MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gjvc | 2025-12-11 01:32:17+00:00
Roboto Condensed's description reads like something written by wine journalist:

Roboto has a dual nature. It has a mechanical skeleton and the forms are largely geometric. At the same time, the font features friendly and open curves. While some grotesks distort their letterforms to force a rigid rhythm, Roboto doesn’t compromise, allowing letters to be settled into their natural width. This makes for a more natural reading rhythm more commonly found in humanist and serif types.

A Sancerre with a long, sweet finish.
by godelski | 2025-12-11 01:33:03+00:00
> Haven't used yay or other aur helpers so far. > Have used Yaourt on Arch in the far past,

Yaourt is an aur helper?

> Maybe that's why my systems run so stable?

Sorry?

>>> I know my ways around Arch

Forgive me, you said this earlier and I think I misunderstood. What does this mean exactly? How long have you been using Arch? Or rather, have you used Arch the actual distro or only Arch based distros?

I guess I'm asking, have you installed the vanilla distro? Are you familiar with things like systemd-boot, partitioning, arch-chroot, mkinitcpio, and all that?
by rapind | 2025-12-11 01:33:07+00:00
> Technically, yes. The CCP, though, wants to incentivize Chinese firms to use domestically-manufactured chips.

This couldn’t be playing out better for Xi. Trump is China’s best president.

I used to think Trump was clueless and being outplayed, but now I realize he’s just looting and couldn’t care less about protectionism or the American worker.

Every single action from this administration can be explained by greed and ego.
by no_wizard | 2025-12-11 01:33:09+00:00
Use case mapping matters. I use AI tools at work (have for a few years now, first Copilot from GitHub, now I use Gemini and Claude tools primarily). When the use case maps well, it is great. You can typically assume anything with a large corpus of fairly standard problems will map well in a popular language. JavaScript, HTML, CSS, these have huge training datasets from open source alone.

The combination of which, deep training dataset + maps well to how AI "understands" code, it can be a real enabler. I've done it myself. All I've done with some projects is write tests, point Claude at the tests and ask it to write code till those tests pass, then audit said code, make adjustments as required, and ship.

That has worked well and sped up development of straightforward (sometimes I'd argue trivial) situations.

Where it falls down is complex problem sets, major refactors that cross cut multiple interdependent pieces of code, its less robust with less popular languages (we have a particular set of business logic in Rust due to its sensitive nature and need for speed, it does a not great job with that) and a host of other areas I have hit limitations with it.

Granted, I work in a fairly specialized way and deal with alot of business logic / rules rather than boiler plate CRUD, but I have hit walls on things like massive refactors in large codebases (50K is small to me, for reference)
by dash2 | 2025-12-11 01:33:17+00:00
> This disproportionately rewards chains and already-central venues. Chains benefit from cross-location brand recognition. High-footfall areas generate reviews faster....

I think this is very likely false if you mean compared to the status quo ante. Before Maps, a well-loved but hard-to-find venue just wouldn't ever be seen by most people, and the absence of reviews made branding more important because it was all you had to go on. I'd be very doubtful if the proportion of independent cafes and restaurants decreases when Google Maps enters an area. (Couldn't find any causal research designs though....)

The more general point that the algorithm is not neutral (and probably never could be) must be right.

(I asked ChatGPT but it ended up with: "We have almost no clean exogenous variation in Maps rankings or feature rollouts at fine geographic scales that would let you estimate impacts on entry, survival, or market structure in a neat DiD/IV way.")
by sigmar | 2025-12-11 01:33:17+00:00
> The conclusion was that superforecasters' ability to filter out "noise" played a more significant role in improving accuracy than bias reduction or the efficient extraction of information.

>In February 2023, Superforecasters made better forecasts than readers of the Financial Times on eight out of nine questions that were resolved at the end of the year.[19] In July 2024, the Financial Times reported that Superforecasters "have consistently outperformed financial markets in predicting the Fed's next move"

>In particular, a 2015 study found that key predictors of forecasting accuracy were "cognitive ability [IQ], political knowledge, and open-mindedness".[23] Superforecasters "were better at inductive reasoning, pattern detection, cognitive flexibility, and open-mindedness".

