MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by taeric | 2025-12-11 19:06:34+00:00
I find the remark that we give things names more as a word play than purpose.... kind of amusing? Like, of course people will find a way to play with the tools they have. And in programming, that is often words. Because what else would it be?

By far the worst aspect of the nerd ecosystem is the odd belief that pops up every so often that names should matter. In every ecosystem, there is usually some odd idea that it is only in their world that people abuse this.

Just skim through that list of things that are unexpectedly named after people. Sure, you can get upset about Shell's sort not having any relation to shells. Or Bloom's filter not having a phase where the data "blooms" into use. But you would have the same issue with French drains. Or how gaslighting has nothing to do with lighting things on fire using gas and the affect that will have.

Honestly, I think this would be a fun list to just keep going. Akin to the old Chuck Norris joke generators.
by verdverm | 2025-12-11 19:06:37+00:00
more or less this, but also synthetic

if you think about GANs, it's all the same concept

1. train model (agent)

2. train another model (agent) to do something interesting with/to the main model

3. gain new capabilities

4. iterate

You can use a mix of both real and synthetic chat sessions or whatever you want your model to be good at. Mid/late training seems to be where you start crafting personality and expertises.

Getting into the guts of agentic systems has me believing we have quite a bit of runway for iteration here, especially as we move beyond single model / LLM training. I still need to get into what all is de jour in the RL / late training, that's where a lot of opportunity lies from my understanding so far

Nathan Lambert (https://bsky.app/profile/natolambert.bsky.social) from Ai2 (https://allenai.org/) & RLHF Book (https://rlhfbook.com/) has a really great video out yesterday about the experience training Olmo 3 Think

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uaZ3yRdYg8A
by orliesaurus | 2025-12-11 19:06:57+00:00
Been tinkering with litestream... the read-only VFS is neat but I'm curious about eventual write capabilities... using VFS for distributed DBs could unlock some interesting patterns.

ALSO I'm thinking about mixing this with object store caching... maybe combining memfs with remote metadata; would love to see more details on performance.

BUT I might be overthinking it... just excited to see SQLite exploring beyond local files...
by andrewl | 2025-12-11 19:07:17+00:00
I strongly agree with this. And what bothers me more than obscure or meaningless names like Viper are silly and embarrassing names like Hunchentoot. Names like that sometimes cause people to dismiss good software. It’s like using Comic Sans in a serious research paper.

One area of the sciences does partly use names like this, and that is biology. Biologists do sometimes name a species after a famous person, as in the louse Strigiphilus garylarsoni:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strigiphilus_garylarsoni
by array_key_first | 2025-12-11 19:07:20+00:00
People care because it's entirely unconscious. Even if you choose not to care, you can't, because you've already seen it.

The way advertisement works is that it's brain hacking - it's just associations. Over time your brain associates a brand with a product or products, and then simply by having this association in your brain you're more likely to buy the product.

This also works for negative advertisement.

Think about it. Suppose you did see mickey mouse saluting Hitler, or maybe you saw mickey mouse stick a jar up his little rat ass.

When you see mickey mouse, undoubtedly, even if just for a second, your mind will think about what you saw before. You might discount it immediately, but the damage is done. You still feel that emotion, even if only for a split second, and you have been influenced by it.
by davnicwil | 2025-12-11 19:07:35+00:00
a recent example I came across was losing a single airpod (dropped on street) and getting a find my notification only when I was already several blocks away. Went back, 30 mins had passed, nowhere to be found.

This is the kind of thing that makes it really clear how far away we actually are from 'real world' intelligence or maybe better described as common sense in our devices, in the detail.

Obviously, the intelligent thing to do there would have been to spam me with notifications the instant my devices noticed my airpods were separated by > 10 metres, one was moving away from the other, and the stationary one was in a street or at least some place that was not home.

But although AI can search really well, and all sorts of other interesting stuff, I think we all have to admit that it still seems really hard to imagine it taking 'initiative' so to speak even in that super simple situation and making a good decision and acting on it in the sensible way that any human would, unless it was specifically programmed to do so.

