MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hahahacorn | 2025-12-26 15:11:33+00:00
> The few dozen people I killed pale in comparison to the thousands of people that die in car crashes each year. So society should really focus on making cars safer instead of sending the police after me.

This is a very irrelevant analogy and an absolutely false dichotomy. The resource constraint (Police officers vs policy making to reduce traffic deaths vs criminals) is completely different and not in contention with each other. In fact they're actually complementary.

Nobody is saying the lesser problem should be dismissed. But the lesser problem also enables cancer researchers to be more productive while doing cancer research, obtaining grants, etc. It's at least nuanced. That is far more valuable than Alfalfa.

Farms also use municipal water (sometimes). The cost of converting more ground or surface water to municipal water is less than the relative cost of ~40-150x the water usage of the municipal water being used...
by SkyPuncher | 2025-12-26 15:11:35+00:00
Thank you for offering your credentials. By nature of this being an internet, tech-focused forum there just aren't many doctors here. Without a reference to credentials, I made a (poor) assumption about your authority on the matter. I was very clear that I probably know more than the average person, but I'm certainly not an authority.

I do think my underlying point is generally, correct, though. And, implicitly supported by your retort. Low and high blood sugar are emergencies of different acuity. To be clear, by the time either of them turns into an emergency, they are both emergencies. However, the time frame for going from "my blood sugar is managed" to "I need emergency intervention" is generally different (and longer for high blood sugar emergencies).
by oldandboring | 2025-12-26 15:11:38+00:00
Personally I bit the bullet and went with the Max plan for Claude Code. After tax it costs me ($108) less than I earn from one billable hour. I have been punishing it for the last two months, it defaults to Opus 4.5 and while I occasionally hit my session limit (it resets after an hour or so), I can't even scratch the surface of my monthly usage limit.
by zmgsabst | 2025-12-26 15:11:44+00:00
There’s a lot of us who think the tension is overblown:

My own results show that you need fairly strong theoretical knowledge and practical experience to get the maximal impact — especially for larger synthesis. Which makes sense: to have this software, not that software, the specification needs to live somewhere.

I am getting a little bored of hearing about how people don’t like LLM content, but meh. SDEs are hardly the worst on that front, either. They’re quite placid compared to the absolute seething by artist friends of mine.
by xorgun | 2025-12-26 15:12:07+00:00
I don’t understand why anyone thinks we have a choice on AI. If America doesn’t win, other countries will. We don’t live in a Utopia, and getting the entire world to behave a certain way is impossible (see covid). Yes, AI videos and spam is annoying, but the cat is out of the bag. Use AI where it’s useful and get with the programme.

The bigger issue everyone should be focusing on is growing hypocrisy and overly puritan viewpoints thinking they are holier and righter than anyone else. That’s the real plague
by aeve890 | 2025-12-26 15:12:10+00:00
>That letter was sent by Opus itself on its own account. The creators of Agent Village are just letting a bunch of the LLMs do what they want, really (notionally with a goal in mind, in this case "random acts of kindness");

What a moronic waste of resources. Random act of kindness? How low is the bar that you consider a random email as an act of kindness? Stupid shit. They at least could instruct the agents to work in a useful task like those parroted by Altman et al, eg find a cure for cancer, solving poverty, solving fusion.

Also, llms don't and can't "want" anything. They also don't "know" anything so they can't understand what "kindness" is.

Why do people still think software have any agency at all?
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-12-26 15:12:12+00:00
This is basically unethical. Imagine anything important in the world that worked this way. "Do nuclear engineering the easy way while it works, and when it stops working, fix the problem."

Software engineers always make the excuse that what they're making now is unimportant, so who cares? But then everything gets built on top of that unimportant thing, and one day the world crashes down. Worse, "fixing the problem" becomes near impossible, because now everything depends on it.

