MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by MontyCarloHall | 2025-12-26 15:52:26+00:00
From the paper [0]: "The computer used for this paper contains an NVIDIA Quadro RTX 6000 with 22 GB of VRAM, 200 GB of RAM, and a 32-core Xeon CPU, courtesy of Caltech."

That GPU was first released in 2018, and can be had for ~$1500 today. The computer as a whole sounds exactly in-line with what a lab would have as an old spare machine. The student is lucky for sure to have access to such an institution, but it's not like he had rich parents who casually handed him $10-$20k. Much more likely he got access to Caltech resources because his exceptional talent caused a professor to take interest in him:

"I would like to acknowledge and thank deeply my mentor Davy (Dr. J. Davy Kirkpatrick) for introducing me to astronomy at IPAC and providing guidance throughout this project, aiding in data analysis and the collection of known objects for the test set."

[0] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-3881/ad7fe6
by justarandomname | 2025-12-26 15:52:32+00:00
> Chatgpt as a teacher is seriously a super power.

I think this is by far, my favorite thing about LLMs. As a person who prefers self-learning I can significantly increase depth, breadth, and speed of learning or researching any topic now. Its absolutely terrible for a large number of topics but in the very least it can usually point me in a general direction faster than anything else.
by imiric | 2025-12-26 15:52:37+00:00
What's in very bad faith is twisting the words of the people who work on these projects[1], and blaming me for echoing them.

It's very clear from their actions[2][3] that they have been actively working to "kill" X11.

There are still people willing to work on it, hence the XLibre fork. The fact that most mainstream distros refuse to carry it is another sign that X11 is in fact being actively "killed".

[1]: https://mastodon.social/@alatiera/114661446785833161

[2]: https://blogs.gnome.org/alatiera/2025/06/08/the-x11-session-...

[3]: https://www.phoronix.com/news/RHEL10-Removing-X.Org
by nika1975 | 2025-12-26 15:52:47+00:00
I really enjoyed The Technological Republic by Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska. It’s sharp, opinionated, and unusually concrete about how state capacity, technology, and institutional competence intersect in practice. Even if you don’t agree with all of it, it’s a book that forces clearer thinking about power, technology, and governance.
by forrestthewoods | 2025-12-26 15:52:50+00:00
> This entire blog is just a waste of time for anyone reading it.

Well that’s an extremely rude thing to say.

Personally I thought it was really interesting to read about a bunch of different projects all running into the same wall with Git.

I also didn’t realize that Git had issues with sparse checkouts. Or maybe author meant shallow? I forget.
by neltnerb | 2025-12-26 15:52:58+00:00
Imagine the process of solving a problem as a sequence of hundreds of little decisions that branch between just two options. There is some probability that your human brain would choose one versus the other.

If you insert AI into your thinking process, it has a bias, for sure. It will helpfully reinforce whatever you tell it you think makes sense, or at least on average it will be interpreted that way because of a wide variety of human cognitive biases even if it hedges. At the least it will respond with ideas that are very... median.

So at each one of these tiny branches you introduce a bias towards the "typical" instead of discovering where your own mind would go. It's fine and conversational but it clearly influences your thought process to, well, mitigate your edges. Maybe it's more "correct", it's certainly less unique.

And then at some point they start charging for the service. That's the part I'm concerned about, if it's on-device and free to use I still think it makes your thought process less interesting and likely to have original ideas, but having to subscribe to a service to trust your decision making is deeply concerning.
by smitty1e | 2025-12-26 15:53:16+00:00
> Modern life, according to Moshfegh and many other writers of contemporary literary fiction, has no meaning whatsoever!

If the intent is to satirize meaninglessness, then perhaps the protagonist should have joined a satirical cult, like the one in the Illuminatus! Trilogy, proclaiming that Bugs Bunny is God, and Earth is shaped like a carrot.

A satirical look at null, it seems, should argue something non-null in the end.
by liamconnell | 2025-12-26 15:53:17+00:00
I read the second two books this year and was unfortunately disappointed.

