MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ocschwar | 2025-12-22 03:53:52+00:00
Well, the Tongan boys provide the only empirical data on how unsupervised children behave on a desert island.

Everything else written about the idea is speculation, from The Coral Island to The CHildren's Island to Lord of the Flies.

But Golding did observe behavior in a boarding school, and while the Tongan boys did also go to boarding school, they also were being raised in Tongan culture, and that culture, including its behavioral norms, was what helped them survive on a desert island.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-12-22 03:54:39+00:00
I've thought about moving to Asia. Then I read about the racism there and realize I'd be right back at home, but now with a language barrier to boot. Oh well.

Everything else sounds great, or tolerable at worst. Public transportation, a more respectful culture, actual 3rd places, housing that isn't treated as an asset to preserve.

I'll still get back to my Japanese learning once things stabilize. Just in case.
by Nevermark | 2025-12-22 03:55:05+00:00
I am not making a scientific claim, or advising people. Just describing a personal judgement call and it’s informal reasoning.

There isn’t any burden for me to carry here.

Nor am I concerned by your apostate heretical state of disbelief. The persecution only confirms the holiness of my cause.

Disclaimer: My opinions are simply my own, and do not, in any way, reflect the views of my past or future selves, beyond a five minute interval.
by skissane | 2025-12-22 03:56:57+00:00
When we think, our thoughts are composed of both nonverbal cognitive processes (we have access to their outputs, but generally lack introspective awareness of their inner workings), and verbalised thoughts (whether the “voice in your head” or actually spoken as “thinking out loud”).

Of course, there are no doubt significant differences between whatever LLMs are doing and whatever humans are doing when they “think” - but maybe they aren’t quite as dissimilar as many argue? In both cases, there is a mutual/circular relationship between a verbalised process and a nonverbal one (in the LLM case, the inner representations of the model)
by Aurornis | 2025-12-22 03:57:06+00:00
> I recently bought the $200/mo OpenAI subscription but could barely use 10% of it

This entire comment is confusing. Why are you buying the $200/month plan if you’re only using 10% of it?

I rotate providers. My comment above applies to all of them. It really depends on the work you’re doing and the codebase. There are tasks where I can get decent results and barely make the usage bar move. There are other tasks where I’ve seen the usage bar jump over 20% for the session before I get any usable responses back. It really depends.
by noosphr | 2025-12-22 03:57:09+00:00
While this is a bit too harsh - and the solution is naive at best - the problem is real.

The idea of bitwise reproducibility for floating point computations is completely laughable in any part of the DL landscape. Meanwhile in just about every other area that uses fp computation it's been the defacto standard for decades.

From NVidia not guaranteeing bitwise reproducibility even on the same GPU: https://docs.nvidia.com/deeplearning/cudnn/backend/v9.17.0/d...

To frameworks somehow being even worse. Where the best you can do is order the frameworks in terms of how bad they are - with tensorflow being far down at the bottom and jax being (currently) at the top - and try to use the best one.

This is a huge issue to anyone serious about developing novel models and I see no one talking about it, let alone trying to solve it.
by VerifiedReports | 2025-12-22 04:00:01+00:00
"Not many people use forward-deleting"

It's just deleting. And that's a questionable assertion for which you've provided no support. You seriously think people Backspace old E-mails away? They Backspace unwanted files away? They Backspace selected areas away in Photoshop? OK.

"I find it much easier to just Fn+Backspace"

Except most people don't find that at all, because it's not marked on the keyboard. And again, you're asserting that a secret, two-keyed, two-handed hotkey is easier than pressing a clearly marked button?

If you watch real users when they're faced with the lack of Delete, they use the arrow keys to move the cursor across the characters they want to delete, and then Backspace them away. Twice as much work. Or they reach for the mouse or trackpad and tediously highlight the characters to delete.

And there is no separate function row on Apple laptops. The Eject key was right above the Backspace key... easily reachable.
by GMoromisato | 2025-12-22 04:00:06+00:00
True--I don't think things got better in the US until after the Korean War. And even the 60s were marred by Vietnam (far more than the impact of the War on Terror).

My parents were born in Peru in 1941/42. Peru was neutral for much of the war, but in 1942 they began deporting Japanese individuals suspected of Axis sympathies to internment camps in the US. In 1945 Peru entered the war on the Allied side. If the war hadn't ended, I'm pretty sure my dad and his family would have been interned.

