MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by DonHopkins | 2025-11-20 10:05:51+00:00
That's one of the funniest and most enlightening classic AI Koans, originally from the ITS file "AI:HUMOR;AI KOANS".

Here's another Moon story from the humor directory:

https://github.com/PDP-10/its/blob/master/doc/humor/moon's.g...

Moon's I.T.S. CRASH PROCEDURE document from his home directory, which goes into much more detail than just turning it off and on:

https://github.com/PDP-10/its/blob/master/doc/moon/klproc.11

And some cool Emacs lore:

https://github.com/PDP-10/its/blob/master/doc/eak/emacs.lore

Reposting this from the 2014 HN discussion of "Ergonomics of the Symbolics Lisp Machine":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7878679

http://lispm.de/symbolics-lisp-machine-ergonomics

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7879364

eudox on June 11, 2014

Related: A huge collections of images showing Symbolics UI and the software written for it:

http://lispm.de/symbolics-ui-examples/symbolics-ui-examples

agumonkey on June 11, 2014

Nice, but I wouldn't confuse static images with the underlying semantic graph of live objects that's not visible in pictures.

DonHopkins on June 14, 2014

Precisely! When Lisp Machine programmer look at a screen dump, they see a lot more going on behind the scenes than meets the eye.

I'll attempt to explain the deep implications of what the article said about "Everything on the screen is an object, mouse-sensitive and reusable":

There's a legendary story about Gyro hacking away on a Lisp Machine, when he accidentally trashed the function cell of an important primitive like AREF (or something like that -- I can't remember the details -- do you, Scott? Or does Devon just make this stuff up? ;), and that totally crashed the operating system.

It dumped him into a "cold load stream" where he could poke around at the memory image, so he clamored around the display list, a graph of live objects (currently in suspended animation) behind the windows on the screen, and found an instance where the original value of the function pointer had been printed out in hex (which of course was a numeric object that let you click up a menu to change its presentation, etc).

He grabbed the value of the function pointer out of that numeric object, poked it back into the function cell where it belonged, pressed the "Please proceed, Governor" button, and was immediately back up and running where he left off before the crash, like nothing had ever happened!

Here's another example of someone pulling themselves back up by their bootstraps without actually cold rebooting, thanks to the real time help of the networked Lisp Machine user community:

ftp://ftp.ai.sri.com/pub/mailing-lists/slug/900531/msg00339.html

Also eudox posted this link:

Related: A huge collections of images showing Symbolics UI and the software written for it:

http://lispm.de/symbolics-ui-examples/symbolics-ui-examples....
by anujgupta82 | 2025-11-20 10:06:33+00:00
We’ve all seen tons of conversational voice AIs that can answer questions. Cute.

But in the real world, great AI isn’t just about knowing what to say — it’s about knowing what NEVER to say, even when someone tries every trick in the book.

Because trust me, you do not want: • a hospitality bot casually throwing abuses, • a BFSI bot saying, “Sure sir, your neighbour’s credit card number is…”, • or a European client’s bot blissfully breaking GDPR.

So how do you teach an AI: “Thou shalt NOT say this — under ANY circumstances”?

We’ve been deep in this exact problem — building a voice AI that smooth-talks scammers for hours yet never leaks even a shred of sensitive info. A polite, talkative decoy that drains scammer energy like a boss.

Demo in the link — it’s fun, I promise.
by weinzierl | 2025-11-20 10:06:41+00:00
For working with many repos beyond pure status reporting there is Joey Hess's mr tool.

My only gripe is that configuration is manual and I wish there was an easy way fetch a set of repos from the well known forges into an mr config.

Oh, and I never figured out how to best work with it in a multi worktree per bare repo setup.
by mike_hearn | 2025-11-20 10:06:49+00:00
LLMs don't model reality, they model the training data. They always reflect that. To measure how closely the training data aligns with reality you'd have to use a different metric, like by putting LLMs into prediction markets.

