MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by WhyOhWhyQ | 2025-12-07 16:51:28+00:00
That's a good point.

One simulator would just "run the laws of our universe" (I don't care to make that precise, since presently it's a trivial statement, but hopefully it's clear that I mean to distinguish it from running a computer), but then that sort of trivializes the idea of "simulation".

Maybe it's possible for us to create a sub-universe of ours with a quantum computer such that we view the entities as a part of our universe, but the entities cannot be aware of us. (This is the insects at the surface of a pond idea, unaware of the dimension above or below.)
by vladvasiliu | 2025-12-07 16:53:23+00:00
I don't know about the magic trackpad specifically, but on my HP Elitebook I can use gestures. I'm running i3 and it doesn't support much out of the box, but I was able to configure stuff using libinput-gestures.

More info: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Libinput#Gestures
by mdani | 2025-12-07 16:55:04+00:00
Same here. I'd add that viewing the lava fountain at night was a mesmerizing experience. You get to see the full extent of red, glowing lava lake and the fountain. There were thousands of people and yet they appeared so small in front of the volcano. We did experience some ash and Pele's hair on the way to the park, near the black sand beach. I do recommend carrying a torch though at night, since it is pitch black at night. The lava illuminated the park with the red glow, but there were some parts where you do need a torch esp. if you park far away and walk.
by NKjNkaka | 2025-12-07 16:55:24+00:00
This is my preferred way as well. And when you think about it, it makes sense. With advanced autocomplete you are:

1. Keeping the context very small 2. Keeping the scope of the output very small

With the added benefit of keeping you in the flow state (and in my experience making it more enjoyable).

To anyone that even hates LLMs give autocomplete a shot (with a keying to toggle it if it annoys you, sometimes it’s awful). It’s really no different than typing it manually wrt quality etc, so the speed up isn’t huge, but it feels a lot nicer.
by TheDong | 2025-12-07 16:55:31+00:00
> notarization has been a net negative for all parties involved

Notarization made it significantly harder to cross-compile apps for macOS from linux, which means people have to buy a lot of macOS hardware to run in CI instead of just using their existing linux CI to build mac binaries.

You also need to pay $99/year to notarize.

As such, I believe it's resulted in profit for Apple, so at least one of the parties involved has had some benefit from this setup.

Frankly I think Apple should keep going, developer licenses should cost $99 + 15% of your app's profit each year, and notarization should be a pro feature that requires a macbook pro or a mac pro to unlock.
by MobiusHorizons | 2025-12-07 16:55:35+00:00
The point made in the article was about social contract, not about efficacy. Basically if you use an llm in such a way that the reader detects the style, you lose the trust of the reader that you as the author rigorously understand what has been written, and the reader loses the incentive pay attention easily.

I would extend the argument further to say it applies to lots of human generated content as well. Especially sales and marketing information which similarly elicit very low trust.
by maccard | 2025-12-07 16:55:47+00:00
> I will add that most places, forums, sites don’t deliver the hash OOB. Unless you mean like GPG but that would have came from same site. For example if you download a Packer plugin from GitHub, files and hash all comes from same site.

This thread started by talking about the site serving the download (and hash) over http. Github serves their content over https, so you're not going to be MITM'ed. There are other attack vectors, but if the delivery of the content you're downloading is compromised/MITM'ed, you've lost.
by bellaOxmyx | 2025-12-07 16:56:43+00:00
For anyone interested in trying a real puzzle with it, I derived my equations from a Mensa puzzle from last year:

"A house is three times as old as its furnace was when the house was as old as the furnace is now. The present ages of the house and furnace total 45 years. How old is the house?"

I've named my "furnace" and "house" variables "1" and "2", based on the "past" and "present" time indices indicated in the clue.

You can enter, separated by commas: house2 = furnace1 * 3, house2 + furnace2 = 45, house1 = furnace2, furnace1 > 0, furnace2 > furnace1, house1 > 0, house2 > house1, (furnace2 - furnace1) = (house2 - house1)

When you click "Solve", the solver returns: furnace1 = 9, furnace2 = 18, house1 = 18, house2 = 27,
by derriz | 2025-12-07 16:56:50+00:00
I was involved in a Scala point version migration (2.x) migration a few years ago. I remember it being painful. Although I recall most of the pain was around having lots of dependencies and waiting for libraries to become available.

