MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mustafa0x | 2025-12-03 21:41:23+00:00
I'm noticing very high latencies accessing my sites. Nonproxied they work fine. Also, friends in the MENA region says the sites are fast.

AI wrote a bash script to compare accessing a site directly (via ip) vs proxied https://gist.github.com/mustafa0x/f11eb7f694a1798af89818888f...

=== Differences (origin - DNS) in seconds === dns: -0.001840 connect: 0.176602 tls: 0.395706 TTFB: -57.478392 total: -56.314747

CF added 1 minute
by adrianmonk | 2025-12-03 21:41:44+00:00
I wish Mini-TOSLINK[1] had been more successful. It's allows you to put an optical and electrical audio output on the same 3.5mm connector (i.e. headphone port), which is helpful for saving space on crowded panels.

The trick is that your 3.5mm connector only needs to connect on the sides, so the end of the jack can be open for light to be transmitted.

This was seen pretty frequently on laptops for a while, but I think two things doomed it. One, most people just don't use optical. Two, there's nothing to advertise its existence. If you do have one of these ports, you probably don't even know you could plug an optical connector in there.

---

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOSLINK#Mini-TOSLINK
by simonask | 2025-12-03 21:41:55+00:00
The beautiful thing about the “async” abstraction is that it doesn’t actually tie you to an event loop at all. Nothing about it implies that somebody is calling `epoll_wait` or similar anywhere in the stack.

It’s just a compiler feature that turns functions into state machines. It’s totally valid to have an async runtime that moves a task to a thread and blocks whenever it does I/O.

I do agree that async without memory safety and thread safety is a nightmare (just like all state machines are under those circumstances). Thankfully, we have languages now that all but completely solve those issues.
by dontlaugh | 2025-12-03 21:42:01+00:00
No, not at all. But by putting every asset a level (for example) needs in the same file, you can pretty much guarantee you can read it all sequentially without additional seeks.

That does force you to duplicate some assets a lot. It's also more important the slower your seeks are. This technique is perfect for disc media, since it has a fixed physical size (so wasting space on it is irrelevant) and slow seeks.
by jmsgwd | 2025-12-03 21:42:05+00:00
Your first question is discussed in the book The Recursive Universe by William Poundstone (1984).

One of the chapters asks "what is life?". It considers (and rejects) various options, and finally settles upon a definition based on Von Neumann-style self-replicating machines using blueprints and universal constructors, and explains why this is the most (only?) meaningful definition of life.

Later, it talks about how one would go about creating such a machine in Conway's Game of Life. When the book was written in 1984, no one had actually created one (they need to be very large, and computers weren't really powerful enough then). But in 2010 Andrew J. Wade created Gemini, the first successful self-replicating machine in GoL, which I believe meets the criteria - and hence is "alive" according to that definition (but only in the sense that, say, a simple bacteria is alive). And I think it works somewhat like how it was sketched out in the book.

Another chapter estimated how big (and how densely populated) a randomly-initialized hypothetical GoL universe would need to be in order for "life" (as defined earlier) to appear by chance. I don't recall the details - but the answer was mind-boggling big, and also very sparsely populated.

All that only gives you life though, not intelligence. But life (by this definition) has the potential to evolve through a process of natural selection to achieve higher levels of complexity and eventually intelligence, at least in theory.
by valyala | 2025-12-03 21:42:43+00:00
What is the purpose of MinIO, Seaweedfs and similar object storage systems? They lack durability guarantees provided by S3 and GCS. They lack "infinite" storage promise contrary to S3 and GCS. They lack "infinite" bandwidth unlike S3 and GCS. They are more expensive than other storage options, unlike S3 and GCS.
by x0x0 | 2025-12-03 21:43:16+00:00
secular is the opposite of cyclical in business. ie a long-term trend.

And same. Though blowing significant fractions of a trillion dollars into (imo) investments that are never gonna return anything near to making that a good plan (ex a government bailout) will inevitably redirect huge portions of stuff we care about. The world's gdp is about 90T iirc; that is basically taking 1/90th of the stuff the world does in a year and putting it into ai.
by deathanatos | 2025-12-03 21:43:17+00:00
Geez, where to start.

