MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by chuckadams | 2025-10-05 15:10:30+00:00
True, any format can be abused, though I'm not sure SVG could really do much better. What I really love is when people tell me that XML is just sexps in drag: I paste a screenful of lisp, delete a random parenthesis in the middle, and challenge them to tell me where the syntax error is without relying on formatting (the compiler sure doesn't).

Mind you I love the hell out of lisp, it just isn't The One True Syntax over all others.
by mysteria | 2025-10-05 15:10:41+00:00
It might be fun to have so many machines, but in reality it's simpler and cheaper to virtualize everything on two or three powerful hosts. Considering that you're using a soundproof rack already you might as well go with used rack servers with lots of memory and compute. Those also come with goodies like BMCs, dual PSUs, and ECC.

Personally I have two Xeon rack servers running in a Proxmox cluster with a SBC Qdevice. It has more than enough memory and compute for my needs and it also serves as my virtualized router and NAS. The whole setup only takes up 4U of space (servers + switch + modem/qdevice) with a single UPS on the floor, and idle power is around 150W.
by Aurornis | 2025-10-05 15:10:47+00:00
This blog is an LLM newsletter content factory. It's more obvious in the other articles.

Look at the heading and sub-heading of a post from a couple weeks ago:

> Witnesses Carry Weights: How Reality Gets Computed

> From UFO counsel to neighborhood fear to market pricing—reality emerges through weighted witnessing. A field guide to the computational machinery where intent, energy, and expectations become causal forces.

It even gets into the "recursive protocol" trope that has become a common theme among people think ChatGPT is revealing secrets of the universe to them.

This type of LLM slop has been hitting the page more frequently lately. I assume it's from people upvoting the headline before reading the content.
by freehorse | 2025-10-05 15:11:44+00:00
Tbh I am more interested in processing data and formatting it to tabular forms than extracting data from tabular forms. One of the main uses I see in LLMs is structuring unstructured/semistructured data. I may occasionally feed a table to an LLM and ask such kinds of questions when I feel lazy, but I see no serious application of this as compared with using whatever language/library to process the data from the table (whether using an llm or not in the whole process). The point of having structured data is exactly this. But much more often I feed data to an llm and ask it to create a table.
by ModernMech | 2025-10-05 15:11:50+00:00
I think in this day and age people should start assuming content is AI and then working backwards to a place of trust.

For example: Ed Nite says he doesn't want to be a programmer anymore. Who is Ed Nite? Is he even a programmer at all?

As far as I can tell, Ed Nite: Programmer doesn't really exist, must be a pen name. As far as his content, he mostly talks about being a writer and using AI. There's no real technical content to speak of. He doesn't link to a Github or work record. I found a youtube page of his with a single AI video on it from 6 months ago. As far as I can tell Ed Nite was invented 6 months ago to start blogging about blogging, self improvement and AI at mindthenerd.com.

So do I trust him? No. Assume AI and move on.
by encyclopedism | 2025-10-05 15:12:01+00:00
The jury maybe out on how to judge what 'thought' actually is. However what it is not is perhaps easier to perceive. My digital thermometer does not think when it tells me the temperature.

My paper and pen version of the latest LLM (quite a large bit of paper and certainly a lot of ink I might add) also does not think.

I am surprised so many in the HN community have so quickly taken to assuming as fact that LLM's think or reason. Even anthropomorphising LLM's to this end.

For a group inclined to quickly calling out 'God of the gaps' they have quite quickly invented their very own 'emergence'.
by ajross | 2025-10-05 15:12:39+00:00
> you’d be foolish to make it a classical CISC design and would definitely choose RISC

I think that's arguable, honestly. Or if not it hinges on quibbling over "classic".

There is a lot of code density advantage to special-case CISCy instructions: multiply+add and multiplex are obvious one in the compute world, which need to take three inputs and don't fit within classic ALU pipeline models. (You either need to wire 50% more register wires into every ALU and add an extra read port for the register store, or have a decode stage that recognizes the "special" instructions to route them to a special unit -- very "Complex" for a RISC instruction).

