MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by benoau | 2025-12-19 18:35:02+00:00
> European-style digital speech laws

AKA Meta and X have to disclose who is funding ads and why their algorithms served w/e content to you.

> these systems aim to “impose hard-left ideological strictures” on American discourse

The law (Digital Services Act) doesn't distinguish between left-wing and right-wing, but fostering political division and radicalizing vulnerable people seems a lot more likely to be done for right wing purposes and this kind of transparency undermines their effectiveness.

Another thing it does is ban advertising based on sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, or political leanings, which "ironically" disproportionately affects one side more than the other too.
by lelanthran | 2025-12-19 18:36:01+00:00
> - first the place that is paying me to solve problems will NOT be just fine when I suddenly leave

Yes they will!

No one, not even the chief officers or the shareholders of a company are irreplaceable. Well, maybe you're the only tech guy in a 5-company outfit?

They'll replace you just fine.

> - second I need UBI or some AI-enabled utopia to be ushered in to live comfortably as goat herder

Well, that's not really relevant to your assertion, is it?

>>> I really really hope an AI will do this work and solve all the “business problems” so I can go and be a goat herder

After all, UBI as an outcome is not dependent on AI solving all the business problems you currently solve.

IOW, whether UBI comes to pass or not is completely independent of "AI takes our jobs".
by 9rx | 2025-12-19 18:37:30+00:00
I tried it once. It uncannily picked up on what I was interested that day. However, by the second day I had moved on to new interests, but it didn't. It keep trying to push the same thing as the day before that I was no longer interested in anymore.

Perhaps the algorithm has gotten better since, but I had no reason to want to use it after that.
by RandallBrown | 2025-12-19 18:37:44+00:00
In my experience (and especially at my current job) bottlenecks are more often organizational than technical. I spend a lot of time waiting for others to make decisions before I can actually proceed with any work.

My judgement is built in to the time it takes me to code. I think I would be spending the same amount of time doing that while reviewing the AI code to make sure it isn't doing something silly (even if it does technically work.)

A friend of mine recently switched jobs from Amazon to a small AI startup where he uses AI heavily to write code. He says it's improved his productivity 5x, but I don't really think that's the AI. I think it's (mostly) the lack of bureaucracy in his small 2 or 3 person company.

I'm very dubious about claims that AI can improve productivity so much because that just hasn't been my experience. Maybe I'm just bad at using it.
by wtallis | 2025-12-19 18:37:52+00:00
The 5700X has the same 8 cores as a 5800X3D but with a slightly higher maximum clock speed (the X3D CPUs tend to have lower maximum voltages because the extra cache die doesn't tolerate voltages as high as the CPU cores do). The only reason the 5700X is running cooler for you is because it comes with a 65W "TDP" setting out of the box rather than the 105W "TDP" setting used by the 5800X3D. If you configure a 5800X3D to operate at the same power limit, it'll give you generally better performance than a 5700X.

In general, buying a power-limited desktop CPU has never been a good strategy to get better efficiency. You can always configure the full-power chip to only use that extra headroom for short bursts, and to throttle down to what you consider acceptable for sustained workloads.
by sallveburrpi | 2025-12-19 18:38:21+00:00
I think age is a lame argument here but fwiw i also grew up on IRC and 90s internet - I just have a less rosy view of that time.

> TikTok causes chemical release in the brain

Basically everything causes a chemical release in the brain. For example HN does as well, would you compare posting on HN to heroin?

> both are hard to fight

I know and knew people both addicted to heroin and to TikTok. Let me assure you that ditching a short-form content addiction is VASTLY more easy than ditching heroin.

> the effects of Heroin which comes with addiction and the cravings are some-what mimicked within the realms of TikTok

This is true for everything that humans enjoy. Next you gonna say that talking a walk in nature or working out is like heroin because I enjoy it and I’m addicted to it (if I don’t do it every day I feel bad and I have a compulsion to do it every day)

> why do you think the world is in utter shit

I disagree with that assessment, the “world” as a whole is actually much better than it used to be 30 years ago. Of course that might not be the case for you individually but then this thread is more about your feelings than an objective observation of the world.

