MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by SilverElfin | 2025-12-07 23:07:37+00:00
It took me a while to figure out who/what this even is, since it’s VERY hard to get to any kind of home page that isn’t just a chatbot interface. Here’s the About page:

https://movementlabs.ai/about

> Movement Labs was founded with a vision to democratize AI while maintaining the highest standards of safety and alignment. We believe that advanced AI should be accessible to everyone, not just those with technical expertise or significant resources.

> Through Momentum, we're demonstrating how AI can be both powerful and safe, useful and responsible. Every feature we build undergoes careful consideration of its potential impacts.

And I guess they have their own inference chip?

https://movementlabs.ai/mpu-blueprint
by skippyboxedhero | 2025-12-07 23:07:43+00:00
Their returns (margins are irrelevant) are usually lower than grocery stores. Large retailers will turn over their inventory tens of times a year, dollar stores won't so the returns are typically lower.

For some reason, left-wing journalists turn into law of one price zealots when confronted with this issue. The reality is that these locations have low-volume and stores everywhere are relatively expensive to run now. For some reason, journalists get angry at the company rather than people who control how much it costs stores to operate. I mean local governments in the US had no problem accepting Dollar General's sales tax from their poor constituents shrug probably more than the corporation is making from the store.

I live in the UK and there is a store like this, Co-Op. The Guardian finds it easier to blame evil foreign corporations because the Co-Op has much higher prices but is a non-profit so the narrative of the evil corporation crumbles.
by youarentrightjr | 2025-12-07 23:07:46+00:00
I see these private equity takes on HN frequently and am really baffled by the ignorance. There's a very clear difference between a public and private company - the fiduciary duty to shareholders.

There is a legal requirement for directors of public companies to act in the financial interests of all shareholders. In practice, and according to precedent, this means long term viability of the company, in other words, a sustained profitable business.

There is no such requirement for a private company. In practice (esp. recent history), this means private equity firms acquire successful businesses to "mine them" of their wealth - capitalizing their assets for personal gain, and leaving nothing left.

The question for public companies isn't how many retail vs institutional investors they have, it's whether an investor can make a claim about a breach of fiduciary duty. It's patently false to say that the institutional investors (who yes, do have more sway) aren't interested in the company acting in their financial interests.
by palata | 2025-12-07 23:08:17+00:00
Slightly unfortunate that "Bag of words" is already a different concept: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bag_of_words.

My second thought is that it's not the metaphor that is misleading. People have been told thousands of times that LLMs don't "think", don't "know", don't "feel", but are "just a very impressive autocomplete". If they still really want to completely ignore that, why would they suddenly change their mind with a new metaphor?

Humans are lazy. If it looks true enough and it cost less effort, humans will love it. "Are you sure the LLM did your job correctly?" is completely irrelevant: people couldn't care less if it's correct or not. As long as the employer believes that the employee is "doing their job", that's good enough. So the question is really: "do you think you'll get fired if you use this?". If the answer is "no, actually I may even look more productive to my employer", then why would people not use it?
by nis0s | 2025-12-07 23:09:04+00:00
I think some people fear that the political or social status of protected classes may diminish by admitting that someone could have a worse life than them despite not being of a protected class. It doesn’t diminish for me, so I have no problem saying that there could be instances where being a protected class isn’t as bad another circumstance for someone who isn’t such a person. It truly depends, everyone’s life is different, and there are indeed worse lives than others, even if it’s someone you normally wouldn’t consider as worse off.
by dididn284d | 2025-12-07 23:09:09+00:00
Second ‘genetics’ comment — wow, we’re really far down the supremacy hole

The key era of tech was when the Jobs and Wozniak built things in their garage, and considered them a bicycle for the mind

You don’t need genetics to ride a bike and improve — but you do need that argument to justify the unjustifiable.

Dark days
by marcosdumay | 2025-12-07 23:09:49+00:00
Yes, it was a clear success. It not only did they improve the education of several children and gathered valuable information on how we can try it better next time, they also scared an oligopolistic industry into diversifying their products and supplying several needs that were ignored.

