MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by phito | 2025-11-25 08:13:38+00:00
The even crazier thing is that DNA does not encode any of that. Behaviour and morphology is not directly encoded in there, you'll only find recipes for proteins. The zigote will divide into billions of cells that share that same recipe book. Depending on the electric and chemical signals surrounding cells are sending, individual cells get their "personalities" or function. This cell colony forms an organism which emerges from the sum of morphology and behaviour of all cells. But you'll find no recipe for an arm in DNA, it is the result of the work of the collective intelligence that is your body.
by lukan | 2025-11-25 08:14:28+00:00
Out of curiosity, when you say you don't like inheritance, does that mean you never use it at all, or you only use it rarely?

Because even though inheritance often is used in a wrong way, there are definitely cases, where it is the clearest pattern in my opinion.

Like graphic libary things. E.g. everything on the screen is a DisplayObject. Simple Textfields and Images inherit directly from DisplayObject. Layoutcontainers inherit from DisplayObjectContainer which inherits from DisplayObject.

Inheritance here makes a lot of sense to me and I don't see how it could be expressed in a different way without loosing that clarity.
by bitwize | 2025-11-25 08:15:11+00:00
I think you're underestimating the role epigenetic information plays. 1.5 GiB encodes every protein used to build us, sure, but which genes get switched on when and how are sensitive to factors not encoded for in DNA, including the environment of the cell and the fundamental chemistry of biology. Epigenetic information is hard to capture but can profoundly affect how an organism develops; cloned cats, for instance, may show a vastly different fur color and pattern from the original, to cite just a highly visible example.
by vincentkriek | 2025-11-25 08:15:13+00:00
As an init manager, systemd is the best thing that has happened to the wider linux ecosystem. Being able to indicate dependencies, document order and being able to let an application tell the init manager it is done and dependents of it can be started makes starting up way better.

I understand the downsides people have of systemd, but I have the feeling the huge upside is often overlooked.
by cons0le | 2025-11-25 08:15:58+00:00
The worst part is when the AI spits out dogshit results --people show up at lightspeed in the comments to say how "you're not using it right" / "try this other model, it's better"

Anecdotally, the people I see the most excited about AI are the people that don't do any fucking work. I can create a lot of value with plain ol' for loop style automation in my niche. We're stil nowhere near the limit of what we can do with automation, that I don't give a fuck about what AI can do. Bruh in windows 10 copy and fuckin paste doesn't work for me anymore, but instead of fixing that they're adding AI
by inglor_cz | 2025-11-25 08:16:09+00:00
We should probably wait before declaring any decisions "incredibly reasonable". After all, the outcomes of previous rationally-sounding decisions were mixed.

One-child policy, intended to prevent overpopulation, made Chinese birth deficit worse than it would have to be - if it were phased out by 1995 or so, there would likely be at least 100 million more young people now. Chinese real estate bubble popped and had to be carefully deflated over several years. Government-driven mass investment into manufacturing resulted in involution and production surplus which now needs readjustments as well. And as of the AI policy, while the stated reasons sound rational, we don't know how the entire thing will pan out yet.

Ming China banned seafaring and exploration because it cost too much money. A very rational decision from their momentary perspective, as it indeed cost too much money at that time. But it turned out that not having a blue water navy was more costly in the long term.

AI may, or may not, follow a similar trajectory, including various market bubbles (South Sea Bubble anyone?). We just don't know. We don't have crystal balls at our service. Neither do the PRC elites.
by Someone | 2025-11-25 08:17:24+00:00
You don’t need git to get something “as simple as a git merge” (Diff3 is from 1979 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diff3)

Diff3 is from 1979 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diff3), so three-way merges (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merge_(version_control)#Three-...) predate git by decades.
by yc-kraln | 2025-11-25 08:18:14+00:00
I came here to post this. We make a lot of the same sorts of optimizations for our OS distro (debian based) -- disabling frequency scaling, core pinning, etc. Critically, CPU0 has a bunch of stuff you cannot push, and you're better off with using one of the other cores as an isolated island.

