MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by PaulRobinson | 2025-11-09 16:28:46+00:00
I once had one of his quote on the back of my business card when I was doing a lot of software dev consultancy: "Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes".

I keep meaning to sit down with this site and make my way through it all. Might make more progress if I grab them into an eReader-friendly format and then peruse them more easily when travelling.
by andreacanton | 2025-11-09 16:28:55+00:00
Thank you for your comment.

yes, english is not my first language, so I use AI to helping me structure the article, but I've edited and fully reviewed and take responsibility for every word in it. (Anyway I will trust less AI next time, so thank you)

What I was trying to say is that if you do less because you don't like where you work, you are losing opportunity to learn skills, or worst: you are learning to do less in general. How can you find a new and better job if you are doing less?
by celeritascelery | 2025-11-09 16:29:30+00:00
Apple TV is much better about this. I have never had it pop up or interrupt me. When it is idle it just goes to a pleasant screen saver and then powers off after a while. It doesn’t try and promote content or display ads for shows. Granted, that could change at any time, but right now I think it is better than all the alternatives.
by goalieca | 2025-11-09 16:29:36+00:00
I can't read the article but that won't stop me from commenting..

This year alone something like 400B was spent on investing in chips, datacenters, electricity buildouts. That's 400B that could have otherwise been invested in people.

While i don't doubt that people will find a few solid business cases for LLMs, i am on team-bubble. I don't think this investment will add 400B worth of value and I very much doubt that this 400B is any good for future growth or long-term aspirations of AGI. Investing 400B into people and (tech) manufacturing would be a solid long-term bet with benefits.
by mystraline | 2025-11-09 16:30:16+00:00
Damn good point.

Unless you have root and can do anything the hardware is capable of, it's not your device. And you shouldn't let any sort of non-owned devices on your network.

Why? Cause devices controlled by other orgs are a foothold situation. And we've had countless attacks of footholds being used as internal points of attack, DDoS, and other attacks.

That also means that all your "cloud devices" should be able to work 100% offline. If not, return them as defective.
by ssl-3 | 2025-11-09 16:30:51+00:00
Every service on the Internet knows its users' IP addresses. It's a very short trip for an interested party to convert an IP address to whatever it is that IP geolocation means today in 2025, where we even have things like RFC 8805 that seek to promote the active dissemination of that information.

What aspects of this blanket reality serve to make ChatGPT uniquely concerning, or even interesting?
by sandworm101 | 2025-11-09 16:31:18+00:00
Yes. In written laws "citizen" generally means any person and/or organization subject to the laws of the state. It doesnt mean just living people who can vote.

Many a young law student has pontificated that as non-citizens, visiting tourists have no rights. There is no more loaded a word in US politics, and none more malleable under the law, as "citizen". It means something different in every context.
by whywhywhywhy | 2025-11-09 16:31:43+00:00
Groks underrated honestly. If you have to market on X you need a sub anyway so it’s replaced casual questions/sort of questions I used to Google for me and I’m not seeing anything worse than ChatGPT and often it’s better. Much better at current events.

The video gen is actually really good fast and cheap for short videos.

Still use Claude and GPT5 for work tasks but I haven’t tried grok extensively for those
by deaux | 2025-11-09 16:32:02+00:00
> It's because I still need to earn a living and this technology threatens my ability to do so in the near future.

That's certainly not the reason most HNers are giving - I'm seeing far more claims that LLMs are entirely meaningless becauzs either "they cannot make something they haven't seen before" or "half the time they hallucinate". The latter even appears as one of the first replies in this post's link, the X thread!
by KristoAI | 2025-11-09 16:32:53+00:00
Since grok 4 fast got this answer correct so quickly, I decided to test more.