That said, OLPC was extremely ambitious. I don't think they achieved any of the project's objectives. They get a lot of criticism because of that, and it's all ridiculously unfair.
by tom_ | 2025-12-07 23:09:55+00:00
Count the pixels! Percentagewise, the window decorations and menu bar in that screenshot take up a lot more space than the modern equivalent does at 5K. If you're comparing it to to the current 14" Macbook Pro, it's closer, but Macbook Pro still wins - and still continues to hold its own even if the classic Mac is producing a 1280x1024 display. And this even though the Macbook Pro is the space-constraised pocket version! (Also note: you haven't even investigated the scaled display options yet)

Disclaimer: I have a desktop Mac, and I'm assuming the pixel counts are the same for the laptops.

(The window corners weren't always round, but there was a bit of rounding to the screen corners there from day 1: https://infinitemac.org/ - this really struck me when I first saw it, coming from the Atari ST.)
by nl | 2025-12-07 23:10:12+00:00
If you haven't tried these things since Sonnet 4.5 came out then it's time to give them another try.

Sonnet 4.5 and especially Codex 5.1 have completely changed the way I build software.

> The fact that tools like Replit also include their own hosting environments is definitely neat, but not really what I was getting at as far as deployment. What I had in mind was managing arbitrary cloud platforms, setting up an optimal architecture for your anticipated scale and usage patterns — whether that's a single Hetzner instance with SQLite or horizontally scaled app servers behind an API gateway with Kafka, Valkey, and Spanner or ScyllaDB — and doing all the DevOps to handle that along with things like CI/CD.

I think this is all possible now. But I don't think it'd work first time because there are so many environmental issues (service auth etc) that can go wrong. Maybe it'd be ok if you have it a root AWS account...
by tracker1 | 2025-12-07 23:10:36+00:00
Agreed... The level of integration across MS products in business is hard to entirely quantify.

NextCloud/OwnCloud and other options can deliver some of it, but all of it is harder... Just email/calendar/contacts is hard to match... Then file collaboration and syncing... And all the corner cases in the various office formats.

Even the non mainline office app, Visio does a lot of things competing apps just don't.

I tend to prefer open source apps for myself, and for code projects, I'll focus on markdown for docs etc... but definitely understand why a corp would just pay the monthly Microsoft tax for all employees.

With the improved web versions, Linux on the desktop becomes an option even then.
by darth_avocado | 2025-12-07 23:10:37+00:00
> Is there some code of conduct for public companies but not private ones?

No but there’s a difference between private companies and PE owned companies. PE model is very different from regular private companies, and it often involves extracting maximum profits at the expense of the company itself.

And as far as public companies go, shareholders will have to say something about the operation of the company if you start intentionally sinking it.
by Supermancho | 2025-12-07 23:11:14+00:00
> Is there some code of conduct for public companies but not private ones?

There's a pattern of behavior, to be sure. The primary control on public companies is shareholder scrutiny. Gutting your company for short term gains, is not always popular. The more diverse the shareholder cohort, the less popular it tends to be.

Private companies don't mind it when they can literally start a new company with the assets from the old without the pesky plebian investors.

Ofc you know this.
by fragmede | 2025-12-07 23:11:42+00:00
Sounds like the setup for a sexist comedian's routine. "Y'know, ChatGPT is totally a woman because she reminds me of my wife. She thinks it knows everything and is convinced she's right, when she's totally full of shit! And what's the deal with airline food?" Swap the gender depending on your target audience.

In other languages, chairs have a gender, along with other everyday items like scissors and it doesn't especially make logical sense, although you can squint and tell a story as why something is the gender that's been assigned. Thus making the gender of AI simply a matter"that's just how things are".
by don-code | 2025-12-07 23:11:45+00:00
> All if, else if constructs will contain either a final else clause or a comment indicating why a final else clause is not necessary.

I actually do this as well, but in addition I log out a message like, "value was neither found nor not found. This should never happen."