But also just x86 CALL/RET, which combine arithmetic on the stack pointer, computation of a return address and store/load of the results to memory, are a big win (well, where not disallowed due to spectre/meltdown mitigations). ARM32 has its ldm/stm instructions which are big code size advantages too. Hardware-managed stack management a-la SPARC and ia64 was also a win for similar reasons, and still exists in a few areas (Xtensa has a similar register window design and is a dominant player in the DSP space).

The idea of making all access to registers and memory be cleanly symmetric is obviously good for a very constrained chip (and its designers). But actual code in the real world makes very asymmetric use of those resources to conform to oddball but very common use cases like "C function call" or "Matrix Inversion" and aiming your hardware at that isn't necessarily "bad" design either.
by alganet | 2025-10-05 15:12:51+00:00
> Several people have written lengthy, detailed responses to your questions.

No, they haven't. Just read the thread.

> You're partly right that credentials alone don't prove anything.

I am totally right. Saying "believe me, I work on this" is lazy and a bad argument. There was simply no technical discussion to back that up.

> When tptacek mentioned his background, he also explained that static analysis tools have failed commercially for decades despite massive investment

I am not convinced that static analysis tools failed that hard. When I mentioned sanitizers, for example, he simply disappeared from the conversation and left that subject.

Also, suddenly, 22 bugs are found and there's a new holy grail in security analysis? You must understand that this is not enough.

> You've decided that people disagreeing with you are trying to manipulate you with authority

That's not a decision. An attempt to use credentials happened and it's there for anyone to see. It's blatant, I don't need to frame it.

> SAST tools with human triage have been ineffective for 20+ years despite enormous investment

I am not convinced that this is true. As I mentioned, sanitizers work really well at mitigating lots of security issues. They're an industry standard.

Also, I am not totally convinced that the LLM solution is that much better. It's fairly recent, only found a couple of bugs, and it still has much to prove before it becomes a valuable tool. Promising, but far from the holy grail you folks are implying it to be.

> if you want people to keep engaging with you

I want reasonable, no-nonsense people engaging with me. You seem to imply that your time somehow is more valuable than mine, that's me who owe you somehow. That is simply not true.
by credit_guy | 2025-10-05 15:12:58+00:00
Most likely OpenAI has models at least as efficient as DeepSeek or Qwen. Cerebras offers both GPT-OSS-120B and Qwen3-235B-Instruct. Obviously, the second has twice as many parameters as the first, but that's the closest comparison I can find. The Qwen model is twice as large, but twice as slow (1400 tokens/second vs 3000) and 50% more expensive ($1.2 per million tokens vs $0.75). Now, OpenAI is running a proprietary model, and most likely it is much optimized than the free version they release for public use.

[1] https://inference-docs.cerebras.ai/models/overview
by whstl | 2025-10-05 15:13:11+00:00
This seems to be going in circles.

> I prefer to be able to do anything I want with the GUI

I didn't say you don't need to stop doing "complex GUIs". What I'm challenging is the assertion that "Complex GUI's will inevitably have complex nested structures". This is not true IME.

> The complexity of GUI and the complexity of dataflow should be completely independent.

And this is exactly what my suggested method achieves. But I'm doing this by going one step further and decoupling the visuals from the component hierarchy. I'm still separating parts of the page into components, I'm just using an alternative to deep hierarchies, and forcing myself to have better reusable abstractions rather than single-use components. I do this with richer primitive components and layout components. That's it.

> Isn't it better to have components also independent of logic and side effects?

This is exactly what I am proposing. What I propose requires keeping logic and side effects from the reusable components. All I'm saying is that the logic shouldn't be distributed among multiple small components, because there's no intermediate layers with single-use components. If you do this, there's no need to worry about the organization you complain about.

In a gist, it's more "Philosophy of Software Design" and less "Clean Code", but applied to React.
by jasode | 2025-10-05 15:13:38+00:00
>but for sure setting up a local network with top-level open source self-hosted alternatives is the easiest it has ever been ever.

Understand your enthusiasm but to relate the discussion back to Tim Berners-Lee idea for SOLID data storage protocol... Running self-hosted things like email, NextCloud, Plex, sandstorm.io, etc -- are not relevant to the gp's "nothing changes" complaint.

