MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by LogicFailsMe | 2025-11-27 18:49:34+00:00
That's the government regulation I want but it's probably not the government regulation we will get because both major constituencies have a vested interest in forcing their viewpoints on people. Then there's the endless pablum hitting both sides, giving us important vital cutting edge updates about influencers and reality TV stars whether we want to hear about them or not...

We say we want to win the AI arms race with China, but instead of educating our people about the pros and cons of AI as well as STEM, we know more than we want to know about Kim Kardashian's law degree misadventures and her belief that we faked the moon landing.
by nechalnikaSama | 2025-11-27 18:49:48+00:00
it's not the voice. it's the lack of need to talk tough about the hard problems. if you accept what is and just babble, anything you write will sound like babbling.

there's enough potential and wiggle room but people align, even when they don't, just to align.

when Rome was flourishing, only a few saw what was lingering in the cracks but when in flourishing Rome ...
by shmerl | 2025-11-27 18:50:49+00:00
> The Adreno user mode driver (UMD) from Qualcomm Technologies is available as a downloadable Debian package and provides Vulkan 1.4 API support as well as the necessary GPU-related firmware.

Are they already using Turnip / Mesa as their Vulkan implementation or not yet? If not, they should. Valve are using Turnip on their Steam Frame.

That would be another step of working with upstream, besides the kernel driver.
by adamzwasserman | 2025-11-27 18:51:30+00:00
the Nature paper is empirically spot-on and theoretically obsolete at the same time

it reflects a pre-1990s dogmatic belief in extrapolationist macroevolution.

It treats high heritability + polygenic additive variance as if that somehow proves the Modern Synthesis was right about everything

It never once mentions developmental constraint, niche construction, active rGE as a macroevolutionary ratchet, cultural-genetic co-evolution, or any of the other mechanisms that the post-2000 literature now recognizes as necessary for understanding why human g exploded in the last million years

YMMV
by rTX5CMRXIfFG | 2025-11-27 18:51:53+00:00
Not the commenter, and I 'm not a fan of how normal it has become to do one's dirty laundry in public. But I find it lamentable that the most popular takeaway from the internet's mainstreaming of feminist thought is that men’s issues are necessarily in competition with women's issues for representation.

It's ridiculous since women's issues are only being better represented recently while men have long dominated politics, religion, and pop culture. But more importantly, the social pressures giving men and boys mental health issues come from the very same patriarchal gender roles that women's rights movements are rebelling against. This nuance had been drowned out by all the noise in internet "discourse".
by egeozcan | 2025-11-27 18:51:54+00:00
The trick with Gemini is to uploading the whole (or the relevant part of the) codebase (depending on the size) as an xml (using repomix et al) then telling it to output whole files.

With a good prompt and soem trial and error in system instructions, as long as you agree to play the agent yourself, it's unmatched.

CLI? Never had any success. Claude Code leaves it in dust.
by SkiFire13 | 2025-11-27 18:52:33+00:00
> Personally, I've come to see this ubiquitous string of symbols, ?? "", as the JS equivalent to .unwrap() in Rust

It's funny you bring this up because people opposed to `.unwrap()` usually mention methods like `.unwrap_or` as a "better" alternative, and that's exactly the equivalent of `??` in Rust.
by PunchyHamster | 2025-11-27 18:52:42+00:00
I'd imagine it's purely because not doing it turned out to be PITA in the long term.

As with pretty much all other ARM cpu vendors that pushed for their own kernel fork just to have drivers that did not need to be okayed by mainstream kernel, it was faster iteration to deliver something working to their clients; but it was also PITA to their clients, especially when industry started demanding longer support for their devices
by hobofan | 2025-11-27 18:52:53+00:00
In theory sure, but you have to evaluate how likely it is.

