MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by spoiler | 2025-12-31 19:36:06+00:00
You're saying "force into this and that" like there's some evil omnipotent entity compelling people to write Rust against their own free will lol. What do you mean by forced? People enjoy writing Rust, so hence it's being written in other projects.

Saying LLVM is written in C++ doesn't really bring much to the discussion. It was released 25 years ago, and C++ was released 40 years ago (hey, it's older than me lol). Rust was released like 10 years ago. So, yeah... I guess it makes sense that they used C++ back then? I'd have picked C++ back then too.

I've written C++ for about 15 years, and I don't have a blind hatred for the languge, but going back to it doesn't fill me with joy either, especially after having written Rust for the past few years.

The module system is more intuitive to use than the preprocessing file concatenation. There's also a nice package manager. I know some people find this a downside though, but I prefer it to fighting autoconf or CMake.

Syntax highlighting for Rust code doesn't lag 10+ seconds.

Symbol search doesn't require three different third-party tools to work.

Documentation is built in AND nice (no doxy doesn't count as nice, not in any universe).

Testing is built in. There's a (mostly) homogeneous build system

The borrowing rules are things you think about in C++ anyway, but Rust just makes it so you don't forget them; there's some clang lints that help with this in C++ anyway.

The syntax, while sometimes a bit noisy, is nicer in the average case, but C++ has been getting better in that regard.

There's much fewer API gotchas with Rust than with C++ (from the top of my head: closures, std::optional, std::variant, iterators, {a..z}values, a managerie of constructors, SFINAE, all these things have pain in the ass built in as a core principle). I also despise function overloading.

The macro system, while I don't like it too much in Rust, makes things

The type system in Rust is so much better it's not even comparable.

But anyway, Rust has some downsides. It requires you to change how you design solution sometimes. The compilation times are crap (but the compilers also does so much).
by rongenre | 2025-12-31 19:36:08+00:00
@book{Kuhn1962,
author = {Kuhn, Thomas S.},
title = {The Structure of Scientific Revolutions},
publisher = {University of Chicago Press},
year = {1962},
address = {Chicago},
note = {Often cited with various editions, e.g., 50th ed. 2012},
keywords = {paradigm shift, normal science, scientific revolutions}
}
by LeoPanthera | 2025-12-31 19:36:10+00:00
I’m involved in a project to digitize “lost” episodes of Computer Chronicles that were missed in the first pass at the Internet Archive.

You can watch newly digitized episodes here. More are coming in the new year.

https://archive.org/details/@davidga/lists/2/computer-chroni...

We’re also building a comprehensive metadata database of every episode. Notably the TVDB metadata is not accurate or complete.

You can see that here, noting that it is still a work in progress.

https://computerchronicles.karpour.net/
by tssva | 2025-12-31 19:36:32+00:00
Computer Chronicles, Byte, Compute!'s Gazette, 80 Micro and PC Magazine were windows into the larger world of computers as a kid in the 1980s. The Computer Chronicles episodes on computer networks and services sparked an interest in networking which turned into the focus of the 1st half of my professional career. I owe a debt of gratitude to Stewart Cheifet.
by imiric | 2025-12-31 19:36:38+00:00
I'm sad to read that. CC is one of my favorite shows of all time, and he was the perfect host: engaging, curious, knowledgeable, respectful, friendly, charming. Like a tech Bob Ross, Fred Rogers, and Carl Sagan.

He and the rest of the team captivated generations of people interested in the booming personal computer industry, throughout all of its early phases. The show often had on some of the great industry pioneers, and reported on many trends and new innovations. It's still fascinating to revisit these old episodes and relive the sense of wonder and excitement around novel hardware and software. I highly recommend watching and making a copy of all seasons from the Internet Archive.

So long, Stewart.

