MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by alembic_fumes | 2025-12-09 22:26:53+00:00
This comment section is for some reason filled with truly incredulous takes, with many seemingly all too willingly embracing the inevitability of personal oblivion awaiting us at the end of our lives. I wonder what solace it brings to entertain the paradox of dying as a way to bring life meaning, and where it ranks between whatever the local pastor or suburb's heroin dealer are peddling.

I suspect our education system is at fault. Too many children in the modern western society grow up completely isolated from philosophical thinking and the teachings of both ancient as contemporary philosophers. As a consequence they never get exposure to the various deep, tragic, hilarious, and most-of-all diverse ways that we as humans have tried to build meaning into our fleeting lives, triumphant or struggling.

To me, this quote from the article best showcases the status quo:

> And here's what I've been circling around: I think the only reason any of this is true is because of death. Without that horizon, we could defer everything indefinitely.

If you agree with that, I cannot stop you. But maybe I can shake you just a little with a different, more individualistic viewpoint:

Whatever life you have, in whatever circumstances, is the one and only life that you do have. The way it has been is the only way that it can ever be, but the future is whatever you make of it, and it cannot be anything else.

Whatever you experience in life, is all that there is to experience. If you yourself don't climb a mountain, you will never know what climbing that mountain is like. And if you hear a tree fall in a forest but then forget about it, it no longer has made a sound.

Nobody else can do this experiencing for you: much like you didn't directly experience your parents' lives, your children won't directly experience yours. But as long as you yourself are alive, you get to experience your parents and children through the only single way that you can: through yourself.

And so to accept death for yourself is to accept the end of all experience that has ever been. It is to accept death not only yourself, but also for your parents, children, all the climbed mountains and sounds of fallen trees, and all life and the universe itself. For once the one singular entity in the entire universe that has been capable of experiencing is gone, it's as if nothing had ever existed.

So try to stick around and keep experiencing? There really isn't, and hasn't ever been, anything else.

Post-mortem survivalists may disagree.
by kunos | 2025-12-09 22:27:15+00:00
I watched a video presentation and cringed a bit to be honest. I've done a bit of 3D with Go some time ago ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjn3twYB7xQ ) and quickly realized it's not a viable tool because of the huge FFI overhead... weird to see all this claims about performance in an engine that will leave so much on the table every single time it makes a call into Vulkan... as soon a decent scene will be added it'll crawl to a stop.

I wish Go didn't have this performance bottleneck because I really like the language and it would be a great middle ground for indie like games that don't want to follow the big engines route but sadly any kind of request of a faster path to call cgo was ignored by the Go team as games is not really something they are interested in.

Still best of luck to the guy but eventually he'll hit a wall and all the claims about performance will look funny.
by ajross | 2025-12-09 22:27:20+00:00
Your "normal people" are mac owners, and your other group is "PC users". You're measuring the 0.1%! (Which, fine, is probably more like 15% or whatever. Still not a representative sample.) You're likely also only sampling US consumers, or even Californians, and so missing an awful lot of the market.

Again, real normal people can't tell the difference. They don't care. And that's why they aren't buying macs. The clear ground truth is that Macintosh is a lagging brand with poor ROI and no market share growth over more than a decade. The challenge is explaining why this is true despite winning all the technical comparisons and being based on the same hardware stack as the world-beating iOS devices.

My answer is, again, "users don't care because the laptop market is commoditized so they'll pick the value product". You apparently think it's because "users are just too dumb to buy the good stuff". Historically that analysis has tended to kill more companies than it saves.
by mikeyouse | 2025-12-09 22:27:57+00:00
It would be a crazy antitrust violation for all of these companies to work together on something closed source - e.g. if Facebook/Google/Microsoft all worked on some software project and then kept it for themselves. By hosting it at a neutral party with membership barriers but no technical barriers (you need to pay to sit on the governing board, but you don't need to pay to use the technology), you can have collaboration without FTC concerns. Makes a ton of sense and really is a great way to keep tech open.
Show HN: Monetizing an API using private keys
by sim04ful | 2025-12-09 22:28:36+00:00
There's no "authentication" step. You just generate a key pair and send the public key via pigeon.

