MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tim333 | 2025-11-25 09:54:21+00:00
At my school, long before AI, the work was of two kinds - homework type essays/problems that you could cheat on if you wanted but there was no point because the feedback was for your benefit and didn't count towards anything, and then proper exams where you were watched and couldn't cheat easily.

Not sure why they don't just do that? It worked fine and would be compatible with LLM use.
by jbstack | 2025-11-25 09:54:47+00:00
Or you can pay £0 per month for 99% of the content.

I'm a bit like the parent comment. I've always wanted to be able to pay a monthly fee (even a high one, say £50 a month) to have access to a good quality selection of movies and TV shows. The thing is, it's always bugged me that you can get a much better experience by pirating than by paying for legitimate access. That seems the opposite to how things should work.

This pre-dates streaming. DVDs came with FBI warnings and other screens that couldn't be fast-forwarded or skipped. You couldn't buy a DVD in the US and play it in a DVD player in Europe because the "region" didn't match. You couldn't easily transfer it to watch on a device without a DVD player because of the DRM.

All of this means that, even ignoring the fact that it's free, it's just far more straightforward to torrent a movie and watch it wherever you want using whatever app you want.
by otikik | 2025-11-25 09:54:52+00:00
> 1.5 GB information

Well, nature has a big advantage over us in that it doesn't need to "make sense" of that code :). So it can, for example, do crazy reusage optimization patterns. A "subroutine" that is used in one place could also be part of a "data piece" of another part. A "header" part can also double down as a "validator" of another part. Doesn't need to make sense, it just needs to work. The only limits are the laws of physics. I would not even call it compression at this point. It's more like heavily optimized spaghetti code.
by delaguardo | 2025-11-25 09:55:29+00:00
Wow, that is a greate news!) Thanks for looking at it from this perspective! There are some benchmarks already available in the project - https://github.com/DotFox/edn.c/blob/main/bench/bench_integr...

you can run it locally with `make bench bench-clj bench-wasm`

Let me know if I can do anything to help you with support in jank.
by defrost | 2025-11-25 09:55:53+00:00
> an ability to flag items for later reading

You can pander to aspirational intended later reading fantasy by using [favorite] for posts and same for individual comments (if you select on the comment time stamp).

You can unfavorite after reading or just grow a longer and longer list of get around to that later.

> or to mute individuals

Reasonably easy with custom filters on <favorite> afblocker extension.
by imiric | 2025-11-25 09:57:08+00:00
This is precisely why it is valid to say that systemd doesn't align with the Unix philosophy, and yet it's also valid that many people such as yourself like it.

I don't want my init system to replace cron. I don't want it to manage logging. I don't want it to have any debugging capabilities. All of these things can be done with other programs, arguably in a much more flexible and robust way.

An init system should do one thing (well): manage system services. Within that context, it should start services on boot, keep them running in the background, and allow the user to create, stop, and start services. That's it. And it could be argued that even those responsibilities are too broad for a single program.

So I understand that you and many others like that systemd provides solutions to all of these tasks in an integrated way. But you should also understand that this does in fact go against the Unix philosophy, of small, independent, but composable programs with a single responsibility. It "proposes" alternatives to many other tools for no particular reason, until users are effectively using GNU/systemd/Linux.

And, yes, I know that technically systemd is not a monolith and is composed of many programs, but that is a moot point. It is a single project, maintained by a strongly opinionated team, and given the importance of it, most distros go all-in, so users are strongly recommended, if not forced, to use all of its programs. In many cases it's not even possible to use one individual systemd program idependently from another. This is why systemd is seen as a kraken that takes over the entire system if you do decide to use one part of it.
by vrighter | 2025-11-25 09:57:23+00:00
I tried to get into machine learning and started out simple. A network of two inputs, and one output. The function to learn was a heart-shaped SDF. I generated training samples from the +/-1 range of coordinates.

For such a relatively simple thing it either didn't converge, or when it did, it got decent error rates. But try feeding it a coordinate outside its training range and it very very very quickly starts outputting total nonsense. This exercise taught me that despite whatever they keep telling us, this shit will never generalize.
by aurareturn | 2025-11-25 09:57:36+00:00
However, the quality of everything around me has gone down noticeably over the last few months.