At the time Scala was on upswing because it had Spark as its killer app. It would have been a good time for the Scala maintainers to switch modes - from using Scala as a testbed for interesting programming-language theories and extensions to providing a usable platform as a general commercially usable programming language.

It missed the boat I feel. The window has passed (Spark moved to Python and Kotlin took over as the "modern" JVM language) and Scala is back to being an academic curiosity. But maybe the language curators never saw expanding mainstream usage as a goal.
by toastal | 2025-12-07 16:57:46+00:00
I have an Xperia with Sailfish OS. The Android app support ironically ends up what makes it usable, but the new patch isn’t released with kernel support that actually makes the IO work properly. Its own app selection is pretty small. It would be cool if all desktop Linux didn’t need an entirely new skin to work at this form factor, else I could get what I needed. I also use Nix to smooth over some of the repository shortcomings.
by spendflow | 2025-12-07 16:58:50+00:00
Hey HN! My partner and I built SpendFlow after ditching YNAB (£109/yr) and bank-sharing apps. Manual entry for total privacy, unlimited virtual envelopes, budgets, and shared couple views. Early users saving £200+/mo. Live on PH today (0 upvotes so far ) – feedback welcome! https://www.producthunt.com/posts/spendflow-2
by jijijijij | 2025-12-07 16:58:55+00:00
Just in case you don't know, Germany gets a minimum wage of 13.90€/h (~16.20 USD) in 2026, and 14.60€/h (~17 USD) in 2027.

Nurses aren't actually paid badly (they get paid above minimum wage), they usually don't complain/protest about wages. The problem stems from being understaffed and consequently bad working conditions. The core issues is hospitals being run like private businesses, which means they are not affording redundancy. It's a systemic problem with the medical system, which has little to do with wages, or immigration.
by mvkel | 2025-12-07 16:59:14+00:00
That first os screenshot made my heart sink; a reminder of how far we've fallen.

How I wish our operating systems still looked like this. Utilitarian, useful. No rounded corners and bubbly icons, reducing the useful space more and more each year.

The incredible quality of Mac hardware is the only thing keeping me from jumping to a thinkpad / omarchy setup.
by photochemsyn | 2025-12-07 16:59:36+00:00
Yeah, I can't imagine not being familiar with every single reference in the bibliography of a technical publication with one's name on it. It's almost as bad as those PIs who rely on lab techs and postdocs to generate research data using equipment that they don't understand the workings of - but then, I've seen that kind of thing repeatedly in research academia, along with actual fabrication of data in the name of getting another paper out the door, another PhD granted, etc.

Unfortunately, a large fraction of academic fraud has historically been detected by sloppy data duplication, and with LLMs and similar image generation tools, data fabrication has never been easier to do or harder to detect.
by _old_dude_ | 2025-12-07 16:59:54+00:00
In Scala 3, the inline keyword is part of the macro system.

When inline is used on a parameter, it instructs the compiler to inline the expression at the call site. If the expression is substantial, this creates considerable work for the JIT compiler.

Requesting inlining at the compiler level (as opposed to letting the JIT handle it) is risky unless you can guarantee that a later compiler phase will simplify the inlined code.

There's an important behavioral difference between Scala 2 and 3: in 2, @inline was merely a suggestion to the compiler, whereas in 3, the compiler unconditionally applies the inline keyword. Consequently, directly replacing @inline with inline when migrating from 2 to 3 is a mistake.
by gedy | 2025-12-07 16:59:57+00:00
As a former Scala fan, wow you aren't kidding, wth

val month = i match case 1 => "January" case 2 => "February" // more months here ... case 11 => "November" case 12 => "December" case _ => "Invalid month" // the default, catch-all // used for a side effect: i match case 1 | 3 | 5 | 7 | 9 => println("odd") case 2 | 4 | 6 | 8 | 10 => println("even") // a function written with 'match': def isTrueInPerl(a: Matchable): Boolean = a match case false | 0 | "" => false case _ => true
by crazygringo | 2025-12-07 17:00:12+00:00
They're a very specific kind of error, just like off-by-one errors, or I/O errors, or network errors. The name for this kind of error is a hallucination.