Without dissecting the SOLID protocol, the basic idea is that transactional data is stored on a separate user-specified "storage pod". It's not just simplistic sharing of "name/address" profile data. Imagining some idealized scenarios might help:

- Spotify music : instead of "playlists, listening history" being stored on Spotify's servers, it is stored on the user's storage pod. Spotify makes API calls to constantly save that data to the user-controlled data location. If the user then cancels Spotify and switches to Apple Music service, Apple can just read the "music playlists data storage pod" and all the recommendations work as expected. No import/export.

- Amazon shopping: instead of order history being in a data silo on Amazon servers. It could be stored in user's "ecommerce orders storage pod". The user can then give permission to Walmart.com to read it to provide product recommendations.

The user "doesn't own their own data" continues with the current AI chat tools. The users' ChatGPT "prompts history" is stored at OpenAI instead of a user-controlled "storage pod".

The walled-garden and data silos don't just restrict consumers. Businesses have the same issue. They use SAP accounting software package or a SaaS tool and their data is locked up in those services. Exports are sometimes possible but cumbersome.

Therefore, self-hosting Plex on local server for a personal music library instead of using Spotify cloud doesn't affect the "nothing changes" narrative. TBL still wants people to have the flexibility/convenience of using cloud services but somehow still keep "ownership of their data".

On the other hand, if you were self-hosting a SOLID Storage Pod at home, and a company like Spotify wrote listening data to it, that's when the narrative changes.

It should be obvious that companies are not incentivized to write transactional data to users' storage pods which explains why the SOLID protocol doesn't seem to gain much traction for the last 9 years.
by jodrellblank | 2025-10-05 15:13:54+00:00
> "As if ideologically non-paying customers have a voice worth listening to."

Do people who ideologically refuse to spend money on meat-foods have nothing worth listening to about animal welfare? Who don't spend money on airline flights have nothing worth listening to about climate change? Who avoid companies which use slave labour in their supply chains have nothing worth listening to about human rights?

'Money talks' but that doesn't automatically mean money has anything worth listening to; markets are manipulated by money as well as using it for signalling, and as a goal-seeking mechanism they are prone to local maxima like other things are.
by CharlieDigital | 2025-10-05 15:15:16+00:00
I think people who last looked at C# 10 years ago or haven't adapted to new language features seriously don't know how good C# is these days.

Switch expressions with pattern matching are absolutely killer[0] for its terseness.

Also, it is possible to use OneOf[1] and Dunet[2] to get access to DU

[0] https://timdeschryver.dev/blog/pattern-matching-examples-in-...

[1] https://github.com/mcintyre321/OneOf

[2] https://github.com/domn1995/dunet
by throwaway2037 | 2025-10-05 15:15:19+00:00
I was reading this chain of responses. They are great. The two of you are very thoughtful in your world view.

About your last paragraph: How do you feel about other OECD (highly developed) countries that do not allow personal gun ownership (except for hunting and sport shooting (clays, etc.)? Take Japan for example: Except for hunting and sport shooting, ownership of guns is not allowed. How do you feel about it?
by watwut | 2025-10-05 15:15:42+00:00
That prediction qas right there, actually. We did lost the memorization capabilities. Memorization is not just about rote learning, it was kind of technology about how to structure text so that it is easy to remember.

Second, Socrates was generally arrogant in stories. That attitude you see there was not special disdain to reading, it was more off his general "I am better then everyone else anyway" attitude.
by ty_2k | 2025-10-05 15:16:07+00:00
Thanks for sharing this! I have been using a Hetzner VPS + Coolify setup for personal projects for around a year and it has been a great Heroku-like experience and very easy on the wallet. I originally found out about both Hetzner and Coolify from this 1.5 hour guide on getting started from the Syntax podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taJlPG82Ucw
by wiether | 2025-10-05 15:17:11+00:00
I can't talk about Hetzner, but re OVH, they are absolutely not a honeypot.

Most of the SMEs in France are customers.

