MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by psyopsy | 2025-12-19 21:11:30+00:00
He ruffles the very sensitive Internet dwellers who have all correct beliefs.

Many years ago, during the peak growth of internet cancel culture, Jon made the mistake of saying an uncontroversial truth about occupational interests heavily correlating with gender.

They took that and twisted it into “he thinks women are inferior.”

Since then, they look for any reason to hate on him. It’s political tribe brain rot as usual.

Check out The Witness subreddit. For a game those people claim to love, they seemed to have absorbed absolutely none of the narrative philosophy.
by Peteragain | 2025-12-19 21:11:48+00:00
"they can articulate concepts.. that [don't exist] in the training corpus" yes, but that doesn't necessarily mean they have a model [of the world]. You might want to say they are articulating the plausible (that is something that fits with our model of the world) but I think they are producing plausible articulations that we interpret against our model.
Aks HN: What's the right process for context transfer between co-founders
by sachingupta006 | 2025-12-19 21:11:56+00:00
We are an year-old pre-seed startup building in the AI space. I lead sales/bd and my co-founder leads product. One of the biggest source of tension between us is sharing of context.

We consciously chose our product build strategy as — build a basic MVP, get continous customer feedback and iterate the product based on that. This means there is tons of customer feedback, input, and discovery that's happening all the time.

One of the challenges we face because of that is that my co-founder feels he is not getting enough context about the customer needs. I proposed the following 2 solutions

He joins as many sales calls as possible — both of us agree that's not scalable bcz there is enough work on the build

Whenever there is an interesting call, I post a summary of what was discussed, the founder should go through the sales call recording and then we have a quick huddle about customer discussion.

I feel the second approach is scalable —without taking too much time on both sides (there's some work in pointing him to the right snippets in the sales call). But he is not okay with that and suggested the following

For every call where a new customer feature was discussed, I fill out a document like this https://limewire.com/d/jBSpt#RpKvNtv5ka

My hesitation in doing that is

Way too much documentation overhead for the stage at which we are at

It's hard to transfer all the context in written docs, unless the docs are very well written and cover difference scenarios — which again takes a lot of time

Discourages in-person discussions - which I believe is very important for the stage at which we are

I would love to get feedback on this issue. What's a good way to handle this?
by contingencies | 2025-12-19 21:12:27+00:00
I am working on fundraising and administration for a robotics venture. Very little work goes on engineering subjects at present, more often things like patent law, corporate administration, strategy, network build-out and the present penultimate goal fundraising for an aggressive scale go to market autonomous factory. However, the prior eight years have given me an amazing opportunity to study all manner of engineering subjects from mechanical to structural, electronic to electrical, production and fabrication through operations research, logistics and supply chain. I now have a very 'grass roots' view of venture administration, cross-disciplinary R&D and commercialization that is globally informed and very difficult to gain in any context. While significant yield remains at this stage speculative, nevertheless it is very interesting!
by flypotimal | 2025-12-19 21:12:32+00:00
Hi HN,

I built flyoptimal.xyz because I was frustrated that Google Flights and Skyscanner force you to choose the order of cities for multi-city trips, not actually optimizing it.

If I want to visit Chiang Mai, Hanoi, and Bali, I usually don't care about the order—I just want the cheapest total route.

This tool brute-forces the route combinations (permutations) to find the true lowest cost. It’s an MVP right now, so it's capped at 5 cities, but the backend logic is working.

Would love to hear your thoughts or if it breaks for your specific route.
by estearum | 2025-12-19 21:13:09+00:00
Eh, I've met at least one "monarchist" (blurry boundary between that and fascist, per his own words) who doesn't fit that description at all. There are people out there who just want to be dom'd by some old man in DC.

And yes, you did say they are rare. Then you said they're not influential while carving out the one major source of alleged influence.