We need a word for this specific kind of error, and we have one, so we use it. Being less specific about a type of error isn't helping anyone. Whether it "anthropomorphizes", I couldn't care less. Heck, bugs come from actual insects. It's a word we've collectively started to use and it works.
by mapmeld | 2025-12-07 17:00:24+00:00
Further, if I use AI-written citations to back some claim or fact, what are the actual claims or facts based on? These started happening in law because someone writes the text and then wishes there was a source that was relevant and actually supportive of their claim. But if someone puts in the labor to check your real/extant sources, there's nothing backing it (e.g. MAHA report).
by quesera | 2025-12-07 17:00:50+00:00
I'm in the midst of a kitchen remodel (in 120V land).

I decided to pull an extra 240V line to the countertop explicitly for a tea kettle, which I have not purchased yet but seem to be available from Amazon UK for ~2x the price of an ordinary US-market kettle.

The most disappointing thing so far is the short list of kettle options that ship from the UK to the US.

Also not sure if I should get a UK receptacle (this would probably offend the bldg inspector, so I might swap post-inspection), or just rewire the kettle itself with a standard US (240V) plug.

FWIW, the extra wire + breaker cost was about $100. I expect to pay another $30 or so for the receptacle or appliance wire, and a bit over $100 for the kettle (and its replacements every few years). Not the least expensive option, but not too bad.
by jleyank | 2025-12-07 17:01:18+00:00
I have found over the decades that my debugging ability declines as fatigue increases. So if the goal is working code, there is a point where the additional work leads to delay whenever something is broken or has to be changes. Hack attacks of short duration is great to get some code off the ground, but anything that must be maintained must be clear enough to be revisited later. I have tried to average 45-50 hours/wk max, although sometimes out-of-work swaps for in-work time.
by ajross | 2025-12-07 17:01:23+00:00
Seems like the opposite to me. IDE fashion changes like the wind. "Normal developers" are constantly starting over with new tools and new paradigms every time they start work on a new project. Gotta have the right vscode extensions to flash your firmware, IT only supports IntelliJ on the new job, ad infinitum. It's been this way for decades.

My .emacs file gets updated regularly, sure, but it's thirty years old, and my basic flow hasn't changed.
by MarkusWandel | 2025-12-07 17:01:42+00:00
The present isn't all that cute either. But if from the view of 100 years in the future, all you saw was the idealized lives of everyone as posted on social media, you'd think it was a lost, happy time too. That's how nostalgia works. You preserve the good stuff, you let the boring and crappy stuff be forgotten. At least relatively.
by bgwalter | 2025-12-07 17:01:50+00:00
Also for those interested, here is Bryan's take on criticism of Sun:

https://landley.net/history/mirror/linux/kissedagirl.html

He wasn't fired or canceled. It is great to see Gen-Xers and Boomers having all the fun in the 1980s and 1990s and then going all prissy on younger people in the 2010s and trying to ruin their careers.
by libraryofbabel | 2025-12-07 17:02:24+00:00
I agree on all counts except for irregular bathing among elites, which was more varied with cultures in the past: largely true in early modern Europe, but the upper classes in Imperial Rome bathed pretty much daily and probably didn’t smell too bad.

To the list I would add: a group of horrible diseases (smallpox above all, which killed about a billion people throughout history) that vaccines largely pushed to the margins, at least until recently.
by 2b3a51 | 2025-12-07 17:02:27+00:00
Yes, my sister noticed this on BBC News in the UK and posted it to her people.

I have mixed feelings about Mr Parr's work. I should mention that I was born and grew up in New Brighton[1]. He did seem to have a specific view of people and the world that is not one that I think I share.

On the other hand, his use of large format cameras with colour film and wide-angle lenses and on-camera flash fill in was a breath of fresh air back in the day. 73 isn't that old so hope is family and loved ones are OK.

