28+00:00
> Being extremely good at something increases the gap between said something and everything else.

You're also potentially over-specializing at one level while at the same time neglecting other levels.

Musicians run into this problem when, for example, they rely solely on muscle memory to make it through a performance. Throw enough stress and complicated music at them and they quickly buckle.

Meanwhile, a more seasoned performer remembers the exact fingers they used when drilling the measure after their mistake, what pitch is in the bass, what chord they are playing, what inversion that chord is in, the context of that chord in the greater harmonic progression, what section of the piece that harmonic progression is in, and so forth.

A friend of mine was able to improvise a different chord progression after a small mistake. He could do this because he knew where he was in the piece/section/chord progression and where he needed to go in the next measure.

In short, I'm fairly certain OP is talking about these levels of comprehension in computer programming. It's fine if someone is immensely comfortable in one IDE and grumpy in another. But it's not so fine if changing a shortcut reveals that they don't understand what a header file is.
by manoDev | 2025-10-18 17:30:30+00:00
No, that definitely happens.

There are two kinds of adjustments: an adjustment transaction (pontual), or re-interpreting what happened (systemic). The event sourcing pattern is useful on both situations.

Sometimes you need to replay events to have a correct report because your interpretation at the time was incorrect or it needs to change for whatever reason (external).

Auditing isn't about not changing anything, but being able to trace back and explain how you arrived at the result. You can have as many "versions" as you want of the final state, though.
by invader | 2025-10-18 17:30:50+00:00
People should also stop using terminal emulators. It is pretty silly to base software around ancient printing terminals. Everyone knows for a fact that only tech illiterates use a console instead of a GUI. Since all great devs use a GUI. Just a fact.

Also, people should stop playing 2D games. It is pretty silly to base your entertainment on ancient technology when modern GPUs can render super-complex 3D scenes.

And don't make me start on people who still buy vinyl...