MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 1718627440 | 2025-11-08 16:03:19+00:00
> Calling into malloc () is writing C in C++, and should only be used for backwards compatibility

And this is exactly the stance I am arguing against. C++ is not the newer version of C. It forked of at some point and is a quite different language now.

One of the reasons I do use malloc for, is for compatibility with C. It is not for backward compatibility, because the C code is newer. In fact I actively change the code, when it needs a rewrite anyway, from C++ to C.

The other reason for using it even when writing C++ is, that new alone doesn't allow to allocate without also calling the constructor. For that I call malloc first and then invoke the constructor with placement new. For deallocating I call the destructor and then free. This also has the additional benefit, that your constructor and deconstructor implementation can fail and you can roll it back.
by littlestymaar | 2025-11-08 16:04:06+00:00
The most popular language by far used for writing UI is JavaScript, and the go to framework this day (React) doesn't use that though.

From the various experiments that popped up over the years, it's pretty clear that the React way works pretty well for Rust, but it's also too slow to be desirable for Rust (what's the point of using Rust for UI if you're going to have web-like performance).

And then again, making a half decent UI framework is a gigantic task, there's just not a whole lot of languages with a decent UI story at all, no matter what's the paradigm of the programming language. (And if you want a language for cross-platform UI, I'd argue that the only one that ticks the box is JS with React in Electron and React Native, and it's not even truly a single framework).
by chmod775 | 2025-11-08 16:05:29+00:00
Never. This wasn't such a sell-off either.

What actually happened is that market cap declined by that amount, where market cap of course is just latest share price multiplied by shares outstanding.

Nobody should be surprised or care that this number fluctuates, which is why certain people try really hard to make it seem more interesting than it really is. Otherwise they'd be out of a job.

There is really nothing dumber than finance news.
by pavelai | 2025-11-08 16:06:01+00:00
There a lot of examples of things been critisized in the beginning and strived, there are a lot of things which have gone. It only means that there could be only reasonable critics. Can you say if your criticism is reasonable? I saw a lot of things being thrashed in the beginning. And these things people use everyday. You can choose from thousands of examples

First plane didn't have cockpit, and windows, could fly only hundreds of meters, and looked more like a clothes dryer than a plane. Someone could call it inefficient (and really it wasn't efficient). It was easy to call it dangerous. But as we can see, planes evolved since then. When the first radio was invented there was no radio station to listen. When the steam train was invented it was crazy expensive and there was no government which has enough money to build all the railroads we have today

All of these technologies were modified by talented people, some of them were inventors, others later adopters. But they changed how this technologies work, and what goods they brought to us

AI is too young technology to tell if it fail or not. You can critisize it or you can change the direction of the progress. It's up to you
by techblueberry | 2025-11-08 16:08:35+00:00
ChatGPT wrote this, but it is basically the argument I’m making:

1. Functional Definition of AGI

If AGI is defined functionally — as a system that can perform most cognitive tasks a human can, across diverse domains, without retraining — then GPT-4/5 arguably qualifies:

It can write code, poetry, academic papers, and legal briefs.

It can reason through complex problems, explain them, and even teach new skills.

It can adapt to new domains using only language (without retraining), which is analogous to human learning via reading or conversation.

In this view, GPT-5 isn’t just a language model — it’s a general cognitive engine expressed through text.

Again I think the common argument is more a religious argument than a practical one. Yes I acknowledge this doesn’t meet the frontier definition of AGI, but that’s because it would be sad if it was the case, not because there’s any actual practical sense that we’ll get to the sci-fi definition. This view that ChatGPT is already performing most tasks reasonably at the edge of beyond human ability is true.
by CWuestefeld | 2025-11-08 16:08:41+00:00
I'm pretty sure that PlexAmp, backed by Plex Media Server, is the pinnacle of music discovery, within whatever you've got in your library. I've got that serving an enormous library that I've compiled through my whole life, but there's no reason (well, other than legalities) you couldn't feed this through the *arrs.

The discovery algorithm works based on fundamental metadata, additional data pulled from Last.fm (e.g., "related artists" and "popular tracks"), as well as its own acoustic matching algorithm.

This arrangement obviates the SD card, and also any other external syncing (PlexAmp plays live from the server, or has its own scheme for downloading to a local cache).
by ursaiceice | 2025-11-08 16:08:47+00:00
“Brainrot” has become a popular slang among teenagers, referring to the idea that consuming certain types of content can “rot your brain.” On Roblox, there are already several hit games built around this concept — like Steal a Brainrot and Plants vs Brainrot.

