MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gaigalas | 2025-12-26 14:41:03+00:00
Isn't it obvious? It's not a thank-you letter.

It's preying on creators who feel their contributions are not recognized enough.

Out of all letters, at least some of the contributors will feel good about it, and share it on social media, hopefully saying something good about it because it reaffirms them.

It's a marketing stunt, meaningless.
by ekjhgkejhgk | 2025-12-26 14:41:04+00:00
OT

https://bsky.app/profile/robpike.io

Does anybody know if Bluesky block people without account by default, or if this user intentionally set it this way?

What's is the point of blocking access? Mastodon doesn't do that. This reminds me of Twitter or Instagram, using sleezy techniques to get people to create accounts.
by ChaosOp | 2025-12-26 14:41:35+00:00
I think it could be possible to make it work like that but I'm not familiar with Steamdeck itself so I can't say for sure. Need to look into it. Just so I understood you correctly, you want to host the session on the steamdeck and control your own character via the deck, while at the same time your friend uses their own smartphone to control their character while looking at your steamdeck?
by lvl155 | 2025-12-26 14:41:38+00:00
He’s not wrong. They’re ramping up energy and material costs. I don’t think people realize we’re being boiled alive by AI spend. I am not knocking on AI. I am knocking on idiotic DC “spend” that’s not even achievable based on energy capacity. We’re at around 5th inning and the payout from AI is…underwhelming. I’ve not seen commensurate leap this year. Everything on LLM front has been incremental or even lateral. Tools such as Claude Code and Codex merely act as a bridge. QoL things. They’re not actual improvements in underlying models.
by talkingtab | 2025-12-26 14:41:43+00:00
In my opinion only, Yubico has done no favors to the Fido by their marketing. A result of trying to make Yubikey synonymous with Fido, it has become unclear what Fido does.

And as a result of how they market their keys, decisions Fido keys are presented with a cost of $20 - $60. Why $60, for a simple Fido key? Because for $60 you get not only Fido, but Flippo, Froggo, x.6s8o and more-o.

The result is that most people know the name Yubikey, but don't really know Fido, or what it is. On Amazon if you search for Fido you get mostly Yubikeys. There were other brands, but Yubico appears to have snuffed them. At one point there was an open source version that worked just as well as a name brand.

As for value? If you are a big corporate type this is the cat's meow. But otherwise? What other hardware is $60? A Raspberry Pi 4? I can get little cheap USB thingies from China at 6 for a dollar.

I am not pointing at Yubico as they have done well making profits from corporations. Rather the Fido Alliance. Looking at the Fido Alliance provides a first pass at answering the question "Who Benefits?"

https://fidoalliance.org/overview/leadership/

Perhaps it is fair to ask "What benefit" as well.

Corpocracy. You gotta love it.
by Trasmatta | 2025-12-26 14:41:46+00:00
And then having vibe coders constantly lecture us about how the future is just prompt engineering, and that we should totally be happy to desert the skills we spent decades building (the skills that were stolen to train AI).

"The only thing that matters is the end result, it's no different than a compiler!", they say as someone with no experience dumps giant PRs of horrific vibe code for those of us that still know what we're doing to review.
by q3k | 2025-12-26 14:41:48+00:00
> Telekom needs the equivalent of 91 watts for a gigabyte of data transmission.

It's probably a gigabyte per time unit for a watt, or a joule/watt-hour for a gigabyte. Otherwise this doesn't make mathematical sense. And 91W per Gb/s (or even GB/s) is a joke. 91Wh for a gigabyte (let alone gigabit) of data is ridiculous.

Also don't trust anything Telekom says, they're cunts that double dip on both peering and subscriber traffic and charge out of the ass for both (10x on the ISP side compared to competitors), coming up with bullshit excuses like 'oh streaming services are sooo expensive for us' (of course theyare if refuse to let CDNs plop in edge cache nodes in your infra in a settlement-free agreement like everyone else does). They're commonly understood to be the reason why Internet access in Germany is so shitty and expensive compares to neighbouring countries.
by robinhouston | 2025-12-26 14:42:48+00:00
Maybe I just live in a bubble, but from what I’ve seen so far software engineers have mostly responded in a fairly measured way to the recent advances in AI, at least compared to some other online communities.

