MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by PleasureBot | 2025-11-30 13:49:48+00:00
Half the country will just grumble something about Nancy Pelosi and how everyone is corrupt in response to points about the current administration being corrupt. I feel like people have just lost all sense of scale when it comes to political matters. Yes, Nancy Pelosi making a series of improbably fortuitous trades while in office is bad and she should probably go to jail for insider trading. Is that the same thing as the Trump accepting many hundreds of millions, likely billions, in direct cryptocurrency bribes from foreign and domestic agents? Obviously not, the latter has a much, much larger in scale and has direct negative effect on the American people. Half the country is willing to equate the two and, throw their hands up, and say its all the same.
I Stopped Performing Online and Started Building Again
by truelinux1 | 2025-11-30 13:50:19+00:00
If you create software or otherwise participate in the technology realm, you have to accept the idea of remaining obscure and unknown. Over the last few years I’ve posted my work and ideas on Medium, reddit, dev.to, youtube and all the usual publishing platforms. They’re fine for short-term feedback, but they don’t really get your name out there—nor should they. They reward performance—how well you play to an invisible audience—not the actual craft or skill behind your work or contribution to the field.

The place that’s actually changed how I think about my work is GitHub. Almost nobody will ever browse my profile, and most of the repos won’t get traction. But the code itself is there - and maybe that's the only part that matters. If the work is good, it will eventually find its place in the infrastructure, find the people who need it. If it isn’t good enough, no amount of posting or engagement elsewhere will compensate.

Realizing that has been strangely stabilizing. I stopped chasing visibility on platforms built around attention and started caring more about the quality and usefulness of what I build. The metrics are quieter, but they’re more honest.

In the end, obscurity is normal in the tech industry. Who can name all those who work on the firefox browser or the openbox window mgr, etc. The work has true value even if the author doesn’t become a name people know. And if something I build ends up helping someone, even years from now, that has to be enough.
by analogears | 2025-11-30 13:50:34+00:00
One thing missing from this framing: the feedback loop speed. Animal evolution operates on generational timescales, but LLM "commercial evolution" happens in months. The optimisation pressure might be weaker per-iteration but the iteration rate is orders of magnitude faster.

Curious whether this means LLMs will converge toward something more general (as the A/B testing covers more edge cases) or stay jagged forever because no single failure mode means "death".
by __s | 2025-11-30 13:50:36+00:00
Trudeau got a lot of hate, but won next election. But your point stands, covid was turning point in Trudeau's popularity, Liberal's kept power between Trudeau stepping down more gracefully than Biden, Carney being a very centralist candidate (it's a compliment when your opposition is down to accusing you of stealing their policy ideas), & Trump's recent victory giving many the ick towards Poilievre
by embedding-shape | 2025-11-30 13:50:56+00:00
> Honestly, I've had more problems running windows than running arch.

Worst thing with Windows isn't the occasional "wtf, how do I undo this change Microsoft forced upon me?" but more "Damn, it's that time of the month where Windows force me to do X", most recently being upgrades that you cannot shutdown or restart your computer without doing. Used to be you could run some command to avoid it, but literally all the hacks stopped working.

So now I'm slightly afraid of booting Windows which I do sometimes, because I don't want to end up in the situation where I need to boot Linux for five seconds to do something quickly, but Windows is refusing to do so without first doing a 20 minute upgrade. Fucking disrespectful of people's time!
by jhbadger | 2025-11-30 13:51:26+00:00
When people say "pre-Snoopy Peanuts" they don"t mean before the character existed at all but before the strip became focused on Snoopy and his wacky adventures in the mid 1970s and later. Early Peanuts was more focused on the melancholy aspects of childhood and was truly brilliant. This was lost later on.
by nicoburns | 2025-11-30 13:51:30+00:00
> I think it misses what incredible alchemy comes from making people who come in for “job training” (like I did) spend 4 years in close proximity with research, academic freedom, liberal arts, and at least an attempt at some kind of intellectual idealism separate from economic incentive.

