MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by matheusmoreira | 2025-12-11 22:01:13+00:00
I had a similar experience. Just chatting about stuff, shooting ideas and concepts back and forth with the AI is quite stimulating. I get to be an obnoxious help vampire without draining other humans of their patience and motivation. It's like having a developer friend with infinite patience to chat with.

In terms of productivity it's having something of a mixed effect. It gives me very clear ideas and direction but at the same time everything just feels done afterwards. All that's left is actually executing the tasks which is... Boring.

I'm not sure I trust ChatGPT to do it for me like an agent. The examples it gives me are never quite right. It's probably a lot better at generating frontend javascript code than programming language interpreter code.
by delusional | 2025-12-11 22:02:22+00:00
A lot of the proposals don't involve you sending your drivers license or "other information" to anyone. The site in question asks you to verify with a trusted third party (usually a government entity), and that trusted third party only provides then with the end result of the validation.

> which is what Google etc have been trying to do for years but this would just completely fast track that.

Excuse me? They have done that for years. There's nothing to "fast track" here. Big Tech already implemented surveillance.
by Yokohiii | 2025-12-11 22:02:26+00:00
I am stuck with your phrasing. Duplication is for me something like cloning or a perfect copy. Which I think is unusual. You will find a chinese phone that looks like an iPhone but is totally different and magnitudes cheaper. What you talk about is probably more like mimicking. Offering something that people are used to to get into the market. But every competitor will eventually look for things to make a brand or product different. What is inevitable, is to diverge from mimicry. So duplicating is an evolutionary process itself.
by IshKebab | 2025-12-11 22:02:28+00:00
Preach! The worst excuse I hear is "but if we have a meaningless name it can't become inaccurate later when the project changes!".

Uhm yeah. That's like saying "if stab myself to death now I can't die of dementia in old age!"

Edit: look, it's here! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46237390
by tennysont | 2025-12-11 22:02:28+00:00
Follow up question that you might know: would multiple LIDAR sensor actually be additive like that? If you can stand a foot away from a car's LIDAR sensor and be unharmed, then can't you have:

| Distance | # of Sensors | | 1 | 1 | | 3 | 9 | | 5 | 25 | | 10 | 100 | | 25 | 625 | | 50 | 2500 | | 100 | 10000 |

x^2 sensors at x feet from you and have the same total energy delivered? If sensors are actually safe to look at from 6in or 3in, then multiple the above table by 4 or 16.

It seems like, due to the inverse square law, the main issue is how close you can get your eye to a LIDAR sensor under normal operation, not how many sensors are scattered across the environment. The one exception I can think of is a car that puts multiple LIDAR arrays next to each other (within a foot or two). But maybe I'm misunderstanding something!
by 8fingerlouie | 2025-12-11 22:02:30+00:00
As far as I know, everything iCloud and Apple Intelligence runs off of their own data centers if you happen to live "near" one, but you could still be using AWS and/or Google as well.

I live near the Danish Apple data center, and pretty much all my iCloud traffic goes there, with a small fraction (<10%) going to Stockholm, which has both AWS and Google data centers, so I assume they're using both for geographical redundancy (erasure coding)

It gets a bit more fuzzy once you start moving into Movies/Music/TV/Billing/whatever as well as their backend services for the store and monitoring.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-12-11 22:02:52+00:00
I think he sort of lived in his own world. He was def pretty neurodivergent, in some way.

I [sort of] remember a movie, once, that had a kid basically doing a "Don Quixote" on the world, where his vision of everything was kind of wondrous.

Don't remember it well enough to recall its name, though...
by n2d4 | 2025-12-11 22:02:54+00:00
That's not true.

> Notable exceptions are Deepseek 3.2 and Opus 4.5 and GPT 3.5 Turbo.

And GPT-4o, GPT-4.1, and GPT-5. Almost every OpenAI release got cheaper on a per-input-token basis.
by rtpg | 2025-12-11 22:03:16+00:00
> It's work they would be doing anyway because they all benefit from it, which is why it isn't a coordination problem

HDMI: tech is shared between you and competitors, but you don't get to collect all the licensing fees for yourself

Some bespoke interface: you can make the bet that your tech is so good that you get to have control over it _and_ you get to license it out and collect all the fees

in the standards case, the standards body will still charge licensing fees but there's an idea that it's all fair play.