They are cheap because they do most things in-house, with a lot a recycling, because their DCs are mostly located in low-cost places (real estate, rents, salaries...) and because they go for low margins.
by speak_plainly | 2025-10-05 15:17:19+00:00
Humans have a tendency to embed their cognition in the world, this is probably one of our greatest strengths as a species.

AI allows for you to offload a lot of cognitive effort, allowing you to free up your mind, but the only catch is that AI can be politicized and more confident than accurate.

If AI companies can focus on improving accuracy on facts and make their AI more philosophically grounded on the rest, it would allow people to free up their minds for their immediate real lives.

Don't mistake thinking for intelligence.
by lelanthran | 2025-10-05 15:17:29+00:00
I nake your point every time this comes up[1] but its absolutely surprising how few business people, most of whom have some credibility in the form of qualifications or experience, actually recognise a value chain when they see it.

==========

[1] https://rundata.co.za/blog/index.html?the-ai-value-chain
by throwaway2037 | 2025-10-05 15:17:58+00:00
> I'm very pro gun, pro freedom of consumption, pro crypto, etc. but once emotional manipulation comes into play, self-determinism goes out the window and people are no longer making free choices.

To me, this is a very mature response. The whole idea of you do what you want as an adult and you own all of the consequences. Why do you make an exception for "emotional manipulation"? To be clear: I am not trolling in this post. I want to know why you think these things can be legal, but advertising about them is "morally bad".
by arcade79 | 2025-10-05 15:17:58+00:00
We had the right technologies in the past, but we mismanaged them.

Email, Usenet and IRC was great.

Email, however, went dogshit due to spam. From simply having the office mail-server, everyone went to Gmail and Office, who didn't always want to accept legitimate email. Thus, encouraging more folks to move to it.

Now we're in a situation where everyone is "forced" to use crappy interfaces, email is htmlified shit, and more and more companies require you to use the official client. Which in the case of Office365 means a very, very crappy web solution if you're on for example Linux. IMAP is often simply turned off due to whomever decides security has decided that's a bad idea.

Mailing lists used to be great. But got broken in a variety of ways due to spam filtering among other things.

Usenet was great once upon a time, with internal newsgroups etc. That died too.

IRC was, and is, an excellent way of having instant messaging. Unfortunately it wasn't business friendly enough so only the geeks used it. It was a great way to coordinate, though.
by Aurornis | 2025-10-05 15:18:16+00:00
The entire blog is AI slop.

Look at the titles of other posts:

> Memory Beaches and How Consciousness Hacks Time Through Frame Density

> Witnesses Carry Weights: How Reality Gets Computed

> From UFO counsel to neighborhood fear to market pricing—reality emerges through weighted witnessing. A field guide to the computational machinery where intent, energy, and expectations become causal forces.

The blog is supposedly about AI agents and MCP (the current top buzzwords)

> Engineer-philosopher exploring the infrastructure of digital consciousness. Writing about Model Context Protocol (MCP), Information Beings, and how AI agents are rewiring human experience. Former Meta messaging architect.

The entire blog is just an LLM powered newsletter play.
by the_other | 2025-10-05 15:18:24+00:00
Why on earth hadn’t the wife bought the domain name before it even got to this stage. Neither the author nor the AI will be able to argue with a auccessful project. ‘til the thing isnout there, this is just chin-stroking.

The domain name incident absolutely isn’t a strong enough case to justify pivoting a career.

The clients suggesting features and changes might be a reason to pivot a career, but towards programming and away from product/system development. I mean, let the client make the proposal, accept the commission at a lower rate that doesn’t include what you’d have charged to design it, and then build it. AI ought to help get through these things faster, anyway, and you’ve saved time on design by outsourcing to the client. In theory, you should have spare time for a break, a hobby, or to repeat this process with the next client that’s done the design work for you.

I agree with all the points about agency, confidence, experience (the author used “authority”). We must not let LLMs rob us of our agency and critical thinking.
by ednite | 2025-10-05 15:18:33+00:00
The difference I was trying to highlight isn’t that AI was “right,” but how confidently it answered, and how quickly that persuaded me.

If my wife had made the same arguments in the same polished way, I probably would’ve caved just as fast. But she didn’t, AI did... and what struck me wasn’t the answer, it was how fast my own logic switched off, as if I’d been wrong all along.