> At least with Heroin you need to inject.

Most heroin users don’t inject which ones again shows you don’t know anything about it outside of tropes and cliches.

“At least with TikTok you need a smartphone and internet and swipe to unlock” - see how dumb that makes me sound?

Don’t get me wrong I dislike the tech hegemony and social media as much as you - I just think your way of arguing damages your position more than it helps it.
by OutOfHere | 2025-12-19 18:38:23+00:00
Allow me to explain a contrarian position. Judges favor individuals that use an expensive lawyer for representation, even if there isn't much of a legal argument to be made. Judges give such individuals a far better deal. The reason for this is that hiring an expensive lawyer shows that you've paid homage to the legal profession with your wallet, that you support the systemic judicial-attorney-penalty complex. It grants you favors.

If now you were to come forward with an AI lawyer, in practice it'll be almost as if you didn't use a lawyer at all, as if you were representing yourself, which will get you the worst possible deal, if any. Things shouldn't be this way at all, but the system is crooked, and so they are this way.

As such, I think some lawyers are going away, but not all. The ones who stand in court will have business.
by tsazan | 2025-12-19 18:38:30+00:00
Agreed. In a perfect world, they would. But I cannot merge PRs into Shopify's core. Waiting for trillion-dollar corporations to change their security models is a death sentence for a new protocol. We build for the infrastructure that exists today, not the one we wish for. When they open the gates, we will move. Until then, we live in the root.
Show HN: Wasm decoder with focus on helpful errors/diagnostics
by pasxizeis | 2025-12-19 18:38:36+00:00
Hey everyone! I started writing a decoder from scratch for WebAssembly modules (i.e. a parser for `.wasm` files).

The primary motivation was to learn both WebAssembly _and_ a new language. However it turned out to be a very fun project, and I think there is space for a decoder with helpful error messages, that can serve as a good debugging tool or for educational purposes.

A sample output can be found at for an invalid module can be found at https://github.com/agis/wadec?tab=readme-ov-file#usage.

Recently it hit v2.0 spec conformance (I'm executing it against the upstream spec test suite.) 3.0 is next on the roadmap.

It's still in very early stage, but any feedback is more than welcome. Thanks!

https://github.com/agis/wadec
by PaulKeeble | 2025-12-19 18:38:51+00:00
There is at least a group that are willing to pay for Firefox if its ultimately a browser built for the user base against a hostile web. But that has never been on offer, donations have always only ever been for Mozilla as a whole and the past decade has been no end of user hostile projects one after the other combined with other projects people want nothing to do with.

I don't know if its possible because its not been tried, but it doesn't work from a low trust position and Mozilla is very much not trusted.
by saubeidl | 2025-12-19 18:38:56+00:00
> Every country wants to be in that position.

I agree. But not many are one of the largest economies in the world and the world's most prolific regulator.

> America should be helping you with them instead of posturing and pretending to be friends with our enemies.

I also agree, but unfortunately the American electorate and its elites have proven deeply untrustworthy. I wish it wasn't so, but that's what happened.

With that in mind, the best outcome for us is to hope for American power to decrease relative to China to increase our own leverage.
by ChrisArchitect | 2025-12-19 18:38:59+00:00
Unrelated to:

Instacart reaches into your pocket and lops a third off your dollars

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46245833

Instacart's AI-enabled pricing experiments may be inflating your grocery bill

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46205041
by Sohcahtoa82 | 2025-12-19 18:39:14+00:00
> there is still a market there, someone will fill it.

How? The cost to design a GPU from scratch is astronomical. Even if a bunch of top brass engineers from NVIDIA left the company to start their own, I'd be surprised if trying to apply as much of their knowledge as possible didn't result in patent violations.

