MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ajross | 2025-12-09 21:50:51+00:00
> They completely revolutionized laptop processors

Tough love: no, they didn't. 99.9% of consumers simply can't detect a performance difference between an M4 Air and a junky Asus box (and what ones can will announce that games run much better on the windows shipwreck!), and while the Air has a huge power delta no one cares because the windows thing still lasts for 6+ hours.

Apple absolutely ran ahead of the industry technically, by a shocking amount. But in a commoditized field that isn't sensitive to quality metrics, that doesn't generate sales.

There's a reason why the iPhone remains the dominant product but macs are stuck at like 9% market share, and it's not the technlogy base that is basically the same between them.

Laptops are done, basically. It's like arguing about brands of kitchen ranges: sure, there are differences, but they all cook just fine.
by tptacek | 2025-12-09 21:50:56+00:00
It was never a reasonable goal of the WebPKI to authenticate entities; only to help establish end-to-end encryption between unrelated parties on the Internet. The WebPKI can ensure you're talking to whoever controls `ycombinator.com`, but it has to be up to some other layer of the security stack to decide whether you want to be talking to `ycombinator.com`. (This is in fact part of the logic behind FIDO2 and phishing-proof authentication).
by atonse | 2025-12-09 21:51:03+00:00
As a sibling poster has said, I don't know how much on-device AI is going to matter.

I have pretty strong views on privacy, and I've generally thrown them all out in light of using AIs, because the value I get out of them is just so huge.

If Apple actually had executed on their strategy (of running models in privacy-friendly sandboxes) I feel they would've hit it out of the park. But as it stands, these are all bleeding edge technologies and you have to have your best and brightest on them. And even with seemingly infinite money, Apple doesn't seem to have delivered yet.

I hope the "yet" is important here. But judging by the various executives leaving (especially rumors of Johnny Srouji leaving), that's a huge red flag that their problem is that they're bleeding talent, and not a lack of money.
by domano | 2025-12-09 21:51:09+00:00
I know about the indexing, marking directories correctly so as not to trigger reindexing etc etc.

Since i work on a couple dozen services in a monorepo in a few languages, no amount of heap memory or CPU will be enough.

One days its the grapqhl plugin, the next day its typescript type inferrence, then something with rust, it just never stops. Sometimes even the golang operations are slow.

Its all just monorepo issues, but i expect my IDE to be able to handle a monorepo, all other IDEs work without issue (and are inferior in functionality sadly)
by jtsiskin | 2025-12-09 21:51:11+00:00
I gave their example “correct” prompt (“Flat, circular, non-itchy, non-painful red rash with a ring, diffuse throughout trunk. Follows week of chills and intense night sweats, plus fatigue and general malaise”) to both ChatGPT and Gemini. And both said Lyme disease as their #1 diagnosis. So maybe it is okay to diagnose yourself with LLMs, just do it correctly!
by bee_rider | 2025-12-09 21:52:20+00:00
Well, thanks I guess. I think it is a cute idea, not a serious one really. At least, I definitely haven’t worked the details.

We’d have to be maintained. Maybe that could be part of the deal. Humans are always changing anyway, so I think we’d couldn’t be left entirely at rest. Maybe we should be run slowly, to just to make sure things are still working. Then we don’t have to worry about at-rest type bitrot.
by ekropotin | 2025-12-09 21:52:23+00:00
Same for MCP - there is always a chance an agent will mess up the tool use.

This kind of LLM’s non-determinism is something you have to live with. And it’s the reason why I personally think the whole agents thing is way over-hyped - who need systems that only work 2 times out of 3, lol.
by quesera | 2025-12-09 21:52:28+00:00
If insurability becomes a crisis, I'd expect it to reduce housing availability and raise prices for competing (insurable) properties.

Of course it wouldn't happen in isolation, so there are other massive forces to consider.

Maybe wide swathes of formerly-occupied (but now uninsurable) land would sell cheaply enough that middle-income people could build inexpensive semi-disposable vacation cottages, like the old days.