LLMs can be used to improve quality too - not just generate code. Use it to test. Use it to write better tests. Use it to automate front-end testing. Use it to learn how to write better code. Use it to learn how a new code base works. Use it for better documentation.

It seems like to me, this dev is working at a place without strong engineering leadership.
by pjc50 | 2025-11-25 09:58:41+00:00
> 8 million people to smoking

Smoking had a huge campaign to (a) encourage people to buy the product, (b) lie about the risks, including bribing politicians and medical professionals, and (c) the product is inherently addictive.

That's why people are drawing parallels with AI chatbots.

Edit: as with cars, it's fair to argue that the usefulness of the technology outweighs the dangers, but that requires two things: a willingness to continuously improve safety (q.v. Unsafe at Any Speed), and - this is absolutely crucial - not allowing people to profit from lying about the risks. There used to be all sorts of nonsense about "actually seatbelts make cars more dangerous", which was smoking-level propaganda by car companies which didn't want to adopt safety measures.
by impossiblefork | 2025-11-25 09:59:02+00:00
Aluminium is also what you built aircraft out of back in the day, and they could very shiny.

I also don't think it's ersatz anything. It's what you use if you build large, stiff objects that aren't supposed to rust. It's certainly less ersatz than steel, with a less martial character.

So I don't agree. I think it can signify something clean, light, unburdened by heavy and unnecessary things. I don't intend to use it though, for reasons everybody else gives, app-stores etc.
by cyco130 | 2025-11-25 09:59:09+00:00
As a person who knows next to nothing about how the brain or the genes that configure it work, I tend to think of this in terms of 80s video games like River Raid. The level data for these games, if stored naively, would fill the computer's available memory many times over. So they just store a pseudorandom number generator seed along with a few other parameters. Coupled with a few rules to make the level playable, it can generate a seemingly impossible number of levels with very little stored data.

Maybe the genes just encode a few crucial rules and the rest just emerge from that.

Oh, and I know even less about how the universe works. But I tend to think of it in the same terms: Emergent phenomena stemming from simple rules à la Game of Life.
by mort96 | 2025-11-25 09:59:10+00:00
> I don't know why you're asking me about examples that violate the rules I proposed. No I don't want that.

Other than the exaggerated 10x, I don't understand how it violates the rules you proposed. You proposed a scheme where part of the screen should be allowed to be significantly brighter than the surrounding SDR GUI's FFF. That makes the surrounding GUI look grey.

> And obviously boosting the brightness of a screen capture is bad. It would look bad in SDR too. I don't know why you're even bringing it up.

I'm bringing it up because that's how HDR looks on the web. Most web content isn't made by professional movie studios.

The example video I linked conforms with your suggested rules, FWIW: most of the image is near black, only a relatively smart part of it is white. The average brightness probably isn't over SDR FFF. Yet it still hurts.
by otikik | 2025-11-25 10:00:09+00:00
> Titanic prow king of the world scene

Well that was transmitting "a pointer" more than anything else, but yes I agree that nature could be doing the same thing. Not hardcode behaviors, but certain chemical reactions to some "pointers" that are totally environment related. Arachnophobia apparently could have a genetic component, so there could be a "spider pointer" somewhere.
by mopsi | 2025-11-25 10:02:07+00:00
> My argument is that Russia was compelled to attack both Georgia and Ukraine because of NATO expansion, or rather preventing NATO expansion, not because of "Putin is crazy, wants to be a Tsar".

This fails to explain why Russia attacked both countries after NATO had decided not to offer them a path to membership.

Putin's intense hostility toward NATO stems from the fact that NATO stands in the way of invading Europe. The blitzkrieg against Ukraine also failed largely because of military support from European NATO members, who used established NATO communication channels to coordinate their efforts - exactly the thing NATO was established for!

If Russia were a normal European country, it would have nothing to lose and much to gain from bordering NATO. NATO membership comes with oversight and separation requirements that make member states stable and predictable. A former, pre-Putin foreign minister of Russia described this as "free-of-charge security on Russia's western border".