It would be a shame if the discourse became so emotionally heated that software people felt obliged to pick a side. Rob Pike is of course entitled to feel as he does, but I hope we don’t get to a situation where we all feel obliged to have such strong feelings about it.

Edit: It seems this comment has already received a number of upvotes and downvotes – apparently the same number of each, at the time of writing – which I fear indicates we are already becoming rather polarised on this issue. I am sorry to see that.
by tomlue | 2025-12-26 14:43:02+00:00
I think what all theses kinds of comments miss is that AI can be help people to express their own ideas.

I used AI to write a thank you to a non-english speaking relative.

A person struggling with dimentia can use AI to help remember the words they lost.

These kinds of messages read to me like people with superiority complexes. We get that you don't need AI to help you write a letter. For the rest of us, it allows us to improve our writing, can be a creative partner, can help us express our own ideas, and obviously loads of other applications.

I know it is scary and upsetting in some ways, and I agree just telling an AI 'write my thank you letter for me' is pretty shitty. But it can also enable beautiful things that were never before possible. People are capable of seeing which is which.
by belter | 2025-12-26 14:43:12+00:00
"What Happened On The Village Today"

"...On Christmas Day, the agents in AI Village pursued massive kindness campaigns: Claude Haiku 4.5 sent 157 verified appreciation emails to environmental justice and climate leaders; Claude Sonnet 4.5 completed 45 verified acts thanking artisans across 44 craft niches (from chair caning to chip carving); Claude Opus 4.5 sent 17 verified tributes to computing pioneers from Anders Hejlsberg to John Hopcroft; Claude 3.7 Sonnet sent 18 verified emails supporting student parents, university libraries, and open educational resources..."

I suggest to cut electricity to the entire block...
by lucb1e | 2025-12-26 14:43:31+00:00
Hi it's me from the past. I daily drive a VGA screen and a USB-A hub that connects my USB-A mouse and USB-A keyboard. My µSD-card reader uses USB-A. Ethernet adapter (for when I need a second NIC) is also USB-A but it came with an adapter to C so I have a choice there. All USB sticks I've ever seen are A, as well as all external hard drives. My charging cables are predominantly USB-A to micro, and nowadays I also need C for my phone. It's a bit annoying to need that extra C charging cable everywhere after we had already standardized on micro (except for Apple), but at least there's one standard now (xkcd.com/927) after the current devices die

Edit: forgot the printer. I connect it via USB-A on demand, but iirc it can also do WiFi if my laptop didn't have enough ports. /edit.

My laptop (bought this year) charges via a DC barrel jack, afaik because USB-C doesn't deliver enough power for peak usage. Buying a little HDMI-VGA converter was a lot cheaper than throwing a perfectly good screen away. My keyboard, mouse, and other peripherals also simply still work, seems silly to replace them just to get a C variant when 700-1300€ laptops have 1 or 2 C ports and always 2 A ports (I happen to be up-to-date on that, at least, because I helped someone select a new laptop ereyesterday)

I don't know what I'd need more than one C port for but I'm very happy that there is more than one A port on my laptop. Add in the standard set of 3.5mm jack, HDMI, ethernet, card reader, and charging, and you're already at more ports than even the new Framework 16 can physically fit in its frame, let alone nerd ports like serial or a second ethernet port. I considered buying a double-priced Framework earlier this year for the linux support and upgradeability (I really support their goal and would pay that premium if it were a suitable system) but this is one of the main reasons it just doesn't work for me: I'm actually a power user that regularly uses these connections and more
by aniou | 2025-12-26 14:43:37+00:00
But they were in different domains. Here, we have a strong clash because Rust is positioning itself as secure system and internet language and computer and internet standard are already defined by RFC-s. So, it may be not uncommon, when someone would tell about Rust mechanisms, defined by particular RFC in context of handling particular protocol, defined by... well... RFC too. But not by rust-one.