I built this because I needed dynamic image examples for a learning app, i'm working on. I wanted to load them using standard <img src="..."> tags, which makes sending Authorization headers impossible.
by nine_k | 2025-12-09 22:28:41+00:00
Well, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonce_word

It makes me sad when a secondary meaning, which does not even overcome the main meaning in usage, becomes an obstacle for the normal use of a word. It's like seeing a rainbow as a sexualized symbol not fit for children, because it also happens to be used by LGBTQ+ community. (BTW, since you're a Brit: did people stop using the word "fag" to refer to a cigarette?)
by tgtweak | 2025-12-09 22:29:07+00:00
dual 3090's (24GB each) on 8x+8x pcie has been a really reliable setup for me (with nvlink bridge... even though it's relatively low bandwidth compared to tesla nvlink, it's better than going over pcie!)

48GB of vram and lots of cuda cores, hard to beat this value atm.

If you want to go even further, you can get an 8x V100 32GB server complete with 512GB ram and nvlink switching for $7000 USD from unixsurplus (ebay.com/itm/146589457908) which can run even bigger models and with healthy throughput. You would need 240V power to run that in a home lab environment though.
by tptacek | 2025-12-09 22:29:09+00:00
Right, and when people who haven't paid that much attention to the machinations of the WebPKI (who could blame them) talk about how weird it is that the browsers killed EV, this is an important part of the backstory: EV was mostly a failed attempt to make the WebPKI do this kind of "do-what-I-mean" entity authentication.

The problem as I see it is: there simply isn't one coherent global notion of what entity authentication means. It's situational.
by GMoromisato | 2025-12-09 22:29:56+00:00
Sure, I agree with that. But at that point it becomes a philosophical/ethical argument: should we allow certain people to die (or even kill them) to benefit others?

There was a time (not even that long ago) when 50% of kids died before the age of 5. I can totally imagine people saying back then that this was the "natural order of things" and that allowing every kid to live would be disastrous to the environment.

My philosophy is that we should allow (and even enable) people to live as long as they want. I wish that were not controversial, but here we are.
by crazygringo | 2025-12-09 22:30:13+00:00
OK, so that's a pop culture thing in Germany, that's interesting.

But the idea that Google Workspace is somehow worse than Microsoft 365 doesn't seem to be supported by any evidence as far as I'm aware of, though.

And if you actually look at paid Workspace terms, Google never looks at or uses your corporate data, and there are tons of internal controls over that. Obviously, tons of companies (including companies who compete with certain Google products) would otherwise never trust or use Google.
by YouAreWRONGtoo | 2025-12-09 22:31:40+00:00
FOMO is the only reason people attend conferences, which is why I visited a few to figure out whether I was missing out on anything.

Speaking at a conference? Same story. You do it, because it's for "personal development", until it's pointless.

Conferences have n00bs and PMs, not the experts, because they don't need to learn anything anymore.
by mrkeen | 2025-12-09 22:31:49+00:00
void* is a problem because the caller and callee need to coordinate across the encapsulation boundary, thus breaking it. (Internally it would be fine to use - the author could carefully check that qsort casts to the right type inside the .c file)

> What if the data structure is more complex, such as a binary tree?

I think that's what the author was going with by exposing opaque structs with _new() and _free() methods.

But yeah, his good and bad versions of strclone look more or less the same to me.
by wredcoll | 2025-12-09 22:32:25+00:00
> I can make a difference as a mortal man"

Thinking of popular fantasy sci-fi, this seems like the exact opposite of what actually happens! With the notable exception of lotr (and how many early readers really focused on frodo's struggle anyways?) most fantasy has some kind of superhuman main character that can singlehandedly change the world.

Scifi tends to be a lot more about people like Picard, important and respected but ultimately limited to influencing others to achieve major changes.
by d3Xt3r | 2025-12-09 22:32:37+00:00
I reckon your best bet would be the Unihertz Jelly Star[1] - it has a 3" screen, which is comparable to your old HTC Hero (3.2"), and you can run a LineageOS GSI on it. Oh, and it has a programmable hardware button, 3.5mm jack and a frikking INFRARED PORT to control TVs etc!