I mean, … the outages are a big part of it. But those outages also extending to taking out my own hardware (e.g., through bugs like the above consuming resources on my own compute) is just double the pain.

But as a product, it's just bad? Riddled with bugs? In no particular order:

* Artifact APIs will return garbage results during a run. Note that the APIs are separate from the GHA actions for interacting with artifacts, and the latter uses undocumented APIs, presumably b/c the documented APIs are buggy AF.

* needs.… will just return junk data, if you typo.

* Builds of actions are not cached, making them rather slow. Many GH official actions hack around this by pointing the tag/branch (e.g., @v4) at a pre-built artifact.

* The pricing is high, compared to other offerings.

* The interface is just FUBAR: e.g., stdin is a pipe, which will wreak havoc on some commands that change their behavior when piped to. stdout & stderr are pipes, which although GHA ostensibly supports colored output, this basically renders it useless.

* Jobs, steps, actions are conceptual mud. There's a few ideas, like "execute this thing" in there, but its all jumbled up/duplicated. Container settings are configured per-job, so if you want to run some steps in one container, and some in another, but in the same job, you're just going to be left out to dry.

* Secrets are hard to manage, and even harder to not leak.

* The expression language has all sorts of corners, like coerced types and functions with parse-time side-effects!.

That's just a few of the bugs I've encountered.
by xanthor | 2025-12-03 21:43:20+00:00
I do about what?

I haven’t actually used harsh language with anyone so I’m not sure what your point is. I have been on HN long enough to know that expressions of strong negative emotion are punished here. That says absolutely nothing about the effectiveness of different methods of influence within an organization.

I think if people are rallying to defend GitHub due to some language that ruffled their feathers and not objective technical merit then they have completely lost the plot as engineers.

As far as Andrew’s goals, I think he has been pretty successful within the framework of the attention economy.
by ReallyOldLurker | 2025-12-03 21:43:29+00:00
OK, here you go:

US Dept of Homeland Defence: https://www.propublica.org/article/microsoft-solarwinds-cybe...

US Congressman Ron Wyden to FTC: https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/09/senator-blasts-micr...
by xboxnolifes | 2025-12-03 21:43:32+00:00
My state was one of the slowest to adopt REAL ID. Last time I had my driver's license renewed, none of the available information made it seem like I could get an REAL ID. Next time I renew ill likely get a REAL ID compliant license, but mine has not been compliant since airports required REAL ID starting 3(?) years ago.
by tombert | 2025-12-03 21:43:44+00:00
I think it appeals to the same itch that languages like Brainfuck scratch.

There's something exceedingly interesting about how you can model complexity with something extremely simple. Brainfuck is fun because it forces you to think extremely low level, because ultimately it is basically just a raw implementation of a Turing machine. I wouldn't want to write a big program in it, but it is fun to think about how you might express a complicated algorithm with it.

Similarly with CGOL, it is really interesting to see how far you can stretch really simple rules into something really complex.

I've written CGOL dozens of times, it's a common project that I do to "break in" a language I've learned, since it's not completely trivial but it's simple enough to not be frustrating, and I completely understand why math/computability-theory folks find it something to dedicate brain power to.
by kentm | 2025-12-03 21:43:49+00:00
Personally, EMR has never shaken off the "scrappy" feeling (sometimes it feels OK if you're using Spark), and it feels even more neglected recently as they seem to want you on AWS Glue or Athena. LakeFormation is... a thing that I'm sure is good in theory if you're using only managed services, but in practice is like taking a quick jaunt on the Event Horizon.

Glue Catalog has some annoying assumptions baked in.

Frankly the entire analytics space on AWS feels like a huge mess of competing teams and products instead of a uniform vision.
by mitchellh | 2025-12-03 21:43:58+00:00
My intention is that the project isn't wholly dependent on me, so that I can move on (one day) and refocus my efforts elsewhere. I think no matter who the donor is, any charity dependent on the welfare of a single large whale is not a healthy organization. I intend to resolve this over time.

That all being said, everyone should give where they want, and if you don't want to give to a terminal emulator non-profit project, then don't! Don't let anyone bully you (me, the person I'm responding to, or anyone else) into what you should and shouldn't charitably support. Enjoy.