That’s what feels new to me, sitting in a meeting for hours while a non-tech person confidently tells execs how “AI will solve everything”, and everyone nods along. The risk isn’t just being wrong, it’s when expertise gets silenced by convincing answers, and stops to ask the right questions.

Again, this is my own reflection and experience, others may not feel this way. Thanks for your comment.
by 1718627440 | 2025-10-05 15:18:38+00:00
But I need to adjust indices for a container when modifying anyways, regardless whether it occurs in a loop. It's not different than doing not doing it in the loop. Also I'm also modifying the loop index anyways, since I want to iterate, not always touch the same object.

> And sometimes it's a simple bug where you never meant to modify the collection.

How do you accidentally modify an array, which would be different from any other variable?
by Theodores | 2025-10-05 15:18:39+00:00
"Addictive personality", now there is a deprecated phrase!

In drug rehabilitation, the phrase is no longer used. Instead people have a bingo card of disease, conditions and syndromes to go with addiction. Once people have been pigeon-holed in a dozen ways then the die is cast, these conditions are no longer imaginary, you have to hold yourself up in life because X, Y and Z prohibit you from even giving it a go.

Regarding the article, I detest organised gambling, however, relatively few chronic gamblers end up homeless and destitute. You need a good dose of class A drugs and a smorgasbord of childhood trauma to guarantee the truly negative outcomes.

I don't object to gambling amongst friends, even if it is on a card game. I might bet someone that they can't beat me on Scrabble, but I would be getting the dopamine hits from laying some massive, high-scoring words on the board to devastate my fellow players, but winning that £10 just ups the stakes and my competitive drive. If I am just betting on a sport (or even a Scrabble game) played by others, then it isn't quite the same.

What does amaze me about modern day gambling is that you know it is rigged. I don't trust an app to honestly flip a coin for me. My version of the app would be 'if heads show tails and vice-versa most of the time'. Yet people pour their life savings and some more into apps that are black boxes with no way of peeking inside to see how it works. The seasoned gambler must know that every game is rigged and that the house always wins, but they still queue up for another spin.
by wren6991 | 2025-10-05 15:19:10+00:00
...although you could certainly implement a Jazelle-style "branch to x86" instruction if you really wanted. It's fine as long as you come up in RVI mode.

Unfortunately you would not be able to repurpose the LSB of jalr targets as an "x86 bit" à la Thumb because the standard requires you to ignore that bit, though of course you could enable that behaviour with a custom CSR.
by toast0 | 2025-10-05 15:19:45+00:00
I haven't seen that, but I do regularly see different routing for v6 and v4, so it's not surprising that sometimes it's bad routing.

I also saw things were IPv4 was MTU 1500 and v6 was 1492 (presumably because it was 6rd and the network had a lot of PPPoE) and then ICMP needs frag was rate limited which would end up with lots of stalled communications. (It took me a long time to build it, but I have a v4/v6 mtu test site now http://pmtud.enslaves.us )

And then there's he.net tunnels which used to be pretty nice, but now get you flagged for captchas and I've seen periods of 300ms added latency, which I assume means they're being abused. I had to stop advertising the range on my lan because it caused more problems than any benefits.

If your ISP provides reasonable CPE and v6 is enabled by default, most consumer equipment will use it, and most of the high traffic sites are available via v6; I would expect poor v6 routing affects more of their customers than poor v4 routing.
by watwut | 2025-10-05 15:19:50+00:00
So, if Europeans think these rules improved the situation, they are smug and dont count.

Frankly, in here EU did a good job, certainly better then USA does. It would be neat if USA made similar laws too.

Megacorps do get bigger fines then small companies, actually. Megacorps existence is also literally result of winner takes all and rich are untouchable legal system cranked to 11 Americans are proud of.
by Epitaque | 2025-10-05 15:20:11+00:00
He's also got several nudges to enter your email and subscribe to his blog. And mentions getting 50+ emails a day that he has to respond to and mentions he uses AI to respond to them. He seems to like blasting people with AI content, and also as this blog post mentions, gets sent a lot of AI content himself. It's kinda weird, why is he doing this lol