The main issue with economics is going to be like with any field, it'll be dominated by academic output because they create so much of the public domain material. The economics texts that align closest with reality are going to be found mostly in private datasets inside investment banks, hedge funds etc, i.e. places where being wrong matters, but model companies can't train on those.
by rincebrain | 2025-11-20 10:07:11+00:00
The nuance there, I think, is that over half the players are reportedly new to the Diablo games, which suggests that their primary intended market was likely not existing Diablo players.

The core kernel of it always seemed, to me, to be an extension of the Diablo 3 RMT auction house idea - they wanted a recurring revenue source from a franchise where traditionally they were not charging one, and in this case, they squared that circle by appealing to users who were not existing players, and so did not have those norms in mind.
Show HN: Interactive research papers (a big step up from ArXiv HTML)
by cjlooi | 2025-11-20 10:07:30+00:00
I’ve been frustrated with PDFs and found arXiv HTML lacking, so I built a fully interactive paper reader.

Features: • Hover references, citations, equations • Light/dark mode • Auto-generated dependency graphs for definitions/lemmas/theorems • Table of contents that syncs with scroll • Highlighting + annotations • “Copy raw LaTeX” anywhere

Featured paper: Video models are zero-shot learners and reasoners (Veo 3) https://www.sciencestack.ai/arxiv/2509.20328v2
by ErroneousBosh | 2025-11-20 10:07:31+00:00
I'm not so sure it's down to the hardware. With something like 180-bit wide microcode store - a very very horizontal microarchitecture - the hardware sure was specialised, but I think it's fundamentally down to Lisp itself.

I don't know a lot of Lisp. I did some at school as a teenager, on BBC Micros, and it was interesting, but I never did anything really serious with it. I do know about Forth though, so perhaps people with a sense of how both work can correct me here.

Sadly, Forth, much as I love it and have done since I got my hands on a Jupiter Ace when I was about 9 or 10 years old, has not been a success, and probably for the same reasons as Lisp.

It just looks plain weird.

It does. I mean I love how elegant Forth is, you can implement a basic inner interpreter and a few primitives in a couple of hundred lines of assembler and then the rest is just written in Forth in terms of those primitives (okay pages and pages of dw ADDRESS_OF_PRIMITIVE instructions rather Forth proper). I'm told that you can do the same trick with Lisp, and maybe I'll look into that soon.

But the code itself looks weird.

Every language that's currently successful looks like ALGOL.

At uni, I learned Turbo Pascal. That have way to Modula-2 in "real" programming but by then I'd gotten my hands on an account on the Sun boxes and was writing stuff in C. C looked kind of like Pascal once you got round the idea that curly brackets weren't comments any more, so it wasn't a hard transition. I wrote lots of C, masses and masses, and eventually shifted to writing stuff in Python for doing webby stuff and C for DSP. Python... looks kind of like ALGOL, actually, you don't use "begin" and "end", you just indent properly, which you should be doing. Then Go, much later, which looks kind of like Pascal to me, which in turn looks kind of like ALGOL.

And so on.

You write line after line after line of "this thing does this to that", and it works. It's like writing out a recipe, even more so if you declare your ingredients^W variables at the top.

I love Forth, I really want to love Lisp but I don't know enough about it, but everyone uses languages that look like ALGOL.

In the late 1960s Citroën developed a car where the steering and speed were controlled by a single joystick mounted roughly where the steering wheel would be. No throttle, no clutch, no gears, just a joystick with force feedback to increase the amount of force needed to steer as the car sped up. Very comfortable, very natural, even more so when the joystick was mounted in the centre console like in some aircraft. Buuuuut, everyone uses steering wheels and pedals. It was too weird for people.
by palata | 2025-11-20 10:08:32+00:00
There is no reason to hard fork, as long as Google contributes to AOSP without breaking it.

Regulators in the US decided that Android did not have to be split from Google, but they could theoretically decide that Google is not allowed to break AOSP to gain a competitive advantage. Not that it would matter: TooBigTech is too powerful to care about regulations anyway.
by muldvarp | 2025-11-20 10:08:33+00:00
> But if you like making computers do things, and you get joy from making computers do more and new things, then LLMs that can write programs are a fantastic gift.