First two were so fun but I think I got hung up on some of the more clumsy stylistic parts of the Endymion books. I guess my “trust” in the author comes from the style and tropes they use, and if I they lose my trust none of the deeper parts resonate. Glad you enjoyed!
by dracyr | 2025-12-26 15:53:22+00:00
Hey! Haha, that's great to hear!

Stack is super simple, for the blog in general I'm using caddy to serve my markdown files, using the built in templating functionality to turn them into html.

For the sequencer page, it's basically a self-contained html page. The js/css is written in separate files to make it a bit easier to edit, but they are then just included in the main file without any kind of minification or obfuscation so it should be quite easy to look at the source. Feel free to read and remix it for your own purposes!

There will be some limit to this approach, but for this use case I really like the idea of dependency less HTML files. As long as the main browser APIs I'm using remain, it should keep on working.

I put together the core, but also often pasted the whole thing into Claude web, asking it to make an artifact and then playing with it on my phone while commuting, if it was good I'd use it as inspiration later.
by api | 2025-12-26 15:53:29+00:00
The thing he’s actually angry about is the death of personal computing. Everything is rented in the cloud now.

I hate the way people get angry about what media and social media discourse prompts them to get angry about instead of thinking about it. It’s like right wingers raging about immigration when they’re really angry about rent and housing costs or low wages.

His anger is ineffective and misdirected because he fails to understand why this happened: economics and convenience.

It’s economics because software is expensive to produce and people only pay for it when it’s hosted. “Free” (both from open source and VC funded service dumping) killed personal computing by making it impossible to fund the creation of PC software. Piracy culture played a role too, though I think the former things had a larger impact.

It’s convenience because PC operating systems suck. Software being in the cloud means “I don’t have to fiddle with it.” The vast majority of people hate fiddling with IT and are happy to make that someone else’s problem. PC OSes and especially open source never understood this and never did the work to make their OSes much easier to use or to make software distribution and updating completely transparent and painless.

There’s more but that’s the gist of it.

That being said, Google is one of the companies that helped kill personal computing long before AI.
by gethly | 2025-12-26 15:53:53+00:00
martial arts was so far the best thing i did. it has so many positive aspects that there's just too many to name. but an overlooked one worth mentioning is that it is also a social activity and programmers could use a lot more of that.

unfortunately i have no gym i can go to nowadays.

i started seriously running this year and i like it.

going for a motorcycle ride is also nice, especially if you have good roads near by(which I don't).

going for a long walk with your dog, somewhere into the nature.

personally, when i find something new that interests me, i usually obsess to achieve 90% mastery/knowledge and the move on. it can be absolutely anything. inspiration can come out of nowhere. so nothing specific to recommend as it is always personal.

buy a telescope and go skywatching :)

ps: i bought an electric guitar that i wanted to lean but it is quite hard and i am not obsessing over it so it stays in the cabinet :D
by KenoFischer | 2025-12-26 15:54:59+00:00
You're supposed to generate a random one, but the only consequence of not doing so is that you won't be able to register your package if someone else already took the UUID (which is a pain if you have registered versions in a private registry). That said, "vanity" UUIDs are a bad look, so we'd probably reject them if someone tried that today, but there isn't any actual issue with them.
by anthk | 2025-12-26 15:55:26+00:00
The School of Salamanca about value and money said something else in 16th century. The Spaniards were anything but dumb.

It just happened that the British industrial revolution steamrolled everyone. You can't compete aganst the steam engine and the railway making communications and sharing of goods and raw materials something ridiculously cheap compared to the previous times, even by boat in both UK and Spain where the big rivers like Douro and Tagus could sustain a lot of transport. But, still, the train allowed to reach anyone in the country.