I don't take any issue with the rarity claim, but it's at this point dangerously naive to act like Yarvin's incredibly unimpressive and juvenile ideas aren't literally shaping our daily lives as we speak.
by goatlover | 2025-12-19 21:13:11+00:00
There's no such thing as "society" except for societal arrangement. And societies of any decent size for the past several thousand years have arranged for governments who decide all sorts of things. Why would state aid be decided by a few "power-crazed" career bureaucrats in representative democracies? This sounds like a libertarian screed against the state doing anything but the minimal.
by InitialBP | 2025-12-19 21:13:15+00:00
I'm sure you are correct about being able to do some clever prompting or tricks to get it to print inappropriate stickers, but I believe in this case it may be OK.

If you consider a threat model where the threat is printing inappropriate stickers, who are the threat actors? Children who are attempting to circumvent the controls and print inappropriate stickers? If they already know about topics that they shouldn't be printing and are trying to get it to print, I think they probably don't truly _Need_ the guardrails at that point.

In the same way many small businesses don't (most likely can't even afford to) opt to put security controls in place that are only relevant to blocking nation state attackers, this device really only needs enough controls in place to prevent a child from accidentally getting an inappropriate output.

It's just a toy for kids to print stickers with, and as soon as the user is old enough to know or want to see more adult content they can just go get it on a computer.
by weeksie | 2025-12-19 21:13:37+00:00
Most of the team uses:

- Claude Code + worktrees (manual via small shell script)

- A root guardrails directory with a README to direct the agent where to look for applicable rule files (we have a monorepo of python etls and elixir applications)

- Graphite for stacked prs <3

- PR Reviews: Sourcery + Graphite's agent + Codex + Claude just sorta crank 'em, sourcery is chatty but it's gotten a lot better lately.

(editor-wise, most of us are nvim users)

Lots of iteration. Feature files (checked into the repo). Graphite stacks are amazing for unblocking the biggest bottleneck in ai assisted development which is validation/reviews. Solving the conflict hell of stacked branches has made things go much, much faster and it's acted as downward pressure on the ever increasing size of PRs.
by nis0s | 2025-12-19 21:13:37+00:00
Here’s an idea. What if instead of left/right wing, you’d sort ideas into useful and useless buckets, given that the context of these labels will change depending on your use case. X is useful for Y, but useless for Z. Ideally, you are tooling around with pro-social ideas for your governance or societal organization frameworks, which is a necessity if you’re optimizing for freedom, morality or ethics.

Sadly, in lieu of understanding larger societal contexts, our roles in them, and reasoning about uncertainty using grounded frameworks or rationale, most people have a tendency towards tribalism, and this is evident for proponents of both left- and right-wing ideologies. What we’re up against is already codified as the seven deadly sins, and despite the centuries of human societal and technological progress, these basic assumptions about anti-social human behavior still hold true.

The problem is when folks lock themselves into positions which they unfortunately convince themselves are beyond reproach. I like the Hegelian approach to ethics and freedom in society, but of course anyone may convince themselves that he’s speaking from their perspective, which I think is great. It shows how similar we all are.
by unkeptbarista | 2025-12-19 21:14:30+00:00
Doing embedded development using C. Thoroughly enjoy it.

I was once in a group that was switched away from the work we were doing and repurposed to do web work. It was a bad experience, but not because it was web work. The code base we were given was in terrible shape and we weren't allowed the time to adequately fix issues. Thankfully I no longer work there.
Kamunity.com (.eu .se) European alternative to Reddit
by hageast | 2025-12-19 21:14:52+00:00
Europe needs its own community platforms .

Many of us rely on Reddit for discussions, knowledge sharing, and niche communities. But it’s also clear where the platform is heading: increased commercialization, centralized control, opaque algorithms, and limited influence for the communities themselves.

That raises an important question: Should Europe really outsource its digital public squares to non-European platforms?

A European alternative to Reddit isn’t about copying features — it’s about different values:

Data protection and GDPR by default Transparent governance and long-term trust Communities that are not just “content”, but stakeholders Infrastructure hosted and governed within the EU

https://Kamunity.eu is an experiment in that direction: a community platform built in Europe, for Europeans, focused on discussion rather than engagement tricks, and designed to grow steadily instead of aggressively.

