MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by oefrha | 2025-10-08 03:08:58+00:00
> Because your company already has considerable experience in working remotely in another territory, of course they didn't need any help.

What are you talking about, my company was fully remote with global employees from day one. And no, our CEO/CFO haven’t founded or worked for another fully remote company before that. This is not a radical concept at all, especially not here on HN.
by ajross | 2025-10-08 03:09:00+00:00
> They were laughed at and shouted down, as doomsayers

That's a fallacy. With billions of humans, given any doom, someone was there to sling it. Because there is always someone slinging doom. You can't listen to all the doomslinging, because to first approximation it's all wrong.

The truth is we'll never know whether the doomslinging cranks were just cranks or geniuses. But the fact that they haven't gone on to further heights of analytical magic tells me they were probably just lucky cranks.

It's the same reason that every four years we learn about a douglas squirrel or whatever that has predicted the last 14 presidential elections. Because we don't hear about all the critters that didn't.
by jamesgeck0 | 2025-10-08 03:09:01+00:00
I'm a little surprised the author is able to fit all this stuff in a 9L pack. My 30L pack is just about full with my typical carry-on loadout of a laptop, Nintendo Switch, lightweight windbreaker, pajamas, shorts, and two shirt/socks/underwear rolls (plus small misc essentials filling out pockets).
by zzo38computer | 2025-10-08 03:09:04+00:00
> You can't even order a burger at some restaurants without scanning the QR code.

I have only ever been to one restaurant where this was the case (and it was not a very good restaurant in my opinion, so I do not intend to go back there even if they have a real menu, unless they also improve their food and management), but they provided a iPad to any customer who needed it for this purpose (I did not need it, since I was not alone and was with another customer who had their own iPad). (I think it might be better to post the menu on the wall for customers to read. It might be suitable to use e-paper displays if they sometimes change but not very often; this is more reliable and does not require as much power, nor emit too much light.)
by tamimio | 2025-10-08 03:10:19+00:00
> crack down on hackers and ransomware fraudsters.

What kind of justification is this?! Seriously, do they think people are 6-year-old toddlers that all you have to say is "Oooo bad guys out there!!" and they will just magically believe everything you say after?! This is mockery, an insult to people's intelligence at best, and a fucking dystopian one mixed with digital ID at worst.

Also, are they gonna ban satellite based internet after? Clowns.
by waltbosz | 2025-10-08 03:10:27+00:00
My experience is it often generates code that is subtlety incorrect. And I'll waste time debugging it.

But if I give it a code example that was written by humans and ask it to explain the code, it gives pretty good explanations.

It's also good for questions like "I'm trying to accomplish complicated task XYZ that I've never done before, what should I do?", and it will give code samples that get me on the right path.

Or it'll help me debug my code and point out things I've missed.

It's like a pair programmer that's good for bouncing ideas, but I wouldn't trust it to write code unsupervised.
by cadamsdotcom | 2025-10-08 03:12:35+00:00
A better term is agentic coding, agentic software engineering, etc. rather than being vibe based.

My process starts from a Claude Code plan, whose first step is to write a spec. I use TDD, and enforce my "unspoken rules of code quality" using a slew of generated tools. One tiny tool blocks code which violates our design system. Another tool blocks code which violates our separation of layering - this forces the HTTP route handler code to only access the database via service layer. Watching the transcript I have to occasionally remind the model to use TDD, but once it's been reminded it doesn't need reminding again until compaction. Claude 4.5 is far better at remembering to do TDD than 4.1 was.

Code reviews are super simple with TDD due to the tests mirroring the code. I also create a simple tool which hands the PR and spec to Gemini and has it describe any discrepancies: extra stuff, incorrect stuff, or missing stuff. It's been great as a backup.

But ultimately there's no substitute for knowing what you want, and knowing how to recognize when the agent is deviating from that.

The opposite of "garbage-in garbage-out" is quality in => quality out.
by kstrauser | 2025-10-08 03:13:12+00:00
Don’t get me started on the ugly detour that was ATM, for when Bellheads wanted to build out the Internet like a phone switch, and when no one could agree on optimal cell sizes and they compromised on 53 bytes to piss off everyone equally.