It is a problem for Putin only because he seeks to invade Europe; NATO stands in the way.

> Your argument is that Russia wants to occupy territory just for the sake of expanding Russia, which is really not logical or reasonable.

It is perfectly reasonable when you look at who holds power in Russia: the old revanchist KGB clan seeking to restore the USSR and the Eastern Bloc. This is the world they grew up in and were indoctrinated into in KGB schools. For them, it is a "normalcy" to which they must return.

> My argument is that if Mexico or Canada joined a military pact with Russia, the US would invade those countries immediately.

There is no need for guessing games when Cuba was actually in a military pact with the USSR until 1991 and hosted jets, bombers, missile cruisers and other conventional weapons for decades after the missile crisis. You can read about Soviet warships conducting missile drills off the coast of Florida in old newspapers. This is far more than anyone has done for countries that have joined NATO since the end of the Cold War. And yet, the US did not invade Cuba.

> Your argument is that any country can join a mutually defence pact without any consequences, as should be the case for Ukraine.

Russia has repeatedly, in writing, pledged to respect the sovereignty of other European countries, including Ukraine, and their freedom to join military alliances. There's nothing to discuss - unless you want to turn Europe into a landscape of semi-sovereign nations ruled by Russia, which raises the question: why should Russia, in particular, be the European master race? Shouldn't the Franco-German alliance, with its much larger economy, bigger population, and numerous allies, instead dictate what Russia can and cannot do?
by matrss | 2025-11-25 10:02:18+00:00
I've lost my laptops SSD (as in: no longer mountable, only got data out of it with some rescue tools) at some point between 2017 and 2020, don't remember when exactly. I've also had a weird experience where a btrfs filesystem formatted on my desktop PC was not mountable on a Raspberry Pi, and vice versa formatted on the Pi was not mountable on the desktop. That didn't instill confidence either.

On the other hand, I've been running a btrfs RAID1 on two HGST datacenter drives for a few years and haven't had issues with that.
by delaguardo | 2025-11-25 10:02:18+00:00
One of a key design principles in EDN is to be exclusively data exchange format. Which is true even for JSON where json-schema is something that sits on top of JSON itself. Same goes to EDN - in Clojure there is clojure.spec that adds schema like notation, validation rules and conformation. https://clojure.org/about/spec , something like this could be implemented in other languages as well.
by netsharc | 2025-11-25 10:02:53+00:00
I wonder if the Add Fonts dialog survived to Windows 10: https://notebooks.com/2011/09/12/how-to-working-with-fonts-i... - during the time Microsoft had 2 designs for settings/control panels, making the OS look like a mess coded by drunks...

Gotta love that the disk and directory picker survived 20-30 years.
by eviekingparra | 2025-11-25 10:03:05+00:00
I built a tool in three weeks with AI to teach myself music notation from the perspective of the guitar fretboard. It started out as tool to learn a song for open mic. Then turned into a coping mechanism for the chaos of my life. Now, it gives me hope that the skills I've learned as an engineer can be used to solve human problems instead of just serving more ads. And maybe, just maybe, it can help me leave tutorial hell for good.

You can see a POC of the app here: https://fretboard-composer-pro-330354285234.us-west1.run.app...

And I wrote a blog post about my life circumstances that led up to it here: https://kingparra.github.io/blog/00_fretboard_composer_copin...
by delichon | 2025-11-25 10:03:09+00:00
In his latest podcast Joe Rogan claimed that John Wayne and others died from cancer caused by radiation from a nuclear test upwind of a movie set for "The Conquerers". Wayne was also a heavy smoker so nobody really knows. Nobody knows how much death and misery the tests caused, or how much war was avoided by nuclear deterence.

By the early 1980s around 40% of the cast and crew had developed cancer, also including Susan Hayward, Agnes Moorehead, and director Dick Powell. And the movie nuclear bombed at the box office.
by aurareturn | 2025-11-25 10:04:49+00:00
These "AI bubble" pop stories are tiring. Vast majority of them fall into one of these categories:

* They're hoping AI doesn't get good enough that their job is made redundant. Calling it an AI bubble and saying it will collapse is copium.