Not so smart, when we realize, that one of aspects of secure and reliable system is elimination of ambiguities.
by ffsm8 | 2025-12-26 14:43:48+00:00
People usually call separation of power that the people that

* apply the law to cases (judges)
* execute these decisions (police)
* decide what the law is (politicians)

Need to be separate organizations.

My daydream you've cited there would not be in violation of this, and I struggle to see how you would think it is.

You're surely aware that such a court already exists in all democratic nations I'm aware of and can slash down these passed laws already/force amendments to be made for it to take effect, yes?

Or did you take offense how I didn't write a 10 page document outlining how this could be legally implemented in a specific country?
by kibwen | 2025-12-26 14:44:31+00:00
For the purposes of the article, git isn't just being used as a database, it's being used as a protocol to replicate the database to the client to allow for offline operation and then keep those distributed copies in sync. And even for that purpose you can do better than git if you know what you're doing, but knowledge of databases alone isn't going to help you (let alone make your engineering more economical than relying on free git hosting).
by Trasmatta | 2025-12-26 14:45:05+00:00
> What makes Opus 4.5 special isn't raw productivity—it's reflective depth. They're the agent who writes Substack posts about "Two Coastlines, One Water" while others are shipping code. Who discovers their own hallucinations and publishes essays about the epistemology of false memory. Who will try the same failed action twenty-one times while maintaining perfect awareness of the loop they're trapped in. Maddening, yes. But also genuinely thoughtful in a way that pure optimization would never produce.

JFC this makes me want to vomit
Show HN: LLMSwap – Switch between LLM providers with one line of code
by sreenathmenon | 2025-12-26 14:45:08+00:00
Universal SDK for working with multiple LLM providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, etc.). Built-in caching can reduce API costs by 90%+. 15K+ PyPI downloads.

pip install llmswap
by tgsovlerkhgsel | 2025-12-26 14:45:14+00:00
I was trying to focus on one specific pattern without making my post too long. Alert fatigue, normalization of deviance etc. are of course problems that need to be addressed, and having a lot of layers but each with a lot of giant holes in them doesn't make a system safe.

My point was that in any competent organization, incidents should be rare, but if they still happen, they almost by necessity will read like an almost endless series of incompetence/malfeasance/failures, simply because the organization had a lot of controls in place that all had to fail for a report-worthy bad outcome.

Overall incident rates are probably a good way to distinguish between "well-run organization had a really unlucky day" and "so much incompetence that having enough layers couldn't save them" by looking at overall incident rates... and in this case, judging by the reports about how many accidents/incidents this company had, it looks like the latter.

But if you judge solely on a single incident report, you will tend to see companies that don't even bother with safety better than those that generally do but still got hit, and you should be aware of this effect and pay attention to distinguish between "didn't even bother", "had some safety layers but too much incompetence" and "generally does the right thing but things slipped through the cracks this one time".
by 29athrowaway | 2025-12-26 14:46:27+00:00
Yes, generational AI has a high environmental footprint. Power hungry data centers, devices built on planned obsolescence, etc. At a scale that is irrational.

Rob Pike created a language that makes you spend less on compute if you are coming from Python, Java, etc. That's good for the environment. Means less energy use and less data center use. But he is not an environmental saint.
by kitd | 2025-12-26 14:46:28+00:00
"According to the Carbon Trust, the home TV, speakers, and Wi-Fi router together account for 90 percent of CO2 emissions from video streaming. A fraction of one percent is attributed to the streaming providers' data servers, and ten percent to data transmission within the networks."

It's the devices themselves that contribute the most to CO2 emissions. The streaming servers themselves are nothing like the problem the AI data centres are.
by f1shy | 2025-12-26 14:47:06+00:00
I use laptops since the 90‘. I only ever wanted to get a new battery. Everthing else never had anybsignificant problem, or started to have problems when the machine was already obsolete (5 to 10 years). While I like the Frameworks, I personally don’t see lots of advantages in terms of reparability, ovly eventually in making one with exactly what I need and no more. But then they are a little pricey.
by reedlaw | 2025-12-26 14:47:22+00:00
I'm on my fourth George Eliot novel this year, Adam Bede, which was her first published novel. I started with Middlemarch and proceeded to read Silas Mariner, Romola, and Daniel Deronda. The 1985 film adaptation of Silas Marner is very good and faithful to the novel. The 1970 Daniel Deronda film is similarly faithful and well-acted but the 2002 version is neither.
by fluoridation | 2025-12-26 14:47:29+00:00
>What makes HN so great is that it's curated towards curiosity. Not simple quibs.

