MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hristov | 2025-12-27 04:23:59+00:00
The fly agaric, is very poisonous and has a very distinctive red with white dots pattern to warn about its poison. Unfortunately, that pattern looks so pretty that disney and ninetendo decided to use it as their generic mushroom coloring. So, if you are hiking with your kids, and they see a pretty mushroom just like in cartoons, don't let them touch it.

If there are enough poisonous mushrooms, it is possible that most animals decide to leave mushrooms alone regardless of distinctive coloring. That seems to be the case because mushrooms tend not to be bitten by large animals, at least when i go mushrooming. If that happens, it is possible that other mushrooms do not develop poison but rather freeload on the poison of other mushrooms.

Thus, one may guess, that first distinctive poisonous mushrooms like the fly agaric developed, then most animals large enough to eat them developed an instinct to avoid all mushrooms, and then the non-poisonous freeloading mushrooms developed.

There are some psychedelic mushrooms in the amazon that use their psychedelic effect to zombify ants and force them to spread the mushrooms spores. That is really disturbing, find a youtube video of it if you feel like having some nightmares.

Furthermore it should be noted that the poison or the psychedelic effect may not even be relevant for evolution. The poisonous or psychedelic compound may be produced for completely different purpose or as a byproduct of the production of another useful compound.
by cloverich | 2025-12-27 04:24:08+00:00
I have two genuine, straight forward answers for you. One, I have an important codebase written in a non-typed language, that is heavily developed still. So being able to add types to it (assuming I / team prefer that) is nice. Second is, I much prefer working in typed language, but company forces X language(s) (say, Ruby, Python, etc). Now I can use types (which I much prefer), and not change language (they prefer). Those are both real life examples. Third is hypothetical, but perhaps some people starting without types decide they like them later and want to dip their toes on. Most of these languages now offer incremental types for people to try them out.
by nis0s | 2025-12-27 04:25:05+00:00
> It's pure religion and has all the power associated with religion

Not exactly. Consciousness has a lot of useful properties that help with different kinds of behaviors in living things, e.g., improving information synthesis through learning (where self-reflection can also help you discover what you don’t know, so you find out what else to learn), and applying cognitive flexibility for adaptability.

That said, you’re right that AI does not need consciousness to be a useful tool. But does AI need consciousness to attain AGI? I think so, there’s no other model that we’re aware of where properties related to conscious beings can be found in beings that aren’t considered as having consciousness.

Is AGI necessary for a tool to have beyond human information synthesis. I don’t think so, as long there’s some process which can help it realize where it’s wrong, and how to correct itself.
by ksec | 2025-12-27 04:26:03+00:00
The OP deleted that sentence and I don't think it should have be flagged and unseen by others so I have vouched for it. I understand a lot of people disagree with it, and may downvote it but that is different to flagging. ( I have upvoted in just in case )

He offer perspective from a Chinese POV, so I think it is worth people reading it. ( Not that I agree with it in any shape or form )
by gtech1 | 2025-12-27 04:27:47+00:00
1. You use 'ex' to mean except ? In common parlance ex means 'example'. So your phrase becomes: National treasures (example gold) were returned in '35 and '56.

Which is what I responded to.

Gold was part bars and part rare historical coins.

Also still unreturned, which is extremely valuable:

Queen Marie’s jewels were not returned
The Romanian Crown Jewels were not returned
Royal and dynastic archives
Private deposits of Romanian citizens
Orthodox Church treasures

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/TA-9-2024-0171...

2. Who were these Bolsheviks ? There was no government, they weren't Russian / Soviet - what were they ? Give me some source that shows Romania was fighting Tsarist Russia / URSS / Russia (?). Your article doesn't clarify that at all. I wonder why.

Romania entrusted Tsarist Russia with its national treasure.

Do you deny there's state continuity from before 1918 ?
by phlummox | 2025-12-27 04:27:57+00:00
> you must surely be guilty of something. Otherwise, all offers would be meaningless and worth nothing.