And that's the problem I think fundamentally, at least for now. There's just too much randomness and too many situations that can occur in the real world, and there's too many integration points for LLMs to deal with these, even supposing they would deal with them well.

In theory it seems like it could be done, but in practice it isn't being done even after years of the tech being available, and by the most well funded companies.

That's the kind of thing that makes me think the long tail of usefulness of LLMs on the ground is still really far away.
by jverducci | 2025-12-11 19:08:13+00:00
Yes and no. Some channels were chosen deliberately, while others were more serendipitous. General networking, conversations, and hunting for startup-related information/tips happened to surface prospects without explicitly looking for them.

In hindsight, there are two things I’d change. One micro-level, one macro-level.

Micro: I would have started creating content on day one, even before anything was built. In any domain, you need time to establish credibility, and the easiest way to accelerate that is by consistently sharing insights, lessons, and thought processes. Building trust starts long before you ship a product. That’s going to be a major focus for us moving forward.

Macro: I would have pushed myself much harder on the networking front a looooong time ago. Earlier in my career, I didn’t step outside my comfort zone enough, and I avoided social platforms entirely throughout the 2010s. Once I decided to build a company, I had to completely overhaul that mindset. My advice to anyone early in their career -> spend a few extra hours each week meeting people, attending events, and expanding your circle. It feels optional, but over time the compounding effects are enormous.
by sergiotapia | 2025-12-11 19:08:28+00:00
If this article was exciting for you, I also highly recommend this one. A random dude fixed a bug in GTA 5 that was the root cause of it loading insanely slowly since the game came out!

https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times...
by indigodaddy | 2025-12-11 19:08:49+00:00
This is awesome. Especially for sqlite db’s that are read only from a website user perspective. My use case would be an sqlite DB that would live on S3 and get updated by cron or some other task runner/automation means (eg some other facility independent of the website that is using the db), and the website would use litestream vfs and just make use of that “read only” (the website will never change or modify the db) db straightup. Can it be used in this described fashion? Also/if so, how will litestream vfs react to the remote db updating itself within this scenario? Will it be cool with that? Also I’m assuming there is or will be Python modules/integration for doing the needful around Litestream VFS?

Currently on this app, I have the Python/flask app just refreshing the sqlite db from a Google spreadsheet as the auth source (via dataframe then convert to sqlite) for the sqlite db on a daily scheduled basis done within the app.

For reference this is the current app: (yes the app is kinda shite but I’m just a sysadmin trying to learn Python!) https://github.com/jgbrwn/my-upc/blob/main/app.py
by OneMorePerson | 2025-12-11 19:08:56+00:00
You can still recreate that life right now if you want, but people are choosing not to (I also choose not to so I'm not saying it's some requirement to do so).

You can get a piece of land and have a simple house on it, get a wood stove, stop buying things that generate trash (grow your own food, etc. and compost all scraps). Raise animals like chickens and goats. Put in a well. There's a ton of guides and YouTube videos out there about people who homestead.

I know people who do this on 1-2 acres and are a couple hours from a major city. The reality is that it's a ton of work and there's downsides, it depends on what kind of person you are.

(This is responding to your specific comment, I know that choosing to do this in the developed world is different from people who have no choice and no options in a developing country/place).
by nicksergeant | 2025-12-11 19:09:04+00:00
I don't know. I would argue that driving experience and reliability are still very much going to be things in the electric car market. I'm an EV9 owner and we have issues w/ the suspension making it feel sloppy over some bumps. There's going to be a ton of nuance in terms of how all of these different electric vehicles drive, ride, and are experienced. And those are all going to come down to the vehicle manufacturers themselves, not just the technology partner for screens.
by thundergolfer | 2025-12-11 19:09:15+00:00
My old company Canva, was pretty good about this and I'm bringing that to the culture at my current place.