I'm really not sure what you want me to take from this article? Do you contend that everyone has the same competency at forecasting stock movements?
by omoikane | 2025-12-11 01:33:42+00:00
> But there is a good answer. It's Gundam 79. That's not hard.

The hard part is that the older series relatively slow paced. I enjoyed most of them when I first saw them, but I am not sure I would have the patience to catch up from the beginning now if I had not watched them before.

Newer series are much faster paced, but they build on the foundations of the older series. Like GQuuuuuuX is great but you might have to watch Zeta Gundam first to fully appreciate it (50 episodes, maybe a few movies). It can be a lot of time commitment depending on where you enter the Gundam universe.
by echelon | 2025-12-11 01:33:52+00:00
It's not "Open".

I wish this had another name.

I love the idea of fire and forget to a central AI aggregator. This one for LLMs, Fal for image and video. You don't need to juggle dozens of API keys or API integrations.

But these aren't open, despite it being in the name.

I want the ability to pull it all on-prem if I so choose.

I probably won't. But if I want to, I should be able to.

Don't use the name "Open" like this.

OpenAI, OpenRouter, OpenArt... Just stop already.

This isn't even fair source, let alone open. It's totally closed and opaque.

I'm half minded to make an "ActuallyOpenRouter".

(I know there are local routers, but I want hosted and managed with the ability to self-manage.)
by heavyset_go | 2025-12-11 01:33:56+00:00
There's internet culture precedent for this. 4chan itself has an early history of picking up leftovers from communities that were banned on other sites/forums/platforms.

4chan's origin itself fits that archetype, as well. It was created when a hentai subforum got banned on a larger forum, and the community moved over to the new imageboard.

It acts as sponge for more than just edgelords.
by jaimex2 | 2025-12-11 01:35:10+00:00
HackerNews used to be full of moderately smart people. This is basically Reddit level comments.

Think for a moment instead of just accepting whatever the media is telling you to think.

How many social networks are there?

Are some of those decentralised?

Will kids move to unmoderated underground ones in response to this?

Will the government expand these laws now that it achieved a foothold?

Parenting and teaching your kids to think and understand how the world works is how you really solve the problems. Not building weak fences and encouraging government over-reach. Raising and guiding your kids is YOUR responsibility, not the governments.

All this came about because some absolute slog of a parent had their kid kill themselves and blamed social media. Where the hell was he while their kid struggled?!
by pxc | 2025-12-11 01:35:19+00:00
Declarative vs. imperative doesn't have anything to do with power or expressiveness. Some general purpose programming languages are declarative, and some declarative DSLs are Turing-complete.

I worry that comments like this lead the average newbie to overlook (or worse, avoid) declarative languages (both among DSLs and among general-purpose languages) because they will associate the term with hacky, confining, gotcha-ridden messes like Terraform's HCL, Azure DevOps' standards-breaking "YAML" DSL, etc.

Incidentally I agree that a language like Python is a terrible fit for this domain, but it's also plain to see that HCL is a shitty tarpit. It's not hard to understand why people want to get away from HCL.

And concretely, you can use Pulumi in a pure functional style with F# or Scala.
by steveklabnik | 2025-12-11 01:35:42+00:00
> LLVM is NOT free software because it is released under the Apache license, which is an open source license but not a free software license.

GNU disagrees with you: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html

> Apache License, Version 2.0 - This is a free software license, compatible with version 3 of the GNU GPL.

Furthermore:

> Further it is not really a confusion to equate permissive licensing with open source as distinguished from copyleft and free software.