This is what the scheduler latency looks like on our isolated core:

# Total: 000300000 # Min Latencies: 00001 # Avg Latencies: 00005 # Max Latencies: 00059 # Histogram Overflows: 00000

(those are uS!)
by Mawr | 2025-11-25 08:18:46+00:00
> The gopls language server generally takes noticeably more memory and cpu than my IDE requires for a similarly sized java project

Okay, come on now :D Absolutely everything around Java consumes gigabytes of memory. The culture of wastefulness is real.

The Go vs Java plugins for VSCode are no comparison in terms of RAM usage.

I don't know how much the Go plugin uses, which is how it should be for all software — means usage is low enough I never had to worry about it.

Meanwhile, my small Java projects get OOM killed all the time during what I assume is the compilation the plugin does in the background? We're talking several gigabytes of RAM being used for... ??? I'm not exactly surprised, I've yet to see Java software that didn't demand gigabytes as a baseline. InteliJ is no different btw, asinine startup times during which RAM usage baloons.
by gf000 | 2025-11-25 08:19:08+00:00
Human speech is not mathematical formalism. What would even "open-source" mean in case of hardware, is there a consensus on it to begin with? Is it only 'every firmware is open-source and available', or would you want the whole floorplan of the chip?

So given that the word doesn't really apply to hardware, I believe they used it correctly (100% means the set of things where it makes sense to be used) and are not misleading. In fact I strongly dislike some of the "open-hardware" marketing of some previously mentioned devices, when that is obviously false and misleading.
by visarga | 2025-11-25 08:19:19+00:00
I don't see a big difference to humans, we are saying many unreasonable things too, validation is necessary. If you use internet, books or AI it is your job to test their validity. Anything can be bullshit, written by human or AI.

In fact I fear the humans optimize for attention and cater to the feed ranking Algorithm too much, while AI is at least trying to do a decent job. But with AI it is the responsibility of the user to guide it, what AI does depends on what the user does.
Show HN: Pixeli – The CLI Tool for Creating Beautiful Image Grids and Mosaics
by zephyrrd | 2025-11-25 08:19:36+00:00
Hi guys, I just released a beta version of Pixeli, a lightweight open-source CLI for merging images into clean, customizable layouts. It’s perfect for creating image grids, Pinterest-style masonry collages, or contact sheets, all tailored for your specific project use case. For more details, check out the complete documentation.

Some basic features include:

Merging images into grids or masonry layouts, setting up per-image aspect ratios, gaps, background color, and captions, and shuffling images for random layouts.

The tool supports JPG, PNG, WebP, SVG, and AVIF. It also uses the npm module Sharp, a Node.js wrapper around the libvips library written with C, ensuring extremely high performance rates.

This project was created with love and submitted to Hackclub Midnight at https://midnight.hackclub.com

Let me know what you guys think or if you spot any problems :) always do appreciate some constructive criticism
by zerratar | 2025-11-25 08:19:54+00:00
{ "data": { "field1": "hello", "test": [ "what", "is", "this" ] }, "something": "yay" }

becomes

data,something [object Object],yay

I already knew complex types / nested objects would not work. but what makes json stronger than csv is that you can handle more complex data types and most people will use json that way too. Otherwise json would just be a less bloated xml, which is a less bloated csv. lol
by aragilar | 2025-11-25 08:20:52+00:00
I'm confused, surely if apps are depending on old, unsupported runtimes (which therefore likely have security issues), flathub has some interest in ensuring users of these apps are notified of this? I would think a policy of requiring uploads must use a supported runtime would mean active apps would be more likely to be using a supported runtime.

This seems to emphasise that users are far safer with distro-provided apps, as the whole point of distros is to ensure all apps use what are effectively supported flatpak runtimes.
by survirtual | 2025-11-25 08:21:21+00:00
Nonsense. Chimpanzees and Bonobos are our distant ancestors. Have a look at how they operate.