Krazam has excellently parodied this unserious naming indulgence of programmers[1]. "See, Bingo knows everyone's name-O. So we get the user ID from there." Racoon, Wingman, EKS (Entropy Chaos Service), RGS, Barbie Doll, Ringo-2.

1. https://youtu.be/y8OnoxKotPQ?si=QkI-TPStI9I4RtAB&t=33
by rkomorn | 2025-12-11 19:09:18+00:00
Not "OP", but I will say that empathy can certainly help you build better things (tools, processes, policies, etc) for the people they affect.

It can also help you understand where coworkers or peers are coming from, and work with them better.

The problem comes when it's a one way road where the empathetic person is doing all the work.
by Spivak | 2025-12-11 19:09:26+00:00
This is the way, you name things random words devoid of all connection to software because you don't want to confuse people later when the scope grows or changes.

Well so in the beginning we only supported email notifications which is why it's called EmailServ but over time it grew into a robust and pretty general queueing service so now it handles all our background task processing. Sending emails is actually handled by EmailWorker but EmailServ still supports its original API which now uses EmailWorker behind the scenes if you prefer that.
by ralferoo | 2025-12-11 19:09:43+00:00
"Raptor Lake" isn't an internal codename, it's very much external as it's what Intel actively referred to that generation as. How's a non-geek shopping for a PC going to know if it's better or worse than "Lunar Lake" or "Alder Lake"? Maybe they just think their machine is shipping with some game where your giant dinosaur bird thing has to stop off for a quick drink to regain energy.

But in any case, this isn't the real travesty with these names. It's that they're reusing existing common words. The article hates on "google" when actually it's a fantastic name - if you googled it when it was introduced, all the results were about what you wanted. By comparison, Alphabet is an awful name, because if you search for Alphabet only a tiny subset of the results are going to be useful to you.
by irusensei | 2025-12-11 19:10:05+00:00
>Every person who encounters your “fun” name pays a small tax. Across the industry, these taxes compound into significant waste

>Reserve the creative names for end-user products where branding matters. For infrastructure, tools, and libraries, choose clarity. Every time.

Ah yes the software I am giving away for free must go easy on the minds of the poor VCs and business drones who are extracting value from it.
by ericmcer | 2025-12-11 19:10:14+00:00
Interesting. It is a shame that you can't really experience art correctly unless you have the context of living in that time & place. I will never experience Anime, Russian literature, early English literature, etc. fully because my lens is always gonna be an American in the 2000s.

I am curious how people 100 years from now will perceive art from the last 20 years, much of it feels like a thinly veiled commentary on whatever hot button social issue was prevalent at the time.
by wat10000 | 2025-12-11 19:10:27+00:00
A butterfly valve is a category of thing. The corresponding word for emacs would be "editor." That is entirely descriptive: an editor edits.

Picking a specific butterfly valve randomly from an internet search, I find one called the FNW FNWHPA1LSTG24.

Product types and categories get generic names, specific products often get weird names. It's true in just about every field.
by almosthere | 2025-12-11 19:10:33+00:00
I really think this is disingenuous thinking. change over time is the original sin. The "market" is very much a real thing. It's the global fabric of everything in the entire world. It is definitely not a model.

Also let's not forget the original sin of communism - which is that everyone is a slave.

Everyone is a slave because you don't own your own labor. It is owned by the government. By definition the people are slaves in communism.
by array_key_first | 2025-12-11 19:10:36+00:00
I swear to god Instagram is like the patriarchy speedrun.

If it finds out you're a woman, within mere minutes it's 100% "you're fat" "try this diet" "you've GOT to buy this viral dress on shein!!"

And if you're a man, it's boobs, ass, objectification, and products to make you feel more like a man.