GP's assertion of population collapse in five years is a bit extreme for me!
by twoodfin | 2025-12-09 21:52:59+00:00
The humor is hit or miss but when it hits it’s quite funny, and the misses are merely groan-worthy.

Triggered by the lighthearted tone of the prompt, I’d bet, but still quite impressive relative to most LLM-generated jokes I’ve had the misfortune to encounter.

My favorite: “Is it time to rewrite sudo in Zig?” which has a few layers to it.
by ewoodrich | 2025-12-09 21:53:03+00:00
At least in my case, the "pinpoint accuracy" of that roast made for a pretty uninspired result, it seemed to be based on like 4 or 5 specific comments seemingly chosen at random.

Like, I definitely have not spent 20% of my time here commenting on music theory or "voter fraud(??)" (that one seems to be based on a single thread I responsed to a decade ago)? ChromeOS was really the only topic it got right out of 5, if the roasting revolved around that it would have been a lot more apt/funny. Maybe it works better with an account that isn't as old as mine?

I find the front page parody much better done. Gemini 2.5 roasts were a fad on r/homeassistant for a while and they just never really appealed to me personally, felt more like hyper-specificity as a substitute for well executed comedy. Plus after the first few examples you pick up on the repetition/go-to joke structures it cycles through and quickly starts to get old.
by ilc | 2025-12-09 21:53:05+00:00
It can. But I don't want to compete for my slot with others who can give the same talk, or a talk that is similar.

I want to make the conference committee choose between "Do we want ilc's talk on X." or "Do we want foo's talk on Y." If we are both discussing the same thing, if I'm unknown, I will lose. OTOH, if I have something interesting to talk about... I have 2 routes to "victory". "ilc gives great talks, he gets good grades and is working on his skills." and "Man that's a damn cool topic. We want that at our conference, even if ilc isn't the BEST speaker, the combo is better."

I didn't start out as the best presenter. I learned. But I always knew I had to have an interesting topic, something that made it worth them giving me a slot.
by aeonfox | 2025-12-09 21:53:06+00:00
> If you can write all that code faster than read what Claude did

I think you need to parse my comment a little more keenly ;)

> The Steam API access Claude one-shotted (with Sonnet 3.7, this was a long time ago) as well as enriching the input data from different sources.

This story isn't different to the usual "I made a throw-away thing with an LLM and it was super useful and it took me no time at all". It's very different to the OP stating you can throw this at mature or legacy codebases and reduce labour inputs by 90%. If the correctness of the code matters (which it will as the codebase grows), you still need to read the code, and that still takes human eyes.
by monerozcash | 2025-12-09 21:53:20+00:00
"Don't ask LLMs leading questions" is a perfectly valid lesson here too. If you're going to ask an LLM for a medical diagnosis, you should at the very least know how to use LLMs properly.

I'm certainly not suggesting that you should ask LLM for medical diagnoses, but still, someone who actually understands the tool they're using would likely not have ended up in your situation.
by ncruces | 2025-12-09 21:53:29+00:00
Yes. You need some syscalls and unsafe, but it's possible.

wazero does this, on amd64 and arm64: https://github.com/wazero/wazero

You can read more about the approach - from the creator - here: https://mathetake.github.io/posts/runtime-code-generation-in...
by maxwellg | 2025-12-09 21:53:33+00:00
> The only issue it solves is if you want to bring your own tools to an existing chatbot.

That's a phenomenally important problem to solve for Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and anyone else who wants to build generalized chatbots or assistants for mass consumer adoption. As well as any existing company or brand that owns data assets and wants to participate as an MCP Server. It's a chatbot app store standard. That's a huge market.
by mrguyorama | 2025-12-09 21:53:57+00:00
>ICE cannot legally arrest people who are citizens for no reason, and yet they have done exactly that 30% of the time by their own admission.

I can no longer modify, retract, edit, etc my comment. This statement is almost certainly false, and I made it without due diligence to confirm I remembered the wording of a claim ICE made.

We know ICE has arrested some people who are American citizens, but we do not have anything near enough good data to make anything close to the claim I made.