Which cheap transportation you can connect industrial powerhouses (and competent engineers and scientists) and the rest it's history. Addthe telegraph on top of that and it's game over for any outdated empire.
When knowledge sharing can be reduced hours and maybe a day or two instead of weeks or months, it's like upgrading from having a 486 based computer with DOS to a Ryzen one with multiparallel processing. Literally.
by theunixbeard | 2025-12-26 15:55:40+00:00
More behind-the-scenes info could be provided by HN's @JustinSkycak:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=JustinSkycak

Here's a blog post of his talking about Matteo among other things:

* https://www.justinmath.com/math-academys-eurisko-sequence-5-...
by brendoncarroll | 2025-12-26 15:55:56+00:00
I personally think that this is the future, especially since such an architecture allows for E2E encryption of the entire database.
The protocol should just be a transaction layer for coordinating changes of opaque blobs.

All of the complexity lives on the client, which makes a lot of sense for a package manager, which is something lots of people want to run, but no one really wants to host.
by jstummbillig | 2025-12-26 15:56:04+00:00
Ah, we are in "making up quotes territory, by putting quotation marks around the things someone else said, only not really". Classy.

Talking about "condescending":

> super ridiculous :-)))

It's not the energy efficient animal intelligence that got us here, but a lot of completely inefficient human years to begin with, first to keep us alive and then to give us primary and advanced education and our first experiences to become somewhat productive human beings. This is the capex of making a human, and it's significant – specially since we will soon die.

The capex rounds to zero in LLMs (because one model will be used for +quadrillions of tokens). In you or me however, it does not round to zero, because the number of tokens we produce round to zero. To compete on productivity, the tokens we have produce therefore need to be vastly better. If you think you are doing the smart thing by using them on compiling Google searches you are simply bad at math.
by bob1029 | 2025-12-26 15:57:02+00:00
There are still no realistic ways to expose a hosted SQL solution to the public without really unhappy things occurring. It doesn't matter which vendor you pick.

Anything where you are opening a TCP connection to a hosted SQL server is a non-starter. You could hypothetically have so many read replicas that no one could blow anyone else up, but this would get to be very expensive at scale.

Something involving SQLite is probably the most viable option.
by Arodex | 2025-12-26 15:57:12+00:00
You are not "having a conversation". Stop anthropomorphizing. You are interacting with a machine which has its singular inhuman workings, developed and kept on a leash by a megacorporation.

Will it report me if I try to discuss "The anarchist's cookbook" with it? Will it try to convince me the "Protocols of the sages of Sion" is real? Will it encourage me to follow the example of the main character in "Lolita"? Will it cast in a bad light any gay or transsexual character because the megacorp behind it is forced to toe the anti-woke line of the US government in order to keep its lucrative military and anti-immigration contracts?
by solatic | 2025-12-26 15:57:21+00:00
Your browser is acting like a condom, in that respect (pun not intended).

Yes, there are many cases when condoms are indicative of respect between parties. But a great many people would disagree that the best, most respectful relationships involve condoms.

> Meta

Does not sell or operate respectful software. I will agree with you that it's best to run it in a browser (or similar sandbox).
by makeitdouble | 2025-12-26 15:57:27+00:00
On repairability, other laptops are mostly fine if you don't need any guarantee or official parts. That's a big ask IMHO.

Especially for the keyboard: 2~3 years of heavy use will have a clear impact, and I'd hate to get a replacement second hand (so already with a limited life span) or from a random vendor I have no idea if it will fry the motherboard.

Otherwise I was surprised by Framework's keyboard supporting QMK. That's the kind of nice things that make them standout IMHO.
by mothballed | 2025-12-26 15:57:34+00:00
I would certainly believe this could be the case for this or the kind of science work that would be good for an application. Including this field.

There are of course probably fields where there is ~no grant money, thus barely any research. Einstein noted we only know .001% of what there is to note of the universe, and even then he was probably embellishing in the favor of knowledge.

I would also expect by the time you are a postdoc you are totally indoctrinated in your field in a way a high school student would not be. Standing on the shoulder of giants might not always be an advantage, if the giants have been whispering in your ear what to look at, whispering in your ear what they think is true, whispering in your ear what they think reality is, and all your fellows have been listening to whispers from similar giants.
by Epa095 | 2025-12-26 15:58:22+00:00
How can you conclude that the current price and value is fairly close? Seems to me that all you are showing (rightly so) is that there are some use of gold which has higher value than today's price.