This is incredibly useful for debugging. When code is running at scale, nonzero probability events happen all the time, and being able to immediately understand what happened - even if I don't understand why - has been very valuable to me.
by manlymuppet | 2025-12-07 23:13:35+00:00
Couldn’t you just feed Claude all the raw, inspect element HTML from the website and have it “decrypt” that?

The entire website is fairly small so this seems feasible.

Usually there’s a big difference between a website’s final code and its source code because of post processing but that seems like a totally solvable Claude problem.

Sure LLMs aren’t great with images, but it’s not like the person who originally wrote the Space Jam website was meticulously messing around with positioning from a reference image to create a circular orbit — they just used the tools they had to create an acceptable result. Claude can do the same.

Perhaps the best method is to re-create, rather than replicate the design.
by cs702 | 2025-12-07 23:15:08+00:00
> Red Baron frozen pizzas, listed on the shelf at $5, rang up at $7.65. Bounty paper towels, shelf price $10.99, rang up at $15.50. Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes, Stouffer’s frozen meatloaf, Sprite and Pepsi, ibuprofen, Klondike Minis – shoppers were overpaying for all of them. Pedigree puppy food, listed at $12.25, rang up at $14.75.

Surely, now that this made the news, there will be an investigation into the fraudulent behavior of Dollar General and Family Dollar.

Left unsaid is that both Dollar General and Family Dollar would become unprofitable if they stop tricking customers. (Both companies typically earn only 3-4% on sales.)
by matheusmoreira | 2025-12-07 23:15:52+00:00
They still read emails. No doubt they're inside Google, Microsoft, Apple. They might not be inside Proton Mail, it uses PGP but keys are stored server side so I wouldn't know.

No doubt they still read texts. I think the US is still among the countries that use SMS a lot.

They no doubt have access to the data big tech's mined out of the entire world's population. That capability alone puts them into "bring everything about this guy up on the screen" territory.
by SauntSolaire | 2025-12-07 23:15:55+00:00
The obvious solution in this scenario is.. to just buy a different hammer.

And in the case of AI, either review its output, or simply don't use it. No one has a gun to your head forcing you to use this product (and poorly at that).

It's quite telling that, even in this basic hypothetical, your first instinct is to gesture vaguely in the direction of governmental action, rather than expect any agency at the level of the individual.
by xyzzy123 | 2025-12-07 23:15:58+00:00
One interesting angle for me is that I am seldom given complete specs or requirements when asked for an estimate. Of course you ask questions to try to determine key information that has not been specified but often the answers are not available or fully reliable.

So any estimate has to include uncertainty about _the scope of the work itself_ as well as the uncertainties involved in delivering the work.

The natural follow on question when you present a range as the answer to an estimate is: what would help you narrow this range? Sometimes it is "find out this thing about the state of the world" (how long will external team take to do their bit) but sometimes it is "provide better specs".
by sirspyr0 | 2025-12-07 23:16:01+00:00
I've been thinking about this for a while: what if consciousness isn't about how much information we process or how it's integrated, but about continuity—the thread of memory and experience that connects us across time?

Humans develop opinions over time based on accumulated input. Our sense of self is a narrative, not a snapshot. Break the continuity (amnesia, coma), and the self breaks too.

I suspect the same applies to AI. A model without persistent context can't develop a real point of view. But one with continuous memory and context? That might be genuinely adaptive, consistent, even conscious-like.

Most theories treat continuity as supporting consciousness. I'm arguing it's the essence.

Not a scientist—just someone with access to a powerful tool and a lot of questions. Would love feedback.

Transparency note: Developed in collaboration with GitHub Copilot (Claude Sonnet 4.5).

Paper: https://github.com/sirspyr0/ai-continuity-system/blob/main/C...

Plain summary: https://github.com/sirspyr0/ai-continuity-system/blob/main/C...
by andrewaylett | 2025-12-07 23:16:10+00:00
TC39 level three, and I don't follow TC39 that closely but it seems to be available everywhere except Safari and I'd not seen it yet.