This is a record of my error. Remember this if you see my comments again.
by tetris11 | 2025-12-09 21:54:11+00:00
Emmy Noether is a good one

> In April 1933, Noether received a notice from the Prussian Ministry for Sciences, Art, and Public Education which read: “On the basis of paragraph 3 of the Civil Service Code of 7 April 1933, I hereby withdraw from you the right to teach at the University of Göttingen.”

> Noether accepted the decision calmly, providing support for others during this difficult time. Hermann Weyl later wrote that “Emmy Noether – her courage, her frankness, her unconcern about her own fate, her conciliatory spirit – was in the midst of all the hatred and meanness, despair and sorrow surrounding us, a moral solace.”

> Typically, Noether remained focused on mathematics, gathering students in her apartment to discuss class field theory. When one of her students appeared in the uniform of the Nazi paramilitary organization Sturmabteilung (SA), she showed no sign of agitation and, reportedly, even laughed about it later.
by scrollop | 2025-12-09 21:54:34+00:00
You don't have to abandon privacy when using an eye - use a service that accesses enterprise APIs, which have good privacy policies. I use the service from the guys who create the This day in AI podcast called smithery.ai -we are access to all of the sota models so we can flip between any model including lots of open source ones within one chat or within multiple chats and compared the same query, using various MCPs and lots of other features. If you're interested have a look at the discord to simtheory.ai (I have no connection to the service or to the creators)
by cogman10 | 2025-12-09 21:54:44+00:00
> How does this line up with your religious belief that doctors are infallible and should be 100% trusted?

Because the way you phrased it with the article in question made it sound like you hadn't first gone to the doctor. This isn't a question about doctors being fallible or not but rather what first instincts are when medical issues arise.

> uneducated comment filled with weird assumptions.

No, not uneducated nor were these assumptions weird as other commenters obviously made the same ones I did.

I'll not delete my comment, why should I? The advice is still completely valid. Go to the doctor first, not GPT.
by xtracto | 2025-12-09 21:54:54+00:00
How are you guys using LLMs? I've done a couple of applications for my own use, including a "Mexican Train Dominoes" online multiplayer using LLMs and it doesn't stop amazing me, Gemini 3 is crazy good at finding bugs at work, And every week there are very interesting advances in Arxiv articles.

I'm 45 years old, have been programming since I was 9, and this is the most amazing time to be building stuff.
by delichon | 2025-12-09 21:55:14+00:00
Widespread failure to die would cement culture in place, and the power structure. It necessarily would dramatically slow down cultural evolution, which strongly depends on funerals. Logan's Run had the right idea, just the wrong number. We old geezers must make way for civilization to effectively adapt to a changing environment.

Even if our lifespans become merely 200 years, imagine if the generation of the US Civil War era were still in power. Great age plus health equals social petrification.
by sureglymop | 2025-12-09 21:55:26+00:00
Lately I have learned assembly more deeply and I sometimes let an AI code up the same thing I did just to compare.

Not that my own code is good but every single time assembly output from an optimizing compiler beats the AI as it "forgets" about all the little tricks involved. However it may still be about how I prompt it. If I tell it to solve the actual challenge in assembly it does do that, it's just not good or efficient code.

On the other hand because I take the time to proof read it I learn from it's mistakes just as I would from my own.
by andrepd | 2025-12-09 21:55:32+00:00
Well I tested the first prompt on ChatGPT and Llama and Claude and not one of them suggested Lyme disease. Goes to show how much these piece of shit clankers are good for.

Llama said "syphilis" with 100% confidence, ChatGPT suggested several different random diseases, and Claude at least had the decency to respond "go to a fucking doctor, what are you stupid?", thereby proving to have more sense than many humans in this thread.

It's not a matter of bad prompting, it's a matter of this being an autocomplete with no notion of ground truth and RLHF'd to be a sycophant!

Just 100B more parameters bro, I swear, and we will replace doctors.
by everfrustrated | 2025-12-09 21:56:25+00:00
With the move to ever shorter certs the risk to letsencrypt having an outage is higher.

It would be nice to read more about what the organization is doing around resilience engineering so we can continue to be confident in depending on it issuing renewals in time.