Tested this on the new hidden model of ChatGPT called Polaris Alpha: Answer: $20,192,642.460942336$

Current gpt-5 medium reasoning says: After confirming my calculations, the final product (P) should be (20,192,642.460942336)

Claude Sonnet 4.5 says: “29,596,175.95 or roughly 29.6 million”

Claude haiku 4.5 says: ≈20,185,903

GLM 4.6 says: 20,171,523.725593136

I’m going to try out Grok 4 fast on some coding tasks at this point to see if it can create functions properly. Design help is still best on GPT-5 at this exact moment.
by lanyard-textile | 2025-11-09 16:33:11+00:00
The true honesty is that judges may rule however they please, regardless of the reasoning. In many cases they require their intuition to guide them. In that sense, it is already up to their gut feeling.

At some point someone needs to weigh the facts, and they are given great discretion to do so. It is generally a good thing, because we have multiple layers of appeal to prevent obviously horrible outcomes.

So this legislation, like all legislation, provides guidance for the good faith judge to help weigh the facts. There is no guidance that will prevent a bad faith judge from ruling badly: You do not need a clause about public safety to get the ruling you want, but there is an argument that your ruling may perhaps be less scrutinized.

There’s a reason an attorney’s answer is always “it depends” :) No legislation is truly airtight from abuse.
by jcalvinowens | 2025-11-09 16:33:14+00:00
> Family Hub™ refrigerators[4] with AI Vision Inside technology will receive upgrades to enable recognition of frequently used packaged foods and even more fresh fruits and vegetables to help families reduce food waste and save money.

This has to be one of the silliest solutions in search of a problem I've ever seen. The fridge costs $3000, by the way.
by sertyu | 2025-11-09 16:33:21+00:00
Unfamiliar but probably System/34 or System/36 running SSP (System Support Program) with IBM 5250 series terminals.

Unsure about the games. Here’s an early lunar lander:

https://www.cs.brandeis.edu/~storer/LunarLander/LunarLander....

Another Lunar version:

https://undefinedvalue.com/lunar-for-c-and-rust.html

System/36 guide:

https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_ibmsystem3rogrammingWi...

Possible source for games in David H. Ahl in his book 101 BASIC Computer Games.
by rossdavidh | 2025-11-09 16:33:30+00:00
My main advice here is that you need to tailor this to the individual child. What will turn one kid on to free computing, will cause another to think of Linux forever after as "that annoying thing which I was forced to use, when I didn't have a choice in the matter", and that's probably the opposite of what you want; it will associate "Linux" in their mind with not having a choice. What is this 8-year old girl interested in?
by IlikeKitties | 2025-11-09 16:33:50+00:00
> Please connect the Samsung^R Family^tm H.U.B.^TM^R to the internet to start the refrigeration cycle.

> Please connect the Samsung^R Family^tm H.U.B.^TM^R to the internet to continue the refrigeration cycle. You refrigeration cycle will end in 28 hours unless reconnected to the Samsung^TM KNOX^R Server System for your security

> Please reposition the Samsung^R Family^tm H.U.B.^TM^R so that 6G Connectivity can be established to start the refrigeration cycle.

> Please unblock all visual obstructions the Samsung^R Family^tm H.U.B.^TM^R Camera and reauthorize usage to continue the refrigeration cycle.

> Please unblock all visual obstructions the Samsung^R Family^tm H.U.B.^TM^R Camera and Reauthorize using your government ID, fingerprint, iris scan and cryptographically singed anus print to continue usage. Failure to comply will cost you 25 Social Credits. You have 27 hours left.
by wkat4242 | 2025-11-09 16:34:48+00:00
I'm running the Win10 version (the latest for that). I will doublecheck, I'm sure I saw the windows store. Mainly running it because my skylake NUC is no longer supported by Win11. And it still works totally fine for programming microcontrollers.

And I do want updates, I just want to decide when to install them. Not that "install before next tuesday or we will do it for you" mafia bullshit.
by spot5010 | 2025-11-09 16:34:50+00:00
The reason code can serve as the source of truth is that it’s precise enough to describe intent, since programming languages are well-specified. Compilers have freedom in how they translate code into assembly and two different compilers ( or even different optimization flags) will produce distinct binaries. Yet all of them preserve the same intent and observable behaviour that the programmer cares about. Runtime performance or instruction order may vary, but the semantics remain consistent.

