MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by stingraycharles | 2025-11-25 13:26:28+00:00
I think it’s a silly take. Companies want to avoid getting bad PR. People having schizophrenic episodes with ChatGPT is bad PR.

There are plenty of legitimate purposes for weird psychological explorations, but there are also a lot of risks. There are people giving their AI names and considering them their spouse.

If you want completely unfiltered language models there are plenty of open source providers you can use.
by kchr | 2025-11-25 13:26:42+00:00
One of the points made in that paper is that you can't even trust the compiler, even if you write the code yourself. I think this is one of the stronger points as it shows you it is unfeasible to require everybody to audit all source code before running it. Be pragmatic, know your threat model, decide who you trust and move on with more important things in your life.

Full disclosure: am free software advocate.
by Borg3 | 2025-11-25 13:26:42+00:00
At least, my Cygwin quickly complain there is sth wrong:

% mkdir '//?/c:/test123 ' % ls ls: test123 : No such file or directory

Still, ls work if test123 is shadowed.

% ls -d test123* test123/ test123 /

But at least, you see it :)
by bo1024 | 2025-11-25 13:26:47+00:00
This is great for a “capstone project” at the end of a degree. But along the way, you have to master sub tasks and small skills in order to build on them later to accomplish lofty goals. So you need to learn the basics first. But AI is really good at helping you cheat on the basics without learning. So we still need to get them to the point of being able to use AI intelligently
by forgetfulness | 2025-11-25 13:26:49+00:00
Able to make changes preserving correctness over time

Vibecoding reminds me sharply of the height of the Rails hype, products quickly rushed to market off the backs of a slurry of gems and autoimports inserted on generated code, the original authors dipping and teams of maintainers then screeching into a halt

Here the bots will pigheadedly heap one 9000 lines PR onto another, shredding the code base to bits but making it look like a lot of work in the process
by ricardobeat | 2025-11-25 13:27:36+00:00
As they said, they are telling you their preference, there is nothing to doubt.

Recently there was a non-native english speaker heavily using an LLM to review their answers on a Show HN post, and it was incredibly annoying. The author did not realize (because of their lack of skills in the language) but the AI-edited version felt fake and mechanical in tone. In that case yes, the broken original is better because it preserves the humanity of the original answers, mistakes and all.
by ncruces | 2025-11-25 13:28:31+00:00
That's not true on a major avenue that serves 10 different routes, which combined have a frequency of one every couple of minutes.

Also, it doesn't help to make bus stops more spaced, and you may not want a bunch of express routes that skip most stops, because another purpose of buses is to help people with difficulty moving (like the elderly), for whom it's not a 5min walk.

You just want to make the service available, and as good as possible, without incentivising people who could just walk to use it.

Because the actual goal is to displace cars (not walkers, or cyclists, or…)
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-11-25 13:28:56+00:00
In general, NTP is a time sensitive process, and application processor/SoC are indeed going to have far greater rates of clock slips than an MCU running off an XTAL or TCXO.

RTLinux has a module feature to sync the scheduler to an external pin state. It is an obscure feature...

Adding more processors creates a well-known named-problem with metastability:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock_domain_crossing

Real-time is not guaranteed latency, and the Pi is not like Zynq fpga. =3
by throwaway2037 | 2025-11-25 13:29:22+00:00
@dang: It would be nice if we can add an exception to these URLs. Currently, the domain hint only says: "microsoft.com". It would be better if it said: "devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing" or "microsoft.com/oldnewthing". I think we did something similar with forbes.com to illuminate when it was a blog (which are frequently low quality), instead of the official media website.
by kchr | 2025-11-25 13:30:38+00:00
> Above a certain complexity, there is basically no 100% open-source hardware out there. > > Like none of the Pinephone, Librem, Framework laptops are "open-source" to the bone.

As an aside, GNU Librephone aims to rectify that by reverse-engineering those blobs and develop their own firmware for baseband chips etc. But I am carefully optimistic about the success since it is a relatively new project and quite a moonshot, even though I would personally stand first in line to buy one if it would materialize.
by AndrewKemendo | 2025-11-25 13:30:40+00:00
> Situations sometimes benefit from irrational approaches (think gradient descent with random jumps to improve optimization performance).