You are in disagreement with the FSF on this issue. "permissive" licenses also follow the Four Essential Freedoms, none of which require viral licensing.
by mbreese | 2025-12-11 01:37:42+00:00
I have a service that other users access through a web interface. It uses an on-premises open model (gpt-oss-120b) for the LLM and a dozen MCP tools to access a private database. The service is accessible from a web browser, but this isn’t something where the users need the ability to access the MCP tools or model directly. I have a pretty custom system prompt and MCP tools definitions that guide their interactions. Think of a helpdesk chatbot with access to a backend database. This isn’t something that would be accessed with a desktop LLM client like Claude. The only standards I can really count on are MCP and the OpenAI-compatible chat completions.

I personally don’t think of MCP servers as having more utility than local services that individuals use with a local Claude/ChatGPT/etc client. If you are only using local resources, then MCP is just extra overhead. If your LLM can call a REST service directly, it’s extra overhead.

Where I really see the benefit is when building hosted services or agents that users access remotely. Think more remote servers than local clients. Or something a company might use for a production service. For this use-case, MCP servers are great. I like having some set protocol that I can know my LLMs will be able to call correctly. I’m not able to monitor every chat (nor would I want to) to help users troubleshoot when the model didn’t call the external tool directly. I’m not a big fan of the protocol itself, but it’s nice to have some kind of standard.

The short answer: not everyone is using Claude locally. There are different requirements for hosted services.

(Note: I don’t have anything against Claude, but my $WORK only has agreements with Google and OpenAI for remote access to LLMs. $WORK also hosts a number of open models for strictly on-prem work. That’s what guided my choices…)
by aegeggg1 | 2025-12-11 01:38:04+00:00
Welcome to BananaPrompts.org – The Premier Resource for AI Generation. In the rapidly evolving world of AI art, the difference between a good image and a masterpiece often lies in the prompt. BananaPrompts is designed to bridge that gap. We are a dedicated platform helping creators, designers, and enthusiasts master AI tools like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion. What we offer: • Curated Collections: Meticulously tested prompts for diverse styles (Christmas visuals, Ins-style minimalism, Cyberpunk, and more). • Visual Inspiration: High-resolution examples paired with their exact generation parameters. • Educational Guides: Tutorials on how to refine keywords and control artistic output. Whether you are a professional looking to streamline your workflow or a beginner exploring digital art, BananaPrompts is your go-to creative partner.
by tzs | 2025-12-11 01:38:13+00:00
First, that is wrong because Venn diagrams don't work the way you think they do.

Second, even if they did work they way they think they do it would still be wrong. :-)

Venn diagrams show all possible inclusion/exclusion relations between the sets they are showing. A Venn diagram of two sets is always two circles that partly overlap.

Even if the way they worked is that you could omit regions that are empty and redraw the remaining regions to be circular, it doesn't help because ending up with a single circle with both sets in it would mean you are asserting the the two sets are equal.

That is clearly false because pretty much everyone can name someone who likes to annoy people by being loud and obnoxious but does not ride a motorcycle.
by lmm | 2025-12-11 01:38:22+00:00
Not my experience. For example the "official" way of achieving the equivalent of sum types (the visitor pattern) is so verbose that idiomatic Java tends to use the equivalent of a "single table inheritance" style instead of proper domain modelling, which inevitably leads to all sorts of logic errors. Idiomatic Java uses "magic" AOP because the alternatives are too verbose, but this also inevitably causes logic errors (indeed in some ways it's worse than C where you'd do the equivalent thing with a preprocessor macro, which is at least a bit more visible in the code even if only due to conventions like UPPERCASE names). What kind of logic errors are seen in C that you would claim that idiomatic Java avoids?
by skissane | 2025-12-11 01:38:36+00:00
If we look at afterlife beliefs-and their secular substitutes such as life extension, cryonics, mind uploading, simulationism, quantum immortality-I don’t think they all have the same motivation-two people may adopt the same belief with different psychological motivations.