I'm not entirely sure whether I like it — I probably need to try using it for a bit (pun obviously intended) before making my mind up. Making it a variable declaration style rather than explicit syntax (like Java's try-with-resources) makes me slightly uneasy, as it's a change in semantics from "normal" declarations. It's not like Rust or C++ where we expect destructors to be called at the end of the scope, and it feels like it's going to be hard to work out where a variable marked "const" should have been marked "using".
by fjfaase | 2025-12-07 23:16:15+00:00
If "islamisation" is a problem, why then is Saudi-Arabia a close ally of the USA?

I think it is more that Trump cannot collect bounties in the form of donations in his crypto currency in exchange for favors.

Maybe it is also because they cannot cope with the idea that the 'socialist' Europe is doing well (lately even better than the USA) economical, while this goes to their ideas of what makes a nation strong.

Also in other aspect such as safety, well being, freedom of press, and life expectancy many countries in Europe are doing better than the USA on average.

The fact that the USA is normalizing relationships with Russia is felt as very worrying especially while painting the EU as an adversary.

The USA is the only NATO country that activated article 5 and many European countries responded, but not the USA is saying they will not respond to article 5 if NATO countries in Europe is attacked by Russia.
by Bluestrike2 | 2025-12-07 23:16:30+00:00
> it's not X (emdash) it's Y

No, no, no! Stop that! The em dash is an wonderful little punctuation mark that's damned useful when used with purpose. You can't turn it into some scarlet glyph just because normal people finally noticed they exist. LLMs use them because we used them, damn it.

For god's sake, are we supposed to go back to the dark ages of the double hyphen like typographic barbarians in the hopes that a future update won't ruin that, too? After all the work to get text editors to automatically substitute them in the first place?

What's funny is that, when people first started noticing that LLMs tended to like the em dash, I'd mentioned to a friend that I hoped—rather naively—it might lead to a resurgence and people would think to themselves "huh, that looks pretty useful." Needless to say, I got that one wrong. Are we really going to sacrifice the poor em dash just because people can't come up with a better signifier for LLM text?
by Aunche | 2025-12-07 23:17:05+00:00
1 v 1, the average nomad could kill the average conscripted peasant who was physically weaker and less experienced. An iron vs a flint spear isn't going to make nearly as much of a difference. Superior numbers for the creation of a professional class of fighters that conquered the weaker nomads, but the steppe nomads remained superior in combat. The Roman, Chinese, Persian, and Muslim empires were only able to keep them at bay by turning them against each other. When they united, they were completely unstoppable.
by belorn | 2025-12-07 23:17:10+00:00
> Nothing has been shown more effective at tearing down prejudices than actual exposure and confrontation.

The result has been fairly inconclusive. What happen is that people generally keep their views about in-groups and out-groups, but then add exception for the person they get exposed to. A good experience/friendship do not translate to a change in definitions for the in-group, nor does it change existing negative generalizations of the out-group.

What has shown to be effective is demonstration of shared values by the out-group, while at the same time avoiding display of different values. When people share the same values, and more importantly, do not display a difference in values, then the in-group can be expanded.

If I remember right, the book Behave by Robert Sapolsky goes through this.
by antonvs | 2025-12-07 23:17:14+00:00
> The Netherlands is no class society

Americans used to claim this too. It’s invariably false. It just means that the wealthiest people do a better job of concealing, or not advertising, how vast the wealth discrepancy between them and the average person is.

> Seeing people in BMWs at the Aldi parking lot

The least wealthy person on the list at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Dutch_by_net_worth could afford 10,000 high-end BMWs and still be extremely wealthy, far too wealthy to have any interest in lining up at Aldi’s for a sale.
by ChrisArchitect | 2025-12-07 23:17:41+00:00
Some of the more recent lookbacks with anecdotes and takes:

The Charisma Machine: The life, death, and legacy of One Laptop per Child (2022)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29971982

OLPC’s $100 laptop was going to change the world (2018)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16849374
by sergeykish | 2025-12-07 23:17:45+00:00
"Poland provoked occupation by Germany" (1939)? Germany "liberated Czechoslovakia Germans" by occupation and annexation (1938)? How occupation and annexation of neighbors ended for WW2 Germany (1938-1945)?