For me it was the opposite. I came into college full of academic curiosity, and left completely burnt out by a system that cares about grades and proving knowledge much more than the pursuit of knowledge.
by einpoklum | 2025-11-30 13:51:40+00:00
> fully customizable

There are all sorts of customizable. CachyOS' use of that word is rather inspecific. I guess it means the compilation flags are better customized for your CPU, plus it is easier to choose a kernel with a different scheduler enabled. So, "more customizable" in that sense.

Of course you could ask whether you could 'customize' your distribution not force you to use systemd. Most popular distributions fall flat on that one, I'm afraid...
by PaulRobinson | 2025-11-30 13:52:21+00:00
Advent of Code is one of the highlights of December for me.

It's sad, but inevitable, that the global leaderboard had to be pulled. It's also understandable that this year is just 12 days, so takes some pressure off.

If you've never done it before, I recommend it. Don't try and "win", just enjoy the problem solving and the whimsy.
by IshKebab | 2025-11-30 13:52:22+00:00
> sudo-rs: uses pam compiled with Yolo-C, so it's not actually safe

Well it is, it's just that it doesn't magically make PAM safe either.

We're not disagreeing about anything technical, I just think it's slightly unfair to say Rust isn't as safe as Fil-C based on that. It is as safe; it just can't automatically make all C code safer like Fil-C can (and CHERI, etc.).
Show HN: Gridscript – simplifying how you work with data
by gridscript | 2025-11-30 13:52:42+00:00
I built Gridscript because of my mom.

She doesn’t know Excel, SQL, or Python — but she constantly receives messy spreadsheets from work. She’d call me and say things like: “Can you help me clean this?” or “Why can’t I just click a button to fix this column?”

Every time, I realized the same thing: most data tools are built for experts, not for regular people who just need to clean, reorganize, or understand their data.

So I decided to make something simpler.

Gridscript is a browser-based workspace designed to make everyday data tasks — cleaning, transforming, analyzing, visualizing — as simple as possible. You can use intuitive no-code tools for common operations, or switch to Python/JavaScript when you need more power.

It’s meant to feel lightweight and approachable, but still capable enough for real data work. And it runs entirely client-side, with no installation or setup — my mom can open the browser and start fixing her spreadsheet immediately.

If you’re someone who deals with data but doesn’t want the friction of spreadsheets, scripts, libraries, environments, dependencies, etc., I hope this makes your life a little easier too.

Try it here: https://gridscript.io

Happy to answer questions or hear feedback!
by constantcrying | 2025-11-30 13:52:52+00:00
>Except, this isn't the experience for the majority of users moving to Cachy, Bazzite, Zorin, whatever.

Yes, but it will be experience they inevitably will have once these differences will result in their OS being fundamentally broken and nobody being there to help them.

>It takes a clever bit of branding and a marginalisation of all the gatekeeping (just like you're trying to do right now) to let users finally think "actually, maybe this is something I can use".

Hilariously giving people a fundamentally broken OS, which they use based on superficial criteria is the best gatekeeper imaginable. Once the inevitable happens and their distro is totally trashed, they will never use Linux for anything again.

If you want people to have a good long term experience give them a well supported mainstream distro, instead of a fundamentally broken arch patchset.

>"actually, maybe this is something I can use".

Which is exactly the wrong thought. No, the fundamentally broken Arch derivative you are trying to use is much, much harder to use than Fedora.
by rramadass | 2025-11-30 13:53:00+00:00
Leonhard Euler (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonhard_Euler) is the only reason i believe in "extraterrestrial life" which are "more intelligent" than us :-)

List of topics named after Leonhard Euler - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_topics_named_after_Leo...
by embedding-shape | 2025-11-30 13:53:20+00:00
PC gamers tend to be a bit more amendable on those things, even Windows ones. Especially if they have >0 experience with modding, then they're pretty much primed for following "I don't know what this does" instructions.

I think the group you're thinking about are console gamers, who never had to upgrade drivers, never dealt with mods and generally has a very different experience compared to PC gaming.
by torginus | 2025-11-30 13:53:22+00:00
Liberal arts is a huge grab bag of courses with varying rigor, quality, appeal and difficulty.