You don't have to be "guilty" of anything to be liable in civil law (which contract law is a part of). "Guilt" is a concept from criminal law. It isn't required for contracts to be enforceable.

In general (there are exceptions) offers alone aren't enforceable and don't result in a contract. You need other elements (agreement by the parties, plus something done in return for what's offered) for a contract to be formed - and then it's enforceable.
by mishu2 | 2025-12-27 04:28:09+00:00
Thank you everyone for taking a look. The website had around 1,200 visitors and received over 90 sketches over the past 24 hours, and I'm happy to say I could approve almost all of them (all except 2 'rocket' sketches which were starting to look a bit dubious, but all in good fun).

The results look very interesting to me, and I think as a next step I will look into adjusting the prompts (both positive and negative). On the one hand, I'd like to keep the sketch/drawing look rather than going full photorealism as some of the videos do, on the other hand I don't want to restrict the users' creativity too much.

I plan to simplify this further and optimize it for tablets. Some friends said they'd like to have their kids try it out it and I like the idea, as by having to sketch it keeps the user in a more active role.

Please let me know if you have any other suggestions.
by yieldcrv | 2025-12-27 04:28:28+00:00
> Ironically, some day we might employ LLMs to re-humanize texts

I heard high school and college students are doing this routinely so their papers don't get flagged as AI

this is whether they used an LLM for the whole assignment or wrote it themselves, has to get pass through a "re-humanizing" LLM either way just to avoid drama
by fragmede | 2025-12-27 04:28:32+00:00
> You don't give it access to your codebase for read or write, correct?

I'm sure you can derive some benefit without doing that, but you're not going to see much of a speedup if you're still copy/pasting and manually prompting after each change. If anybody is copy/pasting and saying "I don't get it", yeah you don't.
by bruce511 | 2025-12-27 04:29:01+00:00
Thats not exactly a new question. Netscape would also like an answer.

Obviously the short answer, for you personally, is "nothing". You cannot affect either the closing business or Google.

The somewhat longer answer is that there are certainly other mail services that currently exist. So there are still options. And yes, those services will need to differentiate their offering.

[Some will no doubt mention the option to self-host. I did that myself for about 15 years. It's a lot of extra work to do that though.]

Obviously some services (like YouTube) are double-sided. Consumers go there because producers are there and vice versa. But, as you point out, even there you have choices - free with ads, or subscription. (Not that you'll get any "customer support" from Google.)
by JKCalhoun | 2025-12-27 04:29:17+00:00
I read a handful of short stories from Exhalation by Ted Chiang. I liked one of them in particular, the others were okay. It is nice to read short stories since you invest very little time in each—in case it turns out the author is not really what you're in to.

Begin the Begin: R.E.M.'s Early Years, Robert Dean Lurie. A band I read everything about. 1984 and the music that entered my life that year truly changed me. But I don't expect anyone that is not a fan of the early band would find it interesting.

Siddhartha, Herman Hesse. It has been recommended to me many times over the years—finally read it. As I mentioned in another comment, it's a good book that younger me might have found more profound. Older me was more or less just nodding my head, "Yep, you'll have to learn for yourself…", etc.

I've been working an analog computer so have read a bunch of old textbooks and such that I have found on archive.org and other places online.

I see quite a few books I purchased this year but have not read. (The Japanese have a word for me.) I should really try to read more next year.
by randycupertino | 2025-12-27 04:29:30+00:00
I was skeptical on Dungeon Crawler Carl and resisted reading it for so long and finally people on reddit constantly recommending it wore me down, even though it's not typically a genre I like I gave it a try and am SO GLAD I did, it is fantastic! I love how it looks like dumb, chaotic fun on the surface but the undercurrent and story steadily reveals something much smarter, angrier and emotionally brutal about resistance and survival in an oppressive system. It's a great series!!
by maplethorpe | 2025-12-27 04:32:34+00:00
I'm sorry but your point doesn't make sense to me. Training on all the world's text but omitting code means that your machine won't know how to write code. That's an enormous impact, not a small one.