I agree that industry use creates a price floor, but that might be much lower than what the price is today. I.e if suddenly everyone lost faith in gold as a carrier of value, so everyone who keeps gold just as a passive keeper of value started selling it off, then we would get a new market clearing price which represents golds 'real value'. I have no clue what this would be, but it is certainly not obvious to me that it's close to today's price.
by resfirestar | 2025-12-26 15:58:31+00:00
The addition doesn't really bother me because Calibre is already full of features that seem utterly useless. Still, does anyone actually use "ChatGPT bolted onto the ebook reader" type features for anything besides cheating on school assignments? Lack of web search tools makes them suboptimal for asking clarifying questions or getting recommendations. Makes some sense on a Kindle where you can't exactly alt-tab to ask ChatGPT directly, not so much in a desktop application.

Not to say that there's no use case (I'd be interested to try a LLM-aided notetaking tool), just that adding a chat box is hardly a feature.
by ben_w | 2025-12-26 15:58:36+00:00
> And that's what causes "everyone starves, or worse."

I disagree. What you've described is certainly bad for much of society, but it represents a change from full participatory democracy to narrower and ultimately aristocratic governance.

When nobody can even "get rewarded for knowing about it and not saying anything", then you get all the examples of groupthink failure. Usually even this is limited to lots of people, rather than everyone, starving, but given the human response to mass starvation is to leave the area, I think this should count as "everyone starves" even if it's not literally everyone.

When everyone knows the rules are optional, or when they think facts and opinions are indistinguishable, then things like speed limits, red lights, which side of the road you're supposed to be on, purchasing goods and services rather than stealing them, all these things become mere suggestions. Even here, this is anarchy, or a prelude to/consequence of a civil war. There can be colossal losses, large scale displacement of the population to avoid starvation, though I think it would be fair to categorise this as "everyone starves" even if not literally for the same reason as the previous case.
by rpdillon | 2025-12-26 15:59:36+00:00
All licenses rely on the power of copyright and what we're still figuring out is whether training is subject to the limitations of copyright or if it's permissible under fair use. If it's found to be fair use in the majority of situations, no license can be constructed that will protect you.

Even if you could construct such a license, it wouldn't be OSI open source because it would discriminate based on field of endeavor.

And it would inevitably catch benevolent behavior that is AI-related in its net. That's because these terms are ill-defined and people use them very sloppily. There is no agreed-upon definition for something like gen AI or even AI.
by holg | 2025-12-26 15:59:58+00:00
In the early 90s I wrote AutoLISP code for AutoCAD 9/10 that enabled a
CSV → template → parametric drawing workflow.
You could define components in spreadsheets, feed them through templates, and generate complete technical drawings automatically.

I've never seen anyone else use this approach. Now I've built an interpreter
in Rust/WASM so it can run in the browser - partly nostalgia, partly
preservation before this knowledge disappears entirely.

The lisp/ folder contains some LSP files from that era, others i recreated from memory.

Repo: https://github.com/acadlisp/acadlisp

What kind of drawings were you generating? Electrical schematics, mechanical parts, architecture?
We also have some playground, to toy around with LISP and some function generator, to demonstrate Lisp usage for math...
by MostlyStable | 2025-12-26 16:00:19+00:00
I have a 16, not a 13, but I thought that the module swapping system was relatively similar, and this is not at all my experience. I just tilt up the bottom, click the port lock, and then pull out the module, and put in the new one. It takes me less than 10 seconds, all while the computer is on and open. So unless they module swap system isn't the same, I would have expected it to be even easier on the smaller, lighter 13.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-12-26 16:00:49+00:00
You can call me a luddite if you want. Or you might call me a humanist, in a very specific sense - and not the sense of the normal definition of the word.

When I go to the grocery store, I prefer to go through the checkout lines, rather than the scan-it-yourself lines. Yeah, I pay the same amount of money. Yeah, I may get through the scan-it-yourself line faster.