(Also, to have been a fly on the while when you worked out that whole congestion thing.)
by thingortwo | 2025-10-08 03:13:41+00:00
Why would you not be able to build a "web analytics tool" with what parent comment mentioned? At the end of the day it is just data and if you are just starting out pretty much anything will scale and if you already have millions of customers you also have capital and people to think about how to make some homegrown solution to specifically cater to that.

The market for these new breed of frameworks is not huge companies with crazy scaling needs but freelancers and your very early stage startups who haven't even found a product market fit since they are starting new they don't have anything to loose with newer stuff and chances are that newer stuff also helps them do more quickly like I haven't used convex but on it's marketing page it does mention a lot and same for other frameworks like pocketbase or SvelteKit combined with a db etc. Like always there is no silver bullet and every stack can seem "random"
by mhamann | 2025-10-08 03:13:51+00:00
Multiple areas of degradation. Typically, you don't ship a dataset to prod and then never change it. You want the system to continue to learn and improve as new data is available. This can create performance issues as the dataset grows in size. But also, your model's performance in terms of quality can degrade over time if you're not constantly evaluating its responses. This can occur because of new info within RAG, a model swap/upgrade, or changes to prompts. Keeping all of those knives in the air is tricky. We're hoping we can solve a bunch of pain points around this so that reliable AI systems are accessible to anyone.
by ajross | 2025-10-08 03:13:51+00:00
> I believe the operators are paid for storage.

Which is to say, you don't know either. What I'm saying is that this huge boom in gold value has not been matched by an equivalent change in gold storage paradigms. And that... probably has some bad externalities.

We actually saw this in the 1990's. Intel had built its business on the back of regular shipping practices, sending pallets of chips to a small list of electronics manufacturers as needed on commercial vehicles. But as the PC market matured and the parts became more easily liquidated on a global gray market, people suddenly realized that you could hijack a truckload of 486's and dump the multi-million-dollar cargo into Taiwan at almost no risk. And there was a rash of chip pirates for a while.

This smells similar.
by Gravityloss | 2025-10-08 03:14:23+00:00
Every single Ikea kitchen furniture unit I've worked with has been flat pack, made of chipboard and assembled with these bolts that attach to a sort of a worm screw (edit: cam dowel lock nut), and some dowels, maybe a few screws. Not a single sheet of real wood or plywood, no dovetail or finger joints.
by bombcar | 2025-10-08 03:14:34+00:00
There are always outliers (that's the whole point).

All he was saying is that when the market for technical books was new (because that was really the only way to get to speed on something) you didn't need to have Knuth-levels of knowledge and writing skill (Knuth is both incredibly knowledgeable and an exceptionally good writer) to make a decent living.
by cosmicgadget | 2025-10-08 03:14:40+00:00
Let's hope the people not subject to a warrant sue ICE's pants off. As far as I can tell, most of the dragnets are either in public places or with the permission of the property owner.

I'd love to be wrong because it means the judciary has a chance to shut this down but I fear outside of a few civil rights suits this will have to be remedied at the ballot box.
by array_key_first | 2025-10-08 03:15:46+00:00
If you change it to 30-50 years then nothing changes for Sora.

Most of the (obviously infringing) video I've seen is stuff well within the past 30-50 years.

Also, no copyright doesn't mean information free for all.

I still can't generate a fake video, pretend it's real, and then claim you're a criminal or you eat babies or something. Because that's libel.

Why do we have libel laws? Because the alternative is that you piss off Walmart or something and then they go and tell all employers that you're a pedophile and then you starve to death, with the cherry on top of having a tainted legacy. So we definitely need the libel laws.

But that's a problem. The whole premise of Sora is that it generates fake video with the intention of making it as real as possible.