Apple had its lightning cable for its iPhones. It collaborated with a standards body for USB-C stuff. Why did it make different decisions there? Because there _are_ tradeoffs involved!

(See also Sony spending years churning through tech that it tried to unilaterally standardize)
by bigiain | 2025-12-11 22:03:17+00:00
I think perhaps the articles argument gets less strong then?

It's claimed grep is "well named" because even though it's not obvious when you first read it, that it being a contraction for "global reg ex print" and hence memorable. I'm not sure the same argument can't be made for libsodium which assuming the reader is familiar with NaCl (the same as the assumption that the previous reader is familiar with regex) then it's an equally memorable name for your crypto library.

There's always a consideration about the context the name is intended and likely to be used in. The article mentions engineering naming and "ibeam", but engineering has it's own technical names an jargon as well. Most people wont know what "4130 tube" means, but people who build bicycle frames or roll cages will - and they're likely to use the less specific term "chromoly" if the don't need to distinguish between 4130 and 4145.

In my head "libsodium" is similar - if you don't know what it (and NaCl) mean, you 100% should keep out of that part of the codebase.
by mmaunder | 2025-12-11 22:03:20+00:00
Yeah I think a lot of us are taking knowing how LLMs work for granted. I did the fast.ai course a while back and then went off and played with VLLM and various LLMs optimizing execution, tweaking params etc. Then moved on and started being a user. But knowing how they work has been a game changer for my team and I. And context window is so obvious, but if you don't know what it is you're going to think AI sucks. Which now has me wondering: Is this why everyone thinks AI sucks? Maybe Simon Willison should write about this. Simon?
by pjmlp | 2025-12-11 22:03:59+00:00
GOGC was introduced in Go 1.5, and I thought the problem was solved.

https://go.dev/blog/go15gc

> Go 1.5’s GC ushers in a future where stop-the-world pauses are no longer a barrier to moving to a safe and secure language. It is a future where applications scale effortlessly along with hardware and as hardware becomes more powerful the GC will not be an impediment to better, more scalable software. It’s a good place to be for the next decade and beyond.
by jmye | 2025-12-11 22:04:52+00:00
> and why that’s a particularly difficult problem to solve

The person I responded to, who seems like someone who definitely knows his stuff, made a comment that implied it was a technically difficult thing to do, not a trivially easy thing that's completely explained by "welp, $$$", which is why I asked. Your comments may point to why ChatGPT doesn't do it, but they're not really answering the actual question, in context.

Especially where the original idea (not mine) was a lightweight LLM that can answer basic things, but knows when it doesn't know the answer and can go ask a heftier model for back-up.
by xoa | 2025-12-11 22:05:18+00:00
Blacklists are an inherently terrible, rights infringing approach to this sort of issue vs whitelists. It would be a lot better if the internet by default was simply considered 18+ (or 16+ or whatever a country wants). Instead, the tld system could be easily used to have age based domains where anyone who wanted one had to meet some set of requirements for content standards, accountability and content vetting, didn't allow user contributed content at all without review or whatever was needed.

At that point all the technical components exist to make this an ultra easy UI for parents. Require ISP WiFi routers at least to support VLANs and PPSKs, which ultra cheap gear can do nowadays no problem, and have an easy to GUI to "generate child password, restrict to [age bracket]", heck to even just put in a birthday and by default have it auto-increment access if a parent wants. Add some easy options for time-of-day restrictions etc, done. Now parents are in charge and no adult needs anything ever.