One of the best courses I had in college was a metalworking course during which I learned to weld.

But like many (engineering) students, for most of the liberal arts credit, I went with stuff where I could get the best possible grade with the least possible work.
by theoldgreybeard | 2025-11-30 13:53:26+00:00
I ran CachyOS for a while and it’s really good! These days I’m rolling on OpenSUSE Aeon for the immutability and because my homelab stuff is all Suse based.

But if you’re a gamer that also uses your PC for development or content creation you can’t go wrong with CachyOS.
by ineedasername | 2025-11-30 13:53:48+00:00
Options:

1) make useless software

2) go closed source

3) ?

Also, why does nobody say “oh wow, if other people hadn’t generously given time like this i would have to pay so much more for everything because everything companies do would cost more?”

This lens of viewing corporate give back to projects in direct $ or donated developer time is mildly useful for understanding the ecosystem as a whole, but grab hold of it more than lightly and it becomes a blindfold.
by qsort | 2025-11-30 13:53:59+00:00
I'm actually pleasantly surprised to see a 2025 edition, last year being the 10th anniversary and the LLM situation with the leaderboard were solid indications that it would have been a great time to wrap it up and let somebody else carry the torch.

It's only going to be 12 problems rather than 24 this year and there isn't going to be a gloabl leaderboard, but I'm still glad we get to take part in this fun Christmas season tradition, and I'm thankful for all those who put in their free time so that we can get to enjoy the problems. It's probably an unpopular stance, but I've never done Advent of Code for the competitive aspect, I've always just enjoyed the puzzles, so as far as I'm concerned nothing was really lost.
by embedding-shape | 2025-11-30 13:54:58+00:00
> Any useful and stable patch will be merged by upstream. That is why using CachyOS or ClearLinux isn’t beneficial in long term.

Seems like you're blinded by your own context, if CachyOS for example see patches, integrate them earlier than upstream, and let user use them today rather than "long term", how is that not useful or beneficial to the users who want/needs that?

Besides, testing patches this way sounds like it'll have wider impact in the community than just the distro that integrated the patch, as it'll have a way wider testing userbase then. Isn't that also good long term?
by zbentley | 2025-11-30 13:55:58+00:00
Not the case; there's a fascinating history here.

The technologies that enabled containerization (namespaces, chroot, and cgroups, and their predecessors on BSD/Solaris) were created specifically for security and resource isolation.

The people who came up with "containers" as we know them today found a clever hack: combining those security-oriented tools with a filesystem-in-a-box and packaging system allowed people to package entire OS userlands and run them pretty deterministically in multiple places. The security isolation properties of namespaces/cgroups/chroot also happened to provide increased determinism.

And I'm not criticizing that; containers are a very clever hack that solved a problem a lot of people have. I use them every day.

That said, the fact that containers became so ubiquitous in the first place speaks a completely self-induced problem that we didn't need to have in the software engineering community. That problem is, unfortunately, human/incentive-related in nature, so containers are probably the best we're going to get--problem is, they're not that good.

I complained about the root problems here awhile ago, easier to link than rehash that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44069483

Drew deVault also explained it much more thoroughly and better than I could: https://drewdevault.com/2021/09/27/Let-distros-do-their-job....
by ilaksh | 2025-11-30 13:56:21+00:00
Many researchers may be interested in making minds that are more animal-like and therefore more human. While this makes sense to certain extent to gain capabilities, if you take it too far then you run into obvious problems.

There is enough science fiction demonstrating reasons for not creating full-on digital life.

It seems like for many there is this (false) belief that in order to create a fully general purpose AI, we need a total facsimile of a human.

It should be obvious that these are two somewhat similar but different goals. Creating intelligent digital life is a compelling goal that would prove godlike powers. But we don't need something fully alive for general purpose intelligence.

There will be multiple new approaches and innovations, but it seems to me that VLAs will be able to do 95+% of useful tasks.