No matter how you cut it, Sora's business model, and moral model, is on shakey grounds.
by zahlman | 2025-10-08 03:16:11+00:00
> I remember this leading to a fun, rambling, back-and-forth discussion of the ways computers can fail. There are so many! Every level of the stack can fail in interesting ways: storage, RAM, memory management, networking. How would a bit flip in a TLB manifest? How does TCP/IP detect and handle ordering? collisions?

Sure, but the simplest ways (at least with CPython) are to invoke C code that crashes via the FFI, or to manually explicitly create a code object from invalid bytecode data (or hex-edit a .pyc file so that the usual machinery does it for you).

Also, as usual I'm tired of the implication that networking is a necessary component of "the stack".
by EvanAnderson | 2025-10-08 03:16:32+00:00
> ... These wallets are meant to initialized by a "seed" and there's a protocol to easily write down that seed...

Yes. That's a thing with some HSMs, too. That's where I've had experience with this kind of protocol.

As it stands Yubico's tokens are unusable to me for personal purposes because they can't be backed-up and restored.
by x-complexity | 2025-10-08 03:16:42+00:00
> Any reason to believe Google's unit economics on AI are any different than the other players here?

Only when it comes to their TPUs, and sometimes that one thing may just be the difference to push them over the hump.

Per-token cost-wise, TPUs (& specialized processors in general) will beat GPUs every time. The efficiency difference between the 2 types is never to be ignored, & is likely why they can shotgun it everywhere.

> And Google is an advertising company. Mostly in search, and increasingly dependent on YouTube. Everything else is a net money loser, including Waymo, Gemini etc.

1) Each venture should be treated as a (relatively) isolated vertical slice

2) 9 out of 10 times, a venture just doesn't break even. That's just the nature of the business.
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-10-08 03:17:09+00:00
> Being good at vibe coding is just being good at coding, the best practices still apply.

How does "vibe coding" embody "best practices" as the industry generally defines the latter term?

As I understand the phrase "vibe coding", it implies focusing solely on LLM prompt formulation and not the specifics of the generated source.

> It'll just be how almost everyone writes code in the future. Just like using an IDE.

The flaw with this analogy is that a qualified developer does not require an IDE in order to be able to do their job.
by agentultra | 2025-10-08 03:17:27+00:00
I don’t think people are good at self-reporting the “boost” it gives them.

We need more empirical evidence. And historically we’re really bad at running such studies and they’re usually incredibly expensive. And the people with the money aren’t interested in engineering. They generally have other motives for allowing FUD and hype about productivity to spread.

Personally I don’t see these tools going much further than where they are now. They choke on anything that isn’t a greenfield project and consistently produce unwanted results. I don’t know what magic incantations and combinations of agents people have got set up but if that’s what they call “engineering,” these days I’m not sure that word has any meaning anymore.

Maybe these tools will get there one day but don’t go holding your breath.
by intalentive | 2025-10-08 03:17:55+00:00
Overall I really like these transformer RNNs. They are basically EBMs learning an energy landscape that falls into a solution, relaxing a discrete problem into a smooth convex one. Reminds me of other iterative methods like neural cellular automata and flow matching / diffusion. This method looks promising for control problems: just tumble your way down the state space, where each step is constrained to be a valid action.
by bombcar | 2025-10-08 03:18:36+00:00
Smut (and Archie Comics) are one of the few ways you can keep selling the same plot over and over again.

You can even find it in serialized writings of some of the "greats" of yore - if you real everything Dickens or Chesterton or Wodehouse wrote, you start to see some serious echos, if not direct repetition.
by userbinator | 2025-10-08 03:18:39+00:00
Something seems a bit off about this article. "Because Ethernet came first" is the real answer; and it being a local network technology, was not readily scaled beyond that, despite the MAC address space being 64k times larger than the IPv4 address space. A key point worth noting about the IP address space, which enabled this crucial scaling to global networks, is its hierarchical structure. MAC addresses are assigned to hardware interfaces, independent of their location, while IP addresses are assigned hierarchically much like numbers in the telephone system, allowing for relatively easy routing at a global scale.