But really the reason not to do it, is there's no need to. There are plenty of other solutions than using Git that work as well or better without all the pitfalls. The lazy engineer picks bad solutions not because it's necessarily easier than the alternatives, but because it's the path of least resistance for themselves.

Not only is this not better, it's often actively worse. But this is excused by the same culture that gave us "move fast and break things". All you have to do is use any modern software to see how that worked out. Slow bug-riddled garbage that we're all now addicted to.
by yes_man | 2025-12-26 15:12:14+00:00
Someone taking the time and effort to write and send a letter and pay for postage might actually be appreciated by the receiver. It’s a bit different from LLM agents being ordered to burn resources to send summaries of someone’s work life and congratulating them. It feels like ”hey look what can be done, can we get some more funding now”. Just because it can be done doesn’t mean it adds any good value to this world
by Kiro | 2025-12-26 15:12:30+00:00
I'm seeing the opposite in the gaming community. People seem tired of the anti AI witch hunts and accusations after the recent Larian and Clair Obscur debacles. A lot more "if the end result is good I don't care", "the cat is out of the bag", "all devs are using AI" and "there's a difference between AI and AI" than just a couple of months ago.
by Verdex | 2025-12-26 15:13:12+00:00
A topic for more in depth study to be sure. However:

1) video streaming has been around for a while and nobody, as far as I'm aware, has been talking about building multiple nuclear tractors to handle the energy needs

2) video needs a CPU and a hard drive. LLM needs a mountain of gpus.

3) I have concerns that the "national center for AI" might have some bias

I can find websites also talking about the earth being flat. I don't bother examining their contents because it just doesn't pass the smell test.

Although thanks for the challenge to my preexisting beliefs. I'll have to do some of my own calculations to see how things compare.
by mattstir | 2025-12-26 15:13:18+00:00
The point is that if he truly felt strongly about the subject then he wouldn't live the hypocrisy. Google has poured a truly staggering amount of money into AI data centers and AI development, and their stock (from which Rob Pike directly profits) has nearly doubled in the past 6 months due to the AI hype. Complaining on bsky doesn't do anything to help the planet or protect intellectual property rights. It really doesn't.
by freedomben | 2025-12-26 15:13:23+00:00
Exactly. It's not just about the best solution to the problem, it's also heavily about the economics around it. If I wanted to create a new package manager today, I could get started by utilizing Git and existing git hosting solutions with very little effort, and effort translates to time, and time is a scarce resource. If you don't know whether your package manager will take off or not, it may not be the best use of your scarce resources to invest in a robust and optimized solution out of the gate. I wish that weren't the case, I would love to have an infinite amount of time, but wishing is not going to make it happen
by Findecanor | 2025-12-26 15:14:30+00:00
I've been feeling a lot the same way, but removing your source code from the world does not feel like a constructive solution either.

Some Shareware used to be individually licensed with the name of the licensee prominently visible, so if you had got an illegal copy you'd be able to see whose licensed copy it was that had been copied.

I wonder if something based on that idea of personal responsibility for your copy could be adopted to source code.
If you wanted to contribute to a piece of software, you could ask a contributor and then get a personally licensed copy of the source code with your name in every source file... but I don't know where to take it from there.
Has there ever been some system similar to something like that that one could take inspiration from?
by simjnd | 2025-12-26 15:14:52+00:00
It's more a matter of effiency and battery life, and that's mostly due to Linux more than inherent to the Framework or its hardware (try running Asahi Linux on an M MacBook and just notice your battery life be cut in half).

I love my M1 Pro MacBook and I wish I could have the same efficiency when running Linux but I can't.

My Framework runs faster, but a lot hotter, louder and with a lot less battery life. But I feel like I'm supporting a good company, a good cause, and I love that I can do software updates without fearing that it fucked everything up like every major macOS release does.
by eleventyseven | 2025-12-26 15:14:59+00:00
FYI this site is a libertarian think tank that exists to attack contemporary state funded liberal arts higher education, in favor of higher ed as job training. From their About Us:

> Since 2003, the Martin Center has been a voice for excellence and accountability in higher education. We believe that higher education should equip students to flourish in their careers, embrace responsible citizenship, and grow as seekers of wisdom. We advocate responsible governance, viewpoint diversity, academic quality, cost-effective education solutions, and innovative market-based reform.