Unless you're in the camp that believes ChatGPT can extrapolate outside of its training data and do computer programming without having ever trained on any computer programming material?
by fragmede | 2025-12-27 04:33:04+00:00
When did you try Claude and Swift? There was a dramatic improvement (imo, I haven't written my own swift, I'm mostly back end guy) with the latest releases, judging by how many iterations on stupid shit my programs have taken.

If you tried it roughly prior to https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode-release-note... give it another shot. f you tried it after and found it lacking then this doesn't apply.
by smj-edison | 2025-12-27 04:33:19+00:00
> You walk away from a Bret Victor presentation inspired, but also intimidated by the work put in, and the work required to do anything similar. When you separate his ideas from the work he puts in to perfect the implementation and presentation, the ideas by themselves don't seem to do much.

Amen to that. Even dynamic land has some major issues with GC pauses and performance issues.

I do try to put my money where my mouth is, so I've been contributing a lot to folk computer[1], but yeah, there's still a ton of open questions, and it's not as easy as he sometimes makes it look.

[1] https://folk.computer/
by vinibrito | 2025-12-27 04:34:51+00:00
There will always be someone whose job is to program computers to do things.

That's us, developers.
That will never change.
We're the ones dedicated to it.

Execs, managers, HR, salesmen, designers etc won't suddenly want to spend their whole days, not even half of their time, tinkering with a computer so it can do what they want.

Else Basic and Fortran would have made everyone software developers.

Do you feel calmer now? (:
by jlubawy | 2025-12-27 04:35:23+00:00
Came here to ask about pipenv. As someone who does not use python other than for scripting, but also appreciates the reproduceability that pipenv provides, should I be using uv? My understanding is that pipenv is the better successor to venv and pip (combined), but now everyone is talking about uv so to be honest it's quite confusing.

Edit: to add to what my understanding of pipenv is, the "standard/approved" method of package management by the python community, but in practice is it not? Is it now uv?
by diavelguru | 2025-12-27 04:39:55+00:00
I agree with this guy: https://obie.medium.com/what-happens-when-the-coding-becomes...
When you look at the AI as having a Jr. Developer at your disposal to do the mundane things you actually elevate yourself higher than you could individually (without the help) as you focus more on architecture and design and guide the LLM to make incremental improvements instead of decremental ones. That's my take at least.

This one also:
https://terriblesoftware.org/2025/12/11/ai-can-write-your-co...
by misswaterfairy | 2025-12-27 04:40:00+00:00
> "Do random acts of kindness".

Random acts of kindness are only meaningful if they come from a human who had the heart, forethought, and willingness to go out of their way to do something kind for someone else. 'Random acts of kindness' originating from an AI is just spam, plain and simple.

The human race is screwed if connection - the one key thing that makes humans, human - is outsourced partially or wholly to robots who absolutely have no ability to connect, let alone understand, the human experience.
by crote | 2025-12-27 04:41:17+00:00
So basically, it avoids the whole chicken-and-egg problem. With UV you've simply always got "UV -> project Python 1.23 -> project". UV is your dependency manager, and your Python is just another dependency.

With other dependency managers you end up with "system Python 3.45 -> dep manager -> project Python 1.23 -> project". Or worse, "system Python 1.23 -> dep manager -> project Python 1.23 -> project". And of course there will be people who read about the problem and install their own Python manager, so they end up with a "system Python -> virtualenv Python -> poetry Python -> project" stack. Or the other way around, and they'll end up installing their project dependencies globally...
by tiffanyh | 2025-12-27 04:42:02+00:00
There’s a great “Smarter Every Day” video on how rockets are made and the guest host was Tory Bruno.

https://youtu.be/o0fG_lnVhHw

Two things I recall from this video from years ago

1. Tory really seemed to be a true expert. Not a typical “CEO”.

2. Seems like a genuinely nice guy, see this moment when Tory recognized Dustin’s dad

https://youtu.be/Bh7Xf3Ox7K8?t=476
by Eridrus | 2025-12-27 04:43:04+00:00
I think grit and hard work will still be valuable attributes, even if AI starts producing perfect software tomorrow.