From what I can tell, men have cause significant damage to women's psyche. Men that turn women into a commodity plaything instead of a fellow human being.

Women are human beings just like men, they aren't some alien species. Trauma hurts their psyche, not pleasure. If women were in a safe, supportive, mature society, some would be monogamous, some would be poly, some would be non-committal (but honest), and some would be totally loose. Just like men. In every case they would be safe to be who they are without abuse.

Instead, and this is where men and women deviate, it is not safe. Men will often kill or crush women, physically, professionally, and often at random. Women are not allowed to walk around at night because some men having a bad day or a wild night may not be able to control themselves, and most of society is just okay with this. Police in large swaths of the world do not help make anything safer, in fact they make it more dangerous.

The only reason women who are more monogamous can seem better off is because society does not make room for those who aren't that way. And there are many who aren't that way. There are many who are forced to mask as that way because it is often dangerous otherwise. At large, a prison for women has been created. I think that people may even enjoy how dangerous it is, in order to force women to seek the safety of a man.

Most of society doesn't make room for liberated women and it is heartbreaking. I will dream of a future where I can meet women as total equals, in all walks of life, without disproportionate power, where all of us as humans are free to be who we are in totality.
by nuuuwan | 2025-11-25 08:22:36+00:00
6% FOR EDUCATION IS AN UNEDUCATED GOAL

Sri Lanka has spent decades chanting the slogan "6% for education".

But if spending has not produced value, why keep worshipping the spending target?

MEDIUM: https://medium.com/@nuwans/6-for-education-is-an-uneducated-...

SUBSTACK: https://open.substack.com/pub/nuuuwan/p/6-for-education-is-a...
by elric | 2025-11-25 08:22:42+00:00
There's this quote from Robert C Martin (Uncle Bob)

> Structured Programming imposes discipline on direct transfer of control. Object Oriented Programming imposes discipline on indirect transfer of control. Functional programming imposes discipline upon assignment. Each of these paradigms took something away. None of them added any new capability. Each increased discipline and decreased capability.

The interface (or extensible class) enables safe indirect transfer of control.
by aacishh | 2025-11-25 08:22:47+00:00
Great question, and you’re absolutely right, not every traveler has a flight, bus, or train ticket. A huge part of our future user base includes road-trippers, RV travelers, bikers, and weekend explorers.

We’re already working on an update where GPS-based verification will automatically confirm that you’ve actually traveled a certain distance or entered the city boundary.

This means even if you’re driving in for a day, weekend, or an extended road trip, the app will still verify your presence and allow you to join that city’s community chat.
by simianparrot | 2025-11-25 08:22:49+00:00
Have you looked into the amazing things people do with procedural generation with only a tiny bit (kilobytes, often) of source code? My intuition is that this is vaguely analogous.

Here's an example from 2003, where the entire source code, from music to visuals, fits in 64 kb: https://youtu.be/HtJvSvQnep0

Here's a good gallery of such demos: https://64k-scene.github.io
by verisimi | 2025-11-25 08:23:11+00:00
Yes, great comment.

What do you think of the idea that people generally don't really like other people - that they do generally disappoint and cause suffering. (We are all imperfect, imperfectly getting along together, daily initiating and supporting acts of aggression against others.) And that, if the FakePeople™ experience were good enough, probably most people would opt out of engaging with others, similar to how most pilot experiences are on simulators?
by Arnt | 2025-11-25 08:24:15+00:00
There's that, and about another investment: "The stock has surged more than 150% in 2025, a clear case of the "Pelosi effect" — stocks often jump when her trades are disclosed, especially small cap stocks"

A book I read described that as the "bigger fool theory": your purchase drives up the price, and the increase will make a bigger fool want to pay an even higher price later. A "growth stock".
by joshtbradley | 2025-11-25 08:24:32+00:00
It surprises me how hyper focused people are on AI risk when we’ve grown numb to the millions of preventable deaths that happen every year.