Sadly no trackball, but no modern phone has one anymore.

[1] https://www.unihertz.com/products/jelly-star
by UncleOxidant | 2025-12-09 22:32:39+00:00
> I have successfully vibe-coded features in C. I still don't like C.

Same here. I've been vibe-coding in C for the sake of others in my group who only know C (no C++ or Rust). And I have to say that the agent did do pretty well with memory management. There were some early problems, but it was able to debug them pretty quickly (and certainly if I had had to dig into the intricacies of GDB to do that on my own, it would've taken a lot longer). I'm glad that it takes care of things like memory management and dealing with strings in C (things that I do not find pleasant).
by hivetechs | 2025-12-09 22:33:00+00:00
Hey, I fully understand. A model or CLI like Gemini releases a new version and it seems like a new place to call home. However, in this time of AI growth, each providers new advancements are reason to make a change, today for you Gemini, perhaps next week, Claude or OpenAI. With HiveTechs Consensus you have use of every leading provider at all times, so use the one you love and compare others any time. You may discover that Gemini excels in frontend but Claude and its latest model excels at backend, reducing your development time.
by simonw | 2025-12-09 22:33:24+00:00
I've not spent enough time with Mistral Vibe yet for a credible comparison, but given what I know about the underlying models (likely-1T-plus Opus 4.5 compared to the 123B Devstral 2) I'd be shocked if Vibe could out-perform Claude Code for the kinds of things I'm using it for.

Here's n example of the kinds of things I do with Claude Code now: https://gistpreview.github.io/?b64d5ee40439877eee7c224539452... - that one involved several from-scratch rewrites of the history of an entire Git repo just because I felt like it.
by slg | 2025-12-09 22:33:34+00:00
I feel like you're getting at something different here, but my conclusion is that maybe the problem is the approach of wanting to monetize each interaction.

Almost every company today wants their primary business model to be as a service provider selling you some monthly or yearly subscription when most consumers just want to buy something and have it work. That has always been Apple's model. Sure, they'll sell you services if need be, iCloud, AppleCare, or the various pieces of Apple One, but those all serve as complements to their devices. There's no big push to get Android users to sign up for Apple Music for example.

Apple isn't in the market of collecting your data and selling it. They aren't in the market of pushing you to pick brand X toilet paper over brand Y. They are in the market of selling you devices and so they build AI systems to make the devices they sell more attractive products. It isn't that Apple has some ideologically or technically better approach, they just have a business model that happens to align more with the typical consumers' wants and needs.
by Yizahi | 2025-12-09 22:33:38+00:00
> At which point, what are you gaining by making it illegal or inconvenient for innocent people to use it for something that isn't otherwise illegal?

The problem is scale. The more widespread is such system, the lower is the barrier to entry and the higher is cost to actually prosecute users to their amount and rate of usage (which we already see today).

Also this whole legal/illegal divide is often presented as if there was approximately same order of magnitude of both users. While I guess that actually the illegal use is way way larger than the legal use, simply because it is so crude and slow and buggy and unsafe by design. (excluding gambling, since that use is kinda derivative, depending on the all other uses making up a base on which to gamble)

And this is why token systems by rights should be heavily restricted, since they are so disproportionate in impact. We can all legally buy a knife in any shop, despite the fact that if used for attack a knife almost inevitably produces at least one body. Small arms are also available almost anywhere but with a lot of restrictions. Big arms are almost never available for purchase, just like explosives. And then the stuff like a canister of zarin is totally out of the question. That's because of the disproportionate effect. Same with financial instruments. Tokens are an Abrams of the finance world, and currently we let anyone have one, which is mindboggling to me.

> In other words, when anyone can send you money without your permission, your options are "everything is dirty" or "everything is clean".

You are correct. Afaik all tries to ban Tornado laundered tokens were eventually dropped. But the mechanism and potential still remains.