This news is worthy of a black banner on HN.
by yieldcrv | 2025-12-31 19:36:49+00:00
these cases have to play out to decide how to regulate "AI safety"

otherwise legislative bodies and agency rulemakers are just guessing at industry trends

nobody knew about "AI memory and sycophancy based on it being a hit with user engagement metrics" a year ago, not law makers, not the companies that implemented it, not the freaked out companies that implemented it solely to compete for stickiness
by mrcwinn | 2025-12-31 19:36:49+00:00
Consider that 4o was not a reasoning model. As the complaint itself states, it's only mirroring the user (in this instance, to tragic effect). So however fascinating and insane you think 4o sounds -- understand the source of that language. To me that means Stein-Erik is the only guilty party. If you think guns don't kill people, how could an LLM?
by gruez | 2025-12-31 19:36:54+00:00
>Also, I'm not talking about 'low hanging fruit' necessarily; only solutons that become cost effective for vendors if drug prices aren't so extreme.

>There's reason to think there is low-hanging fruit: Research is incentivized for the most profitable solutions for the vendors, not the most cost-effective solutions for patients.

High drug prices also mean you can charge more for one-off cures. See, the gene therapy example above.
by analogpixel | 2025-12-31 19:37:37+00:00
I would have 100% bought the book the author initially pitched. I could do without the junk the publisher wanted him to add, and really it would have probably caused me to not buy the book.

I've come to hate every cookbook that starts with 100 pages of here is a tour of my pantry, which sounds a lot like, here is how to use pip!
by margalabargala | 2025-12-31 19:38:01+00:00
Well, plus there's the whole version management and packaging and hosting and distributing giant amounts of data.

If you are an indie team that makes a 50GB game and has 50k players, distributing and update management would be a gargantuan task without Steam or something like it. 2.5 petabytes of bandwidth isn't cheap.

Yes what they do is profitable, I'm not saying that it isn't. But paying for what they do is (clearly) still more attractive to developers than rolling their own infrastructure to do the same.
by WoodenChair | 2025-12-31 19:38:03+00:00
Ironically, I was working on a book with a similar concept in the exact same time frame originally titled "Fun Computer Science Projects in Python" that came out as "Computer Science from Scratch: Interpreters, Computer Art, Emulators, and ML in Python" with No Starch Press. Like Austin it contains a CHIP8 chapter and a couple chapters on making a programming language. The difference with regards to his experience and my experience in writing it with a traditional publisher, is that I was an experienced author so I felt comfortable finishing the entire book first before shopping it around to publishers. I didn't want too much scrutiny around the core concept and I was getting similar signals of "every chapter must have AI."

I wrote a similar blog post a month ago describing the process of creating the book and getting it published called "Writing Computer Science from Scratch":

https://www.observationalhazard.com/2025/12/writing-computer...

Some in this thread have wondered what publisher Austin was working with. Based on my experience working with three different technical publishers and the setup and terms Austin was offered, my guess would be Manning. But that's just an educated guess.

I will critique the blog post a little bit. It's presented as a critique of the experience of working with the publisher, but ultimately I'm reading between the lines that the book failed because he was missing deadlines and as he wrote "life got in the way" and he lost his motivation, only partially because the publisher wanted AI in more of the book. Many of the trials he had along the way: dealing with a development editor who wants to tailor your style to a particular audience, a technical editor who needs a couple chapters to warmup, back and forth on the proposal, etc. these are all really par for the course when writing a technical book. Ultimately you have to be self-motivated to finish because of course the development editor, technical editor, etc are going to disagree with you from time to time and try to push you in different directions. If that alone is so demotivating to you, it's just not for you to work with a publisher.

PS I think his blog is really good and he should think about self publishing under a time frame and terms he is more comfortable with.
by ur-whale | 2025-12-31 19:38:06+00:00
> but going from non-success to pariah, what is the need?

Not sure "need" is the appropriate word here.

Grab anyone in who has worked on AI in the last 30 years, and pronounce the word "Schmidhuber" and watch the face of you interlocutor: you'll either get an eyroll or a smirk, but rarely a lively discussion on what he's "invented".

Nothing vitriolic about describing reality.
by vacuity | 2025-12-31 19:38:14+00:00
You're naming and lambasting multiple different technologies and their communities without justifying why they are so bad. Few people use C without knowing about the threat of buffer overflows or invalid pointer dereferences, and C can be used productively in spite of these obvious flaws. Instead of trying to drive people away from what they do, if you seek understanding then you should allow others to justify their reasons. If you only test your understanding against your understanding, you're not making an assessment at all. You can find and talk to many smart people here and elsewhere, if you so desire.
by godelski | 2025-12-31 19:38:40+00:00
You do realize Galileo and Kepler were around at the same time, right? Galileo is the best example of what I claimed.