And even after the war, the situation was unreal. My dad's uncle didn't believe that Japan had lost the war. He thought it was all just allied propaganda. In 1949 he sold all his possessions and took his family back to Japan--to Okinawa, in fact. When he got there, he saw the truth: the country was smashed to rubble, and he had to beg in the streets for food. My grandfather travelled to Japan, taking my 10 year-old father in tow, to bring the uncle back to Peru.

That's probably one of the tamest, least tragic stories from that time. Even in the US, 400,000 never came home and 600,000 came back wounded. That's a million families affected. Germany, Japan, Russia, France, China, Korea, and even Britain, had far worse stories.

Whatever troubles we have now (and we have plenty), they are not on the same scale as those from that time.
Show HN: Coderive – Iterating through 1 Quintillion Inside a Loop in just 50ms
by DanexCodr | 2025-12-22 04:00:19+00:00
Author: Danison Nuñez Project: Coderive Project Type: Programming Language Highlight: Formula-based Execution

## Coderive - Iterating Through 1 Quintillion in a Loop

*Subtitle: How a phone interpreter achieves what supercomputers cannot*

The Impossible Loop:

```java // In any other language, this would be computational suicide for i in [0 to 1Qi] { // 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 iterations arr[i] = i * i } ```

Traditional Reality:

· Python: MemoryError at array creation · Java/C++: Theoretical 31 years (with 8 exabytes of RAM) · NumPy/TensorFlow: Immediate crash · GPU Computing: 80GB VRAM limit exceeded

Coderive's Reality: 50 milliseconds.

The Magic Behind It:

1. NaturalArray: Virtual arrays that store formulas, not data 2. Runtime Pattern Detection: Transforms loops to mathematical expressions 3. Lazy Evaluation: Computes only what's accessed 4. Formula Storage: LoopFormula, ConditionalFormula, MultiBranchFormula

Technical Deep Dive:

```java // What you write: for i in [0 to 1Qi] { if i % 2 == 0 { arr[i] = i * i } elif i % 3 == 0 { arr[i] = i * i * i } else { arr[i] = i } }

// What Coderive creates internally: arr.addMultiBranchFormula( conditions: [i%2==0, i%3==0], expressions: [ii, iii], elseExpr: i, range: [0, 1Qi] ) ```

The Optimization Pipeline:

``` User Code → Pattern Detection → Formula Creation → Lazy Evaluation ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ O(n) O(1) O(1) O(1) per access ```

Complete Pattern Coverage:

· Simple Transformations: arr[i] = f(i) → LoopFormula · Binary Decisions: if-else → ConditionalFormula · Multi-way Branches: if-elif-else → MultiBranchFormula · Partial Updates: if-only with implicit else preservation

Real-World Impact:

```java // Process every pixel in 8K video (≈33 million frames) for frame in [0 to 33M] { for pixel in [0 to 76804320] { // 33 million frames × 33 million pixels if brightness > 128 { pixels[pixel] = 255 } elif brightness > 64 { pixels[pixel] = 128 } else { pixels[pixel] = 0 } } } // Traditional: Impossible // Coderive: Seconds, not centuries ```

The Secret Sauce:

· No data movement (arrays stay virtual) · No parallel programming (formulas are inherently parallel) · No memory management (O(1) memory complexity) · No specialized hardware (runs on Java 7)

Conclusion: Coderive doesn't just make loops faster—it redefines what's computationally possible on commodity hardware.

Check Coderive now at: [https://github.com/DanexCodr/Coderive](https://github.com/DanexCodr/Coderive)
by Smaug123 | 2025-12-22 04:00:20+00:00
When you say "structurally incapable", what do you mean? They can certainly output the words (e.g. https://github.com/Smaug123/WoofWare.Zoomies/pull/165#issuec... ); do you mean something more along the lines of "testing can prove the presence of bugs, but not their absence", like "you can't know whether you've got a false or true negative"? Because that's also a problem with human reviewers.
by ryanobjc | 2025-12-22 04:01:01+00:00
The "just generate go code automatically then check it in" is a massive miswart from the language, and makes perfect sense because that pathological pattern is central to how google3 works.