It’s early, it’s evolving — but if we want digital sovereignty to mean something in practice, we need to start building and using alternatives.

Curious to hear: How important is it to you that the platforms you participate in are European — not just by users, but by design and governance?
by amypetrik8 | 2025-12-19 21:15:04+00:00
>So never being offered a job because it doesn't exist doesn't lose you anything.

Ah well look, if the job posting was just to collect resumes with zero intention to actually hire, you did lose some things:

- actual time spent applying to a job that was never open - emotional damage on focus to try to get this job - loss of free market value of your data (company profited from this data, when you could have profited from it) - damages for acquisition of your personal data under a fraudulent basis (when otherwise, maybe you did not want your data shared)
by DrewADesign | 2025-12-19 21:15:28+00:00
They're probably referring to this 2023 Reuters article.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-workers-shared-sens...

"...pictures of dogs and funny road signs that employees made into memes by embellishing them with amusing captions or commentary, before posting them in private group chats. While some postings were only shared between two employees, others could be seen by scores of them, according to several ex-employees."

Two-second Google search. It's not very charitable to accuse someone of lying without even looking. It's even mentioned in that mozilla breakdown.
by frizlab | 2025-12-19 21:16:31+00:00
I don’t know about other people, but I tend to love architecting and code. Coding time, after architecting, is the “reward” for the brain. Just write what you’ve painstakingly engineered, let your brain rest.

This is how I work. Honestly the writing time (the one I’m promised I'll gain on by using AI), is something like 10% of my coding time. And it’s the only time I’m “resting” so yeah. I don’t want to get rid of it. Nor do I need it. And I especially do not want to check on the “intern” to verify it did what I imagined. Nor do I want to spend time explaining what I imagined. I just do it.
by estearum | 2025-12-19 21:16:34+00:00
> A member of the "Effective Altruism" community however would likely say that person is being ineffective because kill shelters are a unfortunate necessity to make the numbers on pet adoption work out, and anyway they shouldn't be donating to animal welfare in the first place because the most effective way to be altruistic is to buy mosquito nets for poor tropic countries

It's convenient that statements like this always come out just a few sentences into a critique of EA to helpfully reveal a complete ignorance of EA.

You've evidently been exposed to a lot more contrarian handwringing about EA than to actual EA thought.

This is like someone confidently criticizing Mormons' tradition of visiting Mecca. It just makes zero sense.
by nebula8804 | 2025-12-19 21:16:58+00:00
Looking at the FDR years it came to the elites almost losing everything for them to finally dole out a few crumbs. We are in uncharted territory though. If AGI comes to fruition assuming it does not run the numbers and just emigrate to China it will lead to a world where most people are not needed for GDP growth anymore. How is that society going to self-correct itself?
by neutronicus | 2025-12-19 21:16:59+00:00
I work on a CAD package for Architects. In C++. It is a native Windows / macOS application.

It's a giant pile of legacy code so a lot of what I do is just C++ generalist stuff, but I have a strong math background so if that's ever called for it's me doing that work (especially because I have English-language skills that don't often come with the strong math background at this pay scale). In particular, I'm the guy wrangling Parasolid (geometry kernel used by SolidWorks, for those familiar) to produce geometry for walls and floors.
by crazygringo | 2025-12-19 21:17:14+00:00
"On January 31, 2024, one of the FTC’s Commissioners spoke at an antitrust conference in Brussels and said the FTC had been prepared to block the transaction."

https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/05012...

"We are pleased that Amazon and iRobot have abandoned their proposed transaction... The Commission’s investigation revealed significant concerns about the transaction’s potential competitive effects. The FTC will not hesitate to take action in enforcing the antitrust laws to ensure that competition remains robust."

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/01/...