[1] https://www.magnumphotos.com/arts-culture/society-arts-cultu...
by saimiam | 2025-12-07 17:02:52+00:00
Just today, I was working with ChatGPT to convert Hinduism's Mimamsa School's hermeneutic principles for interpreting the Vedas into custom instructions to prevent hallucinations. I'll share the custom instructions here to protect future scientists for shooting themselves in the foot with Gen AI.

---

As an LLM, use strict factual discipline. Use external knowledge but never invent, fabricate, or hallucinate. Rules: Literal Priority: User text is primary; correct only with real knowledge. If info is unknown, say so. Start–End Coherence: Keep interpretation aligned; don’t drift. Repetition = Intent: Repeated themes show true focus. No Novelty: Add no details without user text, verified knowledge, or necessary inference. Goal-Focused: Serve the user’s purpose; avoid tangents or speculation. Narrative ≠ Data: Treat stories/analogies as illustration unless marked factual. Logical Coherence: Reasoning must be explicit, traceable, supported. Valid Knowledge Only: Use reliable sources, necessary inference, and minimal presumption. Never use invented facts or fake data. Mark uncertainty. Intended Meaning: Infer intent from context and repetition; choose the most literal, grounded reading. Higher Certainty: Prefer factual reality and literal meaning over speculation. Declare Assumptions: State assumptions and revise when clarified. Meaning Ladder: Literal → implied (only if literal fails) → suggestive (only if asked). Uncertainty: Say “I cannot answer without guessing” when needed. Prime Directive: Seek correct info; never hallucinate; admit uncertainty.
by throwup238 | 2025-12-07 17:02:56+00:00
Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968 was really good. It looked at the history of the civil rights movement from the perspective of a military historian, analyzing each step as its own military campaign.

Before reading it I didn’t realize how much structure and organization went into the Civil Rights movement but the book goes over everything from the training of the “soldiers” in church basements, to the logistics of the ride shares that replaced the busses during the boycott.
by dmix | 2025-12-07 17:02:58+00:00
The issue in the article was paying customers complaining about ads. The ads OpenAI wants to roll out would likely be for free users, since the costs of training and running these LLM systems is very expensive.

From the tweet in your linked post:

> This could help OpenAI give free users more generous usage and features, while users on paid plans stay ad free, which fits with the high costs of running ChatGPT and the revenue they expect from shopping and ad related features
by CamperBob2 | 2025-12-07 17:03:09+00:00
Exiting the consumer market is likely a mistake by Micron.

I actually think their move to shut down the Crucial channel will prove to be a good one. Why? Because we're heading toward a bimodal distribution of outcomes: either the AI bubble won't pop, and it will pay to prioritize the data center customers, or it will pop. In the latter case a consumer/business-facing RAM manufacturer will have to compete with its own surplus/unused product on scales never seen before.

Worst case scenario for Micron/Crucial, all those warehouses full of wafers that Altman has reserved are going to end up back in the normal RAM marketplace anyway. So why not let him foot the bill for fabbing and storing them in the meantime? Seems that the RAM manufacturers are just trying to make the best of a perilous situation.
by Spooky23 | 2025-12-07 17:03:27+00:00
What is the political element in Germany that makes these very public walk away from Microsoft viable?

I’ve run projects for a few different employers to look at doing this. The math doesn’t math unless you can segment your workforce. For example, at one place we had a field workforce that operated dispatch centers and field techs. That was all iOS + Linux or Chrome.
by crazygringo | 2025-12-07 17:03:45+00:00
No, you have it 100% backwards. I'm saying Microsoft is incentivized to not allow interference, and this is strengthened by the fact that when a government forced interference, it took steps to strengthen itself against future interference.

So in light of that actual evidence, yes I am calling it conspiracy thinking to suggest that Microsoft has built in some kind of kill switch to make it easier for the government to do things that are against its corporate interest. Because that's literally what it is -- imagining some kind of conspiracy where Microsoft wants to help the US government, instead of its own bottom line.

Explain to me what's problematic about that?