The world also just doesn't change that quickly.

Even with the most rosy projections, there is no way that software engineers are unnecessary in 2-3 years. Go have a look at METR's projections, even rosy projections aren't getting us to software that can replace engineers in a few years, let alone having that change ripple through the economy.

And nobody actually knows how far AI progress will go on the current trajectory. Moore's law was a steady march for a long time, until it wasn't.
by doctorpangloss | 2025-12-27 04:43:52+00:00
I like FFmpeg, I hate doing the whole whataboutism thing, especially because FFmpeg is plainly in the right here, but... listen, FFmpeg as a product is a bunch of license violations too. Something something patents, something something, "doctrine of unclean hands." I worry that HN downvotes people who are trying to address the bigger picture here, because the net result of a lack of nuance always winds up being, "Okay, the real winners are Google and Apple."
by mergesort | 2025-12-27 04:43:52+00:00
That does sound like a good article! Sadly I've never written it and probably won't because I think a lot of that stuff doesn't provide as much value as people assume — which is why my personal conclusion in the post is to just lean into Codex.

This isn't a value judgment, it's just a question of where my priorities and tradeoffs lie. That said, I think Skills are the killer feature because they are a very composable tool — which I'll get to in a bit.

- Your CLAUDE.md should be a good high-level description with relevant details that you add to over time. Think of it as describing the lay of the land the way you would to a new coworker, including the little warts they need to know about before they waste hours on some known but confusing behavior.

- MCP has it's purposes, but it's not really a great tool for software development. It's best served for interfacing with a remote service (because it provides a discovery layer to LLMs on top of an API), but if you use them the way developers are told to, you're almost always better off using an equivalent CLI.

- I'll skip over agents, because an agent is basically a skill + a separate context window, and the main selling point is the context window bit. I think over time we'll see a separation of concerns where you can just spawn a skill with a context window and everyone will forget about the idea of agents in your codebase.

So now Skills. I wrote a well-received post [^1] a few months ago about Claude Skills, and why I think they are probably the most important of these tools. A skill is basically a plain-text description of an application.

The app can be something like I describe where Claude Code converts a YouTube video to an mp3 based on natural language, or you can have a code review skill, a linter skill, a security reviewer skill, and so on. This is what I meant when I said skills are composable.

You can imagine a team having lots of skills in their repo. One may guide an agentic system to build iOS projects well (away from an LLM's bad defaults when building with Xcode), skills that are very contextually relevant to the team, or even skills that enforce copy in your app to conform to your marketing team's language.

Skills are just markdown so they're very portable — and now available in Codex and many other places.[^2] (I had been using OpenSkills to great effect since the way Skills work is just through prompts). I now have a bunch of skills that do lots of things, for coding, marketing, data analysis, fact checking, copy-editing, and more. As a nice benefit they run in Claude — not just Claude Code. If you have ideas for processes you need to improve, I would invest my time and energy into building up Skills more than anything else.

[^1]: https://build.ms/2025/10/17/your-first-claude-skill
[^2]: https://agentskills.io/specification
by nateb2022 | 2025-12-27 04:43:55+00:00
https://stopslopware.net/

Your comment is AI-generated. Your entire README.md is AI generated. Your project structure is a mess, multiple overlapping packages. You declare a pkg/logger package, and yet tons of other code uses a bare stdlib log.Logger.

It looks like none of your CI tests have passed a single commit.

You have an install.sh script that attempts to download an artifact from a non-existent repo dockbridge/dockbridge.