Also, please correct me if I'm wrong, in the case of BTC specifically we can track tokens from the "dust" attack and separate them from the legal and nice tokens, since they will stay in the different UTXO in the same wallet. Though I'm not very familiar with that, if it possible to pick which UTXO to transfer selectively.
by lm28469 | 2025-12-09 22:33:45+00:00
Meanwhile thousands of Americans don't have access to lead free running water, your public transportation system is about as good as ours from 150 years ago, parents have to be back in the office instantly after having a baby, if you don't have insurance a cancer will bankrupt you, your average lifespan is going down, &c.

Keep your llms and iphones, we're more than fine on our side lmao
by HuariHuari1 | 2025-12-09 22:33:54+00:00
I'll do you one better, it's always been a bureaucracy, but even moreso following the end of the 1960s, after the beginning of the "meritocracy" myth within academia. In reality, the incoming well educated migrants (usually European) in the mid 1950s were extremely nepotistic to their own groups, such as the Irish entering Wall street, and hiring only other Irish stockbrokers, or Italian small business owners in New York. They essentially replaced or married the old money and became a noveau riche that's still in the American status quo to this day. There is a new clique of sorts acting as a nepotistic noveau riche, mostly stemming from South or East Asia. Nepotism affects everyone and everywhere, but it's especially prevalent in the United States.

Also the great entertainment has been declining in quality, and it was always funded directly by the U.S. Government and Military to support their ideologies and agendas abroad. The Koreans are recently doing this to great success, and possibly China as well.
by metadope | 2025-12-09 22:34:05+00:00
There were indeed early warning signs that Facebook was shady.

I remember being delighted with FB initially. It was a wonderful way to keep in touch with extended family and wayward friends.

But then I discovered how difficult it was to control my 'timeline/newsfeed' or whatever they called it. There was a small menu attached that allowed you to Sort By Latest or some such... but it wasn't sticky, and so you always had to select it, and it eventually disappeared completely and... you saw what they wanted you to see.

Originally FB would send you an email whenever someone sent you a message on Messenger, and the email contained the contents of the message, so you didn't even need to login to FB, and I enjoyed having that... But that too didn't last long. When they turned that feature off I realized they were all about themselves and their goal of user engagement, and the value-added (for me) dropped to zero.

Sometime after '15 I disengaged. I left the account alive but haven't been on but thrice in 10 years.

I campaigned for a while, within my family and circle of friends, trying to get them to rally around an alternative (I started by offering Slack, feebly) but I was unconvincing and unsuccessful.

I remember the horror of Thanksgiving 2016, as I stood in the living room of my niece's apartment, and pondered the array of five family members before me. Easy chair, couch x 3, easy chair... each of them engrossed by their phones. Nobody was talking, everybody was comfortable, there but also somewhere else.
by matt123456789 | 2025-12-09 22:36:00+00:00
Mine: "You write like you’re trying to hit a word count on a philosophy undergraduate essay, but you’re posting in a Y Combinator comment section... You sound like a Victorian ghost haunting a server room, lamenting the loss of the card catalog."

And

"Go compile your kernel, Matt. Maybe if you stare at the build logs long enough, you won't have to face the fact that you're just as much of a "Lego builder" as the rest of us—you just use more syllables to describe the bricks."

Both are pretty good!
by Lammy | 2025-12-09 22:36:44+00:00
Deprecation warning and eventual removal makes sense for cases where the replacement follows some different programming pattern, like different arguments or different return types, but this particular deprecation appears to be merely a different way of accessing the exact same thing. The diff to add it back in was a seven-line change: https://github.com/urllib3/urllib3/pull/3732/files#diff-008f...

Was it really worth trying to force developers' hands over this in the first place? I doubt users care about the naming purity of the library code. Sure, remove it from the documentation so new users only see the preferred new way, but I would be annoyed if I used this library and had to go around renaming a bunch of call sites just to satisfy upstream's ideological purity drive.
by smeej | 2025-12-09 22:36:54+00:00
I think I'm as interested in it from a pure "button that's always with me" perspective. I already have my original Amazfit Bip watch configured to send a "track back" signal to Snipd via Gadgetbridge to snip podcast notes while I'm driving or washing dishes or whatever. And I've configured a basic Bluetooth remote camera shutter to turn pages forward and backward in KOReader on my Onyx Boox Poke 2 Color so I can read it on a stand while riding a stationary bike under my desk.