For spec driven development to truly work, perhaps what’s needed is a higher level spec language that can express user intent precisely, at the level of abstraction where the human understanding lives, while ensuring that the lower level implementation is generated correctly.

A programmer could then use LLMs to translate plain English into this “spec language,” which would then become the real source of truth.
by thunderfork | 2025-11-09 16:34:57+00:00
My great concern with regards to AI use is that it's easy to say "this will not impact how attentive I am", but... that's an assertion that one can't prove. It is very difficult to notice a slow-growing deficiency in attentiveness.

Now, is there hard evidence that AI use does lead to this in all cases? Not that I'm aware of. Just as there's no easy way to prove the difference between "I don't think this is impacting me, but it is" and "it really isn't".

It comes down to two unevidenced assertions - "this will reduce attentiveness" vs "no it won't". But I don't feel great about a project like this just going straight for "no it won't" as though that's something they feel with high confidence.

From where does that confidence come?
by moritzwarhier | 2025-11-09 16:35:02+00:00
agreed about the point that this has nothing to do with dead internet theory.

A similar idea, but without the timeline idea and with YouTube videos instead of archive.org was this:

YouTube videos that have almost zero previous views (astronaut.io)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20432772

1362 points by monort on July 14, 2019 | 239 comments

I still like that one, maybe it appeals to more people here because the UI is more polished, and the video selection criteria work really well.

Although it also has the feel of seeing stuff that you're not meant to see sometimes.

It has an almost meditative feel to me, I like it.

Last time I opened it, for example, I saw a video of an old man playing a guitar, lots of hobby sports matches, and videos of private celebrations etc

Didn't encounter any NSFW stuff, but it's probably possible as far as YouTube can't prevent it, so if you must be 100% sure, you probably shouldn't open it.
by peter_d_sherman | 2025-11-09 16:35:31+00:00
Observation:

Most programming languages evolved from the limited selection of ASCII printable characters from the keys of early ASCII keyboards (which evolved from earlier typewriters and teletype machines)...

But these days we have Unicode -- a huge amount of potential symbols (and combinations of symbols!) that could be used in new programming languages (i.e., asterisk: '*', long used for multiplication could (finally!) be replaced with a true multiplication symbol: 'x' -- if an extended symbol space were used by the language...

Symbols could visually represent such things as loops, conditionals, variable declarations, etc., etc.

Pointers and pointer dereferencing (if the language supported it) -- could have their own symbols...

Would that be a good idea?

Well, if backwards ASCII compatibility is desired to run on old computers for whatever reason (in a future time when we need to revert back to older/simpler/more predictable systems because the AI's are out of control?) then maybe not...

But if we wanted graphical or quasi-graphical symbols to represent programming constructs more visually -- then maybe the idea has some merit...

Maybe a conversion program could be written that would convert between the new symbol set and ASCII, and maybe the programming language would be created to recognize both constructs...

And yes, I know that there is the Scratch programming language -- but I'm not talking about quite that visual! :-) The language I envision would still be physically typed on a keyboard, as most are today...

Anyway, great looking typeface!
by 0xC0ncord | 2025-11-09 16:35:41+00:00
There are plenty of fridges that don't incorporate "smart" features. There's nothing really complicated about a giant box that you put food in to keep cold and maybe an integrated water dispenser.

I've been shopping for a new fridge lately, and from what I gather most "smart" fridges are still extremely expensive and that makes "non-smart" fridges still very desirable. In other words, "smart" features may not be new, but they aren't standard on a typical fridge... yet.
by 42point2 | 2025-11-09 16:35:55+00:00
We started experimenting with this on a large-ish feature, with several repos involved. Off to a good start. The constitution that’s created as the first step is valuable in its own right. Something that can be used for onboarding both engineers and LLMs. Version 1 generated by specify was already quite good and we iterated from there. We had previously created a Claude.md that took the whole codebase into account, which I think helped.