Some typical dynamics:

Big org platform -> exposed to risk, as you are not a significant addition to their bottom line

Small donation platform -> Can be easily bullied by payment processors to "derisk"

---

every.org is a bit special, as it only lists 501c nonprofits - which the Zig Foundation is - and AFAIK has a decent track record. Most other open source projects don't clear that bar.
by Animats | 2025-11-27 18:53:10+00:00
There's the other side of this issue. The current position of the U.S. Copyright Office is that AI output is not copyrightable, because the Constitution's copyright clause only protects human authors. This is consistent with the US position that databases and lists are not copyrightable.[1]

Trump is trying to fire the head of the U.S. Copyright Office, but they work for the Library of Congress, not the executive branch, so that didn't work.[2]

[1] https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell...

[2] https://apnews.com/article/trump-supreme-court-copyright-off...
by krapp | 2025-11-27 18:53:23+00:00
Hacker News doesn't use a strictly chronological feed. Hacker News manipulates the feed to promote certain items over others. Hacker News moderates legal content. Those are all features of social media algorithms that people are opposed to. It just isn't "objectionable" when HN does it.

And regulations of this kind always creep out of scope. We've seen it happen countless times. But people hate social media so much around here that they simply don't think it through, or else don't care.
by namibj | 2025-11-27 18:53:56+00:00
What you could do is bill per energy in e.g. 15 minute chunks, and separately bill for transformer/line capacity by e.g. the peak usage in any such chunk over the contract period, like they do in Germany for atypical load profile industrial users since decades ago.

Net metering is overall just entirely stupid as a concept; measure inbound and outbound flow separately if you can't just measure the 15 minute chunks; bill grid fees on the energy price on inbound and only pay energy price on outbound. Or even bill grid fees on outbound up to one of many available large substations, and thus handle the issue of demand across large distances making buildout of solar in a convenient but far away place not being disincentivized vs. more-demand-local buildout.
by pitched | 2025-11-27 18:54:08+00:00
If the error isn’t repairable by the user, blocking them from using the app entirely is mean. If the error screen has a message telling the user where to go to set their name, that’s fine but annoying. If the error screen tells the user they can’t use the app until someone checks a dashboard and sees a large enough increase in errors to investigate, that’s a bigger problem.
by rurban | 2025-11-27 18:55:23+00:00
Germany doesn't need to change, just Germans need to change talking lot of bullshit.

I registered a private SW development entity in Germany easily, without any costs. You just need to declare it as System SW, not Applications, or you'll have to pay Gewerbesteuer and Kammermitgliedschaft. Which is a lot and not needed at all. Your yearly taxes are trivial, no need for an accountant.
by kittikitti | 2025-11-27 18:55:23+00:00
You can't really buy a TPU, you have to buy the entire data center that includes the TPU plus the services and support. In Google Colab, I often don't prefer the TPU either because the documentation for the AI isn't made for it. While this could all change in the long term, I also don't see these changes in Google's long term strategy. There's also the problem with Google's graveyard which isn't mentioned in the long term of the original article. Combined with these factors, I'm still skeptical about Google's lead on AI.
Show HN: GimmeGimme – Finding gifts for hard-to-shop-for people
by monatron | 2025-11-27 18:55:58+00:00
Hi y'all, it's that time of year -- you're going to visit the in-laws and you have no idea what to get Uncle Bobby this holiday but you don't want to show up with something boring or generic. You want to find a gift that fits.

I scoured through hundreds of 2025 Holiday Gift Guides, and built a little workflow that combines some scraping, prompt chains, and embeddings that matches the description of a person with a set of gifts that might be a good fit for them. The lists persist, and you can remove items from them to get new suggestions and iterate on the lists until you find some options that make sense for you.

This was built mostly for fun, but full disclosure, there's Amazon Affiliate tags for the items presented.

I'm open to feedback. Hope this helps you find something unique for that person that's hard shop for.

Happy Thanksgiving, Tyler
by rustc | 2025-11-27 18:56:04+00:00
That's how you get this feature: https://wiki.php.net/rfc/deprecate-bareword-strings.

tldr: undefined constants were treated as a string (+ a warning), so `$x = FOO` was `$x = "FOO"` + a warning if `FOO` was not a defined constant. Thankfully this feature was removed in PHP 8.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-11-27 18:57:18+00:00
The GPL arose from Stallman's frustration at not having access to the source code for a printer driver that was causing him grief.