In other words, I am apparently exactly the kind of weirdo who would use the heck out of something like this!
by WhyOhWhyQ | 2025-12-09 22:36:54+00:00
I always state when I use AI because I view it to be deceptive otherwise. Since sometimes I'll be using AI when it seems appropriate, and certainly only in direct limited ways, this rule seems like it would force me to be dishonest.

For instance, what's wrong with the following: "Here's interesting point about foo topic. Here's another interesting point about bar topic; I learned of this through use of Gemini. Here's another interesting point about baz topic."

Is this banned also? I'm only sharing it because I feel that I've vetted whatever I learned and find it worth sharing regardless of the source.
by computably | 2025-12-09 22:37:27+00:00
> Any test you can device for this, ChatGPT would reliably pass if the medium was text, while a good fraction of humans might actually fail.

That's clearly untrue unless you qualify "test" as "objective automated test." Otherwise, "convince Stallman you have intelligence according to his definition," is a test that ChatGPT hasn't passed and which every human probably would:

> I define "intelligence" as being capable of knowing or understanding, at least within some domain. ChatGPT cannot know or understand anything, so it is not intelligence. It does not know what its output means. It has no idea that words can mean anything.
by michaelt | 2025-12-09 22:37:34+00:00
If you're the sort of private person who doesn't want a big online presence - why bother to speak at a software conference? Especially a conference big enough they're selective about who they allow to present?

About 90% of speakers at big events are there to promote their product, or to get their company's name out there for recruitment purposes, or to promote their consultancy, or to build their personal brand. If you don't give a shit about any of that stuff, maybe you don't need to bother?
by notatoad | 2025-12-09 22:37:47+00:00
i'd have a lot more respect for apple's "cautious" approach to AI if they didn't keep promising and then failing to deliver siri upgrades (while still calling out to cloud backends, despite all the talk about local LLM), or if they hadn't shipped the absolute trash that is notification summaries.

i think at this point it's pretty clear that their AI products aren't bad because it's some clever strategy, it's bad because they're bad at it. I agree that their platform puts them in a good place to provide a local LLM experience to developers, but i remain skeptical that they will be able to execute on it.
by rapnie | 2025-12-09 22:37:51+00:00
GNU Taler [0] perhaps. They are funded by EU grants, and have a funding program [1] going to stimulate the ecosystem.

> We are building an anonymous, taxable payment system using modern cryptography. Customers will use traditional money transfers to send money to a digital Exchange and in return receive (anonymized) digital cash. Customers can use this digital cash to anonymously pay Merchants. Merchants can redeem the digital cash for traditional money at the digital Exchange. As Merchants are not anonymous, they can be taxed, enabling income or sales taxes to be withheld by the state while providing anonymity for Customers.

[0] https://docs.taler.net/

[1] https://www.taler.net/en/ngi-taler.html
by UncleOxidant | 2025-12-09 22:38:04+00:00
> It's really funny how much better the AI is at writing python and javascript than it is C/C++. For one thing it proves the point that those languages really are just way harder to write.

I have not found this to be the case. I mean, yeah, they're really good with Python and yeah that's a lot easier, but I had one recently (IIRC it was the pre-release GPT5.1) code me up a simulator for a kind of a microcoded state machine in C++ and it did amazingly well - almost in one-shot. It can single-step through the microcode, examine IOs, allows you to set input values, etc. I was quite impressed. (I had asked it to look at the C code for a compiler that targets this microcoded state machine in addition to some Verilog that implements the machine in order for it to figure out what the simulator should be doing). I didn't have high expectations going in, but was very pleasantly surprised to have a working simulator with single-stepping capabilities within an afternoon all in what seems to be pretty-well written C++.