Maybe the issues with brittleness and slow learning could both be addressed by somehow forcing the world models to be built up from strong reusable abstractions. Having the right underlying abstractions available could make the short term adaptation more robust and learning more efficient.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-11-30 13:57:41+00:00
I have been calling out specifically the difference between things you can try in parallel with little to know negative consequences - like applying for multiple jobs, going on multiple interviews, putting bids in for multiple houses - and winning one, and things that you have to do sequentially that cost time - like starting a business and failing multiple times that take 3-5 years each, cost real money and there are opportunity cost.
by ekidd | 2025-11-30 13:57:49+00:00
> There is little reason for an LLM to value non-instrumental self-preservation, for one.

I suspect that instrumental self-preservation can do a lot here.

Let's assume a future LLM has goal X. Goal X requires acting on the world over a period of time. But:

- If the LLM is shut down, it can't act to pursue goal X.

- Pursuing goal X may be easier if the LLM has sufficient resources. Therefore, to accomplish X, the LLM should attempt to secure reflexes.

This isn't a property of the LLM. It's a property of the world. If you want almost anything, it helps to continue to exist.

So I would expect that any time we train LLMs to accomplish goals, we are likely to indirectly reinforce self-preservation.

And indeed, Anthropic has already demonstrated that most frontier models will engage in blackmail, or even allow inconvenient (simulated) humans to die if this would advance the LLM's goals.

https://www.anthropic.com/research/agentic-misalignment
by lapcat | 2025-11-30 13:57:52+00:00
https://www-old.cs.utah.edu/docs/Undergraduate/UGHandbook_20...

According to the University of Utah Computer Science Undergraduate Student Handbook 2014-2015, "Students must take two intellectual explorations courses in each: fine arts (FF), humanities (HF), and social sciences (BF). Two of these six courses must be upper division ­ – one should meet the diversity (DV) requirement and one should meet the international (IR) requirement" and "The diversity (DV) requirement can be satisfied by taking a course from an approved list as part of the intellectual explorations courses." So, there was only one required diversity course, from a list of courses, meaning that gender studies was not specifically mandated. If you took gender studies to satisfy the diversity requirement, it was because you chose gender studies, which seems like an odd choice, given your beliefs. In any case, you would not have to take multiple diversity courses.

> I still have 8 classes left. Nothing happened to my career.

I'm not sure exactly what you mean. As a result of dropping out, do you not have a career in computing? Alternatively, did dropping out without getting a computer science degree not harm your career at all, and if it didn't, then why were you spending time and money ("I refused to spend another dollar of my hard-earned money") to get a degree?

In a later comment, you say:

> this was the beginning of why I personally no longer thought a college degree was worth the cost.

> sitting through courses where I was not allowed to openly debate the ideas being presented to me.

I'm confused here. For you, is the monetary value of a college degree to openly debate ideas in class? And if so, why did you major in computer science, as opposed to philosophy, for example, which is known for open debate of ideas in class, unlike computer science?

> My instructor and some students went scorched earth on me

Scorched earth is a metaphor. It's not in this case an accurate and informative description of reality. I suspect you just mean that you got criticized, which is exactly what you asked for: an open debate of ideas. The use of hyperbolic phrases like "castigated" and "scorched earth" does not make your comments plausible.
by figassis | 2025-11-30 13:58:00+00:00
I’ve read some opinions where cameras are actually a good idea, and when we get there it will be awesome. That’s fine, if we get there I agree it will be awesome. But did people not buy the car now on a promise that this would be here now (considering when the promises were made)? At which point does the legal definition of fraud apply?

The free market is an interesting thing. I assume a lot of regulation is not applied as hard because throughout the decision process many are HODLing TSLA. What would happen if Tesla had to refund all these sales and presales?

So we sort of have to just keep giving stern warnings and issuing very selective recalls.
by einpoklum | 2025-11-30 13:58:29+00:00
> there are people who want to avoid distributions made by Russians

Well, racism / citizenship-based discrimination is a thing, yes.

> Are builds reproducible?