For some people, the idea that their present conscious moment might eventually be left permanently without any future extension is terrifying-but provided that doesn’t happen, they might be neutral (or even positive) about the prospect of the contents of that consciousness eventually becoming so radically transformed that it becomes a completely different person, or even something which transcends human notions of personhood, albeit ultimately still continuous with the person they are now. For other people, that prospect is terrifying. It really depends on what one is most attached to - the mere continuation of one’s own consciousness, or its distinctive contents that makes you you.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-12-11 01:39:04+00:00
The only way in the semi immediate future that AI coding is going to get better is with some combination of static typing, tools that can do guaranteed safe refactoring (which requires statically typed languages) and immediate feedback when a refactor causes breaking changes.

I’m imagining something like using C# where any code that you write that would cause a compilation error is immediately flagged solution wide + ReSharper that could reason over your code base and do refactors that were guaranteed safe since 2008 and an AI that calls those tools and does deterministic type checks along with running your unit tests.

I haven’t used R# in years. I don’t know how far it’s come.
by srcreigh | 2025-12-11 01:40:08+00:00
> During his time as the Executive Director of the American Peanut Shellers, John helped to found the Peanut Institute and the U.S. Peanut Federation. These two entities have helped to promote the interests of the peanut industry throughout the United States and the world. Moreover, John has worked on eight farm bills during his life, always advocating for those who he represented. Since 2001, John, in association with the National Peanut Board, has helped to steer more than 36 million dollars to food allergy research, outreach and education. Earlier this year, because of his significant contributions to the Peanut Industry, John was inducted into the American Peanut Council Hall of Fame.
by phantasmish | 2025-12-11 01:40:31+00:00
"This is good for this" doesn't mean it's the only thing we use?

People are real eager to tear down a point that was simply "maybe don't let kids use algo-feed social media, because it's an actual garbage fire". The vast majority of the Internet does not have the same problems, to the same degree, as places like Instagram and TikTok. Some of it may have other problems and may be worth looking out for! But most of those other places also have, like, some redeeming features.

Am I also to let my kids wander in toxic waste dumps? I'm pretty surprised at the kind of push-back this is getting. I don't got time to supervise my kids on TikTok or whatever, so... no TikTok. I also don't have time to supervise them playing with boxes of rusty razor blades, so I try not to give them access to boxes of rusty razor blades, either [edit: I can predict the disingenuous replies to this part, so further suppose the blades are bubble-gum flavored and literal hundreds of billions of dollars were spent on packaging and presenting the box and blades to encourage kids to put them in their mouths; there, that's closer to algo feed social media, pretty much no reason to engage nor allow your kids near it, loooots of reason to keep it way the hell away].

This seems really straightforward and reasonable to me.
by losvedir | 2025-12-11 01:41:47+00:00
Agreed. I feel like it's more just a collection of good comments. It doesn't surprise me to see tptacek, patio11, etc there. I think the "prediction" aspect is under weighted.

But it reminds me that I miss Manishearth's comments! What ever happened to him? I recall him being a big rust contributor. I'd think he'd be all over the place, with rust's adoption since then. I also liked tokenadult. interesting blast from the past.
by nostrebored | 2025-12-11 01:42:04+00:00
This idea that regulation fails to destroy industries is farcical. Most examples of “failed regulation” like American prohibition were runaway successes as public policy. Whether it is good or desirable is a different question.

The idea that someone is going to make an engaging experience on a “decentralized” network is honestly a bit silly to me. The market potential of this business is low. Decentralized networks with much larger incentives have failed to capture critical mass.

There will be side effects, but social media has been so ridiculously corrosive to the welfare of teenagers that I can’t imagine a ban would be worse.
by paulryanrogers | 2025-12-11 01:42:05+00:00
Growing up indoctrinated into conversative evangelism, I saw that the Midwestern flavor valued freedom of individuals from government. It was a shallow flavor of self sufficiency, which discounted all social support except family and churches. Abortion was a wedge issue preached from every platform.