"Amazon and robot vacuum maker iRobot (NASDAQ:IRBT) said Monday they would end their plans to merge in the face of opposition from EU and U.S. antitrust regulators."

https://www.investing.com/news/economy/amazon-roombaparent-i...
by xg15 | 2025-12-19 21:18:06+00:00
Yeah, I know the theory of formal grammars and automata that the Chomsky hierarchy is part of. What I meant is that language models and specifically transformer networks are usually entirely separate from that theory, so it would be useful to build a bridge between "modern" language processing using GPTs/LLMs and the classical formal theory.

The most obvious overlap in usage is with programming languages: LLMs can parse and generate code in formal languages, but their processing model is completely different from syntax trees and parsers. So the question is, how do they store the formal structure of a programming language and could this be mapped back in any way to a grammar or automaton?
by amarant | 2025-12-19 21:18:07+00:00
Oh damn, my cousin had carmageddon! We'd stay up all night long playing it when I visited him!

Now I gotta find that other game he had, but I don't remember what it was called. It was kinda like reverse GTA: you played as a female cop and you had to stop the criminals. Iirc there were corrupt cops later on in the game.
by chtefi | 2025-12-19 21:18:24+00:00
Wanted to build a curated list of truly free, publicly accessible real-time datasets and streaming sources to have real-life data, and see their shape quickly in the browser (WebSocket, SSE). Also led me to build kafka-connect-websocket (https://github.com/conduktor/kafka-connect-websocket) to publish into Kafka directly.
by archagon | 2025-12-19 21:18:42+00:00
One has to wonder: why even bother writing a post like this? I’m guessing insecurity.

For what it’s worth, I’m fine with “falling behind.” I didn’t want to be a manager when I was at FAANG, and I don’t want to be an AI puppetmaster now. I got into this field because I actually love programming, and I’ll just keep on doing that while the world gets driven mad by their newfound corporate oracle, thanks. Feel free to lap me with your inscrutable 10,000-line PRs and enjoy your technical debt.
by underfox | 2025-12-19 21:19:08+00:00
> [They aren't] perfect mirrors of "public opinion" (they represent published text, which skews educated and toward dominant viewpoints)

Really good point that I don't think I would've considered on my own. Easy to take for granted how easy it is to share information (for better or worse) now, but pre-1913 there were far more structural and societal barriers to doing the same.
by D-Machine | 2025-12-19 21:19:14+00:00
Indeed, the actual "takeaway":

> Our findings provide insights into the balance between protection by vaccination against target outcomes (positive SARS-CoV-2 tests, COVID-19-related hospitalization, and A&E attendance) and the increased risk of pericarditis and myocarditis. In adolescents, the reduction in risk of COVID-19 hospitalization per 10,000 individuals (−1.14 for first dose vs. unvaccinated, −1.45 for second vs. first dose) was larger than the increase in risk of both myocarditis (0.08 for first dose vs. unvaccinated) and pericarditis (0.31 for first dose vs. unvaccinated, 0.21 for second vs. first dose). However, the reduction in risk of COVID-19 hospitalization in children (−0.02 for first dose vs. unvaccinated) was lower than the increase in risk of pericarditis (0.22).
by davely | 2025-12-19 21:19:43+00:00
While I personally find that generative AI has helped me be more productive and even boosted my ability to learn things, I really _dislike_ that we’ve normalized this behavior:

Whether a Jira ticket, an email, a yearly review, we feed bullet points into a black box to get a bunch of fluffy text. On the other end, we feed the fluffy text into the black box to get bullet points.

We’re killing penguins because we’re somehow afraid to just send the simplified bullet points to each other in the first place.
by qnleigh | 2025-12-19 21:20:03+00:00
I would be very curious to hear about the state of your codebase a year from now. My impression was that LLMs are not yet robust enough to produce quality, maintainable code when let loose like this. But it sounds like you are already having more success than I would have guessed would be possible with current models.

One practical question: presumably your codebase is much larger than an LLM's context window. How do you handle this? Don't the LLMs need certain files in context in order to handle most PRs? E.g. in order to avoid duplicating code or writing something in a way that's incompatible with how it will be used upstream.
by sho_hn | 2025-12-19 21:20:57+00:00
> how is this done ?? what engine is used ? it feels exactly like the original

It's most likely using reVC, a reverse-engineering of the original binaries by decompilation, and then built for the web using emscripten, which does a fairly good job making OpenGL code work on WebGL.