What?

Irrational is sprinkling water on your car to keep it safe or putting blood on your doorframes to keep spirits out

An empirical optimization hypothesis test with measurable outcomes is a rigorous empirical process with mechanisms for epistemological proofs and stated limits and assumptions.

These don’t live in the same class of inference
by chollida1 | 2025-11-25 13:31:13+00:00
Oh man, this has been posted probably 100 times now but this is still a great blog.

I guess today another 10,000 people will learn about how crash bandicoot was made.

https://xkcd.com/1053/

I was in video game development at the time and it was really exciting due to the switch from 2D to 3D for most games which made the math a programmer was required to know go way up in complexity.

And you hade new things called graphics cards that had their own apis to program to and drivers that didn't always do what they were supposed to do so you were always feeling around in the dark a bit when working with a new console or new graphics card. I remember so many bugs that weren't necessarily our fault, but the fault of buggy drivers or a misimplemened OpenGL call by the driver or console provider.

I couldn't imagine layering on top of that a lisp dialog to program your game in given that we were doing incredible things to shave off milliseconds. It seems counter intuitive to put a high level interpreted language ontop of that but these geniuses pulled it off!!
by ErroneousBosh | 2025-11-25 13:32:19+00:00
> The real challenge isn't writing one—any undergraduate can follow the AABBA scheme—it's understanding why meter and scansion matter beyond just counting syllables.

There was a young man from Japan

Whose poetry didn't quite scan

When told this was so

He said "Yes, I know..."

"... it's probably because I try to cram as many syllables into the last line as I possibly can!"

and also

There was a young man from Wick

Whose limericks were twisted and sick

It's best not to mention

How he broke convention

...
by inhumantsar | 2025-11-25 13:32:25+00:00
interesting idea.. I have some thoughts:

- % changes aren't that informative without the raw value change - filtering by country would be useful - a sample set of well-known companies would be good for new people - mucking around with scroll behaviour makes for a terrible experience. on my pixel phone, the site feels slow as all get out and some swipes to scroll move two lines while others fling me across half the page.
by srean | 2025-11-25 13:32:29+00:00
Just yesterday I was mentioning about the shared fascination with everything knitting, weaving, knitting, tatting, crocheting and braiding.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46039952

Wonder if I should braid my wired earphones for storage to prevent tangling. I can keep the cable inside a pouch with the earpieces out but that's not very satisfactory.

My current fascination knitted ropes/cables/cords. These are not the typical ropes that are spun and coiled and held together by friction. These ones made of synthetic fibres look like woven tubes, but the insides aren't hollow. The insides seem packed with more woven tubes.

What I really want to see though, are 3d knitted heavy duty carbon fibre flywheels of optimal shape such that it's under equal radial stress everywhere. The shape is interesting to compute for a solid one.
by kiba | 2025-11-25 13:32:43+00:00
I am on the autism spectrum. I have a deep interest in systems as well, and I like systems and so forth. Things and so forth. Social skills is not what I am good at and I still struggle with but improving with time.

There is an art in which I basically don't do that kind of thinking, that's improvisational comedy.

Improvisational comedy is an art in which I do by honed instinct. There's a system to it, and I can sometime recognize patterns, but most of the work I do is subconscious processing and rather autonomous.

To this day, I think I would have something to teach to the community if I could articulate the unique skills I possess.
by hobofan | 2025-11-25 13:33:39+00:00
> It's tiring reading daily/weekly "Advanced new solution to that problem we said was the advanced new solution last month"

At least for the current iterations that come to mind here, every advanced new solution solves the problem for a subset of problems, and the advanced new solution after that solves it for a subset of the remaining problems.

E.g. if you are tool calling with a fixed set of 10 tools you don't _need_ anything outlined in this blog post (though, you may use it as token count optimization).