A typical packet found on a typical network has a structure like this

IPv6? That's... not really "typical", yet. IMHO even packets with 802.1q tags are going to be more commonly found and "typical" than IPv6.
by nine_k | 2025-10-08 03:19:41+00:00
Does a consumer-grade 8K camera sensor detect a 20°C difference in a few pixels? Cameras have to aggressively fight against thermal noise. Visible light is much more energetic than IR; detecting a faint IR signal with a sensor which is about as hot as the object it's looking at is hard. You need to cool the sensor down; old military aircraft even carried a tank of liquid nitrogen for that.

I mean, yes, you can take a low-noise sensor, add cooling, add a telescope lens so that you'd see the shape more readily, put a bunch of these telescopes on a rotating platform to scan the sky, etc. This is doable, but the thread started with an idea that it's doable with consumer-grade ("cheap") tech. I doubt that.

While at it, even if we assume that stealth does not exist for fast and heavy aircraft, it seems to effectively exist for slow, lighter-weight drones. Ukrainian drones, built from ultralight aircraft like Aeroprakt A-20, somehow penetrate 700 miles into Russian territory to burn refineries. With a cruise speed of 70 mph (sic), it should take them 10 hours to fly this distance. Were they detected efficiently, that would be enough time to scramble an interceptor a hundred times. Apparently this does not happen.
by Avicebron | 2025-10-08 03:20:01+00:00
When the way of consuming the medium changes, the message it carries changes as well. The reason public broadcasting is so well loved and "special" is that it was something collective (out of necessity). If I don't like charcircuit, I can find a youtube video declaring charcircuit a dangerous enemy combatant. When you are the only game in town, there was a sense of making it somewhat "casual" and we got things like bob ross and mr. rogers neighbourhood.
by array_key_first | 2025-10-08 03:20:02+00:00
It's because AI is just software, and like most software, it's shit. Almost a net negative for people. Obviously you can't sell a neutral or net negative product, so you just do what software always does, offset it with ads, i.e. consuming human time instead of money.

If a service has real value people actually want, then it doesn't require ads. If the service needs ads to be viable as a business, that's a strong indicator the product or service isn't very good or useful.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-10-08 03:20:22+00:00
The thing I don't really understand is why no one is doing this. Fine, Qualcomm sucks, but why is there no phone SoC from SiFive?

The TDP of a lot of existing phone chips (e.g. various Snapdragons) is often 10-15W. Ryzen 7 5800U and various others are configurable down to those numbers. Why has no one ever put one in a phone or in a tablet with a cell modem?

Where is Dell or Framework or any of these young companies from China that want to take a dent out of Samsung? Where, for that matter, is Samsung?

Trolls come out to say there is no demand for it, but do the math. Having open source drivers doesn't make your chip less attractive to the people who don't care about that, so if you design the chip you still get all of those sales and the ones from the people who do care. Meanwhile the other incumbents are hidebound and myopic, so if your hardware creates a software ecosystem that depends on it, you'll have it to yourself for a decent while before the recognition that you're getting 100% of those sales because you're the only one providing the hardware documentation they need can permeate through the relevant layers of the incumbent's bureaucracy. And by then you've reinvested that revenue into making a better chip than them.

First mover advantage is valuable.
by umanwizard | 2025-10-08 03:20:25+00:00
> That's interesting, but I wonder if it's not more accurate to say "tradition doesn't support the use of an inverted rook as a promoted queen's proxy" or "FIDE would prefer not using inverted rooks as a promoted queen proxy" instead?

No, it is against the FIDE rules. Both the official rules, and the unofficial explanatory text in the Arbiter's Manual. The official rules say that chess sets contain a piece called a queen, and a piece called a rook. They do not say anything about a piece other than a queen becoming a queen if it is turned in a different orientation, so it should be obvious that it doesn't do so.

But even for those for whom that wasn't obvious, there is additionally the arbiter's manual, explaining that yes, this is in fact the interpretation of the rules that FIDE and senior arbiters believe to be correct.