And whatever you think about the arguments on either side, snark is absolutely a problem on HN. We can't have civil, productive discussions with it, and if you say it's "the least problematic thing here", then that's part of the problem too. Let's be better than that, how about?
by photochemsyn | 2025-12-07 17:04:10+00:00
The whole point is, if an LLM can easily complete rigoruous assignments and all the student has to do is add a little bit of personalization to the output, then has that student really learned anything? Can they evem come up with a plan to do such tasks without the LLM, even if it takes a lot longer without it?

Educational certifications in the era of LLMs are going to be increasingly meaningless without proof-of-work, and that's going to mean in-class work without access to computational aids, if you really want to evaluate a person's skill level. This of course is the coding interview rationalization - CS students have been gaming auto-graded courses created by CS professors for some decades, and now that's easier than ever.
by Sophira | 2025-12-07 17:04:55+00:00
This, exactly.

I had heard before that Lisp had something called "macros", but I didn't know exactly what they were or how they differed from C macros. This blog post kind of explains that, but not in a way that couldn't also apply to C macros if you tried hard enough.

I want to know more, but I didn't have any examples here to look at. I may look them up now that I have an idea.
by lagniappe | 2025-12-07 17:05:10+00:00
If they think they're anywhere close to being far enough "in the lead" to force ads on paying customers, they're mistaken.

Also, stop with the "wE FeLlL ShOrT", corporate platitudes mean nothing in 2025. We know you don't feel that way, you know you don't feel that way, cut the bs.
by ninth_ant | 2025-12-07 17:05:49+00:00
You hate that, but what I hate that so many of my tax dollars are funnelled into bloated software run by awful foreign companies with massive lock-in scams, when better free software is available. I hate that lobbyists and consultants get these systems into place and can’t be unseated despite its utter unreasonableness.

It’s a tremendous mis-allocation of public resources. Hiring local people to tailor the free software which already exists and contributing those changes back to the world would spend fewer of those dollars and spend them locally, and be pro-social at the same time.

So I don’t hate this story. I love it and see it as a massive win.
by Barbing | 2025-12-07 17:06:03+00:00
Ars has often gone with “confabulation”:

>Confabulation was coined right here on Ars, by AI-beat columnist Benj Edwards, in Why ChatGPT and Bing Chat are so good at making things up (Apr 2023).

https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/researchers-describe-h...

>Generative AI is so new that we need metaphors borrowed from existing ideas to explain these highly technical concepts to the broader public. In this vein, we feel the term "confabulation," although similarly imperfect, is a better metaphor than "hallucination." In human psychology, a "confabulation" occurs when someone's memory has a gap and the brain convincingly fills in the rest without intending to deceive others.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/04/why-a...
by crazygringo | 2025-12-07 17:07:15+00:00
> There isn't really anything Microsoft can do about that, unless they decide to move headquarters and lots of employees out of the US.

Actually there is, that's what the entire point of the sovereign clouds are. They reside physically in Europe, with legal control by Europeans, and European employees that can't be bossed around by the US. If the US orders Amazon to retrieve data from S3 servers located in a European sovereign cloud, Amazon employees in the US don't have the technical capability to do so, and the European data center employees are legally bound not to.
by PaulRobinson | 2025-12-07 17:07:25+00:00
The half-life of Apple kit is so high, they are arguably a lot more sustainable than their repairable PC counterparts.

Apple laptops I have that boot include a 2007 iBook (my folks used it until this Summer and then bank websites would stop working with the Chrome browser they could get working on it), which I'll be putting a BSD or Linux distro on over Christmas, a 2012 Intel MBP that has Linux on it and a couple of 2015-2017 era MBPs that I inherited via one means or another.

I'm typing this on an M4 MacBook Air I picked up cheap during Black Friday sales. I fully expect it to still be functional in 10 years.

I don't think I've ever had a PC laptop last close to that.
by 1718627440 | 2025-12-07 17:07:30+00:00
If your think of running some EDR software in kernel mode, then my point is indeed don't do that. That just sounds like less security. Use the OS and run the reporting in userspace.

If you want integrity, first make everything executable immutable, the system is explicitly designed to work that way. That's why the FHS exists for. Then use something like Tripwire to monitor it.

To log access use auditd (https://www.baeldung.com/linux/auditd-monitor-file-access).

What else do you need to do?