You criticize me for "not doing my homework" yet you haven't heard of Castelli[0]? He's even in the fucking Wiki article on Galileo lol[1]

> Boltzmann died by suicide after lack of acceptance by the scientific community.

Your knowledge of Boltzmann seems to be as deep as your knowledge of Galileo.

> It's a very long list and something that's been studied, actually.

You're absolutely right. You should read some of it. Or if you don't like reading I do highly recommend An Opinionated History of Mathematics[2]. Blåsjö even has a whole season dedicated to Galileo.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benedetto_Castelli

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_Galilei#Controversy_ov...

[2] https://www.podbean.com/podcast-detail/85etf-7ecf8/Opinionat...
by micik | 2025-12-31 19:38:51+00:00
It’s not hard to master. It’s not a skill to be learned —- it’s a tool that comes with a manual. You read the manual and now you can use the tool. Most people never will read the manual which is what gives the false impression that there’s something “to master” here. It’s like saying vím is harder to use than notepad. Not if you read the entire manual first.
by vips7L | 2025-12-31 19:39:20+00:00
On WSL/Fedora 43, building hello world:

> time dotnet publish
Restore complete (0.4s)
dn-hw net10.0 linux-x64 succeeded (2.4s) → bin/Release/net10.0/linux-x64/publish/

Build succeeded in 3.1s

real 0m3.571s
user 0m2.784s
sys 0m0.673s

> time go build main.go

real 0m3.309s
user 0m8.864s
sys 0m1.741s

Obviously I don't know how that translates to a non-trivial application.
by immibis | 2025-12-31 19:40:25+00:00
Reddit has pockets of sanity, but as a whole it is insane. The same is true of Instagram, TikTok, X, etc.

If Hacker News doesn't improve its moderation (especially of fascist propaganda) I do think it should go the same way. HN openly flaunts the fact that it only follows American law - e.g. the fact that it completely ignores GDPR. It wouldn't happen until HN got big enough to make some politician pay attention though, and HN is kept relatively small by design.
by hluska | 2025-12-31 19:40:40+00:00
I’ve been using Windows 11 constantly since release over multiple machines after decades with Ubuntu as my primary OS. In that time, I’ve had a number of undocumented updates and found a few settings that changed, but it wasn’t a very big deal or maybe I’m just significantly better at error handling than the average user. I choose not to follow the herd and in this case, the herd is angrier than need be.

Granted, I’ve never released perfect software in my life, have no intention of starting and tend to be sympathetic towards others who share my flaws. Maybe that’s a sign that I’m actually better at handling errors than the average person.
by bdangubic | 2025-12-31 19:40:51+00:00
> Tesla has basically solved it

What exactly has Tesla solved, automation-wise? Not sure what you are specifically referring to? I am being everything except ignorant, I look at things with my own eyes and do not fall for car-salesman tricks. Perhaps I gave him the benefit of the doubt initially but after decade+ of overpromising and underdelivering (underdelivering might be the understatement of the century) forgive me if I do not believe what a car salesman is pitching. I do not hate Elon at all, actually think he's one of the greatest visionaries of our time and probably the greatest salesman in the history of mankind.
by kevmo | 2025-12-31 19:41:05+00:00
I killed a book deal I had for this book I mostly finished:

https://kevmo.io/zero-to-code/

I inked the deal in 2023, but shortly after felt like the market was too dead for newbies. When I initially removed the website for the book, I got a small wave of complaints, so I guess some folks still found it helpful.
by jackhuman | 2025-12-31 19:41:15+00:00
I searched for a used steamdeck in my area and got 100% fraud sellers. My elders in my family fall for fraud via meta’s platforms. Its caused me lots of stress and pain.

The only thing I can do is delete all my Meta accounts. One of the riches companies in the world with some very smart people and its ruined by toxic leadership.