Maybe currently if you enjoy social engineering an LLM more than writing stuff yourself. Feels a bit like saying "if you like running, you'll love cars!"

In the future when the whole process is automated you won't be needed to make the computer do stuff, so it won't matter whether you would like it. You'll have another job. Likely one that pays less and is harter on your body.
by ErroneousBosh | 2025-11-20 10:09:02+00:00
> In fact, many would argue it's fair to say that ARM is not RISC

It isn't now... ;-)

It's interesting to look at how close old ARM2/ARM3 code was to 6502 machine code. It's not totally unfair to think of the original ARM chip as a 32-bit 6502 with scads of registers.

And, for fairly obvious reasons!
by mattlutze | 2025-11-20 10:09:15+00:00
When we let the market bubble-up protective conditions through buyer behavior, we advantage innovation at the cost of accepting more harms, because the market response is always reactive instead of proactive, and the reaction can sometimes take decades or more (like GHG emissions and global warming).

When we let structural regulations assert protective conditions on a market, we try to advantage proactive harm reduction at the cost of innovation, because artificial market limitations will be barriers to innovation and create secondary game conditions that advantage some players.

Which way we lean should depend on the type and severity of potential harms, especially with consideration of how permanent or non-reversible those harms are.
by jwrallie | 2025-11-20 10:09:20+00:00
I’ve been receiving lots of SMS lately claiming to come from “WatApp”, “whtas app” and similar instead of a phone number.

I assume it can be related to this leak? Knowing someone uses a service can increase the effectiveness of targeted phishing.

Interestingly it’s harder to block these senders that do not advertise a number on sms.
by greiskul | 2025-11-20 10:09:32+00:00
The @ operator of php. In languages like Java, to silently catch all exceptions and do nothing with them requires at least some boiler plate.

PHP has an operator for something you should never do in a sane codebase.

You know that python wants good good to look good?

PHP was written in a way that makes bad code look good. And if we want Software Engineering to be a serious field that evolves, we have to be able to be honest with ourselves. It is a bad tool. Good programmers can even write good programs with bad tools. Doesn't mean you shouldn't avoid bad tools given the option.

There probably is a "PHP the good parts". But Javascript actually had a pretty nice core, and an utility of being in all web browsers that no other language could replicate. What niche does PHP have where it brings more value there other nicer languages can't be used instead?
by abigailphoebe | 2025-11-20 10:09:51+00:00
eh, i'm not convinced.

this was in the middle of a scheduled maintenance, with all requests failing at a singular point - that being a .unwrap().

there should be internal visibility into the fact a large number of requests are failing all at the same LOC - and attention should be focused there instantly imo.

or at the very least, it shouldn't take 4 hours for anyone to even consider it wasn't an attack.

in situations such as this, where your entire infra is fucked, you should have multiple crisis teams working in parallel, under different assumptions.

if even one additional team was created that worked under the assumption it was an infra issue rather than an attack, this situation could have been resolved many hours earlier.

for a product as vital to the internet as cloudflare, it is unacceptable to not have this kind of crisis management.
by johnisgood | 2025-11-20 10:10:05+00:00
I have been in many rooms that are completely fine; technical rooms.

As for flagging problematic accounts: how would that work in a decentralized E2EE system, and do you think it cannot be abused? What would you want them to do if I flag your account a million times? Keep in mind they probably may not be able to keep up with it, nor do I expect them to. Additionally, you still should be able to use the service due to its decentralized, privacy-preserving nature, so the worst thing that may happen is getting banned from a Matrix instance, or a room.
by lproven | 2025-11-20 10:11:39+00:00
> That'll be true for a few months at best.

The thing is, I have been in this business for 38 years now, and people have been telling me this for at least 3 or 4 years now. Including face-to-face from industry chip makers.

Really, honestly, right now, next month, OK, next quarter, but definitely by next year, really, the next generation is coming and it will bring the speed. The performance is coming, really soon.

