MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by anthk | 2025-11-20 20:13:06+00:00
Great, I remember a page which stated that it was sad to have free as in freedom ZMachine languages and interpreters (Inform6, Frotz/Fizmo...) but there were very few text adventures under a libre license. So far, the most known ones:

- Spiritwrak

- All Things Devour

- Calypso

- Tristam Island
by theshrike79 | 2025-11-20 20:14:03+00:00
Literally every single CLI-based Agent will show you a suggestion to run /init at startup.

And of course it's up to the developer to keep the documentation up to date. Just like when working with humans. Stuff don't magically document itself.

Yes "good code is self-documenting", but it still takes ages to find anything without docs to tell you the approximate direction.

It's literally a text file the agent can create and update itself. Not hard. Try it.
by rat87 | 2025-11-20 20:14:06+00:00
Corbyn failed because he was a bad politician with extreme views. It was Corbyn not the media who covered him that chose to defend every antisemite they could find. If anything the media was too nice to him(the media is often too worried about false balance you get similar things with Trump). It's entirely unsurprising that he lost what would have been a labor victory without him
by xtracto | 2025-11-20 20:14:07+00:00
I've never understood IQ tests. Granted, i have only seen the beginning of some of them where they show you those 3/4 figures and tell you to choose the "next one" ... I have never had a clue of what am I supposed to look for.

Maybe I am just extremely stupid. But then I'm a walking example that you can be averagly successful even being dumb as a rock, if you are stubborn enough haha.
by lemonwaterlime | 2025-11-20 20:14:10+00:00
You talk about gatekeeping, when most people don't know the difference between git and GitHub, making your first PR is difficult if you have never done it, navigating a repo to look for your first change is difficult. And yet the status quo is that people should just figure that out.

You also talk about gatekeeping when in the many makerspaces I have been to, there are always highly experienced people who tinker on their own terms but rarely pay it forward, meaning they keep their knowledge. The reason for this is due to the often anarchist structure of maker spaces. Things happen if they do.

Sometimes there is an organized class. Most of the times, not. So you come in every week and people are just sitting around talking about the rules of keeping the space clean and when dues are due.

The concept of the hacker space and maker space is great. The execution leaves a lot to be desired. I consider it a 1.0 of a technical movement.
by kianN | 2025-11-20 20:14:13+00:00
I’m just continually amazed by the DuckDB team. We had built out a naive solution with OpenSSL to encrypt duckdb files, but that lead to a 2x runtime cost for first time queries and used up a lot of ram because we were encrypting/decrypting the entire file all at once. It seems like because DuckDB is encrypting at the page level and leveraging modern processors native AES operations, they are able to perform read/writes at practically no cost.
by nabla9 | 2025-11-20 20:14:31+00:00
65% of the US population, 200 million Americans, live within the 100-Mile "Constitution-Free Zone".

Supreme Court has established that some established constitutional provisions do not apply at the U.S. border, and protections against governmental privacy incursions are significantly reduced.

The border search exception applies within 100 miles (160 km) of the border of the United States, including borders with Mexico and Canada but also coastlines.
by godelski | 2025-11-20 20:14:57+00:00
> I have seen the argument that LLMs can only give you what its been trained

There's confusing terminology here and without clarification people talk past one another.

"What its been trained on" is a distribution. It can produce things from that distribution and only things from that distribution. If you train on multiple distributions, you get the union of the distribution, making a distribution.

This is entirely different from saying it can only reproduce samples which it was trained on. It is not a memory machine that is surgically piecing together snippets of memorized samples. (That would be a mind bogglingly impressive machine!)

A distribution is more than its samples. It is the things between too. Does the LLM perfectly capture the distribution? Of course not. But it's a compression machine so it compresses the distribution. Again, different from compressing the samples, like one does with a zip file.

So distributionally, can it produce anything novel? No, of course not. How could it? It's not magic. But sample wise can it produce novel things? Absolutely!! It would be an incredibly unimpressive machine if it couldn't and it's pretty trivial to prove that it can do this. Hallucinations are good indications that this happens but it's impossible to do on anything but small LLMs since you can't prove any given output isn't in the samples it was trained on (they're just trained on too much data).