In 2014 Moscow invaded Ukraine, occupied Crimea, Donetsk, Luhanks. In 2022 Moscow invaded again. No NATO forces in Ukraine. No Moscow forces on NATO members territory. Trump officials unable to answer who started war, you blame NATO, both you and Trump aligned with Moscow.
by JamesSwift | 2025-12-07 23:18:14+00:00
> I can write code that calculates the average letter frequency across any Wikipedia article. I can't do that in my head without tools because of the rule of seven

That is precisely the point I am trying to make. Its an arbitrary goalpost to say that knowing how to write the code doesnt mean its intelligent, and only doing it in a "chain of thought" would be.
by skippyboxedhero | 2025-12-07 23:18:26+00:00
There is a difference.

ROI on payday loans for lenders is typically very high and their main issue is usually regulation that limits the volume they can transact. ROI on dollar stores is very low because the margin is low, costs are high, and inventory turns is relatively low. For example, Dollar General's inventory turns are half Walmart, that means that to continue operating they need to charge higher prices (the margin).

Low margins aren't an indicator of anything. They are a component of financial return in addition to capital. One does not make sense without the other. In high frequency trading, they are making 1/100000th of a percent on a trade, that is a very high return business if you can do this millions of times a day. Similarly, if I run a housebuilder then I need a 20% margin because I am going to be turning over my inventory across multiple years. If you take out industries with intellectual IP and the secular shift in margin due to taxation changes, ROI across industries is relatively stable...because margins don't matter. What is a good indicator of customers exploitation is if ROI is high. For dollar stores, shareholders are getting exploited, not customers (look at DG/DLTR share price, this is with a secular upturn in multiples, if you take out unit growth which is inherently limited the financial performance is non-existent).
by monerozcash | 2025-12-07 23:19:03+00:00
>They still read emails. No doubt they're inside Google, Microsoft, Apple. They might not be inside Proton Mail, it uses PGP but keys are stored server side so I wouldn't know.

I don't doubt for a second that they can read specific emails, but to suggest that they have bulk collection capabilities within Google or Microsoft is a stretch. NSA lacks the legal authority to compel that, NSA lacks the money to bribe Google or Microsoft and NSA likely lacks the political backing to put the biggest US companies in such a compromised position.

>I think the US is still among the countries that use SMS a lot.

Sure, but that's increasingly iMessage.
by larodi | 2025-12-07 23:19:39+00:00
I have experienced the decline in interest in Perl firsthand - having teached a class in Practical Perl Programming for 10 years at a local major university. First years saw 270ppl, second 150, then 100, 80, 50, and I think the last issue was 12 people.

I can speculate a lot about what killed Perl, or at least what called the schism, and in general what was the cause of the schism had roots in what Perl failed to innovate on. The cultural stuff was a side-effect of it.

But then also - Perl has huuuge impact on so many other languages, including JavaScript, that its place in the hall of fame cannot ever be disputed.
by gruez | 2025-12-07 23:20:09+00:00
>It's not about adjudicating disputes in an arbitrary sense, it's about enforcing consumer protection laws about prices displayed and then charged at retail.

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how the legal system works, at least for common law ones. When cops "enforce" the law, like arresting someone or towing a car, they're only allowed to do it because there's some immediate need. In the former case, it's because having a criminal roaming around the streets is a danger to society, and in the latter case because the car is blocking traffic and needs to be removed. In both cases you still need a judge to ruled that the person actually shoplifted or parked illegally. None of these factors apply in a dispute over pricing, and it's not the police's job to strongarm the shopkeeper to accept the lower-marked price. Indeed, in the two examples, there are often cases where no actions are taken at all, for instance issuing a summons instead of arresting someone, or issuing a ticket instead of towing a car.