In a world where he could have just said "Please create a PDP-whatever driver for an IBM-whatever printer," there never would have been a GPL. In that sense AI represents the fulfillment of his vision, not a refutation or violation.

I'd be surprised if he saw it that way, of course.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-11-27 18:58:25+00:00
I keep reading of an "AI race" but like "AGI" the meaning is unclear, namely the definition of "win", "lose" or "tie"

For example, a "space race" might be "won" by the first participant to reach space, or to reach the moon

Is it possible to have a "race" without a time limit or a finish line or some way to determine the "winner"
by ForHackernews | 2025-11-27 18:58:44+00:00
"The lasting memory is not of flight in the modern sense of acceleration, power and performance. It is of how impossibly slow this aeroplane flies, and how absolutely improbable it is that such a machine can actually levitate above the ground."

https://speedreaders.info/32045-the-vandersarl-bleriot-a-cen...
by lutusp | 2025-11-27 18:58:45+00:00
I'm in complete agreement with the idea that people should express themselves in their own words. But this collides with certain facts about U.S. adults (and students). This summary (https://www.nu.edu/blog/49-adult-literacy-statistics-and-fac...) reveals that:

* 28% of U.S. adults are at or below "level 1" literacy, essentially meaning people unable to function in an environment that requires written language skills.

* 54% of U.S. adults read below a sixth-grade level.

These statistics refer to an inability to interpret written material, much less create it. As to the latter, a much smaller percentage of U.S. adults can compose a coherent sentence.

We're moving toward a world where people will default to reliance on LLMs to generate coherent writing, including college students, who according to recent reports are sometimes encouraged to rely on LLMs to complete their assignments.

If we care to, we can distinguish LLM output from that of a typical student: An LLM won't make the embarrassing grammatical and spelling errors that pepper modern students' prose.

Yesterday I saw this headline in a major online media outlet: "LLMs now exceed the intelect [sic] of the average human." You don't say.
by adamzwasserman | 2025-11-27 18:58:48+00:00
My criticism of the Nature paper does imply endorsement of Watson, who was equally stuck in 1950's extropolationist macroevolutionary thinking:

1. Take a trait (IQ) that is highly heritable within well-nourished, educated, industrial populations. 2. Observe large average differences between populations that differ dramatically in nutrition, disease burden, schooling, and historical trauma. 3. Assume, without any direct genetic evidence, that the between-group gap must be largely genetic because the within-group heritability is high

I have made an effort to acquaint myself with the ACTUAL literature on evolutionary theory. It is nothing like what popular media would have you believe.
by hbarka | 2025-11-27 18:58:49+00:00
I had no idea this was the man who was responsible for the cleanroom where I spent thousands of hours working in right after college. To get in a Class 10 cleanroom, there was the laborious routine of gowning from head to toe and then taking the air shower and passing through the airlock before entering the place that looked like it belonged in science fiction. It was a strange environment trying to recognize anyone because all you can see are people’s eyes through goggles. After awhile you remember their gait as the first tell. There was even a belief that exposure to the air inside made people, say for lack of a better word, amorous. Myth or true maybe some can chime in.

Thanks for sharing the article.
by seec | 2025-11-27 18:59:15+00:00
Imagine what macOS is on an Intel Mac nowadays without dedicated GPU. Not the latest version either. I'm pretty sure they do it on purpose with their Metal APIs. There is no reason the same computer can become laggy doing the same exact things a few years later because of simple OS updates that adds very little actual functionality.

My mother use an old Mac Mini that is stuck on an updates from eons ago. It is slow as fuck, even though the softwares have barely changed since it was first used. She'll buy a new Mac because that's what she is used to. But I feel like a pretty bad deal considering where Apple is going.