While browsing, I came across a game that mixes the brainrot meme with the clicker-game genre, which I found surprisingly fun. So I built brainrot-clicker.app to let people play it freely. The site also features a few other related clicker and brainrot-themed games.
by gregoryhinkle | 2025-11-08 16:09:35+00:00
I am going to show you a chart: https://i.imgur.com/q7l3lJt.png

This is a weekly chart of Nvidia from 2023 to 2024. During that period, the stock dropped from $95 to $75 in just two weeks. How would you defend the idea that a major correction wouldn’t have happened back in 2023–2024? Would you have expected a correction at that time? After all, given a long enough timescale, corrections are inevitable.
by guhidalg | 2025-11-08 16:09:55+00:00
You can certainly do that if you restrict software to be a mathematical artifact instead of an executable running on one of 3 kernels with different APIs and behaviors, let alone the mountain of dependencies your code will build and link against.

The reality is that the machines we write software for are complex, and trying to abstract it away and simplify it will introduce more abstractions that someone has to understand and deal with when they inevitably leak. It's not all bad, all this shit we're writing makes a lot of money.
by eviks | 2025-11-08 16:10:27+00:00
> in any of the fonts I use

But we're not talking about you, are we? You made a very general point, so look around... generally

> These are all normal and common.

Again, look around at most popular fonts in this wor(l)d, see how few of them have it. It's only "normal and common" in a small niche of code fonts. At most popular fonts would differentiate width, but that is a far legibility cry from the "exicting" innovation of using a dot. But that would be a surprising experience to most of the users because it's a rare occurence, so breaks your "be boring" maxim.

> Fonts are expected to show common characters as those character

In the case of 0 "as those characters" means an empty oval, so adding a dot/cross is "something differnt to satisfy a singular edge case" of basic legibility at the expense of "every common use case" of confused ovals between 0oO

Also, I finally looked into more details of the ^ and even more confused by your comments: one of the most popular fonts - Verdana - has ^ exactly like described by the OP - top reaching the top of U and bottom reaching the horizontal line in e. Similar with Arial, ony it raises higher than U Same in a popular code font Source Code Pro

So all your "don't mess with expectactions" is made up, they do not exist because that symbol is already popularly different, so there is no expectation that it's a tiny hat!!!
by foldr | 2025-11-08 16:10:36+00:00
Yes, humans can echolocate to a limited extent, just as some animals have very limited analogs of human language. That was the point of the comparison. It is no more sensible to view human language as just a more complex variant of vervet monkey calls than it is to view bat echolocation as just a more complex variant of whatever limited capacity humans have in that area. There is continuity viewed from the outside, if you squint a little, but that's unlikely to correspond to continuity in terms of the underlying cognitive mechanisms. Bats, for example, can make precise calculations of distance based on a built-in reference for the speed of sound: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2024352118

Children don't get 'rich feedback' at all on the grammatical structure of their sentences. I think this idea is probably based on a misconception of what 'grammar' is from a generative linguistics perspective. When was the last time that a child got rich feedback on their misinterpretation of an ACD construction? https://www.bu.edu/bucld/files/2011/05/29-SyrettBUCLD2004.pd...

LLMs trained on small datasets don't perform that well from the point of view of language acquisition – even up to 100 million tokens. There's not a very large literature on this because, as I said, there are many more people interested in making a drive-by critique of generative linguistics than there are people who are genuinely interested in investigating different models of child language acquisition. But here is one suggestive result: https://aclanthology.org/2025.emnlp-main.761.pdf See also the last paragraph of p.6 onwards of https://arxiv.org/pdf/2308.03228

The other point that's often missed in evaluations of these models is their capacity for learning completely non-human-like languages. Thus, the BabyLM models have some limited success in learning (for example) some island constraints, but could just have easily acquired languages without island constraints. That then leaves the question of why we do not see human languages without such constraints.
by YuukiRey | 2025-11-08 16:10:45+00:00
Are we looking at different charts? What I see right now on a 5 day view is:

- Nvidia -11%

- Palantir -16%

- Oracle -11%

- Meta -5%

With some very quick and extremely cursory napkin maths I do get in the 800 billion range, which the original article mentioned. I guess the linked article rounded it up to make it more sensational.
by Forgeties79 | 2025-11-08 16:11:02+00:00
>the point of these LLMs is to do things that computers were bad at.

The way they’re being deployed it feels like the point of LLMs is largely to replace basic online search or to run your online customer support cheaply.

I’m a bit out on a limb here because this is not really my technical expertise by any stretch of the imagination, but it seems to me these benchmark tests don’t really tell us much about how LLM’s perform in the ways most people actually use them. Maybe I’m off base here though
by trenchpilgrim | 2025-11-08 16:11:46+00:00
In my experience:

1. Start building stuff that is hard to build that requires touching these niche topics. Especially stuff you don't know how to build

2. As you encounter problems, you'll have to scour for solutions (AI doesn't know these things due to lack of training data). In the process you will find people who are also working on these problems. Ask these people well-formed, intelligent questions.
by bee_rider | 2025-11-08 16:12:04+00:00
>> A weeks ago, my friends and I were talking about the inner workings of Zen 5. We were talking about how the CPUID instruction works, and how AMD MSRs are technically editable if you ask the processor nicely.