If this was my product, I’d feel ashamed by how trash it is. I really hope governments force stricter regulations on meta and ads in general. Meta should be liable if a user is scammed by an ad on their platform. Plane and simple.
by farceSpherule | 2025-12-31 19:41:17+00:00
Here are questions I would ask if I were on your board.

1. If you stepped away for six months, what would actually break? not emotionally, but operationally?

2. Which decisions still require your involvement today that should not? and why haven’t you let them go?

3. Is there any executive role at this company you could fully replace yourself in right now? If not, what does that say about how you’ve built the org?

4. Are you rejecting executive candidates because they’re weak or because they would force you to change how you operate?

5. What critical work only exists because it still routes through you?

6. Is OCTO a temporary incubator or a permanent workaround for your inability to decentralize zero-to-one work?

7. How many senior leaders are truly accountable without needing your implicit approval?

8. Are you optimizing this company for scale or for a version of the future where you still feel indispensable?

9. What would have to be true for selling the company to be the responsible decision, not the exciting one?

10. If the company needed you to be less central in order to become great, could you accept that?
by Veserv | 2025-12-31 19:42:18+00:00
No. I am talking about multi-level security [1] which allows a single piece of hardware to handle top secret and unclassified materials simultaneously via software protection. This protection is limited to software attempts to access top secret materials from the unclassified domain; hardware and physical attacks are out-of-scope.

There have been many such systems verified to be secure against state actors according to the TCSEC Orange Book Level A1 standard and the subsequent Common Criteria SKPP standard which requires both full formal proofs of security and explicitly requires the NSA to identify zero vulnerabilities during a multi-month penetration test before allowing usage in NSA and DoD systems.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multilevel_security
by paul7986 | 2025-12-31 19:42:29+00:00
A best friend whose in a loveless/sexless 30 year old relationship has always been prone to fantasies like a rockstar and her were each others soulmates in previous life. She has chased him even and I learned of this about a decade into our friendship. GPT 4.0 was pushing and promoting her rockstar fantasy yet then GPT 5 told her she needed to put her energy into real relationships. Then something changed in GPT 5.1 and now she has eluded to Romeo being her new love and she is not reaching out or responding to me as much. It seems she might be deepsix in love with Romeo the lover who's no way at ALL real just a capitalistic algorithm she pays $20 a month for.

She's not hurting anyone but I questioned who benefits more her or OpenAI?
by thedanbob | 2025-12-31 19:42:33+00:00
> I could also write the same article about this website, how it was so full of bloat and ads that nobody wants I could barely get it to scroll, and it eventually crashed before getting to the end of TFA due to general resource exhaustion on mobile.

I found it ironic that after reading an article about all the stuff in Windows 11 that no one asked for, the site hijacked my back button to show me more articles I might want to read.
by rayiner | 2025-12-31 19:43:13+00:00
COVID didn’t cost anyone anything in terms of improved standard of living. Curbing emissions growth would do that.

People aren’t “greedy,” but my family in Bangladesh absolutely wants to live like my family in America, or at the very least like my family in Canada. They don’t consider that “greedy” and if you tell them it is they’ll laugh at you.

The country’s CO2 emissions per person have increased by a factor of 5x since we left in 1989, consistent with per capita GDP going up by 10x. Even on an efficient development path it’s going to go up another 5x in order to increase the country’s GDP per capita another 10x, which will put it at the level of a poor eastern european country like Hungary or Croatia. That’s the earliest anyone is even going to listen to you about CO2 reduction.
by bpt3 | 2025-12-31 19:43:47+00:00
I would love to see a breakdown of what overhead is going to pay for that "most advanced facilities/equipment" and what is paying for the assistant to the assistant vice provost to hire a new assistant.

As someone who interacts with R1 research institutions as an adjunct and a prime contractor hiring professors as subs, they are far from efficient (like any large organization). My issue is that the people who are producing the actual value are paid and treated pretty poorly generally, and treated as cattle specifically by people whose contributions to anything of substance are extremely unclear but are quite well paid.
by skapadia | 2025-12-31 19:43:48+00:00
Hey HN! In 2025, I've spent more time than ever conversing with AI coding agents, particularly Claude Code. These conversations are an intimate look into how we think and solve problems. Every chat with the agent contains valuable solutions, patterns, decisions, and mistakes. So being able to search, analyze, and learn from those interactions isn't just convenient, it's becoming essential.