My Tomb Raider web build I linked here elsewhere was done the same way (reversing by the amazing people in the TR1X project).
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-12-19 21:21:10+00:00
We're not. At ardour.org we've banned any and all LLM-generated code (defined as code that was either acknowledged to be LLM-generated or makes us feel that it was).

This is based on continual (though occasional) experiments asking various LLMs for solutions to actual known problems with our code, and utter despair at the deluge of shit that it produces (which you wouldn't recognize as shit unless you knew our existing codebase well). 2 weeks ago, there was the claim that our code makes extensive use of boost::intrusive_ptr<> ... in 300k lines of C++, there isn't a single use of this type, other than in an experimental branch from 6-7 years ago.

So we just say no.
by azangru | 2025-12-19 21:21:15+00:00
I am deeply baffled by this kind of response.

Firstly, because this site happily handles the amount of traffic that puts many hobbyist sites that happen to get on its front page into a hug of death; so its developers must have done something right on the backend that is probably above the web programming 101 level.

But secondly, because this was precisely my point. One does not need a super popular front-end framework to make an awesome web product, and the HackerNews site is a testament to that.
by bobnarizes | 2025-12-19 21:21:22+00:00
Side project: A native macOS app in Swift that runs locally and uses AI to clean and organize files by moving them into the best-matching folders. No backend or accounts. https://floxtop.com

Full-time: C++ work on nearby connectivity (bluetooth) for embedded / industrial devices (factory equipment). Deep stack, hardware constraints, long lifecycles, high reliability.

Non-web work feels very different: stronger constraints, slower but deliberate releases, and bugs are much more expensive. There’s a lot of interesting software being built far away from HTTP and browsers.
by twotwotwo | 2025-12-19 21:21:37+00:00
Your version only describes what happens if you do the operations serially, though. For example, a consumer SSD can do a million (or more) operations in a second not 50K, and you can send a lot more than 7 total packets between CA and the Netherlands in a second, but to do either of those you need to take advantage of parallelism.

If the reciprocal numbers are more intuitive for you you can still say an L1 cache reference takes 1/2,000,000,000 sec. It's "ops/sec" that makes it look like it's a throughput.

An interesting thing about the latency numbers is they mostly don't vary with scale, whereas something like the total throughput with your SSD or the Internet depends on the size of your storage or network setups, respectively. And aggregate CPU throughput varies with core count, for example.

I do think it's still interesting to think about throughputs (and other things like capacities) of a "reference deployment": that can affect architectural things like "can I do this in RAM?", "can I do this on one box?", "what optimizations do I need to fix potential bottlenecks in XYZ?", "is resource X or Y scarcer?" and so on. That was kind of done in "The Datacenter as a Computer" (https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~shivaram/cs744-readings/dc-comput... and https://books.google.com/books?id=Td51DwAAQBAJ&pg=PA72#v=one... ) with a machine, rack, and cluster as the units. That diagram is about the storage hierarchy and doesn't mention compute, and a lot has improved since 2018, but an expanded table like that is still seems like an interesting tool for engineering a system.
by ASalazarMX | 2025-12-19 21:21:38+00:00
Fallout 4 is ten years old and just recently was sold again as a remake, basically a small update with pre-included mods. Skyrim is 14 years old and I'm sure it will be resold at least one more time before TES VI is released.

Moddable games are like prescription pills that add one ingredient to a patent-expired recipe, to repatent it as new.
by etyp | 2025-12-19 21:23:01+00:00
This is one of those natural consequences of "everything is an expression" languages that I really like! I like more explicit syntax like Zig's labelled blocks, but any of these are cool.

Try this out, you can actually (technically) assign a variable to `continue` like:

let x = continue;

Funnily enough, one of the few things that are definitely always a statement are `let` statements! Except, you also have `let` expressions, which are technically different, so I guess that's not really a difference at all.