It's just the same as in other programming disciplines. Nobody is forcing you to stay up to date with frontend framework trends if you have a minimally interactive frontend where a <form> elements already solves your problem. Similarly, nobody forces you to stay up-to-date with AI trends on a daily basis. There are still plenty of product problems ready to be exploited, that do well enough with state of AI & dumb prompt engineering from a year ago.
by throw0101c | 2025-11-25 13:33:42+00:00
> Ideally I'd want a read-only root FS with maybe an /etc and /var managed by an overlay.

OpenZFS 2.2 added support for overlays, so you can have the main pool(s) mounted as read-only:

* https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/releases/tag/zfs-2.2.0
by xphos | 2025-11-25 13:34:44+00:00
It's not about being easy it is about being profitable. I don't care where you fall politically, accounts like this increase engagement and thus profit. Companies like profit so this type of thing despite being much easier than some might assert is going to be slow to do. You can have legal requirements around identification for accounts over 2K followers. It basically would never inconvience people unless they are trying to be an influencer
by throwaway2037 | 2025-11-25 13:34:54+00:00
Oh god, this again. One word: "History". No one thought we would need more than 16 bits (65k chars) to represent all the world's written languages. Then it happened. There must be no less than one thousand individually authored blog posts and technical articles on this matter. Win32, Java, and Qt all suffer from the same UTF-16 internal representation. There has been endless discussion on the matter over the last 10 years about how to change these frameworks to use UTF-8 internal representation. It is a crazy hard problem.
by mkornaukhov | 2025-11-25 13:35:12+00:00
> handlig c++ types with gdb can be a nightmare and you either develop your own gdb glue code or write c-like c++.

That's why better to use lldb and it's scripts.

> I think the idea of using only a small subset of C++ is interesting but it ignores the problem that many people have, you don't have the time to implement your own STL so you just use the STL.

Yeah, agree. It's just much easier to take a "framework" (or frameworks) where all the main problems solved: convenient parallelism mechanisms, scheduler, reactor, memory handling, etc. So it's turning out you kinda writing in your own ecosystem that's not really different from another language, just in C++ syntax.
by sofixa | 2025-11-25 13:36:32+00:00
> xx60 is mid range at best. Maybe even xx50 if those still exist

"It's mid range if it exists" doesn't make sense.

Also you're missing that they're talking about 3070, a card from 2020 (5 years ago), 2 generations behind this year's 50xx series. The 30xx matters more than the xx70 here. It was an upper midrange card when it came out, and it's solidly midrange for Nvidia's product lineup today. You can have cheaper and decent just fine (integrated Ryzens like you mentioned are fine for 1080p gaming on most titles).
by stingraycharles | 2025-11-25 13:36:45+00:00
All those are completely irrelevant. Quantization is just a cost optimization.

People are claiming that Anthropic et all changes the quality of the model after the initial release, which is entirely different and the industry as a whole has denied. When a model is released under a certain version, the model doesn’t change.

The only people who believe this are in the vibe coding community, believing that there’s some kind of big conspiracy, but any time you mention “but benchmarks show the performance stays consistent” you’re told you’re licking corporate ass.
by throw0101c | 2025-11-25 13:37:26+00:00
> Over 22 years of maintaining servers, I have had serious issues exclusively with ZFS.

I've been using ZFS since it initially debuted in Solaris 10 6/06 (also: zones and DTrace), before then using it on FreeBSD and Linux, and I've never had issues with it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
by CivBase | 2025-11-25 13:38:57+00:00
> the majority of grading has to shift to in-class work (instead of at-home assignments)

My wife is a teacher. He school did this a long time ago, long before AI. But they also gave every kid a laptop and forced the teachers to move all tests/assignments to online applications with the curriculum picked out by the administrators (read as: some salesperson talked them into it). Even with assignments done in class, it's almost impossible to catch kids using AI when they're all on laptops all the time and she can't teach and monitor them all at the same time.

