MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dylan604 | 2025-11-30 21:40:20+00:00
> particularly find educational use cases of AI video are becoming compelling.

compelling graphics take a long time to create. for education content creators, this can be too expensive as well. my high school physics teacher would hand draw figures on transparencies on an overhead projector. if he could have produced his drawings as animations cheap and fast using AI, it would have really brought his teaching style (he really tried to make it humorous) to another level. I think it would be effective for his audience.

imagine the stylized animations for things like the rebooted Cosmos, NOVA, or even 3Blue1Brown on YT. there is potential for small teams to punch above their weight class with genAI graphics
by dragonwriter | 2025-11-30 21:41:14+00:00
They would, but even orgs that have historically had .int domains tend to move off them to either their own TLD (like CERN moving to .cern) or to other gTLDs (like the Commonwealth of Nations from commonwealth.int to commonwealth.org.) Ironically, NATO was using .nato briefly in 1990 before moving to .nato.int

So, CSTO using csto.org rather than csto.int is probably just keeping up with the times, not failing to get an .int
by robot-wrangler | 2025-11-30 21:41:48+00:00
Chain-of-code is better than chain-of-thought because it's more grounded, more specific, and achieves a lot of useful compression. But my bet is that the proposed program-of-thought is too specific. Moving all the way from "very fuzzy specification" to "very concrete code" skips all of the space in the middle, and now there's no room to iterate without a) burning lots of tokens and b) getting bogged down in finding and fixing whatever new errors are introduced in the translated representations. IOW, when there's an error, will it be in the code itself or in the scenario that code was supposed to be representing?

I think the intuition that lots of people jumped to early about how "specs are the new code" was always correct, but at the same time it was absolutely nuts to think that specs can be represented in good ways with natural language and bullet-lists in markdown. We need chain-of-spec that's leveraging something semi-formal and then iterating on that representation, probably with feedback from other layers. Natural-language provides constraints, guess-and-check code generation is sort at the implementation level, but neither are actually the specification which is the heart of the issue. A perfect intermediate language will probably end up being something pretty familiar that leverages and/or combines existing formal methods from model-checkers, logic, games, discrete simulations, graphs, UML, etc. Why? It's just very hard to beat this stuff for compression, and this is what all the "context compaction" things are really groping towards anyway. See also the wisdom about "programming is theory building" and so on.

I think if/when something like that starts getting really useful you probably won't hear much about it, and there won't be a lot of talk about the success of hybrid-systems and LLMs+symbolics. Industry giants would have a huge vested interest in keeping the useful intermediate representation/languages a secret-sauce. Why? Well, they can pretend they are still doing something semi-magical with scale and sufficiently deep chain-of-thought and bill for extra tokens. That would tend to preserve the appearance of a big-data and big-computing moat for training and inference even if it is gradually drying up.
by amluto | 2025-11-30 21:42:46+00:00
To make a nice air purifier, you want to deliver clean air at some respectable rate, where “clean air” is a notional amount of completely pure air, and you want this to work for all particle sizes. If you move 1000cfm (that’s a whole lot BTW) through a filter that removes 60% of the worst-case particles, that’s 600cfm of clean air.

At some point I found a nice chart, IIRC from the EPA, showing the efficiency plotted vs particle sizes for a variety of filters. IIRC the filters generally split into two categories: those with decent efficiency all the way down to zero microns and those with very poor efficiency at small sizes. IIRC the split was around MERV 12. Obviously your filter is not the filter in the chart.

So I would go with MERV 13 or even a bit higher. Also, keep in mind that pressure drop is related to the velocity of air through the filter, so a physically larger filter will have lower pressure drop at the same flow rate. But the need to replace a filter is related to collected gunk per unit area, so doubling your filter area will cost twice as much but last twice as long and will use less power and run quieter.