> people have been telling me that LLMs cannot solve problems that is not in their training data already. Is this really true or not?

Up until very recently most LLMs have struggled with the prompt

Solve: 5.9 = x + 5.11

This is certainly in their training distribution and has been for years, so I wouldn't even conclude that they can solve problems "in their training data". But that's why I said it's not a perfect model of the distribution.

> a pig with a dragon head

One needs to be quite careful with examples as you'll have to make the unverifiable assumption that such a sample does not exist in the training data. With the size of training data this is effectively unverifiable.

But I would also argue that humans can do more than that. Yes, we can combine concepts, but this is a lower level of intelligence that is not unique to humans. A variation of this is applying a skill from one domain into another. You might see how that's pretty critical to most animals survival. But humans, we created things that are entirely outside nature require things outside a highly sophisticated cut and paste operation. Language, music, mathematics, and so much more are beyond that. We could be daft and claim music is simply cut and paste of songs which can all naturally be reproduced but that will never explain away the feelings or emotion that it produces. Or how we formulated the sounds in our heads long before giving them voice. There is rich depth to our experiences if you look. But doing that is odd and easily dismissed as our own familiarity deceives us into our lack of.
by tekne | 2025-11-20 20:15:13+00:00
I think the issue is that autism is not necessarily a disorder.

I'm mildly autistic and I like the way I am. Really. I don't consider it a disability at all; it's got pros and cons, but for every thing that I'm worse at than a "normal" person, I feel there's something else equally valuable I'm better at, so it balances out as a slight positive for me and a big positive for humanity because, as the OP alluded to, diversity enables specialisation.

The issue is of course some people genuinely experience autism as a disability, and the more severe it is, the more likely that is to be the case. But you can make a solid argument that autism is not necessarily disability: like height, gigantism is unhealthy, but being tall can be adaptive!
by jatora | 2025-11-20 20:16:32+00:00
I have seen this study cited enough to have a copy paste for it. And no, there are not a bunch of other studies that have any sort of conclusive evidence to support this claim either. I have looked and would welcome any with good analysis.

"""

1. The sample is extremely narrow (16 elite open-source maintainers doing ~2-hour issues on large repos they know intimately), so any measured slowdown applies only to that sliver of work, not “developers” or “software engineering” in general.

2. The treatment is really “Cursor + Claude, often in a different IDE than participants normally use, after light onboarding,” so the result could reflect tool/UX friction or unfamiliar workflows rather than an inherent slowdown from AI assistance itself.

3. The only primary outcome is self-reported time-to-completion; there is no direct measurement of code quality, scope of work, or long-term value, so a longer duration could just mean “more or better work done,” not lower productivity.

4. With 246 issues from 16 people and substantial modeling choices (e.g., regression adjustment using forecasted times, clustering decisions), the reported ~19% slowdown is statistically fragile and heavily model-dependent, making it weak evidence for a robust, general slowdown effect.

"""

Any developer (who was a developer before March 2023) that is actively using these tools and understands the nuances of how to search the vector space (prompt) is being sped up substantially.
by szszrk | 2025-11-20 20:16:32+00:00
They work in the open from the beginning, so it's easy to track:

What's up: https://codeberg.org/comaps/comaps/projects/16883

and an example of major UI discussion that you are interested in: https://codeberg.org/comaps/comaps/issues/348

I use it since the fork and love their energy and tempo. It's amazing when you take into account it's history, that it was closed source at some point (maps.me), opensourced, forked...
by stevenjgarner | 2025-11-20 20:16:41+00:00
Drove a new Hyundai with dealer plates from AZ to Minnesota and got pulled over by Bethany, MO city police on I-35 in northern MO with no probable cause other than window tint being too dark. They tore the car apart certain that I was muling drugs (removed seats, body panels, etc). Took 6 hours. Never found anything and left me with "we know you have committed a crime, we just cannot find it, but you will get caught". I had to put the car back together myself in the dark.