* They feel like they missed investing in AI and is now hoping AI stocks drop 50-80% so they can finally buy in

* They work in a job that AI hasn't penetrated deeply yet so they're unaware of just how useful it is even today

Most of these journalists, who are so sure that we're in an AI bubble and it's going to collapse, do not have an economic background nor tech background. I don't understand how they are so confident.

In general, the mass media is very much anti-tech. Even before the AI boom, the mass media is overwhelmingly negative on big tech companies and most startups. Of course they are cheering/hoping for an AI collapse.
by elmerfud | 2025-11-25 10:04:58+00:00
Wow, CNBC thinks being a shill for corporations that have pushed the throwaway economic model on us is news worthy. Just wait, in their next article they'll talk about the environmental damage of all the throw away electronics.

There is no loss of innovation by having reliable things than can last several years. What is actually criminal is selling a device that should last for 5 years but allowing it to become insecure the day it's released with no updates or fixes even within their warranty period.
by ErroneousBosh | 2025-11-25 10:05:27+00:00
> If Google, who now have Android working on desktop, and can market it well enough

Too little, too late.

Everyone's switching to Linux now, in droves. Microsoft have hit that Trust Thermocline[0] and that has made perfectly ordinary people like your parents or the guy you sometimes chat to in the pub or your plumber go "You know what, fuck it, I'm going to give this Linux thing a go", and they actually are doing that.

We're at a point now where most people do everything in a web browser, for better or worse, so the OS that your browser runs on is pretty much irrelevant. It's been that way for years, but it's taken Windows to get to a point where it's not just that people don't like it but they actively distrust it.

[0]https://blogs.cardiff.ac.uk/sarahlethbridgelean/trust-thermo...
by troupo | 2025-11-25 10:05:29+00:00
> if Netflix offered Disney more money then they wouldn't have felt it necessary to launch their own service

Oh. "Just" offer them more money. Where would that money come from, exactly?

> Its possible Disney just completely overestimates how much they can make on their own

You underestimate how much content Disney owns, and how much of it is basically free for them ar this time
by Glemkloksdjf | 2025-11-25 10:05:52+00:00
So you don't even try LLMs regularly?

And whats with everything else regarding ML progress like image generation, 3d world generation etc.?

I vibe coded plenty of small things i haven't ever had the time for them. You don't have anything which you wanted to do and can fit in a single page html application? It can even use local storage etc.
by gloxkiqcza | 2025-11-25 10:06:25+00:00
> There is no point in paying for streaming

Spotify is so cheap that it is worth it for the convenience alone. Not to mention Spotify is legal while piracy is not.

However, I agree that if you enjoy music (or any other art/content) someone produces, it’s only fair (and natural) to support them in a more direct way.
by saubeidl | 2025-11-25 10:06:32+00:00
This directly contradicts the article:

> Revenue from it has climbed despite the exodus and now sits at 0.6% of GDP — not a trivial sum. For context, Britain’s Labour government is hunting for savings of a similar magnitude to help hit its fiscal targets.

> Private home and second house (cabin) has reduced value.

That sounds like a desirable result? Housing costs are out of control.
by hermitcrab | 2025-11-25 10:06:59+00:00
I tried converting this:

[

{ "name": "Avocado Dip", "carb": 2, "cholesterol": 5, "fiber": 0, "minerals": { "ca": 0, "fe": 0 }, "protein": 1, "sodium": 210, "vitamins": { "a": 0, "c": 0 } }

]

And I got:

name,carb,cholesterol,fiber,minerals,protein,sodium,vitamins

Avocado Dip,2,5,0,"{""ca"":0,""fe"":0}",1,210,"{""a"":0,""c"":0}"

Which is not what I would expect.
by slightwinder | 2025-11-25 10:07:02+00:00
In this specific case, it's because of creative conflicts. Volker Wertich, the creator of Settlers 1&3, was also supposed to be creator for the newest Game, Settler: New Allies (part 8(?) of the mainline). He left after Ubisoft was not convinced from his Vision, considered it too complex, ambiguous. They release the reworked final version some years later, and it flopped hard. He then went on to create Pagonia after it came to light how much the new part sucks.