Also, electrostatic filters can lose their charge from exposure to various contaminants.

edit: it was the chart here, also mentioned down thread.

https://www.frdmtoplay.com/nagivating-air-purification/

Portable Air Cleaners, Furnace, and HVAC Filters. 3ed. EPA 402-F-09-002

And I remembered a bit wrong. Even MERV 10 will pick up the smallest particles, but MERV 8 may miss some. But for good performance at the most penetrating size, you want MERV 12-ish. For a single-pass filter (filtering outdoor air as it enters), you want much higher - MERV 16 or even HEPA or near-HEPA, if you want acceptable performance against potentially nasty outdoor conditions due to wildfire or nasty human particle sources.
by BanditDefender | 2025-11-30 21:43:19+00:00
It is better to say humans formalized it :) All birds and mammals are capable of arithmetic in the sense of quantitative reasoning. E.g. a rat quickly learning that if they're shown two plates, one with two rocks and one with three rocks, if they pick the plate with five rocks they get a treat. That is to say rats understand addition intuitively, even if they can't write large numbers like humans can.

Too many AI people are completely uninterested in how rats are able to figure stuff like that out. It is not like they are being prompted, they are being manipulated.
by bitwize | 2025-11-30 21:44:00+00:00
> People "stepped up"

If by "people" you mean a fascist who doesn't know how to program, then sure. But the sensible people who don't present a security threat with their politics or with shitty code are 100% in the Wayland camp.

> Also the people that used to maintain X11 (e.g. Keith Packard) had nothing to do with building Wayland.

Those people aren't maintaining X11 today, are they? The people who are maintaining X11 today have put it in bugfix-only mode and have told you, many times, that the future is Wayland. End of discussion.

Look, you want to run a retro 90s desktop for shits and giggles, that's great. There's even an officially supported path for this use case: Ariadne Conill's Wayback. But the DEs and the toolkits are all removing X11 support within the next year or two. There is no future there. You want to keep running modern software, you will have to switch to Wayland eventually—and soon.

> Wayland on the other is just a insanely stupid API. Everybody advocating for Wayland should be forced to write a simple client at least once without relying on behemoths like GTK or Qt.

Nobody actually develops applications that way. They all use a toolkit, and the behemoths cover pretty much 90% of actual application development (modulo things like Electron). Both of those, by the way, are deprecating X11 support.
by neilv | 2025-11-30 21:44:15+00:00
Academia and higher education have long-established ideals, institutions receive considerations from society in light of that, and they are also supposed to be regulated in some ways (e.g., accreditation).

I think a better defense than the libertarian "don't tell me what to do with my property" would've taken the angle that "university X isn't actually becoming a factory for pumping out techbro libertarian scourges of society".
by evil-olive | 2025-11-30 21:44:41+00:00
> Grok button on each Twitter post is just amazing to quickly get into what post even references and talks about.

when Charlie Kirk was shot, and the video was posted to Twitter, people asked Grok to "fact-check" it...and Grok told them the videos were fake and Kirk was alive. [0]

Grok also spread misinformation about the identity of the shooter. [1]

> On Friday morning, after Utah Gov. Spencer Cox announced that the suspect in custody was Robinson, Grok's replies to X users' inquiries about him were contradictory. One Grok post said Robinson was a registered Republican, while others reported he was a nonpartisan voter. Voter registration records indicate Robinson is not affiliated with a political party.

and that's just one particularly egregious event in a long string of problems, such as the MechaHitler thing. [2] and the Elon Musk piss-drinking thing. [3]

so if you're going to defend these "AI" integrations as being useful and helpful...I dunno, Grok is probably not a good example to point to.

0: https://www.engadget.com/ai/grok-claimed-the-charlie-kirk-as...

1: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ai-false-claims-charlie-kirk-de...

2: https://www.npr.org/2025/07/09/nx-s1-5462609/grok-elon-musk-...

3: https://www.404media.co/elon-musk-could-drink-piss-better-th...
by gf000 | 2025-11-30 21:44:44+00:00
> outright banned from the gitlab

Yeah, lies and then you come in with shit like this. You can surely show several proofs then, right?

> Wayland on the other is just a insanely stupid API. Everybody advocating for Wayland should be forced to write a simple client at least once without relying on behemoths like GTK or Qt.