And in fact, it's dire. It's crap.

Apple has a huge lead with its Arm chips and although most of the team that made that happen went off to other companies years ago now, nobody else has caught up. Qualcomm isn't there, but it's closer than anyone else. Amazon's server chips look promising but they're huge multicore things, not desktop/single-user devices at all, and they're very expensive in standalone desktops like from System 76.

Nobody so far can equal what Arm can do in skilled hands, and I bought my first desktop Arm computer in 1989. I've known that the potential was there for over a third of a century because I was there at the start.

I have Raspberry Pi 3, 4 and 5 devices here.

Look at this thing: https://system76.com/desktops/thelio-astra-a1.1-n1/configure

It is one hundred times the price of a Pi and can it deliver 100x the single thread performance? No, it cannot.

Can any money buy a RISC-V that can compare to the performance of a $60 Pi 5?

I don't think it can, and promises of "jam tomorrow" don't cut it.
by tcfhgj | 2025-11-20 10:11:53+00:00
> There seemed to be a lot of velocity in the beginning but the last couple of years have addressed approximately nothing in terms of the UX and it's a crying shame as Matrix/Element had a lot of potential.

It still has.

And with Element X they have greatly improved the UX.

Plus utd errors have been reduced by a lot.

That said, I haven't ever had issues with devices not being correctly verified ( I use that feature since it was released - and can still recover the encrypted messages of that time).
by lm28469 | 2025-11-20 10:12:45+00:00
> I feel people were much more sensible about AI back when their thoughts about it weren't mixed with their antipathy for big tech.

Why big tech ? Big corps in general have been fucking us over since the industrial revolution, why do you think it will change now lol ? If half of their promises had materialized we'd be working 3 days a week and retire at 40 already
by miki123211 | 2025-11-20 10:12:47+00:00
> Bizarrely horrible approach

I very heavily disagree here, we aren't doing as much of this as we should be.

Society is too complex of a system to predict what consequences a law will have. Badly written laws slip through. Loopholes are discovered after the fact. Incentives do what incentives do, and people eventually figure out how to game them to their own benefit. First order effects cause second order effects, which cause third order effects. Technology changes. We can't predict all of that in advance.

Trying to write a perfect law is like trying to write a perfect program on your first try, with no testing and verification, just reasoning about it in a notebook. If the code or law is of any complexity, it just can't be done. Programmers have figured this out and came up with ways to mitigate the problem, from unit testing and formal verification to canaries, feature flags, blue-green deployments and slow rollouts. Lawmakers could learn those same lessons (and use very similar strategies), but that is very rarely done.
by f1shy | 2025-11-20 10:13:14+00:00
That of the 2 wire is just wrong. At this point I do not know if you want to win the discussion or what. I live in a 2 wire-wired house. As long as I do not change the installation, is all ok.

Wann die Änderung verpflichtend ist Bei Neuanlagen: Die klassische Nullung darf seit 1973 nicht mehr für neue Installationen verwendet werden. Bei Modernisierungen: Wenn im Rahmen von Renovierungen oder Erweiterungen gearbeitet wird, müssen betroffene Stromkreise auf ein separates Null- und Schutzleitersystem umgerüstet werden. Bei unsicheren Anlagen: Ist der Bestandsschutz nicht mehr gegeben, weil Mängel oder Gefahren bestehen, die die Sicherheit für Leib und Leben oder Sachen gefährden, ist eine Umrüstung erforderlich.

You can live without a garage. Can't you? In Germany a car is pretty safe in the street. And I assume, you do not have a 50k+ car, if we are discussing "why can't I buy a house"...

Kitchen and Bath look perfectly usable for many years still... That is what I mean. People say "I will not have a house" but what they mean is: "I will not have a perfect house, with completely new bath and kitchen, garage, lots of room for everything, very well located" well, no, you will not. Sorry.