I don't think we know in detail what his original vision was, we can only assume if Pagonia is aiming to manifest it. And there is the theory that Ubisoft didn't like to have two similar games in their catalogue. They already have the Anno-Franchise, which is very similar to settlers, and had a promising new game released around the time Wertich left Ubisoft.

So the answer is probably a mix between internal politics of big companies, risk-avoidance and creative minds being too creative for the average manager. The more money you push, the more the system strifes to controlled outcomes. And Ubisoft was pushing very big around that time, to the point that they killed themselves, it seems.
by Huppie | 2025-11-25 10:07:02+00:00
Yeah, I kinda like the method siscia suggests downthread [0] where the teacher grades based on the question they ask the LLMs during the test.

I think you should be able to use the LMM at home to help you better understand the topic (they have endless patience and you can usually you can keep asking until you actually grok the topic) but during the test I think it's fair to expect that basic understanding to be there.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46043012
by wink | 2025-11-25 10:07:46+00:00
I am not surprised, from memory I only know like 3 people who ever willingly used 8.x. The active user base must be tiny compared to Windows 7 and 10 users (if we just stick to that range).

I have personally not used it for more than an hour total (on anyone's PC combined) and I have (co-)owned and used at least one Windows PC continuously since 1995.
by HeinzStuckeIt | 2025-11-25 10:08:11+00:00
Reminiscent of the shooting of Tarkovsky’s Stalker, where there was a toxic-waste-producing facility right nearby (and you can supposedly see toxic waste on camera) and some of the cast and crew got ill or died from horrible cancers.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalker_(1979_film)#Filming
by Taniwha | 2025-11-25 10:08:20+00:00
Unix up until at least System III used the structure thing to do the equivalent to unions, before unions were a thing - for example each disk driver had a data structure that began with a common part and then had a per-device part, generic parts of the kernel used a generic structure that only represented the generic data structure, drivers used their own version.

I think part of this is that early Cs didn't have a full type system, there were limits to the types you could describe (the ones you couldn't were mostly a bit esoteric and not very useful) - from memory in the original PCC types were encoded in the compiler as words rather than trees (pdp11 memory was scarce)
by aurareturn | 2025-11-25 10:09:06+00:00
It's possible that Google is too late in stopping OpenAI.

Every non-tech person around me goes to ChatGPT app by default. The branding is too strong. OpenAI also seems to productize better. They're moving at a faster clip. Google has historically been very weak at productizing tech.

For all their resources and the ability to quickly ship software via LLM assistants, they still don't have a Mac app for Gemini.
by im3w1l | 2025-11-25 10:09:22+00:00
My advice would be: It can't agree with you if you don't tell it what you think. So don't. Be careful about leading questions (clever hans effect) though.

So better than "I'm thinking of solving x by doing y" is "What do you think about solving x by doing y" but better still is "how can x be solved?" and only mention "y" if it's spinning its wheels.
by hakanderyal | 2025-11-25 10:09:40+00:00
If you have the time & bandwidth for it, sure. But I do not, at I'm already at max budget with 200$ Anthrophic subscription.

My point is, the cases where Claude gets stuck and I had to step in and figure things out has been few and far between that I doesn't really matter. If the programmers workflow is working fine with Claude (or codex, gemini etc.), one shouldn't feel like they are missing out by not using the other ones.
by gonzobonzo | 2025-11-25 10:10:10+00:00
> And a video game is exactly that: a video game. You can play it or leave it.

No one is claiming you can't walk away from LLM's, or re-prompt them. The discussion was whether they're inherently unchallenging, or if it's possible to prompt one to be challenging and not sycophantic.

"But you can walk away from them" is a nonsequitur. It's like claiming that all games are unchallenging, and then when presented with a challenging game, going "well, it's not challenging because you can walk away from it." This is true, and no one is arguing otherwise. But it's deliberately avoiding the point.