Retired age men driving dealer plate cars eastbound onto I-80 in Nebraska out of Colorado from I-76 get stopped ALL THE TIME as potential drug mules.
by wkat4242 | 2025-11-20 20:16:53+00:00
He just says what he needs to say in order to accomplish his company's goals: selling lots of AI.

That makes him as trustworthy as a used car salesman.

I mean I think there's a niche where AI is useful but it's not for all the things they're trying to push it for.

It's the metaverse and blockchain hypes all over again. Always trying to cram it into situations where it adds no value and even detracts. Instead of focusing on the ones where it really does.
by milst | 2025-11-20 20:17:08+00:00
Very interested in the idea of an AI being able to interact with my filesystem.

we experimented with something like this: https://local-note-taker.vercel.app/chat

repo in case you'd rather run it locally: https://github.com/tambo-ai/local-note-taker

Curious to compare how our two ideas are built differently, feel free to reach out (email in my profile)
by dust42 | 2025-11-20 20:18:58+00:00
My absolute personal favourite is Toccata and Fugue played by organist Hans-André Stamm on the Trost-Organ of the Stadtkirche in Waltershausen [1]. Great videography, great organ and very expressive organist. From 3:28 on you can also see the foot work.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nnuq9PXbywA&list=RDNnuq9PXby...
by 317070 | 2025-11-20 20:19:44+00:00
Every now and then, topics on HN are being brigaded by (among others) such accounts. But to do that effectively, you need to build a sizeable amount of accounts with some karma, and I think that's what is tried here with an LLM.

Last time I was very suspicious about the discussion, was here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45809866 Lots of comments from new-ish accounts.
by lemonwaterlime | 2025-11-20 20:19:50+00:00
I agree with the outcome of increased fabrication tools availability.

Yet, when the intent is that the population is to be empowered democratically to wield these tools, there needs to be a better pedagogical culture in the communities.

I cannot believe the amount of people replying who seem to think that having a path to improvement is gatekeeping. How are people supposed to actually use these tools to make greater than novelty-level changes in their lives and communities?

The price of Arduino has not only been going up and up, but there have been IP disputes over the years. At the same time, you can get chips for pennies on the dollar. People in this thread are lamenting the possible demise of Arduino, when like Cloudflare, like Github, and like so many other things, they should have never been so invested into a single player.

The result of Arduino going away should be "Ah, it is a sad day that one of our many choices of accessible boards is going away. let's make sure the other ones are robust against that same fate and keep creating with our remaining tools."

Instead, the conversation is "How dare that big corp change the terms and conditions on our only hobby option!"

I certainly see a structural and cultural problem here.
by johnea | 2025-11-20 20:19:53+00:00
As usual, HN comments go immediately off the rails into the right-wing nut weeds 8-/

Loss of the SRO model in residential real estate was a major setback to low income residents, and is undoubtedly a significant contributor to modern homelessness.

https://www.pew.org/en/research-and-analysis/issue-briefs/20...

Instead of facing this, the comments are full of the typical "gubment regulation" bullshit.

This is related to the other typical bullshit regarding homelessness, namely that the problem, again, is the gubment getting in the way of free enterprise and preventing it from saving the world, in the form of building more housing.

Here in San Diego, almost 9000 new units were permitted in 2024. Thousands of rental units came online in the last year. However, the average rental price of one of these new apartments is about $4000/month, for 1 bedroom.

What ended the prevalence of SROs was real estate being redeveloped for more profitable buildings, including high end housing and office space. To the extent that regulations affected closing SROs, it was for the purpose of facilitating this upscaling.

Even if the accusations leveled against SROs are all true, would you prefer psycho drug-addled homeless peoplle live in flop houses, or on the freeway overpasses?