Even ignoring the design part, you have to deal with actual manufacturing. TSMC is ostensibly the only guys in town that could make it, but their fabs are already occupied by NVIDIA's orders. Building your own fab is billions of dollars and several years.
by qingcharles | 2025-12-19 18:39:20+00:00
Agree. As a dev I've had to pivot a dozen times in my career. If you're a dev you should be able to learn a new language fairly quickly, all the core elements are the same, just the vocabulary is a little different. Since nobody has "fixed" C to avoid these bugs, and we're not going to go as far as put Java or .Net in the kernel, then I think Rust is probably the best, most pragmatic solution we have right now.
by charleshn | 2025-12-19 18:39:22+00:00
They should be reintroducing the 3D vcache [0] variants (X) in EPYC, with a higher cache/core ratio, that was present in EPYC4 (e.g. 9684X [1]) they for some reason wasn't available in EPYC5.

Makes a massive difference at high density and utilisation, with the standard cache/core performance can really degrade under load.

[0] https://www.amd.com/en/products/processors/technologies/3d-v...

[1] https://www.amd.com/en/products/processors/server/epyc/4th-g...
by m01 | 2025-12-19 18:39:30+00:00
Ironically on Kobo you can buy Enshittification with DRM:

"Download options: EPUB 3 (Adobe DRM)": https://www.kobo.com/gb/en/ebook/enshittification-4

Kobo does sell some other books DRM-free, so perhaps this is some sort of error. You can buy it directly from the publisher without Adobe DRM, there it has a watermark instead.
by happymellon | 2025-12-19 18:39:33+00:00
> How would you know a non-slop PR didn't use AI?

I don't, hence why I have to take your word for it.

The PRs that people have submitted where they either told me up front or admitted to using AI after the review probed as to why they would be inconsistent in their library usage were not good and required substantial rework.

Yes, some people may submit PRs that used AI and were good. But if so, they haven't told me but I would have hoped that people advocating it would have either told me or got me to review, said it is good, and then told me it was a test and the AI passed. So far that hasn't happened, so I'm not convinced it's a regular occurrence.
by cbcam | 2025-12-19 18:39:40+00:00
I work in RF comms. Most of my work is in network simulation from the transport layer all the way down to the physical layer to prove out radio performance before expensive flight testing. I also work on error correction schemes as the networks I develop may be lossy compared to the internet at large.

I used to work in web dev, but I enjoy my current work a lot more. Most of my web role was just taking mockups from the UX team and translating them into code which felt mindless. Now I get handed a system and am asked to squeeze as much performance out of it as possible which I find much more interesting.
by simonw | 2025-12-19 18:39:46+00:00
> I mention the problem of ‘hallucinations’ – when an AI model presents false or fabricated information as factual – and the need for a human face in court. The Sandie Peggie judgment allegedly contained AI-made errors. He waves this all away. ‘Temporary bugs and sentimental preferences. The economic argument is overwhelming.’

As usual with "AI replacing humans", the key thing to consider here is accountability.

I want to get my legal advice from someone who is accountable for that advice, and is willing to stake their professional reputation on that advice being correct.

An LLM can never be accountable.

I don't want an LLM for a lawyer. I want a lawyer armed with LLMs, who's more effective than the previous generations of lawyers.

(I'd also like them to be cheaper because they take less time to solve my problems, but I would hope that means they can take on more clients and maintain a healthy income that way even as each client takes less time.)

The closing paragraph of that story:

> ‘My niece is a lovely girl, really smart, great at school, and the other day she told me she wants to be a lawyer. And I thought, “Oh my God, my little niece wants to be a lawyer”, and I flat out told her. I said please do not destroy your life. Do not get into a lifetime of debt for a job that won’t exist in ten years. Or less.’

Uh oh. Here we go again, with the "don't bother studying computer science, it's 2002, all the jobs will be outsourced to cheaper countries in the next few years!". So glad I didn't listen to that advice back then!
by stuffn | 2025-12-19 18:39:47+00:00
A person let's their case be argued by ChatGPT Esq. At sentencing:

"Your honor, the death penalty for a traffic ticket?"

AI will never replace humans in this capacity. Lawyers may be scummy but most people would take a slimeball lawyer over a hallucinating, sycophantic "AI" pretending to be both a human and a lawyer. This reads more like astroturfing by Sam Altman to keep the ChatGPT hype going while he cashes out.
by jchw | 2025-12-19 18:40:00+00:00
Hah! I just ran into this recently and can confirm. The coax to my DOCSIS ISP was damaged during a storm, which was causing upstream channels to barely work at all. (Amusingly, downstream had no trouble.) While waiting for the cable person to come around later in the week, I hooked my home gateway device up to an old phone instead of the modem. I figured there would be consequences, but surprisingly, everything went pretty smoothly... But my Wireguard-encapsulated connections all hung during the TLS handshake! What gives?