The sheer velocity at which Instagram will shovel you into capitalist-patriachy++ is shocking.
by ericmay | 2025-12-11 19:10:40+00:00
The official said the ship had been previously linked to the smuggling of Iranian oil — a global black market that the Justice Department has been investigating for years. The vessel was sailing under the flag of another Latin American nation in which it was not registered, the official said, and its ultimate destination was Asia. A federal judge issued a seizure warrant roughly two weeks ago because of the ship’s past activities smuggling Iranian oil, not because of links to the Maduro government, the official said. Prosecutors have said that Iran uses money generated from oil sales to finance its military and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, which the United States has designated a terrorist entity.

You can argue that the US is increasing pressure on Maduro (good, we don't like dictators working with China, Russia, and Iran, right?) but I think the headline is a bit too strong given this background.
by skydhash | 2025-12-11 19:10:45+00:00
Looking up documentation is normal. If not, we wouldn't have the manual pages in Unix and such an emphasis on documentation in ecosystems like Lisp, Go, Python, Perl,... We even have cheatsheets and syntax references books because it's just so easy to forget the /basics/.

I said notetaking, but it's more about building your own index. In $WORK projects, I mostly use the browser bookmarks, the ticket system, the PR description and commits to contextually note things. In personal projects, I have an org-mode file (or a basic text file) and a lot of TODO comments.
by lynndotpy | 2025-12-11 19:11:01+00:00
Agreed entirely.

I want to add some technical details, since this is a peeve I've also had for many years now:

The standard for this is Microsoft's PhotoDNA, a paid and gatekept software-as-a-service which maintains a database of "perceptual hashes." (Unlike cryptographic hashes, these are robust against common modifications).

It'd be very simple for Microsoft to release a small library which just wraps (1) the perceptual hash algorithm and provides (2) a bloom filter (or newer, similar structures, like an XOR filter) to allow developers to check set membership against it.

There are some concerns that an individual perceptual hash can be reversed to a create legible image, so I wouldn't expect or want that hash database to be widely available. But you almost certainly can't do the same with something like a bloom filter.

If Microsoft wanted to keep both the hash algorithm and even an XOR filter of the hash database proprietary, that's understandable. But then that's ok too, because we also have mature implementations of zero-knowledge set membership proofs.

The only reason I could see is that security-by-obscurity might be a strategy that makes it infeasible for people to find adversarial ways to defeat the proprietary secret-sauce in their perceptual hash algorithm. But I that means giving up opportunities to improve the algorithm, while excluding so many ways it could be useful to combat CSAM.
by lcuff | 2025-12-11 19:11:37+00:00
Peter Drucker wrote that the most important thing a manager could have was 'character'. I've asked myself "What is character?", and the best answer I've come up with is: "The willingness to do the right thing regardless of negative consequences to oneself." When I look at myself, I don't believe I have character. I want to be liked too much, and in my emotional core, I'm frightened. I don't think I'm alone in this. I think a lot of people in managerial roles have little or no character, and are unwilling to take on the monster of 'the system', whatever that means in their context, because in general their superiors don't want to hear the bad news a manager with character might deliver. I've worked for managers who were complicit in hiding the dilution of stock options; who failed to push back on higher-management policies that were eroding the morale of their subordinates; who failed to be straight with subordinates about things they could improve; Who accepted ridiculous schedule demands on their teams, allowing death marches. You've probably got many examples of your own.

I wish there were some easy solution to this problem, but I don't see one. I do recommend the NASA document "What Made Apollo A Success". https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19720005243
by dllu | 2025-12-11 19:11:39+00:00
Depends on the wavelength of lidar. Near IR lidars (850 nm to 940 nm, like Ouster, Waymo, Hesai) will be focused to your retina whereas 1550 nm lidars (like Luminar, Seyond) will not be focused and have trouble penetrating water, but they are a lot more powerful so they instead heat up your cornea. To quote my other comment [1]:

> If you have many lidars around, the beams from each 905 nm lidar will be focused to a different spot on your retina, and you are no worse off than if there was a single lidar. But if there are many 1550 nm lidars around, their beams will have a cumulative effect at heating up your cornea, potentially exceeding the safety threshold.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46127479
by jimmySixDOF | 2025-12-11 19:12:03+00:00
How is this determining a comment is "Highly Upvoted" on HN where that is explicitly kept out of the ui/ux and new comments are a/b tested across users etc... it's not a thing you can know. I have had comments with a big number of descendents but very low upvotes so thats not a reliable indicator either. Genuinely curious.
by atonse | 2025-12-11 19:12:25+00:00
What does a bubble pop look like to people?