If it's offensive to you to have to step over some crack heads encampment to walk to the opera, maybe it's worth spending some of the ballooning wealth of the nation to put them into cheap housing...
by neilv | 2025-11-20 20:20:02+00:00
I worked briefly on GDS/ARS protocol in modern times (for reservation system on Linux servers that could talk directly to the mainframe network, rather than using a middleware wrapper around your own mainframe)

The protocols are heavily documented in many ways, but we also had an on-site pair of experts on this particular mainframe network, as an information resource, and we needed them. And I still had to reverse-engineer some semantics or format from real-world protocol captures, and freeze that knowledge in unit tests.

There was one opcode that initially sounded simple. IIRC, linguistically, it turned out be closer to an eval than an echo.

This kind of work, carefully interoperating with critical legacy systems, can be more interesting and positive than serving cat pictures and running surveillance trackers in exactly the architecture memorized for a Design Interview. But if you do anything involving mainframes, and then want to go back to startups or Big Tech, I wouldn't put the toxic keyword "mainframe" on your techbro resume; use euphemisms like "global financial system" instead. Also, you should say that you "disrupted" it; though disrupting a critical system is not usually considered a positive achievement in other circles.
by tptacek | 2025-11-20 20:20:07+00:00
This is mostly a canard, kept alive by fundraising pages at ACLU, but contradicted directly by current pages on the ACLU's site. It feels useful on a message board to call out things like this, but it actually hurts people in the US, who deserve to know that they do not surrender their 4th Amendment rights simply by dint of living within 100 miles of Lake Erie.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45041697

(There's a really good Penn State law review article on that thread).
by wkat4242 | 2025-11-20 20:20:36+00:00
I manage M365 too (well part of it because we're a big company). And yes Microsoft really screwed us over when they suddenly offered "free promotional access" of SharePoint Copilot to our users.

We hadn't certified this and weren't planning to offer it any time soon but they just switched it on and included a setting to turn off off again. But by the time we did users had already used it and were complaining.

Working with Microsoft is tedious. They're always trying to sell stuff and undermine you. I consider them more of an adversary than a trusted vendor/partner.
by reactordev | 2025-11-20 20:20:58+00:00
I cut my teeth on Bach on Cello when I was 7. By the time I was in high school I could play all the instruments. I still don’t consider Bach to be the genius everyone says he was. He was a nepo baby with a big purse. His brothers, his family, all musicians of note for prominent figures of society. However, his leaning on his long history of music within the family helped polish his work as structured which helped sell it. Now, Jean-Babtiste Lully was a character…
by bigfishrunning | 2025-11-20 20:21:14+00:00
Ok, let me reframe then. Imagine you paid for someone's tuition. Would you like them to go to class and get the education you paid for? If they, after several years of them not attending lectures, fail to be educated, was your money wasted?

Now imagine you're a big donor. You donate enough money for, say, 10 scholarships. None of them attend class. None of them get degrees. Are you likely to donate again?
by Viliam1234 | 2025-11-20 20:21:28+00:00
> it’s hardly “recovering” the origins of EA to say that it owes a huge debt to Peter Singer

Guessing by the contents of this comment section, many people seem to believe that EA was invented by SBF, so it can be quite a shock for them to learn otherwise.

(That of course assumes that they would read the article...)
by oconnor663 | 2025-11-20 20:21:40+00:00
> They did this by not breaking the universe in these major updates