> As do we all.

I think they interpreted “as do we all” as pointing out humorously that this is an unusual friend group. So, speculation that it might have formed online makes sense, because online spaces can sometimes facilitate that sort of thing.
by estebank | 2025-11-08 16:12:45+00:00
> its ugly as sin

Uncalled for and subjective. Certainly plenty of people call Rust's syntax ugly. Discussing syntax and not semantics is a waste of time.

> has zero use case other than mingling with legacy c code

So it has a use case?

> who in their right mind wants to be doing that

Some people have to.

> absolute insanity to use it when rust exists unless you have that very specific c related slave work to do

Some people do.

What's the need for such emotionally charged language in your comment?

I have my own reasons not to use Zig at this moment. I want enforced memory safety and am waiting on 1.0 to see what the language finally looks like. Until stabilization I certainly won't be using it in production. But that doesn't mean the project is meritless, that experimenting with language features before then is wrong, that making a language suitable for specific niches is a bad idea.

I don't see Zig as a replacement for tools that would have been written in Go, Java or C#, and I would rather we had less memory unsafe software out there, but it is a clear step function ahead of C.

Just like I and many others spend a lot of time trying to make Rust the best it can be, their team is doing the same.
by fwn | 2025-11-08 16:12:46+00:00
While I like the general idea of Ecosia (in that it's a less harmful ad-funded service) they do share user IP addresses with their search partners (Google and Microsoft).

> We, and our search partners, collect your IP address in order to protect our service against spammers trying to conduct fraud or to up-rank specific search results.

Src.: https://www.ecosia.org/privacy

This shouldn't necessarily stop anyone; I think it should just be mentioned when it is suggested as an alternative to DuckDuckGo. You probably wouldn't switch from a search engine that proxies all favicons to avoid tracking to one that sells your identity to Google and Microsoft for tree-money.
by teslabox | 2025-11-08 16:12:58+00:00
I saw a car with terrible headlights, so I started a recording to see if there was flicker (which sometimes indicates that they're aftermarket). The light turned green, the car pulled forward & leveled out, and the headlights became less blinding. It was just a regular Hyundai SUV:

https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckyourheadlights/comments/1mshs0v...
by cmrdporcupine | 2025-11-08 16:14:11+00:00
I think the market & political/economic actors as a whole are justifying these investments on the basis that the benefit is distributed across the labour market generally.

That is, it doesn't matter so much if OpenAI and individual investors get fleeced, if there's a 20-50% labour cost reduction generally for capitalism as a whole (especially cost reduction in our own tech professions, which have been very well paid for a generation) -- Institutional investors and political actors will benefit regardless, by increasing the productivity or rate of exploitation of intellectual / information workers.
by jt2190 | 2025-11-08 16:14:40+00:00
I think it’s hard for individuals to think at the scale of very large institutional investors. They have lakes of money [1][2] that they have to invest in a balanced way, including investing a small percentage into “it probably won’t work but if it does we’ll make a fortune”-type bets. Given the size of these funds even a small percentage is a very large number.

There are also a finite number of opportunities to invest in, so companies that have “buzz” can create a bidding war among potential investors that drives up valuations.

So that’s one possible reason but in the end we can’t know why another investor invests the way they do. We assume that the investor in making a rational decision based on their portfolio. It’s fun to speculate about though, which is why there’s so much press attention.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_pension_scheme...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_wealth_funds...
by chemotaxis | 2025-11-08 16:14:52+00:00
I've heard it over and over again that the ultimate problem with corporate governance is that the CEOs and the VPs are incentivized to make the stock up at any cost to pad their own coffers. This is basically taken as gospel in many circles.

Now you have a company where the leader at least notionally doesn't have that kind of a financial stake... and we think that's bad? I disagree with Altman on almost everything, but it feels like grasping at straws.
by neilv | 2025-11-08 16:14:57+00:00
> Distribution Strategy - Assuming this is the right persona, how are you going to reach them, and can you communicate with them authentically?

The author's use of "communicate with them authentically" where I'd expect "persuade them", seems to be building on:

https://www.reifyworks.com/writing/2020-11-04-what-is-a-valu...