(Also, I don't want to repeat this everywhere but I paid taxes and I lost a comma, so no need to worry about that anymore! Everyone please pull out your most microscopic violins! )
by martin-t | 2025-12-03 21:43:58+00:00
The underlying issues are:

1) People don't really vote based on logic and sound reasoning. They vote based on what sounds right to them. If they're unhappy with something, they vote for somebody who also claims to be unhappy about it, regardless if he has any actual solutions.

2) Even for the minority who wants to vote based on sound principles, it's very hard to push information back to them. If the politician changes his mind, he has to explain it to his voters. Are there really platforms which allow in-depth conversations in political debates?

Every university classroom has a whiteboard and a projector. Because you need to draw graphs, diagrams, etc. You need to explain the general structure and then focus on the details without losing track of the whole.

Is there a single country where politicians use either when talking to each other or voters?
by ModernMech | 2025-12-03 21:44:08+00:00
> If you haven’t had a mind blown moment with AI yet...

Results are stochastic. Some people the first time they use it will get the best possible results by chance. They will attribute their good outcome to their skill in using the thing. Others will try it and will get the worst possible response, and they will attribute their bad outcome to the machine being terrible. Either way, whether it's amazing or terrible is kind of an illusion. It's both.
by alwa | 2025-12-03 21:44:29+00:00
I tend to agree: I don’t understand what the “one-off app” is trying to achieve. In the example of the rental apartment—the user specified the parameters in the query. Just apply them, right?

I offer this in the spirit of feeling like I’m missing something, not out of negativity—I just genuinely don't understand the proposition.

What’s the advantage of trying to extract and normalize features from already-messy data sources, then provide controls that duplicate the query, rather than just applying the query and returning the results? Isn’t the user turning to a natural-language LLM specifically to avoid operating idiosyncratic UI controls?

For that matter, it takes time to learn to use an interface effectively. To understand how what it says it’s doing connects to what it’s actually doing. I know I can always trust McMaster Carr’s filter controls, and I know I can never trust Amazon’s wacky random ones.

It seems to me that it’s much harder to pick the right controls and make them work correctly than it is to throw some controls in an interface. Maybe that’s what I’m missing: that just wiring in controls in the first place is the hard part for most people who don’t work in this space.

Is the idea here that I’d need to learn a brand new interface, and figure out whether I can trust it, with every query?
by palmotea | 2025-12-03 21:44:33+00:00
> We hear AI advocates say that their workflow is amazing, but we watch videos of their workflow, and it doesn't look that great. We hear AI advocates say "the next release is about to change everything!", but this knowledge isn't actionable or even accurate.

There's a lot of disconnected-from-reality hustling (a.k.a lying) going on. For instance, that's practically Elon Musk's entire job, when he's actually doing it. A lot of people see those examples, think it's normal, and emulate it. There are a lot of unearned superlatives getting thrown around automatically to describe tech.
by input_sh | 2025-12-03 21:44:39+00:00
PageRank, everything before PageRank was more like yellow pages than a search engine as we know it today. Google also had a patent on it, so it's not like other people could simply copy it.

Google was also way more minimal (and therefore faster on slow connections) and it raised enough money to operate without ads for years (while its competitors were filled with them).

Not really comparable to today, when you have 3-4 products which are pretty much identical, all operating under a huge loss.
by ruralfam | 2025-12-03 21:44:49+00:00
Welp Gemini got me. Using G3 to improve what I write, generate specific images, and use NotebookLM to dive into some research materials. Tried to do a bit each day with my free credits, but hit the limit too often. G2.5 was not nearly as useful. So I upgraded my baselevel Google workspace plan. Recently spoke to someone who is also using G3 a lot with good results. YMMV re: G3, but Google hooked me, and now I pay more. However I think it is worth it for what I do. G3 is my helpful, nerdy work mate. I never plan to use agenic AI. Not using ChatGPT much if any at all anymore. Sorry Sam.
by tomasphan | 2025-12-03 21:45:50+00:00
There is a couple reasons why Jensen won't take off the gaming leather jacket just yet:

1. Gaming cards are their R&D pipeline for data center cards. Lots of innovation came from gaming cards.

2. Its a market defense to keep other players down and keep them from growing their way into data centers.

3. Its profitable (probably the main reason but boring)

4. Hedge against data center volatility (10 key customers vs millions)

5. Antitrust defense (which they used when they tried to buy ARM)
by shadowgovt | 2025-12-03 21:46:04+00:00
In general, it's a losing fight to try and dictate how other people use the English language.