I don't think the amount of breakage per se was the problem with Python 3. I think the problem was that for a long time (until u"" strings in 3.3? four years after 3.0?) there was ~no way for a library to support both 2 and 3 in a single codebase. That meant that each project had to either maintain a fork, or do a "flag day" migration, which in practice meant you couldn't migrate until all your dependencies were migrated. Big mistake in retrospect.
Ask HN: Suggestion for a cheap (long) video creation AI platform?
by squarefoot | 2025-11-20 20:21:52+00:00
Till today, aside the occasional ChatGPT interactions, I've used AI only for music, mostly covering my old compositions of many years ago. Now I'd like to work on an old idea using my music as soundtrack then making a video out of a story I've been cooking in my head for some time. Which service would you suggest to make a 1 hour+ long video either as a cartoon movie or a sequence of panels comic style, that is no need for photo quality, possibly alternating both? Of course I don't expect the full video or sequence and am prepared to cut and paste several sections together, sync with music, etc. The AI however should be "I" enough to maintain characters and environment consistent through the video, that is not changing faces or clothing, etc. It may appear a stupid question, but as I have zero experience with AI video, I rather ask first before wasting months for something that wouldn't work. Also, I'm retired and wouldn't make money out of it anyway so it should be as cheap as possible, I don't need fast creation times, 4K, any promotion or other options. Ideally it would be distributed as Creative Commons. Which service would you recommend? I know the technology is running at crazy speed so what someone would recommend today could be not the best one in two weeks; still better than nothing. Thanks for any advice!
by csours | 2025-11-20 20:22:10+00:00
100 Mile Border Zone - https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/border-zone

Your rights are limited in interactions with CBP, or to state the inverse: CBP have claimed more powers than traditional law enforcement. This has been true for quite a while; they have at various times been more and less careful about your rights while exercising those powers. They are being less careful now.
by tptacek | 2025-11-20 20:22:24+00:00
The Border Patrol probably is allowed to operate anywhere within the United States, but being in the Border Patrol doesn't (at least statutorily) give them any magic powers; in particular, you don't get "border search authority" by being a part of CBP, but rather by being any law enforcement officer confronting someone who you reasonably believe crossed the border recently.
by codegeek | 2025-11-20 20:22:25+00:00
"Suddenly, drivers find themselves pulled over — often for reasons cited such as speeding, failure to signal, the wrong window tint or even a dangling air freshener blocking the view. They are then aggressively questioned and searched, with no inkling that the roads they drove put them on law enforcement’s radar."

Wow, this is incredibly concerning. So they can pull me over, lie about why and then try to manufacture something ?
by unbalancedevh | 2025-11-20 20:22:53+00:00
> Perl is most human-like programming language

This claim always seemed bizarre to me. What kind of drugs do you think a layman would think you were on if you showed them a typical Perl program and asserted how "human-like" it was? Even if you tried to follow-up and explain it: "No, no, see this bit means open whatever file stream is specified in the command line, as long as it starts with a letter between 'A' and 'F' that can be either upper or lower case, and is followed after any random characters by at least 3 digits in a row. Then this next character means.... See? It's just like I'm describing it to you!"
by kashnote | 2025-11-20 20:22:58+00:00
I hate that they kinda try to hide the model version. Like if you click the dropdown in the chat box, you can see that "Thinking" means 3 Pro. When you select the "Create images" tool, it doesn't tell you it's using Nano Banana Pro until it actually starts generating the image.

Tell me the model it's using. It's as if Google is trying to unburden me with the knowledge of what model does what but it's just making things more confusing.

Oh, and setting up AI Studio is a mess. First I have to create a project. Then an API key. Then I have to link the API key to the project. Then I have to link the project to the chat session... Come on, Google.
by standardUser | 2025-11-20 20:23:04+00:00
> often for reasons cited such as speeding, failure to signal, the wrong window tint or even a dangling air freshener

Police shouldn't be able to pull someone over for an air freshener or tinted windows. They can send a fix-it ticket without wasting the time and resources, and without causing the inconvenience or diversions in traffic. And, as a private citizen, I strongly prefer the police have the minimal necessary powers to detain me.
by thewebguyd | 2025-11-20 20:23:39+00:00
> but never have I heard about them implementing insecure protocols.

That's because they don't. Google takes security seriously. There's a reason GrapheneOS is only supported on Pixel devices currently as well, because of certain hardware security features.

Nothing you do with Google is private from Google but it's certainly designed to belong only to Google, your data is one of their most important assets. Of course they are going to secure it and prevent others besides themselves from getting or using it.

It's the most common misconception with Google, that they "sell your information." They don't, they never have. They use your info, aggregated with all other Google users, to sell targeting for ads. They don't sell the actual data.