I’m perhaps less sold on the idea of the spec being the source of truth — would have to do some design iterations and see if that holds up. I do like that it imposes some structure/rigor on the design process.
by irskep | 2025-11-09 16:36:18+00:00
I'm really excited by this development! Material for MkDocs has raised the quality level of so many projects' docs, my own included, by making good navigation the default. It's by far my favorite system to browse as a reader, and use as a project maintainer.

I hope the new theme allows for more customization than the old Material theme. It was really hard to create a unique brand identity within the constraints of Material; it just wasn't built with customization in mind beyond a color. The "modern" theme looks minimal in a way that gives me some hope for this.

Looking forward to kicking the tires on Zensical!
by darth_avocado | 2025-11-09 16:36:45+00:00
This is what amazes me. I swore off Samsung because of their unreliability: smartphones, TVs, refrigerators are terrible despite demanding a premium price over other cheaper players that offer better quality. Instead of investing time and effort in making their products better they’re doing the exact opposite. No one has ever said “the fridge is going to show me ads now? Better throw away my old one and get this bad boy on launch day”. Just make your products better people.
by noir_lord | 2025-11-09 16:38:07+00:00
I have a Samsung smart TV it's never seen the internet, I just didn't let it connect - it's a display for a box running Fedora, that is its entire job to be dumb and display whatever is sent down the wire.

Devices that do need to be on the internet but I can foresee no reason they ever need to talk to anything else on the network go on their own VLAN (down to the level of my VR headset since it had a Meta logo on the box...).

My boys gaming PC can't even see my desktop (since there isn't a scenario where it needs to).

Other than the "smart" TV I own nothing "Smart" because I don't want anything smart.
by jlokier | 2025-11-09 16:38:16+00:00
Currently I don't use vibe coding or even code assistants, so I can't speak to how the battery fares when doing that sort of thing. I don't know how much or how intensively they need to run the underlying LLMs.

For chatting with LLMs via ollama, I've seen total power usage go to about 50W (on an M3 Max) while the LLM is active, which is about 3x-4x power usage compared to just idling with browsers and editors open.

So I'd estimate about 2-3 hours of continuous LLM use on battery. Because I have enough RAM spare, at least there's no need to keep shutting down and reloading models.

I haven't really pushed it to find out how long they run on battery, as I haven't used LLMs all that much.

I'm more interested in the underlying operations of how they work, investigating novel model architectures and techniques, and optimising performance, than actually using them as an end user :-) Similar to how I enjoyed writing game engines more than playing games :-) Maybe I'll get into using them more in future.
by chasd00 | 2025-11-09 16:38:25+00:00
My 13 year old came to me asking for Linux because of steam. He had heard of people moving to steam on Linux instead of upgrading to windows11. So if your child is into gaming show them steam on Linux and at least they’ll use it to play games. Then from there you can ease them into Linux itself while having steam+games to keep up the usage and interest.

Just take it slow, I pushed the console a little too hard on my 13 year old. He now refers to it as the “black box of despair” hah.
by ocdtrekkie | 2025-11-09 16:38:41+00:00
I think this is a hindsight is 20/20 issue. In 2021, we really should've prosecuted Trump and sent him to prison. We wouldn't be dealing with the incredible litany of crimes and economic damage we deal with now if we had.

But in 2021, I don't think anyone seriously imagined Trump would actually be President again, and if you don't think he'll actually have any power, yeah, in 2021 it probably looked like a bad optics thing that probably wouldn't make any positive impact to do. And not for nothing, we were also still very much in the middle of COVID-19 as an active crisis.
by estimator7292 | 2025-11-09 16:39:02+00:00
Samsung is forever dead to me. A couple years ago I was working with a customer, showing them something on my phone. In the middle of the interaction, actively using my phone, Samsung forced it to reboot for an update I never agreed to.

..and fucking bricked my phone. Right there on the spot in the middle of a sale.

Plus the whole Tizen situation on the Gear watches was incredibly disappointing. I paid all kinds of money for a nice watch that had zero utility outside of Samsung's tiny, tiny walled garden and their very few, very broken apps. I'll never not be mad about it.
by dspillett | 2025-11-09 16:39:14+00:00
> What about people who need to use creative tools?