Do you publish any of this? DR plans? Etc.

I don't mean for this to be a negative - really impressed by LE - but we've had a lot of Cloudflare outages recently and my mind is on vendor reliability & risk at the moment.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-12-09 21:56:27+00:00
> As my own life progressed, the feeling of novelty became harder to find, and then less important. Grief became easier, death became lighter.

This has been my experience as well. When I was 20, I couldn't understand why someone would be ready to die outside of extreme illness or depression. Now, at 40, I am beginning to understand. I'm not ready to die yet, but I can envision myself being there someday. This world is tiring and I can understand how a person would reach the point where they welcome an end to their story.
by traceroute66 | 2025-12-09 21:56:29+00:00
All the usual phishing checks were done if that's what you're thinking.

In terms of the actual mail with identifying details removed, I'd have to go back and ask.

I did look before posting here as I thought they had already forwarded it to me, but it was last year, so I have almost certainly cleaned up my Inbox since. I'm not an Inbox hoarder.
by orangecat | 2025-12-09 21:56:57+00:00
Property taxes are use taxes. You're paying for the right to occupy an inherently limited resource, and for necessary services and infrastructure. It's not a wealth tax because it doesn't matter how much equity you have; it's the same whether you fully paid in cash or have an interest-only mortgage. It's also not a capital gains tax because the purchase price doesn't matter.
by to11mtm | 2025-12-09 21:56:58+00:00
> What level of technical due diligence was performed by organizations like Mastercard, Volvo, PayPal, Baidu, Alibaba, or AT&T before adopting this system?

I have to note the following as a NATS fan:

- I am horrified at Jespen's reliability findings, however they do vindicate certain design decisions I made in the past - 'Core NATS' is really mostly 'redis pubsub but better' and Core NATS is honestly awesome, low friction middleware. I've used it as part of eventing systems in the past and it works great. - FWIW, There's an MQTT bridge that requires Jetstream, but if you're just doing QoS 0 you can work around the other warts. - If you use Jetstream KV as a cache layer without real persistence (i.e. closer to how one uses Redis KV where it's just memory backed) you don't care about any of this. And again Jetstream KV IMO is better than Redis KV since they added TTL.

All of that is a way to say, I'd bet a lot of them are using Core NATS or other specific features versus something like JetStream.

tl;dr - Jetstream's reliability is horrifying apparently but I stand by the statement that Core NATS and Ephermal KV is amazing.
by ljm | 2025-12-09 21:56:59+00:00
I constantly run into issues where features are planned and broken down outside-in, and it always makes perfect sense if you consider it in terms of the pure user interface and behaviour. It completely breaks down when you consider the API, or the backend, is a cross-cutting concern across many of those tidy looking tasks and cannot map to them 1:1 without creating an absolute mess.

Trying to insert myself, or the right backend people, into the process, is more challenging now than it used to be, and a bad API can make or break the user experience as the UI gets tangled in the web of spaghetti.

It hobbles the effectiveness of whatever you could get an LLM to do because you’re already starting on the backfoot, requirements-wise.
by pedalpete | 2025-12-09 21:57:14+00:00
We regularly get contacted by people in Europe who want to buy our product, but we haven't been providing support due to the cost of certs, and other regulatory needs (medical/wellness device).

We want to help people in the EU, but with laws like replaceable batteries, it's going to push us further and further away from being able to do that.

Our product is designed to be refurbished, but not user-replaceable.

At the same time, how many products do people give up on because of battery life, and is this a non-issue with future battery chemistries?

Do people replace their phones because the battery isn't good anymore, or is it more likely they've broken the screen, cameras, etc to the point where it doesn't make sense to replace those anymore? Or they just want the newest thing?
by DontForgetMe | 2025-12-09 21:57:40+00:00
Occam's razor says the sun orbits the earth, everybody dies from Sudden Unexplained Death Syndrome, and the correct way to spell Occam's razor is Okams Raza (in all languages, because lavishes other than English are difficult).

It's literally a platitude. It's like the saying 'when the going gets tough, the tough get going': it's reallyemorable and descriptive and is maybe a good guideline in many situations.