Where they write:

> When someone asks me what makes good marketing, and I’m in the mood to boil it down, I usually say something like “Good marketing is authentic.” What I mean by that is that good marketing is genuine, it derives its essential principles from a core that is pure and has a real purpose. This might sound counterintuitive if you’re someone who generally believes that marketing is phony and can’t be trusted. Well, as marketers, we can tell you – sometimes it is phony. But also, like anything else, most marketing isn’t great, and can be improved. How to improve it? That’s right, make it more genuine.
by montroser | 2025-11-08 16:15:09+00:00
This is...not for me. It follows a big pattern in Ruby/Rails culture where to understand the code, you first have to understand the magic. And, it's never all that obvious where to go to try and understand the magic, because the magic itself has been imported by magic.

I once was hackathoning with a colleague who was trying to get me excited about Rails, and he said, "look how great this is -- if you want the idea of '1 day', you can just write `1.day`!". I opened up a irb to try it out, and it didn't work. We were both confused for a bit until he figured out that it was a Rails thing, not a Ruby thing. That Rails globally punches date/time methods into integers, which he thought was cool, and I thought was abhorrent. I asked, "okay, if I came across this code, how would I be able to know that it came from Rails?" He said, there wasn't any way to really trace a method to its source definition, you just kinda have to know, and I decided this whole thing was too much of a conflict with my mental model for how humans and code and computers should work together.
by stevenjgarner | 2025-11-08 16:15:13+00:00
I feel your passion, but I feel this is a little hyperbolic? I feel your passion is directed more at UEFI secure-boot than at Linux. I am no lover of the UEFI secure-boot world, using shims as a first-stage boot loader component whose job is to bridge the firmware’s trusted key infrastructure (typically Microsoft’s signing key) to a Linux (or other non-Windows) bootloader/kernel chain.

> Linux is under control of the same companies

Linux is indeed open source, so are you trying to say that "Linux is EFFECTIVELY under control of the same companies VIA UEFI WITH SECURE BOOT ENABLED"? Or is there a big-Tech cabal controlling Linux in another manner? I get that most big-Tech companies are major contributors to open source projects.

> all major distributions (Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu) ship with a shim signed by Microsoft

Having a shim signed by Microsoft makes no difference if these distributions are being installed on hardware without UEFI firmware implemented on the motherboard’s SPI flash e.g. motherboards from Purism (Librem Laptops), System76 (Thelio, Galago Pro, etc.), Framework Laptop (2021 →), Star Labs, Raspberry Pi / Single-Board Computers and uncountable DIY PC builds with motherboards (ASUS, ASRock, Gigabyte, etc.) that expose Secure Boot options. It is usually only when consumer hardware is being used from major OEMs (Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc.) that ship with only Microsoft’s key in the firmware trust database.

> and systemd

You are suggesting that “systemd” is also part of the lock-in or control (in your mind) of those distributions. But strictly in the context of shim and Secure Boot, systemd is not the same issue: systemd is an init-system/process manager in userland, not part of the firmware/boot loader signature infrastructure. Major distros use systemd, so from a “vendor/lock-in” narrative they may lump bootloader trust and systemd governance together. But strictly speaking your assertion is more of a opinion/ideological piece than a formal technical dependency.

> *BSD is the only escape

Not true. Not all Linux distributions use it — Tails, Qubes OS, PureOS, Alpine, Void, Gentoo, etc., deliberately avoid it. Most minimalistic, privacy, or DIY distributions refuse the Microsoft-signed shim route because their users are expected to control their firmware settings or use owner-controlled keys.
by shantara | 2025-11-08 16:15:15+00:00
One huge downside of iBooks is that it would happily deauthorize access to the (DRM free) epub files you’ve added to the app manually after a couple of days without internet connection. I made a mistake of going on a long distance hiking trip and thinking can read some books in the tent before falling asleep. Nope, eBooks refused me until I returned to the mobile coverage area and resynced my library with their cloud service. I switched to an offline-first 3rd party app immediately after.
by pzo | 2025-11-08 16:15:21+00:00
after small digging they have Full VSCode debugging [0] which is nice. RN have Radon IDE but it's a paid sub. What's interesting Valdi using Hermes (the one from RN) so maybe there is a way to retrofit this to work for RN. Wondering if they did AOT and JIT by themselve or they using static hermes branch or using only hermes in dev mode.

[0] https://github.com/Snapchat/Valdi/blob/main/docs/docs/workfl...
by tptacek | 2025-11-08 16:15:33+00:00
You brought this up 7 months ago, and when I responded that this is in fact an active field of study with new science being produced constantly, you had no response. I presumed you just conceded the point. If you missed my point last time, well, I've made it for you again: your claim that this research is suppressed is trivially falsifiable.
by zdragnar | 2025-11-08 16:15:44+00:00
Visual design is only one part of UX- interaction design and information architecture are equally important components.

At my last two jobs, when I did v front end work I had to coach designers through UX on a regular basis, because the designers did as much for the marketing department as they did for the development team.

Sadly, UX as a discipline doesn't get much love from most companies.