Bring back pencil and paper. Bring back calculators. Internet connected devices do not belong in the classroom.
by winlundn | 2025-11-25 13:39:04+00:00
Reference: https://microcad.xyz/2025/11/20/spirograph/

^ This link worked yesterday when Ycombinator cited them. Now it doesn't work. Who at Microcad is scared right now? Or does this removal regard perhaps a more common situation -- such as their code wouldn't compile with microcad and so they had to pull it, rewrite it, and will publish Spirograph later?
by tyleo | 2025-11-25 13:39:22+00:00
I've been interested in making some 3D web games. After a review of some of the available engines I stumbled across Babylon. This seems like a bit of a hidden gem and it's used by a few real-world projects like Xbox Design Lab (https://xboxdesignlab.xbox.com).

It's been shared here a few times but I thought I'd surface it again in case anyone else is looking for a small, fast, web-based game engine and this has flown under their radar.
Ask HN: Should account creation/origin country be displayed on HN profiles?
by megraf | 2025-11-25 13:39:54+00:00
Would it be beneficial for a platform to display the country of account origin on each user’s profile? I’m curious how the HN community thinks about this from angles like privacy, moderation, transparency, anti-abuse, and whether it meaningfully improves discussion quality. Are there strong reasons for or against showing this kind of metadata publicly?
by psychoslave | 2025-11-25 13:41:01+00:00
Sure, but that’s not raw individual output on its mere direct utterance capacities.

Now anyone mildly capable of using a computer is able to produce many more fictional characters than all that humanity collectively kept in its miscellaneous lores, and drawn them in an ocean of insipid narratives. All that nonetheless mostly passing all the grammatical checkboxes at a level most humans would fail (I definitely would :D).
by liendolucas | 2025-11-25 13:41:25+00:00
They are pushing hard the adoption of restrictive platforms where people that have no idea how technology works lose the ability to control their devices, a fucking basic right. And this is done transparently to people that are not tech-savvy. This affects everyone, but the main difference is that is extremely hard to make people that are not in technology understand WHY such platforms should be avoided.
by throw0101c | 2025-11-25 13:41:29+00:00
> Needing (emphasis there) to fail over should be for emergencies, not standard operating procedure.

You should be failing testing failover regularly, just like you're testing backups and recovery, and other things that should not "need" to happen but have to actually work when they do.

A good time would be during your monthly/quarterly/(bi)annual/whatever patch cycle (and if there are no patches, then you should just test failover).
by gpderetta | 2025-11-25 13:42:23+00:00
As someone that has been using C++ extensively for the last 25 years, each release has felt as an incremental improvement. Yes, there are big chunks in each release that are harder to learn, but usually a team can introduce them at their own pace.

The fact that C++ is a very large and complex language and that makes it unapproachable is undeniable though, but I don't think the new releases make it significantly worse. If anything, I think that a some of the new stuff does ease the on-ramp a bit.
Show HN: PoliSciPy – A Python library for making Electoral College maps
by quantumHashMap | 2025-11-25 13:42:55+00:00
Hi HN! I built PoliSciPy, an open-source Python package for quickly generating customizable, publication-quality U.S. Electoral College maps using matplotlib.

I designed it to be flexible and easy to use: you can merge your own data, define custom colormaps for parties or candidates, and generate maps (including for historical elections) in under 10 lines of code.

Under the hood, I edited a US Census Bureau Shapefile in ArcGIS, applied transformations, computed centroids for labeling, and added some extra features for styling and customization.

PyPI: https://pypi.org/project/poliscipy/

GitHub: https://github.com/poliscipy/poliscipy

Docs: https://poliscipy.github.io/poliscipy/

I would love any feedback on API design, performance, or features you would like to see. I had a lot of fun building it and am happy to answer any questions!
by delaguardo | 2025-11-25 13:43:02+00:00
Thanks for the link!

Yes, EDN is a textual format intended to be human-readable. There is also a format called Transit used to serialise EDN elements. Unlike raw EDN, Transit is designed purely for program-to-program communication and drops human readability in favor of performance. It can encode data into either binary (MessagePack) or text (JSON), but in both cases, it preserves all EDN data types and originates from the Clojure language.

https://github.com/cognitect/transit-format
by troupo | 2025-11-25 13:43:17+00:00
> You pay the owner of e.g. the Louvre to see e.g. the Mona Lisa.