Why would you do it outside of toying around? Btw, I have and it's nothing out of ordinary.
by jasomill | 2025-11-30 21:45:45+00:00
Reminds me of a silly thing that happened when I was a freshman in high school, ca. 1992.

We had a dumb "computer literacy" class taught in an computer lab full of PS/2 Model 25s with no hard drives, and were each issued a bootable floppy disk containing both Microsoft Works and our assignment files (word processing documents, spreadsheets, etc.), which we turned in at the end of class for grading.

We started Works in the usual way, by typing "works" at the MS-DOS prompt.

One day, out of boredom, I added "PROMPT Password:" to AUTOEXEC.BAT on my disk, changing the DOS prompt from "A:\>" to "Password:" when booted from my disk.

Two days later, I got called into the dean's office, where the instructor demanded to know how I used my disk to "hack the network" — a network that, up until this point, I didn't even know existed, as the lab computers weren't connected to anything but power — and "lock me out of my computer", and threatened suspension unless and until I revealed the password.

After a few minutes trying to explain that no password existed to a "computer literacy" instructor who clearly had no idea what either AUTOEXEC.BAT or the DOS prompt was, nor why booting a networked computer from a potentially untrustworthy floppy disk was a terrible idea, I finally gave in.

"Fine. The password is works. Can I go now?"
by wjb3 | 2025-11-30 21:45:46+00:00
A qualified health claim is a claim that has been reviewed and issued by the FDA. Upon a rigorous review of scientific evidence provided, the FDA will issue a ‘Letter of Enforcement Discretion’ for a “qualified health claim” when emerging evidence is credible and compelling enough to suggest a link between a certain food and a specific health benefit, in this case, yogurt and a reduced risk of type 2 diabetes. The FDA also imposes strict wording requirements on qualified health claims, both to reflect the strength of the scientific evidence supporting that claim and to convey any other necessary qualifications.
by Boogie_Man | 2025-11-30 21:45:59+00:00
Thanks for posting this. I mostly gave up on viewing the one or two Twitter feeds that interest me after nitter stopped working. It wasn't ideological, I just wasn't able to reliably view and navigate without an account, and when I made an account it just kept showing me like "black HS football player bad sportsmanship".

Look like I've got about two years of James Cage White story arcs to check in on.
by dayjah | 2025-11-30 21:46:37+00:00
That’s great to know! There are plenty of issues which are reasonably well documented in the zed repo.

https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/26277

About 4mos ago I moved to using brew for zed because at the time there was some hard block on updating rustc in nixpkgs-stable to a version which included some feature that zed relied upon.
by chihuahua | 2025-11-30 21:46:46+00:00
I agree, I feel like the 68k architecture was a dream for assembly programming. each register is large enough to store useful values, there are lots of them, there are instructions for multiply and divide. This allows you to focus on the essence of what you want to accomplish, and not have to get side-tracked into how to represent the X-coordinate of some object because it's just over 8 bits wide, or how to multiply to integers. Both of these seemingly trivial things already require thought on the 6502.
by jvanderbot | 2025-11-30 21:47:46+00:00
I'm a bit surprised you can honestly believe that a competition of humans isn't somehow different if allowed to use solution-generators. Like using a calculator in an arithmetic competition. Really?

It's not much different than outlawing performance enhancing drugs. Or aimbots in competitive gaming. The point is to see what the limits of human performance are.

If an alien race came along and said "you will all die unless you beat us in the IEEE programming competition", I would be all for LLM use. Like if they challenged us to Go, I think we'd probably / certainly use AI. Or chess - yeah, we'd be dumb to not use game solvers for this.

But that's not in the spirit of the competition if it's University of Michigan's use of Claude vs MIT's use of Claude vs ....

Imagine if the word "competition" meant "anything goes" automatically.
by simonw | 2025-11-30 21:47:49+00:00
I file issues, comment on issues, review PRs and increasingly ship code entirely from my phone (thanks to LLM assistance).