I agree about heating. But 50k is for the whole building, which will probably have reserves, so it will cost you maybe 5k to 10k spread in 6 months or so. And you get state help because you will surely go for heat-pump, means it even goes a little down. So the price goes to 310k...
by pete1302 | 2025-11-20 10:13:45+00:00
- Shorts/Reels (do I need to give a reason for this)(I happily "choose" a good 30 min+ fails/funny/wins compilation and watch it rather than playing with a slot machine). - Instagram (I am not a photographer/artist, then why should I convey everything to my friends in Audiovisual way?)(even Facebook was better).
by lizcall | 2025-11-20 10:14:38+00:00
Assuming the recursing self-improvement doesn't run into physical hardware limits.

Like we can theoretically build a spaceship that can accelerate to 99.9999% C - just a constant 1G accel engine with "enough fuel".

Of course the problem is that "enough fuel" = more mass than is available in our solar system.

ASI might have a similar problem.
by jaggederest | 2025-11-20 10:15:22+00:00
As a ceramicist it'd be difficult to 3d print with because the kinds of temperatures you can reach even with heavily fluxed silica is still extremely high. I fire bisque at cone 04 which is approximately 1060C / 1940F and that's considered low fire, only extremely heavily fluxed glazes (usually pure frit or equivalent) melt at that level.

Putting 3d printing concepts on the table, though, you could definitely see something like a sintered bed printer using a laser to print it, but then you wouldn't get anything close to the standard FDM style print.
by threeducks | 2025-11-20 10:15:32+00:00
After being once again frustrated by the CUDA installation experience, I thought that I should give those containers a try. Unfortunately, my computer did not boot anymore after following the installation instructions for the NVIDIA container toolkit as outlined on the NVIDIA website. Reinstalling everything and following the instructions from some random blog post made it work, but I then found that the container with the CUDA version that I needed had been deprecated.

There were other problems, such as the research cluster of my university not having Docker, but that is a different issue.
by mike_hearn | 2025-11-20 10:15:52+00:00
Sure they do. Even-handedness is not some uniquely American value. And anyway they recognize that their current analysis has a US-specific slant; it's still a good place to start, especially as so much of the world follows US culture and politics.

It's probably the case that Anthropic's staff has political biases, but that doesn't mean they can't aim for neutrality and professionalism. Honestly my opinion of Anthropic has gone up a lot from reading this blog post (and it was already pretty high). Claude 1 was wild in terms of political bias, but it got so much better and this effort is absolutely the right way to go. It's very encouraging that the big model companies are making these kinds of efforts. I believe OpenAI already did one, or at least publicly talked about the importance of even handedness in public already.

Years ago I worked for Google and left partly because I saw the writing on the wall for its previous culture of political neutrality, which I valued more than any 20% time or free lunch. Over the next ten years Google became heavily manipulated by the left to brainwash its users, first internally, then in periphery products like News, then finally in core web search. It is by far the most distressing thing they've done. I worried for a long time that AI companies would be the same, but it does seem like they recognize the dangers of that. It's not just about their users, it's about employees being able to get along too. Apparently Googlers are trying to cancel Noam Shazeer right now for not being left wing enough, so the risks of political bias to maintaining the skill base are very real.

I think the most interesting question is where the market demand is. Musk is trying to train Grok to prioritize "truth" as an abstract goal, whereas the other companies are trying to maximize social acceptability. The latter feels like a much more commercially viable strategy, but I can see there being a high end market for truth-trained LLMs in places like finance where being right is more important than being popular. The model branding strategies might be limiting here, can one brand name cover models trained for very different personalities?
by matheusmoreira | 2025-11-20 10:16:12+00:00
The "hacker spirit" is dying.

Corporations and governments are locking computers down. Secure boot. Hardware remote attestation. Think you can have control by installing your own software? Your device is now banned from everything. We eill be ostracized from digital society. Marginalized. Reduced to second class citizens, if that.

Everything the word "hacker" ever stood for is being destroyed. I predict one day we'll need licenses to program computers.

It's gotten to the point sacrificing ideals for money has started to make sense for me. The future is too bleak. Might as well try to get rich.