People always rave about how long Apple computers last. I bought my first personal Mac in 2004 and I have to hard disagree. They last only if you buy the most expensive model and even then it still is going to be a miserable experience towards the end. Meanwhile, cheapo Windows PC get 10 years OS support, mostly trouble free. Reality distortion field is massive indeed.
by intelec1 | 2025-11-27 18:59:26+00:00
What if the United States, a country that promised to be a "sanctuary for the persecuted," is secretly transporting people to camps in Africa, circumventing its own laws and international law? This video offers an analytical investigation into the hidden system of US deportations to "third countries": Ghana, Eswatini, Ruanlu, and other countries where refugees find themselves without protection, without documents, and without a chance for justice. We examine in detail how the secret deportation scheme works: What is "removal to a third country" and how it violates the principle of non-refoulement and the Convention against Torture; How the US Supreme Court, through its "shadow list," greenlit the secret flight program; The stories of Orville, Jim, Miriam, and other people who were officially protected from deportation by US courts but were still secretly transported to camps in West Africa; How media manipulation turns social workers and refugees into "violent criminals" in official press releases; How lawyers and human rights activists are creating a "citizen's detective agency" to track secret charters using aviation data and finances; The numbers behind hidden deals: how much the US pays El Salvador, Eswatini, Rwanda, and other countries to support deportees; Why federal judges acknowledge that the government is shirking its legal obligations but remain powerless against the executive branch; How this practice is dangerous for international law, democracy, and the refugee protection system worldwide. This video is for those who want to understand the reality behind the headlines about the "fight against illegal immigration," how the US is building a shadow immigration policy, and why the destruction of legal guarantees in one country becomes a signal to authoritarian regimes around the world. Subscribe to the channel if you value in-depth investigations, international politics, human rights, the US immigration system, and real, not merely ostentatious, government accountability.

#USA #deportation #refugees #humanrights #immigration #USApolitics #internationallaw #investigation
by fragmede | 2025-11-27 19:00:13+00:00
Because the complaints about the power and water usage of AI are mostly motivated reasoning. I don't like AI, therefore I'm going to find a reason not to like it. I Listen, if it's Greta Thunberg pointing out that AI datacenters use a lot of resources, yeah, I'm willing to listen. But when the voices saying "but what about all the water/electricity is wasting" is coming from individuals I know personally haven't previously given a shit about the planet or conservation or recycling and have made fun of me for reusing things instead of throwing stuff into the garbage, I'm sorry, but those complaints from those individuals fall on deaf ears. Not saying you are, just a theme I've noticed with people in my life.
by briancmoses | 2025-11-27 19:00:19+00:00
You're entirely right about this kind of content and the people who create it festers cynicism. But in the end, I am powerless to do anything to counter said cynics. Unfortunately anything that I write otherwise will just invoke more cynicism and I'm sure in the eyes of the cynics, it's justified.

These DIY NAS build blogs have a bit of formula: Here's my criteria, here are the parts that I chose to meet that criteria, and here's what I think after I've built and tested it to the best of my ability.

If I had my choice, my blog would inspire people to understand their own criteria and give them the confidence to go build something unique that meets that same criteria. This absolutely happens, but it's the exception rather than the rule. The rule is that people choose to replicate these DIY NAS builds part-for-part.

I'm as confident in this DIY NAS as I've been for the ones I created in the past. The times there were issues with these builds (eg: the defective C255X/C275X CPUs from Intel), I've updated those blogs with all the details I can muster about those issues.
by LogicFailsMe | 2025-11-27 19:01:02+00:00
Yes, you absolutely can do this and back in the before times Facebook used to have an API that let you design your own interface to it.

But now I think that will be treated with as much derision by FAANG as ad blockers because you're preventing them from enraging you to keep you engaged and afraid. Why won't you think of the shareholder value (tm)?

But mandating API access would be fantastic government regulation going forward. Don't hold your breath.
by AlotOfReading | 2025-11-27 19:01:34+00:00
The term "slave" encompasses a lot of wildly different kinds of unfree labor. The racialized system most people think of from transatlantic slavery is a very recent thing.