The answer is MTU. The MTU on my network devices were all set to 1500, and my Wireguard devices 1420, as is customary. However, I found that 1340 ( - 80) was the maximum I could use safely.

Wait, though... Why in the heck did that only impact Wireguard? My guess is that TCP connections were discovering the correct MSS value automatically. Realistically that does make sense, but something bothers me:

1. How come my Wireguard packets seemed to get lost entirely? Shouldn't they get fragmented on one end and re-assembled on the other? UDP packets are IP packets, surely they should fragment just fine?

2. Even if they don't, if the Linux TCP stack is determining the appropriate MSS for a given connection then why doesn't that seem to work here? Shouldn't the underlying TCP connection be able to discover the safe MSS relatively easily?

I spelunked through Linux code for a while looking for answers but came up empty. Wonder if anyone here knows.

My best guess is that:

1. A stateless firewall/NAT somewhere didn't like the fragmented UDP packets because it couldn't determine the source/dest ports and just dropped them entirely

2. Maybe MSS discovery relies on ICMP packets that were not able to make it through? (edit: Yeah, on second thought, this makes sense: if the Wireguard UDP packets are not making it to their destination, then the underlying encapsulated packets won't make it out either, which means there won't be any ICMP response when the TCP stack sends a packet with Don't Fragment set.)

But I couldn't find anything to strongly support that.
by doctorpangloss | 2025-12-19 18:40:24+00:00
> so what exactly is the point of 5800X3D scalping

in the past, growth in PC gaming came naturally with the growth in the adoption of computers around the world.

at saturation of "new to computers" audiences, growth in PC gaming comes from convincing the core gaming demographic, newly-turned 13 year old boys, to agitate for PCs instead of XYZ.

so a big part of it is the retail-marketing experience - the aesthetics of buying - and scalping / sense of urgency plays extremely well with the buyer who actually chooses PC over a nintendo switch, as opposed to a kid who will never make the more expensive choice ever.

this is really a story about saturation than it is about hardware or shortages for AI usage or whatever.
by PaulHoule | 2025-12-19 18:40:29+00:00
The Chomsky Hierarchy isn't the right way to think about, in fact the Chomsky paradigm probably held back progress in language technology over the past 70 years.

In the Kuhnian sense, Syntactic Structures was the vanguard of a paradigm shift that let linguists do "normal science" in terms of positing a range of problems and writing papers about them. It was also useful in computer science for formally defining computer languages that are close enough to natural languages that people find them usable.

On the other hand, attempts to use the Chomsky theory to develop language technology failed miserably outside of very narrow domains and in the real world Markov models and conditional random fields often outperformed when the function was "understanding", "segmentation", etc.

From an engineering standpoint, the function that tells if a production is in the grammar that is central to the theory is not so interesting for language technology, I mean, if LLMs were -centric then an LLM would go on strike if you got the spelling or grammar wrong or correct you in a schoolmarmish William Safire way but rather it is more useful for LLMs to silently correct for obvious mistakes the same way that real language users do.

The other interesting thing is the mixing of syntax and semantics. For a long time I believed the "Language Instinct" idea of Pinker in which the ability to serialize and deserialize language is a peripheral that is attached to an animal and you need the rest of the animal and even the surrounding world to have "human" competence. Now LLMs come around and manage to show a lot of linguistic competence without the rest of the animal and boy we have egg on our face, and coming out of the shadow of the Chomsky theory, structuralism will rear it's head again. (e.g. "X is structured like a language" got hung up on the unspoken truth that "language is not structured like a language")
by tptacek | 2025-12-19 18:40:59+00:00
For modern scientific rebuttals to race science, I'd start with Sasha Gusev and Eric Turkheimer. You'll read about things like missing heritability and the methodological problems of twin studies (which are grave). I'd also read Cosma Shalizi's "g, a statistical myth", which is also fun just from a sort of mid-level math/stat perspective. A classic in the field that still holds up is Ned Block's "Race, Genes, and IQ", written as a response to The Bell Curve.