Now I highly doubt politicians are all being honest about full motivations here, clearly there are plenty of forces trying to use this issue as a wedge to go after rights in general. But at the same time parental concern is real, and non-technical people find it overwhelming. It'd be good if industries and community could proactively offer a working solution, that'd reduce the political salience a great deal. It's unfortunate the entire narrative has been allowed to go 100% backwards in approach.
by scubbo | 2025-12-11 22:05:31+00:00
Exactly this. You can put information in a place that motivated consumers can find it. Heck, you could _even_ pay for it to be there, or to be prioritized there, if you want (I don't love that, but I don't have a coherent way to prevent it). But you should _not_ get to inject your information into my life.
by ekipan | 2025-12-11 22:05:45+00:00
Hard agree. Literally every Windows editor I've ever used, except Notepad, allows me to configure it to save CRLF or LF or sometimes even CR files. And I always just leave it on LF because it's easier.

Old Notepad support should not be a priority for a language implementer. Get a real text editor, they're varied and plentiful. This was always a non-issue drudged up by nobody actually interested in using Zig and so it was rightfully ignored.
by quitit | 2025-12-11 22:05:54+00:00
There are overwhelming dichotomous portrayals in this debate which gives me pause because there are entities who benefit from both sides of this debate, but neither would benefit with a sensible privacy-preserving solution.

So instead of advocating for those sensible and workable solutions, the discussions are always centred on either blocking any attempt at reform while hyperventilating about vague authoritarianism or a similarly vague need to protect the innocent.

Meanwhile in the world of smartphone data providers, social media networks, and the meta/googles of the world: they all know your personal information and identity up to the wazoo - and have far more information on every one of you than what is possessed by your own governments (well except for the governments that are also buying up that data.)

So let me be clear, the gate is open, the horse has bolted - recapturing your privacy is where attention should be focused in this debate... even if it's bad for shareholders.
by didibus | 2025-12-11 22:06:02+00:00
> Overall, my conclusion is that ChatGPT has lost and won't catch up because of the search integration strength.

Depends, even though Gemini 3 is a bit better than GPT5.1, the quality of the ChatGPT apps themselves (mobile, web) have kept me a subscriber to it.

I think Google needs to not-google themselves into a poor app experience here, because the models are very close and will probably continue to just pass each other in lock step. So the overall product quality and UX will start to matter more.

Same reason I am sticking to Claude Code for coding.
by reanimus | 2025-12-11 22:06:38+00:00
> Electric cars are supposed to be simple. Give me something in a shape of a Civic, with the engine replaced with a motor and a battery good for 150 miles, and sell it for $10-12k new. Don't even need an entertainment cluster, give me a place to put a tablet or a phone and just have a bluetooth speaker.

I think this is more or less the pitch behind Slate (https://www.slate.auto/en), though it's more of a truck/SUV form factor.
by pastel8739 | 2025-12-11 22:07:09+00:00
I very much hope that this doesn't happen. So much wasted energy for so little benefit. What's one to do in this world if they don't have the money to own a car that constantly drives them around? What's one to do if they like becoming familiar with a place, rather than watching place after place whiz by? What's one to do if they want to build relationships with the other humans in the world?
by libroot | 2025-12-11 22:07:09+00:00
Weird, the certificate should be fine. Here's a link for Web Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20251211220119/https://libroot.o...

We also have Tor onion site: http://librootfuuucybrkpvarmpswsxnbsakf2oqqzxncvsqrvc2j73kuu...

And I2P: http://xvqmnhevx32br7m4e7g3yoxfirizo4m3uktym3wnuntbgbr5bvna....
by josters | 2025-12-11 22:07:12+00:00
I have circled back to using the apps that are already on my phone, especially the Apple Reminders app which I am currently trying out as my main notes and ideas system.

I have placed it as one of the two bottom widgets on the lock screen which gives me immediate access to everything I need to capture a thought: a main note, the list where I want to store it (e.g., work or personal), the notes field if more context is needed, and I can flag it or schedule a reminder. The app then also has an optional auto-categorize feature which works quite well. Add to that reliable sync across devices and except for a good way to bulk export lists, this has everything I want from a quick draft and capture system.
by LargoLasskhyfv | 2025-12-11 22:07:29+00:00
Plasma/KDE's virtual desktops are working for me, as 3x3, 4x4 would be too small in the widget which shows in the 'taskbar', which is only 24 pixels high, here.