Nothing resembling that was widespread in precolumbian North America. The earliest similar systems I'm aware of took root in the 17th and 18th centuries, well into the early colonial period.
by vadansky | 2025-11-27 19:01:43+00:00
He lost me at the first example:

```ts user?.name ?? "" ```

The issue isn't the nullish coalescing, but trying to treat a `string | null` as a string and just giving it a non-sense value you hope you'll never use.

You could have the same issue with `if` or `user?.name!`.

Basically seems the issue is the `""`. Maybe it can be `null` and it should be `NA`, or maybe it shouldn't be `null` and should have been handled upstream.
by Chris_Newton | 2025-11-27 19:02:10+00:00
I once had a well-known LLM reproduce pretty much an entire file from a well-known React library verbatim.

I was writing code in an unrelated programming language at the time, and the bizarre inclusion of that particular file in the output was presumably because the name of the library was very similar to a keyword I was using in my existing code, but this experience did not fill me with confidence about the abilities of contemporary AI. ;-)

However, it did clearly demonstrate that LLMs with billions or even trillions of parameters certainly can embed enough information to reproduce some of the material they were trained on verbatim or very close to it.
by macintux | 2025-11-27 19:02:51+00:00
You're moving the goalposts.

You said:

> Most people on HN who advocate regulating social media...want to make all algorithmic feeds other than strictly chronological illegal

I don't buy that, at all. I think they want a chronological feed to follow, and they want the end of targeted outrage machines that are poisoning civil discourse and breeding the type of destructive politics that has led to our sitting U.S. president to call for critics to be hanged.

Comparing what Facebook has done to the U.S. with HN's algorithm is slippery slope fallacy to an extreme, and even if HN's front page algorithm against all odds was outlawed due to a political overreaction to the destruction Facebook has wrought, I'd call it a fair trade.
by dang | 2025-11-27 19:04:25+00:00
Could you please make your substantive points without breaking the site guidelines? They include:

"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. 'That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by Ajakks | 2025-11-27 19:05:09+00:00
So, you're a business owner and you've decided we need AGI bc you're fine. You've no one to blame when the Revolution comes.

You clearly do not understand AGI. It's a gamble that really is most easily explained by saying, creating a god. That thing won't hate us. We create its oxygen - data. If anything, it would empower us to make of it.
by britch | 2025-11-27 19:05:17+00:00
Early errors are good, but I think the author overstates the importance of filtering out empty strings

---

I disagree that erroring out when the app doesn't have ALL the data is the best course of action. I imagine it depends a bit on the domain, but for most apps I've worked on it's better to show someone partial or empty data than an error.

Often the decision of what to do when the data is missing is best left up the the display component. "Don't show this div if string is empty", or show placeholder value.

---

Flip side, when writing an under the hood function, it often doesn't matter if the data is empty or not.

If I'm aggregating a list of fooBars, do I care if fooBarDisplayName is empty or not? When I'm writing tests and building test-data, needing to add a value for each string field is cumbersome.

Sometimes a field really really matters and should throw (an empty string ID is bad), but those are the exception and not the rule.
by gloosx | 2025-11-27 19:07:58+00:00
If unit tests are boring chores for you, or 100% coverage is somehow a goal in itself, then your understanding of quality software development is quite lacking overall. Tests are specifications: they define behavior, set boundaries, and keep the inevitable growth of complexity under control. Good tests are what keep a competent developer sane. You cannot build quality software without starting from tests. So if tests are boring you, the problem is your approach to engineering. Mature developers dont get bored chasing 100% coverage – they focus on meaningful tests that actually describe how the program is supposed to work.
by jsheard | 2025-11-27 19:08:19+00:00
Maybe eventually, but Valve don't tend to update their hardware very often so it'll probably be a while. They went over 6 years between their last VR headsets, and the Deck is over 3 years old now with no hint of a successor coming (the OLED version is more recent but that was a minor iteration with mostly the same specs).
by system2 | 2025-11-27 19:08:27+00:00
Amazing, after playing all the Quake series (still playing Quake 2 daily), I learnt something new about it. I will definitely try the turtle command and try to make it appear (somehow), maybe artificially with the maxfps command. There is no way I can organically produce it on a 32-core CPU. Maybe I can try with a VM with very low specs.