A ton of google3 is generated, like output from javascript compilers, protobuf serialization/deserialization code, python/C++ wrappers, etc.

So its an established Google standard, which has tons of help from their CI/CD systems.

For everyone else, keeping checked-in auto-generated code is a continuous toil and maintenance burden. The Google go developers don't see it that way of course, because they are biased due to their google3 experience. Ditto monorepos. Ditto centralized package authorities for even private modules (my least fave feature of Go).
by herdymerzbow | 2025-12-22 04:01:49+00:00
I agree. Would be fascinating how that 3% breaks down. Although excluding the SteamOS/steam deck users that desktop segment drops to about 2.25%, seeing how 25% of Linux installs are steamOS.

I think SteamOS being available for PC and promoted by Valve could be a game changer. It provides a trusted and familiar pathway for a different way of doing things. But while it would perhaps reduce Windows installs, I can't see it help grow a user base of DIY linux tinkerers, if that is of any importance. I can kind of see it being a bit like Android makes the majority of phone users linux users, but not entirely sure what that means for linux desktop.
by amarant | 2025-12-22 04:02:19+00:00
Tbf, I did start the comment with "I have more money and no kids". I don't fault anyone for discarding poverty after that point on!

But yeah, in the end even my budget was stretched to it's limits! Not that I was in any way poor, pulling around 3x the average salary in my area. Shit just got crazy expensive. Had I known the condition the house was in when I bought it, I would've lowered my offer by around 25%. But it was impossible to inspect the foundation without first breaking up the floor, and I don't blame the seller for not wanting to do that. I don't think they knew the condition either tbf. Based on the bottled message I found, nobody had looked under those floorboards since shortly after Kennedy's assassination!
by johnnyanmac | 2025-12-22 04:02:36+00:00
I'm getting to that point where I may need to upgrade. Now I need to delay it more because AI is gonna make electronics even more expensive than the tarriffs in 2026.

2026 seems to just be becoming the "please don't break" era unless I can find some proper work this time. Car is on its last legs, a variety of housing appliances to repair, computer I use professionally. If nothing else, I upgraded my phone this year so that should get me through 2028 at least.
by krautburglar | 2025-12-22 04:06:30+00:00
Worship of the eternal steady-state. Whoever speaks against any intervention to preserve it is a heretic, and must be excommunicated.

Whether it’s ML training, pentesting, or old-fashioned engineering, we have to throw the occasional curve-ball at our systems in order to improve them. Surprise internet shutdowns are good, even if the ostensible reasons for them are dumb. Maybe people will host more information offline, and become less dependent on cloud services…
by pfych | 2025-12-22 04:07:41+00:00
Someones linked in this thread the Defunctland video essay on these characters that I highly recommend watching since it goes into this in detail.

But the main reason is, there's a lot of brand imagery on the line with these interactions, someone putting on a voice, or using a voice changer could make a mistake. Disney instead have a conversation tree with pre-recorded voice lines that a remote operator can control. Much harder to mess up
by asa400 | 2025-12-22 04:08:35+00:00
I wholeheartedly concur based on my experience with Rust (and other languages) over the last ~7 or so years.

> If I call a function which returns an object of type T, I can safely assume the object lasts forever. It cannot be mutated by any other code (since its mine). And I'm not going to break anything else if I mutate the object myself. These are really nice properties to have when programming at scale.

I rarely see this mentioned in the way that you did, and I'll try to paraphrase it in my own way: Rust restricts what you can do as a programmer. One can say it is "less powerful" than C. In exchange for giving up some power, it gives you more information: who owns an object, what other callers can do with that object, the lifetime of that object in relation to other objects. And critically, in safe Rust, these are _guarantees_, which is the essence of real abstraction.

In large and/or complicated codebases, this kind of information is critical in languages without garbage garbage collection, but even when I program in languages with garbage collection, I find myself wanting this information. Who is seeing this object? What do they know about this object, and when? What can they do with it? How is this ownership flowing through the system?

Most languages have little/no language-level notion of these concepts. Most languages only enforce that types line up nominally (or implement some name-identified interface), or the visibility of identifiers (public/private, i.e. "information hiding" in OO parlance). I feel like Rust is one of the first languages on this path of providing real program dataflow information. I'm confident there will be future languages that will further explore providing the programmer with this kind of information, or at least making it possible to answer these kinds of questions easier.
by herdymerzbow | 2025-12-22 04:08:36+00:00
I know linux gaming is getting a buzz and I'm happy to see it. I'm honestly surprised it took so long for people like Gamers Nexus to review linux, but thankful that they did.