All of six of these commits today were created and shipped from my phone while I was out and about on a nice dog walk: https://github.com/simonw/tools/commits/47b07010e3459adb23e1... - now deployed to https://tools.simonwillison.net
by crabmusket | 2025-11-30 21:47:54+00:00
That's the kind of lazy bullshit idea that, to me, exemplifies the AI hype slop era we're in. The point of a chart is to communicate visually. If the chart isn't clear without a supplemental explanation, why is it there?

If user research indicates your chart isn't clear enough, then improve the chart. But what are the odds they did any user research? They probably just ran an A/B test and saw number go up because of the novelty factor.
by prmoustache | 2025-11-30 21:48:41+00:00
> vm.swappiness defaults to 60, which is default from when everyone was still running spinning rust with a swap partition. Servers these days usually have very specific storage+memory configurations, whereas the usual desktop or laptop has an SSD and 16GB+ of RAM with RAM compression expanding it.

You don't need to compile a specific kernel for that, this is setup via sysctl.
by shoo | 2025-11-30 21:49:05+00:00
Service oriented architecture seems like a pretty good idea.

I've seen a few regrettable things at one job where they'd ended up shipping a microservice-y design but without much thought about service interfaces. One small example: team A owns a service that runs as an overnight job making customer specific recommendations that get written to a database, and then team B owns a service that surfaces these recommendations as a customer-facing app feature and directly reads from that database. It probably ended up that way as team A had the data scientists and team B had the app backend engineers for that feature and they had to ship something and no architect or senior engineer put their foot down about interfaces.

That'd be pretty reasonable design if team A and team B were the same team, so they could regard the database as internal with no way to access it without going through a service with a well defined interface. Failing that, it's hard to evolve the schema of the data model in the DB without a well defined interface you can use to decouple implementation changes from consumers and where the consuming team B have their own list of quarterly priorities.

Microservices & alternatives aren't really properties of the technical system in isolation, they also depend on the org chart & which teams owns what parts of the overall system.

SOA: pretty good, microservices: probably not a great idea, microservices without SOA: avoid.

For anyone unfamiliar with SOA, there's a great sub-rant in Steve Yegge's 2011 google platforms rant [1][2] focusing on Amazon's switch to service oriented architecture.

[1] https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse452/23wi/papers... [2] corresponding HN thread from 2011 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3101876
by alexfoo | 2025-11-30 21:49:12+00:00
Perl is my starting point.

It has many of the required structures (hashes/maps, ad hoc structs, etc) and is great for knocking up a rough and ready prototype of something. It's also quick to write (but often unforgiving).

I can also produce a solution for pretty much every problem in AoC without needing to download a single separate Perl module.

On the negative side there are copious footguns available in Perl.

(Note that if I knew Python as well as I knew Perl I'd almost certainly use Python as a starting point.)

I also try and produce a Go and a C solution for each day too:

* The Go solution is generally a rewrite of the initial Perl solution but doing things "properly" and correcting a lot of the assumptions and hacks that I made in the Perl code. Plus some of those new fangled "test" things.

* The C solution is a useful reminder of how much "fun" things can be in a language that lacks built-in structures like hashes/maps, etc.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-11-30 21:49:21+00:00
You can flag, but a lone flag is worthless. Not sure how many it takes to nuke a story or comment.

For myself, I only downvote/flag stuff that I consider harmful to the community.

That does not include stories or comments with which I disagree. In fact, I frequently upvote comments posted, that attack my own positions, if they do so in a reasonable manner. Groupthink sucks, and I frequently change my mind, based on orthogonal feedback.
by kasey_junk | 2025-11-30 21:49:59+00:00
There were specific mortgage subsidies as part of tarp. For instance the making homes affordable and hardest hit fund programs.

But beyond that if the mortgages had been sold at market prices many of them would have been snapped up by companies that aggressively went after the secured properties. That’s the _natural_ outcome of letting the market action happen. More people would have been put out of their homes.