Then for them a bad tool is still the best tool for the job of those available.

OP did say they don't push Linux on others. If you have a specific need that ties you to Windows (due to platform incompatibility that you have no power to change) then you use Windows.

No point the rest of us sticking with Windows if we want to move and don't have reason not to though.
by joshtbradley | 2025-11-09 16:39:16+00:00
I’m glad you experienced the CLICK, I did too when GPT-3 released. The comment section was full of snarky, cynical, dismissive remarks with hundreds of likes. It smelled like Reddit but it was HN.

Cynicism is a dangerous instinct that captures many people. It’s easy, it’s rewarding, and it offers the psychological safety of unity. But it’s missing a key component. Hope.

I have no problem with critiques if they are accurate, insightful, and helpful. But cynics don’t think this way. Cynics seek to find the minimum viable argument to destroy anything that threatens change.

Stay awake my friend. Remain hopeful. We are hackers. We believe in the liberating potential of technology. We refuse to succumb to the lazy ignorant masses. We build.

“Only optimists build complex systems.”
by blibble | 2025-11-09 16:39:33+00:00
> Why did you remove your original comment of "time to use another password manager"? Do you lack the courage of your convictions? Why not make the change yourself?

because I thought it was a bit mean spirited and toned it down, thanks for bringing it back

> Stop using any code that might ever have been AI generated.

way, way ahead of you buddy
by jbreckmckye | 2025-11-09 16:40:00+00:00
> It will sell very well because it a) will be cheaper than non-advertising laden fridges,

Will it? Investors would prefer full price fridges with full price ads.

Most consumers won't even know they've installed adware until the appliance is turned on, and what are they gonna do? go to all the effort of returning and buying another fridge?

Captive audience
by testdelacc1 | 2025-11-09 16:40:22+00:00
The point isn’t to play the best “non-faddish” games. It’s to play what’s in the zeitgeist and form bonds with people their own age.

I’m so glad my parents didn’t override my decisions on literature or video games or TV shows. I watched anime then, my parents didn’t get it, and that’s perfectly fine. I continue to enjoy it now. If they had made me adopt their mindset of “anime = fad” or “anime = cartoon = childish” I’d have been worse off. Instead of enjoying masterpieces like Frieren I’d be snobbishly thinking about what a fad it is.
by heresie-dabord | 2025-11-09 16:40:26+00:00
> I’m not proposing using Classic Mac OS on original hardware (though one can, as other comments have noted)

Noted, the other commenters (nevermind old Macs... TRS-80?!) are letting nostalgia override a writer's practical need for either a) a system that will never die (i.e. a unicorn), or b) a set of software tools that will make the writer's life easier and provide resilience.

Impossible to beat Linux for (b).

> A tiling WM setup might work for some but my preference leans towards a traditional floating WM

Just to clarify, Sway is a tiling WM, labwc is a floating WM. In my experience, either one works brilliantly for writing. Sway enforces a WM pattern; labwc affords the flexibility to define decorations as Openbox themes.
by portaouflop | 2025-11-09 16:40:36+00:00
True and if there was a good dumb phone alternative I would prefer that probably.

I do however need to use some apps sometimes unfortunately. My bank for example implemented some proprietary 2fa method that I need to use an app for (or i buy a special device to it which also seems inconvenient).

Anyway it’s the only phone i ever bought; only used 2hand ones before and I’ll probably won’t buy another
by jhbadger | 2025-11-09 16:40:52+00:00
I'm not so sure about that -- Crick had a much more productive scientific career post structure than did Watson (who went into administration instead). He also had the mathematical skills needed for interpreting crystallography data that Watson lacked (Crick had studied physics as an undergraduate while Watson had studied zoology).

As for why Franklin and Watson didn't get along, you can get some idea from Watson's own writings -- Watson liked to talk and joke around and Franklin wasn't interested in that sort of thing, at least not during work hours.