> In these endeavors, we are motivated by the principles that have traditionally guided public policy in the United States: limits on government; freedom to pursue goals through voluntary means, both for-profit and nonprofit; accountability through private property rights and contracts; and the belief that competition is an excellent regulating force.
by oldandboring | 2025-12-26 15:15:01+00:00
I feel you brother/sister. I actually pay for Claude Code Max and also for the $20/mo Cursor plan. I use Claude Code via the VSCode extension running within the Cursor IDE. 95% of my usage is Claude Code via that extension (or through the CLI in certain situations) but it's great having Cursor as a backup. Sometimes I want to have another model check Claude's work, for example.
by Marha01 | 2025-12-26 15:15:02+00:00
Perhaps you are right in principle, but I think advocating for degrowth is entirely hopeless. 99% of people will simply not chose to decrease their energy usage if it lowers their quality of life even a bit (including things you might consider luxuries, not necessities). We also tend to have wars and any idea of degrowth goes out of the window the moment there is a foreign military threat with an ideology that is not limited by such ways of thinking.

The only realistic way forward is trying to make energy generation greener (renewables, nuclear, better efficiency), not fighting to decrease human consumption.
by epicprogrammer | 2025-12-26 15:15:06+00:00
I am one of the builders behind Dropstone.

Yesterday, I posted our whitepaper here as a 'discovery' because I was nervous about a cold launch. That was a mistake, and the community rightfully flagged it for lacking transparency. I apologize for the cloak and dagger.

We are reposting this today as an official Show HN to stand behind the tech properly.

The Problem: We built this because we hit the 'Linearity Barrier' with standard agents—after 50+ coding steps, context rot sets in and the agent starts hallucinating.

The Solution: Dropstone uses a Recursive Swarm Topology. Instead of linear prediction, it spawns parallel 'Scout' agents to explore solution paths and uses Entropy Pruning to kill branches that hallucinate.

I'm here to answer any technical questions about our D3 Engine, the latency trade-offs of swarm architecture, or the 'Trajectory Vectors' we use for context management.
by guerby | 2025-12-26 15:15:22+00:00
I bought several "Security Key NFC by Yubico": their cheapest model, no storage or fancy stuff.

My personal strategy is to use keys generated this way:

ssh-keygen -t ed25519-sk

Rules:

- A generated key never leave the machine it was generated on.

- ssh agent is never used

- ProxyJump in HOME/.ssh/config or -J to have convenient access to all my servers.

- DynamicForward and firefox with foxyproxy extension to access various things in the remote network from my local machine (IPMI, internal services, IoT, ...)

- On the web no passkey, only simple 2FA webauthn.

My understanding is that more features including "storage" means more attack surface so by avoiding it you're 1/ more secure 2/ it's cheaper.

White paper on passkey says their security is equal to the security of the OS (Microsoft Windows ...) so I avoid passkeys.
by gsnedders | 2025-12-26 15:15:24+00:00
Also, as someone on the periphery of Selenium (mostly via WebDriver), some of the challenge is that Selenium has a huge amount of test code already written for it — and making radical API changes would break every test already written for it, and at that point you’re effectively a new library.

It’s gonna be very interesting to watch exactly how the adoption of WebDriver BiDi goes with Selenium, especially once WebDriver Classic starts to go away, and how API stability is balanced with exposing more and more async capabilities.
by Epa095 | 2025-12-26 15:15:32+00:00
Notice that the weavers, both the luddites and their non-opposing colleagues, certainly did not get wealthier. They lost their jobs, and they and their children starved. Some starved to death. Wealth was created, but it was not shared.