I’m fairly ambivalent on tarp. I think letting actors take risky actions and get bailed out creates a moral hazard. But that applies to mortgage holders who were over extended and auto workers who get bailed out ahead of other stake holders too. I can see a strong argument that we should have biased that way, but to say we didn’t help “regular” people is just false narrative.
by TRiG_Ireland | 2025-11-30 21:50:13+00:00
At what point did you decide that I have employees?

I find that I work better in an office, depending on the office. I'm in no position to enforce that position on anyone. (I'm currently unemployed and looking for work, in fact.) I find that I dislike giving up room in my small house for work. And I dislike having no separation between work and home.

These are all personal preferences. Nothing is being enforced on anyone. Your reaction is overblown.
by AGI-slop | 2025-11-30 21:50:38+00:00
A few days ago i took a photo of some water pipes, and asked chatgpt to review it .

Unbeknownst to me that there was an issue. It pointed out multiple signs of slow leaks and then described what i should do to test and repair it easily.

I see a lot of negative energy about the 'AI' tech we have today to the point where you will get mass downvoted for saying something positive.
by crabmusket | 2025-11-30 21:51:48+00:00
Lots of businesses like to claim being a "startup" as it brings connotations of innovation, dynamism, coolness, being the "next big thing" etc. There are many senses of the word, and it can be used in different ways (e.g. I work at a small business which has some elements of startup culture, and it's not an incorrect way to give people a sense of what it's like here - but we're definitely well established) but I think often being one of the "cool kids" is part of the motivation.
by electroly | 2025-11-30 21:53:04+00:00
Context7, I assume? I wanted to like context7 but I constantly need documentation that is either private or not in a format that context7 supports. Instead, I scrape the docs to Markdown, stick them into a "context" folder[1], and use Cursor's vector codebase indexing. This allows the agent to literally ask questions like "how do I do ABC with library XYZ?" and the vector database delivers a chunked answer from all available documentation. This is, IMO, much better than how context7 works: context7 just returns whole pages of documentation, polluting the context window with info that isn't relevant to what the agent wanted to know.

I have done this with entire textbooks. Find a PDF and get GPT-5 to transcribe it page by page to Markdown. Costs a couple bucks and turns the agent into a wizard on that subject.

Context7, too, could easily have been a command line tool that both you and the agent can use. Even now, I don't see what MCP--specifically--brings to the table.

[1] One trick for Cursor users: put "/context/" in .gitignore and "!/context/" in .cursorignore. This will keep it out of git but still index it.
by throwaway31131 | 2025-11-30 21:54:20+00:00
For some definitions of serious, sure. The main critical piece that’s missing is all the testing infrastructure. Buying 100 or so ASICs for university use is one thing. Buying 100K, or more, is another.

Not the gdb support via jtag that software engineers need, they have that. But the various manufacturing test suites, which do modify gate netlists, and automated circuit characterization techniques that electrical engineers and the manufacturing engineers use.
by Aperocky | 2025-11-30 21:55:09+00:00
> And let’s be clear: We don't need AGI (Artificial General Intelligence).

In general, I think we want to have it, just like nuclear fusion, interplanetary and interstellar colonization, curing cancer, etc. etc.

We don't "need" it similar to people in 1800s don't need electric cars or airports.

Who owns AGI or what purpose the AGI believe it has is a separate discussion - similar to how airplanes can be used to transport people or fight wars. Fortunately today, most airplanes are made to transport people and connect the world.
by bkolobara | 2025-11-30 21:55:13+00:00
It still kinda sucks though. You can make it work, but you can also easily end up wasting a huge amount of time trying to make it do something that it's just incapable of. And it's impossible to know upfront if it will work. It's more like gambling.

I personally think we have reached some kind of local maximum. I work 8 hours per day with claude code, so I'm very much aware of even subtle changes in the model. Taking into account how much money was thrown at it, I can't see much progress in the last few model iterations. Only the "benchmarks" are improving, but the results I'm getting are not. If I care about some work, I almost never use AI. I also watch a lot of people streaming online to pick up new workflows and often they say something like "I don't care much about the UI, so I let it just do its thing". I think this tells you more about the current state of AI for coding than anything else. Far from _not sucking_ territory.