Despite all this you are refusing to believe it's actually against the rules. I am not sure what else I can cite to convince you. Google, ask your favorite LLM, or ask a FIDE arbiter if you want -- everyone will agree that if you promote to a rook, it is a rook, regardless of whether it's upside down or not.

Nobody has written a formal definition of which piece in a chess set is "the rook" and which one is "the queen", because the FIDE rules were not written by formal logicians, and so it probably never occurred to them that this was necessary.

This simply never comes up. You are probably the only person in history from the founding of FIDE until now who has pretended not to know what a rook or a queen is.

> My thinking is that if we take "many active tournament players will see it every year or two" as the absence of a strict prohibition

I think you are misinterpreting that comment. They are saying those players will see a scenario with two queens of one color on the board every year or two, not that they'll see someone trying to use an upside-down rook to stand for one of them.
by EvanAnderson | 2025-10-08 03:20:43+00:00
I suppose I should have preemptively made that argument and then argued against it.

My point is that there should be a mechanism to extract key material in an encrypted form. The backup could only be restored onto properly-prepared hardware (either by way of a device master key held under escrow by Yubico, or by an initial "seed" set by the user when commissioning the hardware).

Setting up multiple keys at the same time isn't just inconvenient, but actually defeats the purpose of backup. If both keys have to be present in the same place at the same time it's not a backup.

The workflow with tokens that can't be backed-up creates needless labor and risk. HSM vendors have solved this problem (albeit with tremendous vendor lock-in) but apparently that's too difficult for consumer token vendors to handle.
by xwolfi | 2025-10-08 03:20:45+00:00
You forget one side of the equation: yes money is "printed" with abandon, but the other side gets an IOU, a debt, to repay with dividend.

The government BORROWS printed money, the FED emits debt against that money, and the hole keeps getting bigger. You certainly solved a short term problem, but you also created a long term one.

Meanwhile, people make less children, immigration is reduced, debt buyers, the ones receiving the interest, are starting to think twice, someone will be left with the bag and it's gonna be the 401k bondholders relying on these debt interest to finance their non productive retirement.

BTC is being bought maybe due to it's non correlation with those debts, but it's also printed virtually with absolutely no tangible value (the network can just collectively decide to change its rules with no legal repercussion), and gold definitely has tangible value (at least, it makes your wife smile and stop haggling when she gets some to put around her neck, so infinite value right there vs btc) and is bought in India and China to prepare for catastrophe, but it has many issues (heavy, hard to transport cross border, dangerous and expensive to store, concentrated in vaults against paper gold with all the issues that this creates etc)
by SamBam | 2025-10-08 03:21:27+00:00
Sperm whales may have more massive brains, but they have fewer cortical neurons total, and of course a much smaller brain to body mass ratio.

But more importantly for this conversation, our brains use up a staggering 20-25% of our resting metabolic needs. A whale brain uses something like 3%.

For us to be able to devote 20% of our calories to our brains, we simply needed to have a huge excess in the number of calories we had available. This is why the cooking hypothesis makes sense. Once we were smart enough to get lots of excess calories, that opened the door to this new fitness landscape of organisms that could devote a ridiculous proportion of their food to their brains. It wasn't that we gave up something else, it's that this wasn't even a possibility before.
by simonw | 2025-10-08 03:23:19+00:00
> They choke on anything that isn’t a greenfield project and consistently produce unwanted results.

That was true 8 months ago. It's not true today, because of the one-two punch of modern longer-context "reasoning" models (Claude 4+, GPT-5+) and terminal-based coding agents (Claude Code, Codex CLI).

Setting those loose an an existing large project is a very different experience from previous LLM tools.

I've watched Claude Code use grep to find potential candidates for a change I want to make, then read the related code, follow back the chain of function calls, track down the relevant tests, make a quick detour to fetch the source code of a dependency directly from GitHub (by guessing the URL to the raw file) in order to confirm a detail, make the change, test the change with an ad-hoc "python -c ..." script, add a new automated test, run the tests and declare victory.

That's a different class entirely from what GPT-4o was able to do.