Signed, someone who remembers when we tried to convince the media that "hackers" were the ones who built novel stuff and innocently probed networks to understand them and the people who breached systems maliciously or for personal gain should be called "crackers." And someone who watched the GNU people be very upset for decades about linux not being called "GNU/Linux."
by WreckVenom | 2025-12-03 21:46:18+00:00
> I used to do a little bit of level building for IdTech3 games back in the day but it's been 20 years. I'm not totally ignorant of what's involved, just mostly ignorant. I really want to know though, what is all that data!? Textures?

Mostly. I have a HD texture pack for Quake 1 that weighs in about 15GB on my NAS. That project is from 2011-ish.

> Robocop: Rogue City takes something like 8gb.

Did you mean 38GB? According to Steam the space required for Robocop Rogue City is ~38GB.
by dxdm | 2025-12-03 21:46:21+00:00
Of course there is a difference between anger and love. Either one can be present without the other, and that they can sometimes mix and play off each other does not change that they are different.

You are playing around with words to pretend they are the same. That's very poetic and dramatic, but I hope you realize that love is not the same as anger, and that neither truly requires the other.

If done right, love can eat anger. If done wrong, anger will eat love, and much more. These outcomes are not the same. That's were the game gets serious, and that's why I'm being such an ass about what you wrote.
by ekrapivin | 2025-12-03 21:46:25+00:00
https://inSolitaire.com

I've spent several years (since Covid) developing an ad-free website with 50+ solitaire/puzzle games.

I've gotten some feedback from HN already and now trying to fix things (rewriting the engine for 4th time). Hoping to add some more hundred games soon!

I'm also wondering what it is missing – any particular game or mode (e.g. daily games or tournaments)?
by anonymous908213 | 2025-12-03 21:46:25+00:00
> Do you think the original comment posted by quapster was "slop" equivalent to a copy-paste spam bot?

Yes: the original comment is unequivocally slop that genuinely gives me a headache to read.

It's not just "using any punctuation rarer than a period": it's the overuse and misuse of punctuation that serves as a tell.

Humans don't needlessly use a colon in every single sentence they write: abusing punctuation like this is actually really fucking irritating.

Of course, it goes beyond the punctuation: there is zero substance to the actual output, either.

> What's wild is that nothing here is exotic: subdomain enumeration, unauthenticated API, over-privileged token, minified JS leaking internals.

> Least privilege, token scoping, and proper isolation are friction in the sales process, so they get bolted on later, if at all.

This stupid pattern of LLMs listing off jargon like they're buzzwords does not add to the conversation. Perhaps the usage of jargon lulls people into a false sense of believing that what is being said is deeply meaningful and intelligent. It is not. It is rot for your brain.
by dwa3592 | 2025-12-03 21:46:30+00:00
I asked about twinning extra spicy tea bc i had just made it for me: https://www.phind.com/search/twinnings-extra-spicy-tea-bd067...

and after about 90 seconds the mini app was created which had a few sliders for cardamom, cinnamon, ginger which was really confusing, then it showed a bunch of other stuff which was also completely useless. I did the same search on Google ( https://tinyurl.com/47sh4eah ) and did not dislike the answer bc i know it didn't burn 1000s of tokens for that query. Sorry for being a bit harsh but I have never seen wastage of resources as bad as this.
by adamzwasserman | 2025-12-03 21:46:36+00:00
I wonder what it was you were taught growing up.

My grandfather was a through-and-through Communist - a Red Russian who came to the US after escaping a Nazi firing squad and living in the forest for months. Once in the US, he organized labor, and got blackballed by McCarthy. And yet what he taught me, for as long as I can remember, was that life was not fair and I had no business expecting it to be.