Tribalism was a key substrate. This often manifested as a near blind loyalty to the party and chosen thought leaders like Bill Graham, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, and now Tucker Carlson. They told us how to interpret events and we repeated the talking points. They gave us the (often contradictory) rules and principles we were to use to view everything in life.
by XenophileJKO | 2025-12-11 01:42:23+00:00
I beginning to think most "advanced" programmers are just poor communicators.

It really comes mostly down to being able to concisely and eloquently define what you want done. It also is important to understand what the default tendencies and biases of the model are so you know where to lean in a little. Occasionally you need to provide reference material.

The capabilities have grown dramatically in the last 6 months.

I have an advantage because I have been building LLM powered products so I know mechanically what they are and are not good with. For example.. want it to wire up an API with 250+ endpoints with a harness? You better create (or have it create) a way to cluster and audit coverage.

Generally the failures I hear often with "advanced" programmers are things like algorithmic complexity, concurrency, etc.. and these models can do this stuff given the right motivation/context. You just need to understand what "assumptions" the model it making and know when you need to be explicit.

Actually one thing most people don't understand is they try to say "Do (A), Don't do (B)", etc. Defining granular behavior which is fundamentally a brittle way to interact with the models.

Far more effective is defining the persona and motivation for the agent. This creates the baseline behavior profile for the model in that context.

Not "don't make race conditions", more like "You value and appreciate elegant concurrent code."
by dsevil | 2025-12-11 01:42:50+00:00
I've seen some comments about how Times New Roman was replaced with something else to improve readability by many.

There's an irony: the _Times_ (of London) commissioned it in 1932 to improve the readability of its newspaper, which previously used a Didone/Modern style typeface.

I like Times New Roman and I find Calibri, a rounded-corner sans serif, to be an absolute abomination of milquetoast typography.
by jiggawatts | 2025-12-11 01:43:39+00:00
Every aspect is at least partially broken several times a day, and even when there isn't a temporary outage of something somewhere, there are nonsensical "blocks" for things that ought to just work.

I've been using the AI Studio with my personal Workspace account. I can generate an API key. That worked for a while, but now Gemini CLI won't accept it. Why? No clue. It just says that I'm "not allowed" to use Gemini Pro 3 with the CLI tool. No reason given, no recourse, just a hand in your face flatly rejecting access to something I am paying for and can use elsewhere.

Simultaneously, I'm trying to convince my company to pay for a corporate account of some sort so that I can use API keys with custom tools and run up a bill of potentially thousands of dollars that we can charge back to the customer.

My manager tried to follow the instructions and... followed the wrong ones. They all look the same. They all talk about "Gemini" and "Enterprise". He ended up signing up for Google's equivalent of Copilot for business use, not something that provides API keys to developers. Bzzt... start over from the beginning!

I did eventually find the instructions by (ironically) asking Gemini Pro, which provided the convenient 27 step process for signing up to three different services in a chain before you can do anything. Oh, and if any of them trigger any kind of heuristic, again, you get a hand in face telling you firmly and not-so-politely to take a hike.

PS: Azure's whatever-it-is-called-today is just as bad if not worse. We have a corporate account and can't access GPT 5 because... I dunno. We just can't. Not worthy enough for access to Sam Altman's baby, apparently.
by marai2 | 2025-12-11 01:43:44+00:00
1. Why Machines Learn - Anil Ananthaswamy

Fantastic exposition of machine learning. The author does an amazing job of bringing a technical subject down to an easily readable level.

2. The Joy of Abstraction - Eugenia Cheng

Similar to the above review. I never thought Category Theory could be made so easily readable!

3. A Little History of Philosophy - Nigel Warburton

Small, compact book. A quick interesting jaunnt through the history of philosophy. Entertaining and educational!
by phantasmish | 2025-12-11 01:45:27+00:00
Ah, the inevitable "meh, give up, it's hopeless" post, to go along with the "why don't parents do their fucking job and leave us alone?" posts. No thread on HN related to parenting and technology is complete without a healthy dose of both sorts of post.

Sorry, I'm trying to do my fucking job, as others demand.