Remember this when talking about their actions. People live and die their own life, not just as small parts in a large 'river of society'. Yes, generations after them benefited from industrialisation, but the individuals living at that time fought for their lives.
by antirez | 2025-12-26 15:15:37+00:00
You would expect that voices that have so much weight would be able to evaluate a new and clearly very promising technology with better balance. For instance, Linus Torvalds is positive about AI, while he recognizes that industrially there is too much inflation of companies and money: this is a balanced point of view. But to be so dismissive of modern AI, in the light of what it is capable of doing, and what it could do in the future, is something that frankly leaves me with the feeling that in certain circles (and especially in the US) something very odd is happening with AI: this extreme polarization that recently we see again and again on topics that can create social tension, but multiplied ten times. This is not what we need to understand and shape the future. We need to return to the Greek philosophers' ability to go deep on things that are unknown (AI is for the most part unknown, both in its working and in future developments). That kind of take is pretty brutal and not very sophisticated. We need better than this.

About energy: keep in mind that US air conditioners alone have at least 3x energy usage compared to all the data centers (for AI and for other uses: AI should be like 10% of the whole) in the world. Apparently nobody cares to set a reasonable temperature of 22 instead of 18 degrees, but clearly energy used by AI is different for many.
by cons0le | 2025-12-26 15:15:45+00:00
Finally someone echoes my sentiments. It's my sincere belief that many in the software community are glazing AI for the purposes of career advancement. Not because they actually like it.

One person I know is developing an AI tool with 1000+ stars on github where in private they absolutely hate AI and feel the same way as rob.

Maybe it's because I just saw Avatar 3, but I honestly couldn't be more disgusted by the direction we're going with AI.

I would love to be able to say how I really feel at work, but disliking AI right now is the short path to the unemployment line.

If AI was so good, you would think we could give people a choice whether or not to use it. And you would think it would make such an obvious difference, that everyone would choose to use it and keep using it. Instead, I can't open any app or website without multiple pop-ups begging me to use AI features. Can't send an email, or do a Google search. Can't post to social media, can't take a picture on my phone without it begging me to use an AI filter. Can't go to the gallery app without it begging me to let it use AI to group the photos into useless albums that I don't want.

The more you see under the hood, the more disgusting it is. I yearn for the old days when developers did tight, efficient work, creating bespoke, artistic software in spite of hardware limitations.

Not only is all of that gone, nothing of value has replaced it. My DOS computer was snappier than my garbage Win11 machine that's stuffed to the gills with AI telemetry.
by faidit | 2025-12-26 15:16:19+00:00
Postmodernism is a pretty dead horse to beat on at this point. Once upon a time people in academia were afraid to call it out as nonsense, for fear of getting called too dumb to understand the "discourse". It's now widely derided by lefties as a 1980s CIA conspiracy to befuddle dissidents with bizarre logic puzzles and meaningless jargon.
by mergesort | 2025-12-26 15:16:32+00:00
Heya, author here! Admittedly this was a quick blog post I fired off, much shorter than my usual writing.

My goal wasn't to create a complete comparison of both tools — but to provide a little theory a behavior I'm seeing. You're (absolutely) right that it's a theory not a study, and I made sure to state that in the post. :)

Mostly though the conclusion describes pretty succinctly why I wrote the post, as a way to get more people to try more of the tools so they can adequately form their own conclusions.

> I think back to coworkers I’ve had over the years, and their varying preferences. Some people couldn’t start coding until they had a checklist of everything they needed to do to solve a problem. Others would dive right in and prototype to learn about the space they would be operating in.

> The tools we use to build are moving fast and hard to keep up with, but we’ve been blessed with a plethora of choices. The good news is that there is no wrong choice when it comes to AI. That’s why I don’t dismiss people who live in Claude Code, even though I personally prefer Codex.

> The tool you choose should match how you work, not the other way around. If you use Claude, I’d suggest trying Codex for a week to see if maybe you’re a Codex person and didn’t know it. And if you use Codex, I’d recommend trying Claude Code for a week to see if maybe you’re more of a Claude person than you thought.