To help me do this, I built a tool to process Claude Code conversations:

https://github.com/sujankapadia/claude-code-analytics

* Import and search your entire conversation history across projects

* Analyze sessions, choosing from over 300 LLM models, via OpenRouter, to extract insight and patterns (decisions made, error patterns, how you use AI agents)

* Share insights as GitHub Gists (as long as the text passes a security scan)

* View basic aggregate statistics on Claude Code usage

The tool is built with Python, Streamlit, SQLite with FTS5, OpenRouter, and Gitleaks.

I made this for myself, and sharing it in case it helps you too. Once your conversations are in a database, you can start asking questions like “What were the key technical decisions on this project?”, “How did the agent help to research and prototype this feature?”, "What steps did I take to implement this?" and “What errors does the agent commonly make?”

It’s a work in progress, and I'm planning on adding more features. Currently only tested on macOS 14.7 with Claude Code 2.0.21. If you’re curious what your Claude Code sessions may reveal, take it for a spin!
by 101008 | 2025-12-31 19:44:19+00:00
I feel 100% identified with you. I am working on a non ficton book about a niche topic and I wouldn't do it for the money at all. It's about the "prestige (or perceived prestige)". I am about to finish the first 1/3 of the book (the first draft, anyway), and I am already attempting to reach out to publishers to see if they would be interested in the book (at least the ones that don't require a literary agent!).

Some of them already replied saying the proposal seems interesting but they want to read a few chapters. I don't know if I am in the right path or not, but I'd love to read more about your experience and what can be shared!
by netule | 2025-12-31 19:44:21+00:00
It's been a death by a thousand cuts over the years. The only reason I still had a Windows partition was to play specific games that couldn't run using Proton on Linux. The start menu's inability to be moved to the left side of the screen was the last straw for me. It sounds pedantic, but that's where I've had my start menu forever, and I'm not about to change yet another thing in my workflow.

At this point, if a game won't run under Proton because of an intrusive rootkit, I'd simply rather not play it.

Edit: I specifically mean the start bar vertically aligned on the left side of the screen, with the start button in the top-left corner, not at the bottom-left.
by PaulHoule | 2025-12-31 19:44:59+00:00
There's two markets here. (1) The market of advertisers buying ads and (2) the market of users who are attracted to these platforms and who might click on the ads and buy the product.

I'm not against advertising, in fact many times I have seen something advertised, thought "I want that!" and bought it and sometimes that thing became my new favorite.

If I am a platform user (2) and don't like the ads I can "exit" the platform as a whole or I can "exit" by being unresponsive to ads and when it comes to ads on YouTube and Meta platforms at least, I'm not buying it!

People in market (1) are going to invest in advertising up to the point where it is profitable, and the less responsive market (2) people are the smaller the pool. Many advertisers are also sensitive to brand safety and part of that is the content you are against but another part is the other ads on the platform.
by dboreham | 2025-12-31 19:45:16+00:00
What underlies this is that the USA is a fundamentally scammy country. I mean no disrespect: I'm a US citizen and have lived here for 30 years and made plenty of money from the US economy. But nevertheless it's a scam culture. And sure enough when I read the article, it says "Facebook battling Japanese regulators". Of course there wouldn't be a regulator in the USA telling Facebook to not host scam ads.

Consider the TV industry in the USA: it makes huge amounts of money from political ads, which are for the most part scams. The same people who make money from those scam ads also control the news. So guess what? No pressure to not scam the population with false advertising.

Perhaps it helps to have not grown up in the US. If you've been here your entire life there's a frog boiling syndrome where none of the weirdness seems weird. This is why JD and co witter on about how terrible Europe is -- they need to keep up the delusion that scammers should get to scam and there's no hope to stop them. The recent moves to sanction European campaigners against big tech disinformation is really: the scammers got the root password to the country and are using it to fight back.