I don't have offhand good links to critiques of Gould that are on any site I would recommend you read.
by echelon | 2025-12-19 18:41:09+00:00
> ‘My niece is a lovely girl, really smart, great at school, and the other day she told me she wants to be a lawyer. And I thought, “Oh my God, my little niece wants to be a lawyer”, and I flat out told her. I said please do not destroy your life. Do not get into a lifetime of debt for a job that won’t exist in ten years. Or less.’

Bets that this won't happen in just 10 years?

DARPA Grand Challenge took 20 years, and it's still not on the interstates. Waymo is amazing, but it's still a work in progress.

I know it's coming, but solving problems that require 99.999% correctness is hard work. Mistakes multiply.

A toy can be ready tomorrow, but a precision legal tool needs to be better than humans. Not unlike driving 70 mph on the interstate highway with hands off the wheel.
by phkahler | 2025-12-19 18:41:27+00:00
Upgraded my 2400G to a 5700G with new 64GB RAM a while back, which is really the end of the road for my system. I got a solid 3x performance increase on multi-threaded apps. Also have enough RAM to play with some this AI stuff - yes even on an AMD APU. Next purchase will likely be Zen 7.
by Sohcahtoa82 | 2025-12-19 18:41:28+00:00
In the mid 90s, sure, but prices were coming down fast.

There was a sweet spot in ~1999 where you could buy an A-Bit BH6 motherboard, 300 Mhz Celeron A (overclocked to 450 Mhz), 3dfx Banshee, and all the other components to make a PC for only ~$500 and have a respectable gaming machine.
by lumost | 2025-12-19 18:42:02+00:00
We're at a funny stage where some careers are becoming "post-LLM". For example, SWE is either rapidly approaching, or surpassing the point where LLMs can do most of what we traditionally viewed as day to day SWE work. However this doesn't translate into "no more SWEs." I have no doubt that what it means to be a lawyer day to day will shift with LLM advancements.
by jollyllama | 2025-12-19 18:42:18+00:00
> You can replace "videogames" with literally anything and it still works.

That's like saying "one who cannot go without food is the same as one who is addicted to heroin." You're engaging in superficiality to the point that all distinction is made meaningless.

> It's like pointing out some school shooter played a violent video games

That's a totally different argument
by fragmede | 2025-12-19 18:42:18+00:00
I vibe coded the shit out of a Chrome extension that does that while waiting on CI/CD. Go read the content.js to make sure I'm not hacking your shit, download the repo to your computer, enable developer mode in chrome, "load unpacked", point it at the directory with those files, and enjoy your tool tips.

https://github.com/fragmede/honest-hn-tooltips

Edit: Took 18 minutes.
by bitwize | 2025-12-19 18:42:42+00:00
Here's something to bake your noodle:

Apple makes Lightning to HDMI dongles that contain 400 MHz Samsung ARM SoCs and 256 MiB of RAM onboard.

They run frickin' Darwin.

There is more power in one of those dongles than there was in the OG iMac, and it runs a cut-down macOS. No cap.

And yes, Doom has been ported: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4XCkeN0XuqA
by lelanthran | 2025-12-19 18:43:24+00:00
> I think you have this backward. Someone who never reads might forget how to write. Someone who never writes, but reads all the time, will not forget how to read.

You are saying something completely different to what I am saying; are you really saying that someone who writes all the time will forget how to read?

You understand that the act of writing is in fact partially reading?
by sallveburrpi | 2025-12-19 18:43:25+00:00
The chief officers and/or shareholders are probably the ones who are the most replaceable….

AI utopia is not needed for UBI that is true - but it will be much easier to become reality if “all the jobs” are taken.

Aside from all the snark - I think that the fundamental societal problem is that there will always be some shitty jobs that no one wants to do and there needs to be some system to force some people to do these jobs - call it capitalism, communism, or marriage. There is no way around this basic fact of the human condition