8 million people to smoking. 4 million to obesity. 2.6 million to alcohol. 2.5 million to healthcare. 1.2 million to cars.

Hell even coconuts kill 150 people per year.

It is tragic that people have lost their mind or their life to AI, and it should be prevented. But those using this as an argument to ban AI have lost touch with reality. If anything, AI may help us reduce preventable deaths. Even a 1% improvement would save hundreds of thousands of lives every year.
by rob_c | 2025-11-25 08:24:54+00:00
> I worry about the damage caused by these things on distressed people

I worry what these people were doing before they "fell under the evil grasp of the AI tool". They obviously aren't interacting with humanity in a normal or healthy way. Frankly I'd blame the parents, but on here everything is b&w and everyone should still be locked up who isn't vaxxed according to those who won't touch grass... (I'm pointing out how binary internet discussion has become to the oh so hurt by that throw away remark)

The problem is raising children via the internet, it's always and will always be a bad idea.
by silisili | 2025-11-25 08:25:37+00:00
It's weird. When Netflix came about, I was excited to dump all the bespoke pirating stuff that it replaced. I didn't mind paying for content, in fact, I was glad to.

Fast forward a while, and now Netflix seems to be an undiscoverable mess of old and foreign content while charging twice as much. Each IP owner felt it necessary to make their own way worse clone, and still, after paying more than a hundred a month, there are things just not available on any of them. And now, more than ever, the high seas seem so enticing again.

I'll never really understand how they ruined the opportunity presented, but they really soured people on their value proposition.
by teddyh | 2025-11-25 08:25:45+00:00
See also “Phosphor”¹, a screen saver, part of XScreenSaver², but also usable as a terminal:

/usr/libexec/xscreensaver/phosphor -scale 2 -delay 0 -program $SHELL

1. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6ZWTrl7pV0>

2. <https://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/>
by trashtester | 2025-11-25 08:27:27+00:00
I don't think human DNA generally codes for the behavior derectly. Rather, DNA can code for how the brain learns from incoming data streams.

If the brain naturally tunes into some sources or patterns of input rather than others, it may learn very quickly from the preferred sources. And as long as those sources carry signals that are fairly invariant over time, it may seem like those signals are instinctual.

For instance, it may appear that humans learn to build relationships with kin (both parents and children) and friends, to build revenue streams (or gather food in more primitive societies) and reproduce.

Instead, the brain may come preloaded to generate brain chemicals when detecting certain stimuli. Like oxytocin near caregivers (as children) or small fluffy things (as adults). When exposed to parents/babies, this triggers. But it can also trigger around toys, pets, adopted children, etc.

Friendship-seeking can be, in part, related to seretonin-production in certain social situations. But may be hijacked by social media.

Revenue-seeking behavior can come from dopamin-stimulus from certain goal-optimzing situations. But may also be triggered by video games.

And the best known part: Reproductive behavior may primarily come from sexual arousal, and hijacked by porn or birth control.

Each of the above may be coded by a limited number of bytes of DNA, and it's really the learning algorithm combined with the data stream of natural environments that causes specific behaviors.
by f1shy | 2025-11-25 08:28:07+00:00
IMHO absolutely. The basics of lexer and parser are still there. Some of the optimizations are also relevant. You just cannot expect to read the book and be able to write GCC or LLVM from scratch(1).

For learning deeper about other advanced topics there is:

https://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs6120/2025fa/

and

https://mcyoung.xyz/2025/10/21/ssa-1/

So maybe writing a compiler with exactly one FE (for a simple language) and one BE (for a simple architecture), with say 80% of the optimizations could be a doable project.

(1) We should define what we mean by that, because there are thousands of front-ends and back-ends.
by tannhaeuser | 2025-11-25 08:29:28+00:00
Is anyone really using bazel outside Google in any meaningful capacity? There used to be a number of really popular and widely used projects such as closure compiler, gwt/j2cl, guava and other Java libs, and supposedly lots of golang stuff (not to speak of k8s where people seem to be satisfied it's a black box) that are dying behind bazel walls.
by bayindirh | 2025-11-25 08:29:38+00:00
Threads share the same memory by definition, though. When you isolate these threads from a memory PoV, they become processes.