That owner is the French state that heavily subsidises The Louvre. On top of that no one prevents you from taking pictures or videos of Mona Lisa, re-drawing it any way you like, and posting those photos and videos and drawings and what not anywhere.

Additionally, there's nothing preventing museums just exhibiting their collections anywhere, and they do that frequently.

Meanwhile Disney not only has exclusive rights to an insane amount of properties [1], they will sue you for breach of copyright.

[1] My favorite example is Winnie the Pooh. Disney had exclusive rights to the character and stories for 70 years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winnie-the-Pooh#Disney_exclusi...

So while (most) of the Western world was/is in the chokehold of Disney, other parts of the world had completely different takes on the character: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wlk7O2-rnQs
by phantasmish | 2025-11-25 13:43:23+00:00
God, I’d love to once again be working at a company where coding speed mattered.

Meanwhile in non-tech Bigcos the slow part of everything isn’t writing the code, it’s sorting out access and keys and who you’re even supposed to be talking to, and figuring out WTF people even want to build (and no, they can’t just prompt an LLM to do it because they can’t articulate it well, and don’t have any concept of what various technologies can and cannot do).

The code is already like… 5% of the time, probably. Who gives a damn if that’s on average 2x as fast?
by devmor | 2025-11-25 13:43:26+00:00
> So many a young Lab will spend a while standing on the shore, watching humans or other dogs in the water, and fussing because they don't dare to join the fun. Then they may (for example) eventually lean too far and fall into shallow water. Within moments, they'll typically be swimming around and having the time of their lives.

Interesting, I didn’t know this was a common phenomenon! It describes exactly what happened with my childhood lab - my family would go swimming at the river and he would whine and fuss at the shore, until one day he wanted to play with another dog that was in the water so badly that he just jumped in, and was swimming around like he’d been doing it his whole life already.
by easyascake | 2025-11-25 13:43:47+00:00
I use the GitLab CLI (glab) extensively, because it is so much better than the (official) GitLab MCP. I just run `glab auth login` before launching Claude Code, then tell CC to use `glab` to communicate with the GitLab API.

When using the MCP, I have to do a whole OAuth browser-launch process and even then I am only limited to the 9-10 tools that they've shipped it with so far.
by sudosysgen | 2025-11-25 13:44:29+00:00
It's a tradeoff you can make. The US is far from the only country in the world where fare evasion is a problem. I've lived in countries with similarly high inequality and homelessness where fare evasion was such a problem despite enforcement that the bus drivers would simply refuse to pick up certain passengers, and conversely people would then hitch a hike on roller skates behind the bus.
by Anamon | 2025-11-25 13:45:21+00:00
They didn't say communism was the only other option; this seems like a bad faith reply.

Capitalism increasingly fails to provide well-being to the majority of the global population. It's obvious we need to come up with something else, even if it's not clear yet what shape that will take.

If we can't find an alternative that works, we can also just wind down humanity, and not much of value to the universe will be lost :)
by bmn__ | 2025-11-25 13:45:33+00:00
> Is Dragon book still relevant?

No, not at all, the teachings and techniques have been surpassed since four decades or so.

The algorithm LALR is flawed, it only works for a subset of CFG instead of all. That alone is already a death blow. If you want to try out BNF grammars in the wild, it is nearly guaranteed that they are complex enough for LALR to shit itself with S-R conflicts.

The technique of generating and dumping source code is awkward and the reasons that made that a necessity back then are no longer relevant. A good parser is simply a function call from a code library.

The technique of tokenising, then parsing in a second pass is awkward, introduces errors and again the reasons that made that a necessity back then are no longer relevant. A good parser works "on-line" (term of art, not meaning "over a computer network" here) by tokenising and parsing at the same time/single-pass.

The book precedes Unicode by a long time and you will not learn how to properly deal with text according to the rules laid out in its various relevant reports and annexes.

The book does not take into consideration the syntactic and semantic niceties and features that regex have gained since and thus should definitely also be part of a grammar parser.

> recommend any other learning resources

Depends on what your goals are. For a broad and shallow theoretical introduction and to see what's out there, browse the slide decks of university lectures for this topic on the Web.