He taught me that if I failed, it was no one's fault but my own. He taught me to live by my wits - how to survive outdoors in winter, how to shoot, how to fix machines, how to work wood. He raised me to survive a collapse of civilization because he had lived through one.

For him, self-reliance wasn't opposed to his politics. It was forged by them. I'm not sure what to make of your post, but I wanted to offer a different picture of what a Communist might teach.
by spamizbad | 2025-12-03 21:46:49+00:00
> To me, any software engineer who tries an LLM, shrugs and says “huh, that’s interesting” and then “gets back to work” is completely failing at their actual job,

I don't understand why people seem so impatient about AI adoption.

AI is the future, but many AI products aren't fully mature yet. That lack of maturity is probably what is dampening the adoption curve. To unseat incumbent tools and practices you either need to do so seamlessly OR be 5-10x better (Only true for a subset of tasks). In areas where either of these cases apply, you'll see some really impressive AI adoption. In areas where AI's value requires more effort, you'll see far less adoption. This seems perfectly natural to me and isn't some conspiracy - AI needs to be a better product and good products take time.
by kube-system | 2025-12-03 21:47:05+00:00
The problem occurs any time someone need an ID to do something they need to do, and are unable to get one. It is better with multiple authorities because people have more options for obtaining that prerequisite valid ID.

There are many instances throughout history of ID requirements being weaponized to suppress minority groups, from Apartheid Pass Laws, Jim Crow, or recent US suppression of minority, young, or transgender voters.

Of course, these things certainly aren't fixed by simply having more options to get a valid ID, but they are mitigated to some degree.
by venturecruelty | 2025-12-03 21:47:19+00:00
Yes, because they're more likely to understand that the computer isn't this magical black box, and that just because we've made ELIZA marginally better, doesn't mean it's actually good. Anecdata, but the people I've seen be dazzled by AI the most are people with little to no programming experience. They're also the ones most likely to look on computer experts with disdain.
by tokioyoyo | 2025-12-03 21:47:28+00:00
It’s one of those “people hate noticing AI-generated stuff, but everyone and their mom is using ChatGPT to make their works easier”. There are a lot of vocal boosters and vocal anti-boosters, but the general population is using it in a Google fashion and move on. Not everyone is thinking about AI-apocalypse every day.

Personally, I’m in-between the opinions. I hate when I’m consuming AI-generated stuff, but can see the use for myself for work or asking bunch of not-so-important questions to get general idea of stuff.
by cluckindan | 2025-12-03 21:47:45+00:00
SSR with CSR is a worst-of-both-worlds approach. It leads to brittle ”isomorphic” behaviors when the same code needs to handle both SSR and CSR, inevitable client-side ”hydration” mismatches and various other issues. The same code needs to fetch eagerly but minimally, but also use and update the server-provided data on the client-side.

Ultimately that so-called ”isomorphism” causes more numerous and difficult problems than it solves.
by efficax | 2025-12-03 21:49:13+00:00
Google had PageRank, which gave them much better quality results (and they got users to stick with them by offering lots of free services (like gmail) that were better quality than existing paid services). The difference was night and day compared to the best other search engines at the time (WebCrawler was my goto, then sometimes AltaVista). The quality difference between "foundation" models is nil. Even the huge models they run in datacenters are hardly better than local models you can run on a machine 64gb+ ram (though faster of course). As Google grew it got better and better at giving you good results and fighting spam, while other search engines drowned in spam and were completely ruined by SEO.
by layer8 | 2025-12-03 21:49:16+00:00
> So, no. I don't think "engineers don't try because they think they can't." I think engineers KNOW they CAN and resent being asked to look pretty and do nothing of value.

I understood “they think they can’t” to refer to the engineers thinking that management won’t allow them to, not to a lack of confidence in their own abilities.
by stagas | 2025-12-03 21:49:17+00:00
Quantization and repetition are what some genres depend on. It won't be the right instrument for a Rock ballad, but for a Techno track you need this kind of "everything being quantized". That said, in loopmaster you can add swing and noise to the note offsets to humanize a sequence, a lot is left to the imagination and ability of the creator.