But by saying 'For home users they literally have 0 lock in now days other than familiarity.' I think you severely underestimate how powerful familiarity is in anchoring non-tech users to particular platforms. However dysfunctional they can be.

As I mentioned, I moved to linux myself earlier this year. But the first time I tried it was probably around 2004. And I've dipped in and out occasionally but not stuck with it until this year, when I've found it to be a significant improvement on the Windows alternative.

Microsofts own creation presents a real opportunity for an uptake in linux adoption. But I do think it still presents sufficient friction and unfamiliarity for average non-tech users to take on. The only significant issue I had with your initial comment was with your reference to a 'mass' exodus, even if it is confined to the gaming community.

Happy to be proven wrong of course. And perhaps to the annoyance of my friends, willing to help anyone I know interested with a linux install.

But looking forward to the Dec 2025 steam survey. Looking forward to the tiny contribution my little install will make to the linux numbers!
by ooshaun | 2025-12-22 04:08:38+00:00
We built PDF Craft, an MIT-licensed PDF to EPUB/Markdown converter that handles the hard parts: scanned documents, LaTeX formulas, and complex layouts. Key features: Accurate OCR: Built on DeepSeek-OCR, works even with low-quality scans LaTeX formula support: Precise recognition of math equations and chemical formulas Smart layout preservation: Handles two-column formats and text-image layouts Local or cloud: Run free locally (needs RTX 3060+) or use our cloud service 4000+ GitHub stars: https://github.com/oomol-lab/pdf-craft
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-12-22 04:08:40+00:00
> when it costs >$10B to develop a new microchip manufacturing process that inherently limits how many players the market can support.

Does it though? TSMC's market cap is over a trillion dollars. Likewise Nvidia. What's $10B compared to these numbers? Less than 1%. Maybe we couldn't have a thousand of them, but why couldn't we have ten?

Not only that, this technology isn't a single invention, so why does it have to be a single company? Couldn't some companies make the fabs and other ones operate them, causing them each to require less capital and be easier to compete with on its own? Couldn't the various pieces of equipment in the fabs each be developed by a separate company?

"It costs >$10B to do this as a vertically integrated conglomerate" is bad, so maybe don't have that.
Show HN: Spooled – Open-source webhook queue and job runner built in Rust
by Dalresin | 2025-12-22 04:09:11+00:00
Hey HN,

I built Spooled because I was tired of setting up Redis + Sidekiq/Bull every time I needed background jobs, and watching webhooks fail silently with no visibility.

Spooled is a single Rust binary that handles:

- Job queues with automatic retries and exponential backoff - Webhook delivery with real-time status via SSE - Dead-letter queues (failed jobs aren't lost) - Cron scheduling - Job dependencies / workflows - Multi-tenant with API key auth

It's self-hosted, needs only Postgres, and deploys in one command:

docker run -p 8080:8080 ghcr.io/spooled-cloud/spooled-backend:latest

REST and gRPC APIs. SDKs for Node.js, Python, Go, and PHP.

GitHub: https://github.com/Spooled-Cloud/spooled-backend

Live demo: https://example.spooled.cloud

Docs: https://spooled.cloud/docs

Would love feedback on the API design and what features would make this useful for your stack.
by GMoromisato | 2025-12-22 04:09:50+00:00
I find this almost comically revisionist.

400,000 US soldiers/marines never came home. Another 600,000 came back wounded. That's at least a million families affected.

And by 1950, only five years after the end of the war, millions of men were sent overseas again for the Korean War.

And after that, the children of the returned WWII soldiers were sent off to Vietnam, unleashing the greatest civil unrest in the US since the Civil War.

And you think it was a great time for all because the dollar was worth a lot?
by hokuut | 2025-12-22 04:09:56+00:00
Thanks for sharing! I hadn't seen Biff – it's way more comprehensive than what I built.

nanji was just a quick scratch-my-own-itch tool for checking "what time is it in Tokyo/Dallas right now", but I can see Biff handles that and much more.