Took me some time and asking in their irc-channel, but actually the basic setup is super-simple, and was too 'intuitive' for an old greybeard like me :-)

You right-click on the launcher icon, or the systray and "Add or Manage Widgets", then a window appears where you can pick all sorts of widgets in a bar to the left, which then appear in a subwindow to the right. You just want the Pager, and remove any instances of that Activities Pager thing, if it is/they are already present(because you can have multiple instances in different places(leftover from earlier tries, maybe)).

What I didn't get was that you can pick that pager-widget from the subwindow, and move it anywhere you want it to in that whole taskbar-panel(outside the edit window!), by holding the mousebutton down(drag), until it is exactly where you want it, and then releasing the mouse-botton(drop).

And then "Exit Edit Mode" in the still open window, which then closes. That's all there is to it.

(Similar to how you customize the appearance of Firefox)

From then on you can configure the pager by right clicking onto it, and virtual desktops in system settings like you want them. Maybe having it appear larger with some key-combo, or whatever.

During the time I cursed it, I discovered the activity thing isn't really active anymore, they just let it there for the people who want/like it, meanwhile the real virtual desktop thing didn't get much attention, but that may change in the future?

Hopefully?
by mikegodshall | 2025-12-11 22:07:46+00:00
Location: Spokane, WA area (Pacific Time)

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Python, Django, React, Next.js, TypeScript, Node.js, PostgreSQL, AWS, Claude Code

Résumé/CV: https://linkedin.com/in/mikegodshall

Email: michaelgodshall@gmail.com

17 years building production systems. Led teams at Collective (fintech) and FullStack Labs (consultancy). Delivered mission-critical apps for California DHCS, enterprise clients, and startups. Currently shipping full-stack applications and MVPs faster using AI-driven development. Looking for senior engineering, team lead, or contract work. Open to engineering management and technical PM roles as well.
by BobaFloutist | 2025-12-11 22:07:49+00:00
Overwhelmingly, across different societies, with different efforts to tweak variables, the result is that pregnancy and childbirth are risky and unpleasant enough that the average woman, given the choice, doesn't want to do it twice.

Fertility used to be higher because women used not to have that choice. At this point, if we want to grow or sustain populations, the only possibilities seem to be

1. Take that choice away from women. Not only would this be abhorrent, I'm not sure it's even possible without some sort of mass violence or horrific war.

2. Bribe women to have children, above and beyond the (economic) cost of having them. This seems difficult, and I genuinely don't know how high you'd have to go to get to replacement fertility. If you're not a woman, genuinely imagine how much you'd have to be paid to give birth to two babies you don't want. Then add the economic opportunity costs to that. Do we really have the resources to give that to half the population (because how do you know who wouldn't give birth without it)? Plus, a lot of men would be very mad.

3. Massive government investment into obstetrics to make pregnancy and childbirth dramatically easier on your body. This, to me, seems the most plausible, though there're obviously still major social barriers.

4. Develop sci-fi tech that removes or reduces the obligation for only women to bear children - either by inventing make pregnancy (halves the necessary average fertility, plus it's much easier to convince people who haven't done it before to have a baby) or artificial wombs. This is pretty far out, but I'm not aware of any actual hard limits on the possibilities. From my perspective, it's probably easier than stopping aging, which looks to have some genuine enthropic challenges.

Everyone (including me) is inclined to blame lower birthrates on their pet social cause (economic inequality, cost of housing, "The LGBT agenda", cars, cities, foreigners, the job market, social media, feminism, Marxism, conservatism, obesity, vaccines) but just as an example, the reduction US birthrates has largely been driven by a precipitous drop in teen pregnancy. As hormonal birth control and sex education has become more available, it's been easier and easier for women to prevent unwanted pregnancies without the cooperation or involvement of men, and birthrates have, predictably, dropped.

And I think it's probably going to be pretty hard to put that genie back in the bottle, unless you can get women to vote against their own right to vote and weather the inevitable storm caused by telling 50% of everyone they're not really people anymore and should just do what they're told. Women tend to be less violent and less physically imposing then men, but I don't think they're actually much less capable of causing destruction with, like, a petrol bomb, and I think we would probably find the line that overcomes that tendency pretty fast if we went down that path.
by camel-cdr | 2025-12-11 22:07:59+00:00
> Expanding it into μops during the decoding stages seems straightforward.