Does anyone envision a scenario where OpenAI or Anthropic (or google) disappears?

I can understand the investment bubble in new infra. But even that, I’m not so sure. Right now, demand is so far outstripping supply, which is why we’re having so many conversations about energy or chips.

But yes that’s the bubble people keep talking about.
by famouswaffles | 2025-12-11 19:12:34+00:00
Open AI sat on GPT-4 for 8 months and even released 3.5 months after 4 was trained. While i don't expect such big lag times anymore, generally, it's a given the public is behind whatever models they have internally at the frontier. By all indications, they did not want to release this yet, and only did so because of Gemini-3-pro.
by smcleod | 2025-12-11 19:12:37+00:00
The DGX Spark is not good for inference though it's very bandwidth limited - around the same as a lower end MacBook Pro. You're much better off with a Apple silicon for performance and memory size at the moment but I'd recommend holding off until the M5 Max comes out early in the early as the M5 has vastly superior performance to any other Apple silicon chip thanks to its matmul instruction set.
by zelphirkalt | 2025-12-11 19:12:55+00:00
I would like to go even further and say: Those things, art, photography, video, coding ... They are forms of craft, human expression, creativity. They are part of what makes life interesting. So we are in the process of eliminating the interesting and creative parts, in the name of profit and productivity maxing (if any!). Maybe we can create the 100th online platform for the same thing soon 10x faster! Wow!

Of course this is a bit too black&white. There can still be a creative human being introducing nuance and differences, trying to get the automated tools to do things different in the details or some aspects. Question is, losing all those creative jobs (in absolute numbers of people doing them), what will we as society, or we as humanity become? What's the ETA on UBI, so that we can reap the benefits of what we automated away, instead of filling the pockets of a few?
by sosodev | 2025-12-11 19:13:11+00:00
Yes, a sufficiently advanced marrying of TTS and LLM could pass a lot of these tests. That kind of blurs the line between native voice model and not though.

You would need:

* A STT (ASR) model that outputs phonetics not just words

* An LLM fine-tuned to understand that and also output the proper tokens for prosody control, non-speech vocalizations, etc

* A TTS model that understands those tokens and properly generate the matching voice

At that point I would probably argue that you've created a native voice model even if it's still less nuanced than the proper voice to voice of something like 4o. The latency would likely be quite high though. I'm pretty sure I've seen a couple of open source projects that have done this type of setup but I've not tried testing them.
by subscriptzero | 2025-12-11 19:13:52+00:00
I would love to do something like this, and weirdly I even have a dual 3090 home setup.

Any chance you can outline the steps/prompts/tools you used to run this?

I've been building a 2nd brain type project, that plugs into all my work places and a custom classifier has been on that list that would enhance that.
by ssl-3 | 2025-12-11 19:14:06+00:00
If their idea is both novel and useful, and if it actually works, and they can actually produce it, then: They can sell it to other automakers.

(GM has made a lot of cars with their own transmissions. And at various times, they've supplied -lots- of them to other automakers all over the world. They've made a lot of money doing this.

Someone's gotta build the machine vision/control systems for all of these self-driving cars; that someone may well be Rivian.

It's not as sexy as something like a new convertible might be, or a $40k self-driving electric car, and a consumer might not even know that the new car in their driveway has expensive Rivian parts buried inside, but that future can be very profitable for them.)
by wat10000 | 2025-12-11 19:14:10+00:00
More to the point, what does a John Deere S7 600 do, or a 310 G-Tier, or a Z515E ZTrak? Emacs is an editor. That part is descriptive: an editor edits. The product name is not expected to describe what the product is. The general product category is what does that.