I'll definitely look into jiff for the system tzdb approach.

Appreciate the pointer!
by trostaft | 2025-12-22 04:09:56+00:00
It's nothing special. I'm an academic and usually I balance my desire to work / deadlines and family obligations. The last month I screwed up my management and got frustrated at both. I was holding that emotion even after crunch-time had passed.

Sometimes a lighthearted piece is all you need to remember to release. What's the saying? "The sea of bitterness is vast. Turn back, and you may yet see shore." I still love what I do, even if it got tougher than expected for a moment.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-12-22 04:10:15+00:00
> Automatic updates are needed for security. The only era when you didn't need them was pre-Internet. They're not something we want to get rid of.

That was true right up until companies started routinely pushing updates that broke things, removed useful features, added user hostile features, or even outright ads. If I have to give up automatic security updates to not have my software get worse on me over time, I will gladly do so. I would rather have security updates and not have the user-hostile stuff, but we seem to be unable to get that, so the next best thing would be no automatic updates at all.
by rerdavies | 2025-12-22 04:10:20+00:00
Light years ahead in an architectural direction that nobody else followed. So not so much "Light Years Ahead" as "light years sideways". And even then, not really so much light years ahead of the Intel 4004, which made it to market a mere two years later. (The Intel 4004 would have made it to market a year earlier had the Apollo Guidance Computer not consumed 100% of very limited American VLSI production capacity for a year, directly ahead of the Intel 4004).

Certainly a fabulous piece of engineering. The problem being that the Intel 4004 was considerably more fabulous. One can very reasonably ask whether the Apollo Guidance Computer advanced or delayed the delivery of microcomputers.
by Animats | 2025-12-22 04:10:50+00:00
This is Garman SafeReturn, and this is its first real save. Here's a demo.[1] It's been shipping since about 2020, originally on the Cirrus Vision Jet. There's a lot going on. The system is aware of terrain, weather, and fuel, but not of runway status. So it gives the ground a few minutes to get ready, sending voice emergency messages to ATC. If you watch the flight track, you can see the aircraft circle several times, some distance from the airport, then do a straight-in approach. It sets up for landing, wheels down, flaps down, lands, brakes, and turns of the the engine. It doesn't taxi. Someone from the ground will have to tow or taxi the aircraft off the runway.

It's mostly GPS driven, plus a radar altimeter for landing.

The system can be triggered by a button in the cockpit, a button in the passenger area, and a system that detects the pilot isn't making any inputs for a long period or the aircraft is unstable and the pilot isn't trying to stabilize it. The pilot can take control back, but if they don't, the airplane will be automatically landed.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-ruFmgTpqA
by mcmoor | 2025-12-22 04:10:55+00:00
I think part of it is that geniuses gets (or at least feels) rewarded whenever they try learning, while other people might not. For the same amount of effort, the amount of new knowledge gained by other people is fewer than what geniuses can get. Overtime, leaning no longer feels worth it. Thus normal people no longer feels curious while geniuses still do.
by ursAxZA | 2025-12-22 04:11:44+00:00
The analogy breaks at the learning boundary.

Humans can refine internal models from their own verbalised thoughts; LLMs cannot.

Self-generated text is not an input-strengthening signal for current architectures.

Training on a model’s own outputs produces distributional drift and mode collapse, not refinement.

Equating CoT with “inner speech” implicitly assumes a safe self-training loop that today’s systems simply don’t have.

CoT is a prompted, supervised artifact — not an introspective substrate.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-12-22 04:14:42+00:00
>I’m AMAZED they’re not designed to handle this better.

This has been the MO for "tech companies" for the past 20 years. Meanwhile I'm told I'm paranoid when the industry of "move fast or break things" decides to move into mission/safety critical industries and use its massive wealth to lobby for deregulation to maintain its habits.

We certainly have BS regulations done to constrain competition. But I'd wager a good 80% of them exist for good reason.
by jablongo | 2025-12-22 04:14:42+00:00
It is what it is thinking consciously / its internal narrative. For example a supervillain's internal narrative with their plans would go into their COT notepad. If we want to really lean into the analogy between human psychology and LLMs. The "internal reasoning" that people keep referencing in this thread.. referring to the transformer weights and inscrutable inner working of a GPT.. isn't reasoning, but more like instinct, or the subconscious.