You're binding to 0.0.0.0, so someone with a public IP will have an exposed docker daemon. You claim security but "Implement proper host key verification" is a TODO item: https://github.com/Max-Levitskiy/DockBridge/blob/23d164232b8...
by energy123 | 2025-12-27 04:45:20+00:00
Text is bytes that's accompanied with a major constraint on which sequences of bytes are permitted (a useful compression into principal axes that emerged over thousands of years of language evolution), along with a natural connection to human semantics that is due to universal adoption of the standard (allowing correlations to be modelled).

Text is like a complexity funnel (analogous to a tokenizer) that everyone shares. Its utility is derived from its compression and its standardization.

If everyone used binary data with their own custom interpretation schema, it might work better for that narrow vertical, but it would not have the same utility for LLMs.
by mergesort | 2025-12-27 04:45:44+00:00
Hey there, article author here! I spent a lot of time writing up a comment that talks through my process so I'll just lazy link it here if that's ok. [^1]

But the truth is I do build real production features all the time! That just wasn't the focus of this article. :)

[^1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46399123
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by DerekDragon | 2025-12-27 04:46:11+00:00
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by ComplexSystems | 2025-12-27 04:46:24+00:00
Suppose you have (let's say) a 3x3 matrix. This is a linear transformation that maps real vectors to real vectors. Now let's say you have a cube as input with volume 1, and you send it into this transformation. The absolute value of the determinant of the matrix tells you what volume the transformed cube will be. The sign tells you if there is a parity reversal or not.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-12-27 04:47:17+00:00
As you say, conglomerates being profit motivated tend to produce largely uninteresting slop. See the vast majority of the movie industry.

Patrons will produce some very interesting and detailed work but it will not necessarily align with your tastes and there will probably not be all that much of it. European history makes this clear enough (imo).

A system in which individual or very small groups of creators are able to produce work of their own choice that appeals to a small to moderately sized niche of their choosing seems like it should produce the best outcome from the perspective of the typical individual. Fiction books are a decent example of this. We get lots of at least decent quality work because a single author can feasibly produce something "on credit" and recoup the costs after the fact.
by xvilka | 2025-12-27 04:47:22+00:00
I always liked their original UI - Photon[1][2]. Very lightweight and fast. Also a distinct and consistent style. I understand why they dropped it in favor of Qt and later Web technologies, but it's still a big loss.

[1] https://www.qnx.com/developers/docs/6.5.0SP1.update/com.qnx....

[2] https://www.mikecramer.com/qnx/momentics_nc_docs/photon/prog...
by wrycoder | 2025-12-27 04:49:16+00:00
An EV with a degraded battery and miles per charge is still very useful for retired people who are tired of traveling long distance and can plug in at home. There should be a good market for them.

I tend to keep my cars over 200,000 miles. Today's cars last a long time. Still, looking back over the past three year's expenses between 150,000 and 200,000 miles, almost all of them relate to engine peripherals - like a new exhaust system, work on emission controls, and a new gas tank, which an EV doesn't have - or brakes, which on an EV last much longer.
by gpm | 2025-12-27 04:49:29+00:00
Sure, maybe anyways but let's assume it is, the parties to that contract are the manufacturer and the copyright holder. The contract allows the manufacturer to distribute it to the distributor without requiring the distributor to agree to the terms and itself become a party. The distributor can then sell the device with the software on it on without acquiring a license and becoming a party to the contract because the copyright has been exhausted (first sale doctrine).

EULA's get around this by forcing the end user to become a party to the contract via a click wrap agreement. There is usually no such click wrap agreement binding the distributor in the case of the GPL. And the GPL doesn't require the creation or maintenance of such a click wrap agreement so the manufacturer would be free to remove it even if the original software had one.
by RossBencina | 2025-12-27 04:49:36+00:00
Form a quadratic equation to solve for the eigenvalues x of a 2x2 matrix (|A - xI| = 0). The inverse of a matrix can be calculated as the classical adjugate multiplied by the reciprocal of the determinant. Use Cramer's Rule to solve a system of linear equations by computing determinants. Reason that if x is an eigenvalue of A then A - xI has a non-trivial nullspace (using the mnemonic |A - xI| = 0).