Moreover, threads are arguably useless without shared memory anyway. A thread is invoked to work on the same data structure with multiple "affectors". Coordination of these affectors is up to you. Atomics, locks, queues... The tools are many.

In fact, processes are just threads which are isolated from each other, and this isolation is enforced by the processor.
by weinzierl | 2025-11-25 08:30:01+00:00
The CLA very well allows them to use all of the contributions to make a proprietary fork. The license is irrelevant for that[1].

Calling it "stealing" doesn't help.

[1] I'd usually call it a distraction, a sleigh of hand, smoke and mirrors, but we have to give Eric credit for not burying the CLA.
by somenameforme | 2025-11-25 08:31:44+00:00
I wouldn't mind seeing education return to its roots of being about learning instead of credentialization. In an age where having a degree is increasingly meaningless in part due to many places simply becoming thinly veiled diploma treadmills (which are somehow nonetheless accredited), this is probably more important than ever. This is doubly so if the AI impact extremists end up being correct.

So why is the issue you described an issue? Because it's about a grade. And the reason that's relevant is because that credential will then be used to determine where she can to to university which, in turn, is a credential that will determine her breadth of options for starting her career, and so on. But why is this all done by credentials instead of simple demonstrations of skill? What somebody scored in a high school writing class should matter far less than the output somebody is capable of producing when given a prompt and an hour in a closed setting. This is how you used to apply to colleges. Here [1], for instance, is Harvard's exam from 1869. If you pass it, you're in. Simple as that.

Obviously this creates a problem of institutions starting to 'teach the test', but with sufficiently broad testing I don't see this as a problem. If a writing class can teach somebody to write a compelling essay based on an arbitrary prompt, then that was simply a good writing class! As an aside this would also add a major selling point to all of the top universities that offer free educational courses online. Right now I think 'normal' people are mostly disinterested in those because of the lack of widely accepted credentials, which is just so backwards - people are actively seeking to maximize credentials over maximizing learning.

This is one of the very few places I think big tech in the US has done a great job. Coding interviews can be justifiably critiqued in many ways, but it's still a much better system than raw credentialization.

[1] - https://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/education/harvard...
by 1718627440 | 2025-11-25 08:31:44+00:00
>> Saying someone is your favorite X and someone is the greatest X are different things, you can think of someone as the greatest X and not like them (unlikely but possible).

> Agreed. That's my point.

You do? You agree, that "X is the greatest Y" is just a valid statement as "X is my favourite Y" and conveys different information? Wasn't my observation, but then the discussion is finished. Actually the former is a better statement on a discussion website, since it allows discussion, while the latter is basically a useless statement, that you can't even object to.

> We are talking about art.

So what. You can still discuss this. Also music is also a science and Bach did some important work in this direction. There are different tastes, but whether a given artist caters to a taste the best, is something you can discuss objectively. Also composing is a craftsmanship, and you can still discuss the craftsmanship even if you don't agree with the final work.

> X is the greatest author/writer/etc, X is the greatest painter, X is the greatest musician, X is the great film director, etc. If we can't even decide within a particular art form, who is the greatest, it even more laughable to say X is the greatest artist FULL STOP.

"hearsathought" is the greatest discusser! There I just did it. Doesn't seem to be impossible to me.

> it even more laughable to say X is the greatest artist FULL STOP.

Why? lordleft didn't even claim to talk for all humans.

>> In addition he [Bach] is also (jokingly) called the fifth evangelist, at least in Germany. Not sure, if this remark is known elsewhere.

> Who cares? It just proves my point.

How so? I don't get your point than, because to me it proves the opposite.

> Who cares?

A lot of people found it useful to spark a discussion and it is currently the first comment.

> He made the comment in the spirit of being a silly fanboy. Just like most respondents so far.

Nah, that's just your opinion.