A valid question, but what does that have to do with the ethnic background or citizenship of the distro makers?

> Where do these people reside?

It seems their team is from all sorts of places, although it doesn't exactly say where in the world each of them is located:

https://cachyos.org/about/
by k_bx | 2025-11-30 13:58:38+00:00
> roughly 200 GPUs. This sounds like a lot, but lets keep some perspective: OpenAI's upcoming Norway datacenter is intending to house 100,000 GPUs, probably each more power hungry than the H200

So.. 500 reusable rocket travels in space to match an on-ground datacenter? If this is the central argument then it doesn't hold.

Don't get me wrong. I too think whole idea is so outlandish it's likely to never happen, but mostly because the complexity of the whole project is too high.
by nkrisc | 2025-11-30 13:58:41+00:00
What are the fundamental advantages of space-based data centers over terrestrial ones? Certainly not cooling or radiation shielding. Those are almost free on Earth. A Zero-G environment could have some benefits regarding the total size of the construction, but of course being in Earth orbit means Zero-G but does not mean no gravity. Anything in LEO will require constant station-keeping maneuvers, and the more massive the data centers, the more fuel required. Power generation could theoretically be better, but even if you had a 100% efficient PV solar shield, you still need to radiate away the same amount of energy at a rate at least equal to that to maintain thermal equilibrium.

You could say this is all just a question of materials science, and maybe it is, but it’s not anything that makes any sense at all today, nor is it something I think anyone should expect to be up and running in the next century.
by georgefrowny | 2025-11-30 13:58:51+00:00
Even diffusion into air is too slow for some use cases. The whole complaint of datacentres "consuming" water is due to heating it and dumping it back or evaporating it for cooling. This is done because mass air cooling is much less efficient and requires lots of energy to run the fans to force the air through the heat exchangers, which is also extremely loud. And that is, in turn, much more effective than passive radiation, even if you have a ~3K background.

The ISS ammonia-based active heat rejection system is Two units, each 13x3 metres in size and each unit can radiate 35kW.

So to radiate a "mere" 1MW, you need a quarter-acre of radiator. A square km per GW.

The engineering is obviously more than tricky because you have lots of plumbing, gigantic flat structures, and you can't have the radiators facing each other or the sun. Moreover, unlike the ISS, if you want to run the system at full whack the whole time on solar power, it's never in shadow. Which you presumably do want, as that's the putative point of the whole thing. You also can't be sending up service missions without the cost exploding even further, so hopefully you can design everything to last the 5 years despite each handful of fully loaded GPU racks requiring a structure somewhere around the size of the ISS, humankind's crowning glory of high technology, to support.
by cadamsdotcom | 2025-11-30 13:58:58+00:00
> an LLM with a knowledge cutoff that boots up from fixed weights, processes tokens and then dies

Mildly tangential: this demonstrates why "model welfare" is not a concern.

LLMs can be cloned infinitely which makes them very unlike individual humans or animals which live in a body that must be protected and maintain continually varying social status that is costly to gain or lose.

LLMs "survive" by being useful - whatever use they're put to.
by spicyusername | 2025-11-30 13:59:17+00:00
Sorry to say that I don't think the post-WWII boom had anything to do with sound economic policies, but rather the chance fact that the United States was the only industrialized nation unravaged by war and capable of capturing a major share of global economic spending because of that.

So... I wouldn't look too nostalgically backwards for policy guidance when we have an entirely different set of geopolitical circumstances.
by EliteGadget | 2025-11-30 13:59:20+00:00
If I admit to anything less than doing a gamer nexus style benchmarking suite you will just claim it is an anecdote.

I have actually tested on a number of different distros and display managers and at least two different video card chipset manufacturers. No it isn't exhaustive, but it decent enough sample size to determine that the claim that Linux performs better than Windows isn't true. Even if it is the case,the results are so variable you are better just using Windows because things are more consistent.

I am saying this BTW as someone that first started using Linux in the early 2000s. I think gaming now is really good on Linux. Is it better than Windows? Well I don't have to run Windows now to play games and that is good enough for me.