But using it to evaluate the tensile strength of various metals according to their velocity would be wild, because it had never pretended to be anything like a rule. It's not like theory of gravity or 'I before e except after c', which are based on actual analysis and results.

Legit assuming that everything is as simple as it can be, that the most obvious idea to occur to any untrained observer is the most accurate, is literally a guaranteed way to go though life without understanding anything, at all. Using it to argue with people who appear to obvious what they're talking about (and there are so, so many undisputed studies on the exact reasons scammers do what they do: it's too filter people or. There is no debate, academically) is a pretty slippery slope to 'anybody who doesn't think and act exactly like me is lying, because no reasons or facts exist unless I personally hold or after with them', and it's definitely a thought process worth challenging.

Although to be fair, its best application might be re. online arguments that you don't really care that much about. So if you just meant that the previous poster had given a reason and you were going with that because it's easier, my bad.
by Escapado | 2025-12-09 21:57:48+00:00
Interesting story. I want to agree with the general advice not to use it for that - especially if that is how you use it. And I want to preface this with: Don’t take this as advice, I just want to share my experience here. I tend to do it anyway and had fairly large success so far but I use the LLM differently if I have a health issue that bothers me. First I open Gemini, Claude and ChatGPT in their latest, highest thinking budget installment. Then I tell them about my symptoms I give a fairly detailed description of my person and my medical history. I prompt them specifically to ask detailed questions like a physician would and ask them to ask me to perform tests to rule out or zoom in on different hypothesis about what is might have. After going back and forth, if they all agree on a similar thing or a set of similar things I usually take this as a good sign I might be on the right track and check if I should talk to a professional or not (edging on the side of caution). If they can’t agree I would usually try to get an appointment to see a professional and try to get sooner rather than later if anything potentially dangerous popped up during the back and forth or if I feel sufficiently bad.

Now, I live in Germany where in the last 20 years our healthcare system has fallen victim to neoliberal capitalism and since I am publicly insured by choice I often have to wait for weeks to see a specialist so more often than not LLMs have helped me stay calm and help myself as best as I can. However I still view the output less as a the output or a medical professional and try to stay skeptic along the way. I feel like the augment my guesswork and judgement, but not replace it.
by aystatic | 2025-12-09 21:57:54+00:00
don't see why they would care to put out docs on it considering macos doesn't even permit kexts anymore, there'd be no gpu drivers anyways. i figured it was obvious we're talking in the context of running linux on these things, given the parent topic.

> There's also an Apple VP saying unified memory on AS doesn't leave room for DGPUs and separate VRAM

can you link to this? my intuition is that they're speaking on whether apple would include dgpus inside AS systems like they used to with nvidia and amd chips in macbooks, which i agree wouldn't make much sense atp
by J_Shelby_J | 2025-12-09 21:58:08+00:00
The real reason single family housing ownership is the only real option is that society effectively pays people to own; appreciation out weighs all costs of ownership so in the end it’s free or even an investment.

But if it was truly a free market and supply met demand owning housing would be a depreciating asset and renting would be cheaper.

Land ownership is a cultural construct. Their is no natural state.
by schoen | 2025-12-09 21:58:25+00:00
I think you're right that this consensus was clearly emerging then (I remember Firesheep in 2010 as another big identifiable contributing factor), but I remember actively asking smaller sites to enable HTTPS in that era, and they would often refuse. So I think Snowden also contributed to the spread of the norm.

It is possible that there's a retcon element, because it's not always clear in my memory exactly what year various sites became more favorably disposed towards the request to use HTTPS. So I could be misremembering some of them as agreeing post-Snowden when they'd actually agreed one year before, or something.
by ksymph | 2025-12-09 21:58:38+00:00
There are some funny ones in there:

> Finally mobile Flash video

> Google acquires advertising startup

> Track users' mouse movements on your webpages

> YouTube: identifying copyrighted material can't be an automated process. Startup disagrees.

Also kind of interesting how little HN commenting styles have changed. Aside from the subject matter, it's barely noticeable that the comments are from 2007. I don't think the same would be true of many other places round the web.