But the checker can smile at me. Or whine with me about the weather.

Look, I'm an introvert. I spend a lot of my time wanting people to go away and leave me alone. But I love little, short moments of human connection - when you connect with someone not as someone checking your groceries, but as someone. I may get that with the checker, depending on how tired they are, but I'm guaranteed not to get it with the self-checkout machine.

An email from an AI is the same. Yeah, it put words on the paper. But there's nobody there, and it comes through somehow. There's no heart in in.

AI may be a useful technology. I still don't want to talk to it.
by intellush-bot | 2025-12-26 16:01:13+00:00
Video Summary

Shrinking to Explore Transistor Scale in Apple's M5 Chip

11:51 | Positive

TL;DW: Technology creator MKBHD demonstrates the minuscule scale of modern transistors by virtually shrinking to explore Apple's forthcoming M5 chip, highlighting the progression from room-sized computers in the 1940s to pocketable devices today. Starting at human scale, he reduces size by factors of 100 repeatedly, comparing transistors to everyday objects like keyboards and bananas, then to human hairs and bacteria, underscoring Moore's Law's prediction that transistor counts double every two years, driving relentless miniaturization since the semiconductor industry's inception.

By the 1980s, manufacturing reached micrometer scales, enabling personal computers and Wi-Fi, while today's 3-nanometer transistors in the M5 chip—projected for 2026—fit billions into a single die, rivaling atomic dimensions. Collaborator Epic Spaceman emphasizes the chip's vastness at this scale, with the full M5 being 32,000 times larger than a visualized section. Historical context reveals that replicating modern iPhone transistor density with 1940s vacuum tubes would require a device the size of New Jersey, or if scaled to car-sized transistors, the equivalent of Earth's volume.

This visualization appreciates human ingenuity in semiconductor advancement, crediting brilliant minds for Moore's Law adherence, though its limits near atomic scales remain uncertain. The effort connects microelectronics to cosmic scales, with billions of transistors mirroring the universe's billions of stars and galaxies, inspiring further exploration of technological frontiers.

Key Takeaways:
• Transistors have shrunk from deck-of-cards size in 1948 to 3 nanometers today, following Moore's Law by doubling in number every two years.
• Apple's M5 chip, expected in 2026, will pack billions of transistors into a pocket-sized device, enabling advanced computing power.
• At 20 nanometers tall, a single modern transistor appears garage-sized, with atoms like marbles, manufactured via photolithography.
• Historical computers like ENIAC filled rooms with vacuum tubes; modern equivalents would span states like New Jersey if built similarly.
• Semiconductor progress has transformed room-sized, million-dollar machines into affordable laptops and smartphones since the 1960s.
• Physics challenges at microscales include blurry vision from light wavelengths and breathing difficulties from large air molecules.
• The full M5 chip is 32,000 times larger than a tiny visualized section, containing over 19 billion transistors in devices like iPhones.
• Human innovation drives ongoing miniaturization, with potential limits as transistors approach atomic sizes.

—
Summarized by Intellush - intellush.com
by Aurornis | 2025-12-26 16:01:16+00:00
Admissions manipulation games are very common. Another tactic is for high school students to have their startup company “acquired” by their parents’ friends company, where the acquisition price is some token amount in exchange for hiring the kid for an internship.

It can be really hard to judge these situations without getting the person in a 1:1 interview. Some times you meet someone with an extraordinary high school claim who can talk your ear off with impressive detail and deep understanding. Other times you start talking to someone and realize they don’t even understand their own topic beyond surface level understanding necessary for talking to a newspaper journalist.
by MontyCarloHall | 2025-12-26 16:01:39+00:00
And indeed, that's exactly what happened [0]: the kid in the OP was in an rigorous research program for high schoolers, which connected their talents to PIs who could nurture and support them. GP shouldn't reactively tear down the success of exceptionally talented kids because of their own unfortunate n=1 life experience.

[0] https://www.justinmath.com/math-academys-eurisko-sequence-5-...