I wouldn't say so, because if you want to be able to crack an instruction into up to N uops, now the second instruction could be placed in any slot from the 2nd to the 1+Nth and you now have to create huge shuffle hardware tk support this.

Apple for example can only crack instructions that generate up to 3 μops at decode (or before rename) anything beyond needs to be microcoded and stall decoding other instructions.
by onraglanroad | 2025-12-11 22:08:36+00:00
Actually, it's kind of the same. LLMs don't have a "new memory" system. They're like the guy from Memento. Context memory and long term from the training data. Can't make new memories from the context though.

(Not addressed to parent comment, but the inevitable others: Yes, this is an analogy, I don't need to hear another halfwit lecture on how LLMs don't really think or have memories. Thank you.)
by 9rx | 2025-12-11 22:09:06+00:00
Software often puts the version in the name. Which is the same as the S7 designation in the case of said combine. S7 is just a restyled S7x0 series combine, which was the successor to the S6x0 series.

It's not a perfect system. Before the S6x0 was the 9x70STS series, after the 9x60STS series, and the 9x50STS series. You can find a version number in there, albeit not a perfectly sequential one. Although that's nothing new. Windows 3.1 turned 3.11, 95, 98. iOS 17 turned 26. You get the picture.
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-12-11 22:09:27+00:00
This was the argument about Fury Road (mostly real) vs Furiosa (a lot of CGI.)

But only bad CGI is visible. I guarantee you have watched CGI footage and not noticed. At all.

The problem over the last decade or so hasn't been the technical limits of CGI, but studio unwillingness to spend enough on it to make it good.

And directors have also become less creative. You can find UK newsreels from the 50s on YouTube, and some of the direction and editing are superb - a beautiful mix of abstraction, framing, and narrative.

Most modern directors don't have that kind of visual literacy. The emphasis is more on spectacle and trying to bludgeon audiences into submission, not on tastefulness and visual craft.
by BoppreH | 2025-12-11 22:09:36+00:00
I think the author makes a hard distinction between consumer products and infrastructure/engineering products. The Shelby Cobra has a funny name, but its engine is the memorably named V8. The Hoover Dam is a dam, and the Golden Gate Bridge is a bridge.

We can argue about namespace pollution and overly long names, but I think there's a point there. When I look at other profession's jargon, I never have the impression they are catching Pokemon like programmers do.

Except for the ones with Latin and Greek names, but old mistakes die hard and they're not bragging about their intelligibility.
by ralfd | 2025-12-11 22:09:50+00:00
This was from Scott Alexander December link list:

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-december-2025

> a Herasight client describes her experience with embryo selection, and her feelings upon the birth of her selected child.

See also: https://x.com/GeneSmi96946389/status/1993170153207742481

> If anyone is thinking about doing polygenic embryo screening and is wondering which company they should go with, here is a simple breakdown of the four main players in the space and the advantages and disadvantages of each:
by niccl | 2025-12-11 22:10:37+00:00
I had a gig last night. Small local band with a bit of a following that hasn't performed for a few months. Audience of 120 or so. Great fun. My occasional hobby is lighting live music so I have to take what bands I can. Fortunately I really enjoy working with these people.

After the show two of the band (40 and 37 y.o.) were talking about what next. They realise that, sadly, they're probably not going to make it big, but aren't sure that the occasional local gig with audience of 120, or supporting someone bigger but where the audience don't care, is enough. What should they do? give up? change mental focus and do something completely different (one thought about being a counsellor, the other about going into visual art). I'm older, so they were asking whether I'd had similar thoughts. Sure have. I long ago realised I could never make a living lighting live music unless I moved to the US, or possibly europe. For reasons, neither were practical, so I consciously decided that desgining hardware, writing software, and doing the occasional hobby lighting gig were enough. But for those two? No idea.

Not really sure where this is going, but the tone of the article really resonated with the discussion with those two last night, and my tiredness this morning.

I still think live music beats the pants off recordings. And show in smaller venues where you can really see and interact with the band are _way_ better than big shows where you just have loud television