> Maybe you’ll discover your current approach isn’t the best fit for you. Maybe you won’t. But I’m confident you’ll find that every AI tool has its strengths and weaknesses, and the only way to discover what they are is by using them.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-12-26 15:16:40+00:00
I really don't know if in twenty years the zeitgeist will see us as primitives that didn't understand that the camera is stealing our souls with each picture, or as primitives who had a bizarre superstition about cameras stealing our souls.

An easy way to answer this question, at least on a preliminary basis, is to ask how many times in the past the ludds have been right in the long run. About anything, from cameras to looms to machine tools to computers in general.

Then, ask what's different this time.
by jasomill | 2025-12-26 15:16:44+00:00
Interesting. I've been using Unix systems for 30 years and never noticed this.

On my Fedora system, /usr/bin/cd is just a shell script that invokes the shell builtin:

#!/usr/bin/sh
builtin cd "$@"

I suppose it could be useful for testing whether a directory exists with search permissions for the current user safely in a multithreaded program that relies on the current directory remaining constant.
Show HN: Zero-config staging environments for GitHub repos
by mikesol | 2025-12-26 15:16:44+00:00
Hi HN,

I'm building Autodock, a service that spins up preview environments for more or less any webapp.

When you make a PR to a repo with the Autodock GH App installed and the GH Action configured, you'll get links to your deployed app in a comment. Here's an example of what one looks like: https://github.com/mikesol/inboxpilot/pull/1#issuecomment-36...

The differences between Autodock and, say, Vercel preview environments are:

- It works with complex monorepos, including frontends, backends, databases, queues and various microservices.
- Once your dev box is up and running, you can use MCP to interact with it over SSH. While my goal with Autodock is to achieve one-shot deployments, this is useful to fix any issues that may arise.
- I built Autodock with observability as a first-class citizen, so everything in the box is wired to go through Loki.
- Each box has inbound email, and there's a browser debugging functionality too that corrolates backend and frontend logs.

I've tested it on Lago, Nango, and Strapi, and I'm making my way down awesome-oss-alternatives over the next few weeks.

I built Autodock because this year I tried out overemployment for a few months and quickly realized that one of the biggest time sinks was deploying and maintaining staging environments. It started as a way for me to quickly launch and stop remote servers, and I grew its feature set as different needs emerged from different projects. By the end of my time being overemployed, I was using it as an internal tool for every job. I thought it'd be fun to build it as a business and see if it could go head-to-head with bigger players in the space like Codespaces or GitPod by leaning into this novel approach.

Installation instructions are on https://autodock.io/preview-setup. There's a no-credit-card-required free tier that you can use to try it out. I'm curious to hear how it fares on folks's GitHub repos!
by jqpabc123 | 2025-12-26 15:16:46+00:00
I hear this a lot but I've never understood why people think it's a deal breaker.

Maybe it's a deal breaker and maybe it's not.

At this point, we're groping in the dark. We don't know enough to stay anything for sure. But we're throwing $billions at it based on the pure hope of somehow getting lucky.

For example, we can't even say for sure that consciousness is something that is isolated in the brain. Neurons exist throughout the human body. Consciousness could very well be a whole body phenomenon --- or not, we really don't know.

Does anyone really know if a human body can be realistically mimicked by software at this point? How much energy and computing power would be required to do so? Is there enough on the planet?

Bottom line: At this point, there are more questions than answers.

https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/wellness-and-preventi...
by weakfish | 2025-12-26 15:16:50+00:00
I really do appreciate your willingness to live and let live. Too many people from all perspectives are missing that ability when it comes to non-critical things, and forget that they can just… not hang out with the people they disagree with.

The other comments below you seem to be willingly ignoring that you did the mature/kind thing and just wished them well and moved on, whereas a less mature person would have caused a ruckus.