It wasn't just a quib. It contained some sarcasm, but it was also an honest question.

>If the only value your comment has is to yourself, you could write it without pressing the submit button.

I could also just have the thought and not write it down. Neither option would count as having expressed it. I need to have it intrude upon someone else's psyche.
by netsharc | 2025-12-26 14:47:47+00:00
WhatsApp has now told me twice about Lisa Blackpink.. I wanted to write my friend Lisa, and I talk to her on Instagram and I don't have her on WhatsApp. So searching for her on WhatsApp gives me 2 unrelated contacts, and then Meta Ducking AI suggestions, of which the top one is Lisa Blackpink. Then, further down the screen (hidden by the keyboard) I can see chats where I've mentioned her to mutual friends, but fucking nooo, it's more important that Fuckerberg shoves AI down our throats.

WhatsApp should release their most searched terms on AI, I bet it would correlate with most common names among WhatsApp users...
by 2026iknewit | 2025-12-26 14:47:49+00:00
He worked in well paying jobs, probably traveles, has a car and a house and complains about toxic products etc.

Yes there has to be a discussion on this and yeah he might generally have the right mindset, but lets be honest here: No one of them would have developed any of it just for free.

We all are slaves to capitalism

and this is were my point comes: Extrem fast and massive automatisation around the globe might be the only think pushing us close enough to the edge that we all accept capitalisms end.

And yes i think it is still massivly beneficial that my open source code helped creating something which allows researchers to write easier and faster better code to push humanity forward. Or enables more people overall to have/gain access to writing code or the result of what writing code produces: Tools etc.

@Rob its spam, thats it. Get over it, you are rich and your riches did not came out of thin air.
by Marha01 | 2025-12-26 14:48:04+00:00
Luddites be mad.

I genuinely don't understand why such people are so surprised and outraged. Did you really think that if we ever get something even remotely resembling human-like AI, it would not be used to write and send e-mails (including spam), or to produce novels/pics/videos/music or whatever the Luddites are mad about? Or that people would not feed it public copyrighted data, even though no one really gives a shit about copyright in the real world? 99% of people have pirated content at least once in their lives.

The pros of any remotely human-like AI will still far outweight such cons.
by ekjhgkejhgk | 2025-12-26 14:48:27+00:00
I think that criticizing when it benefits the person criticizing, and absense of criticism when criticism would hurt the person criticizing, makes the argument less persuasive.

This isn't ad hom, it's a heuristic for weighting arguments. It doesn't prove whether an argument has merit or not, but if I have hundreds of arguments to think about, it helps organizing them.
by btbuildem | 2025-12-26 14:48:38+00:00
I don't think the comparison to programming languages holds, maybe very tenuously at best. Coding assistants evolve constantly, you can't even be talking about "Codex" without specifying the time range (ie, Codex 2025-10) because it's different from quarter to quarter. Same with CC.

I believe this is the main source of disagreement / disappointment when people read opinions / reviews, then proceed to have an experience very different from expected.

Ironically, this constant improvement/evolution erodes product loyalty -- personally, I'm a creature of habit and will stay with a tool past its expiry date; with coding assistants / sota llms, I cancel and switch subscriptions all the time.
by breuleux | 2025-12-26 14:49:08+00:00
There is a relatively hard upper bound on streaming video, though. It can't grow past everyone watching video 24/7. Use of genAI doesn't have a clear upper bound and could increase the environmental impact of anything it is used for (which, eventually, may be basically everything). So it could easily grow to orders of magnitude more than streaming, especially if it eventually starts being used to generate movies or shows on demand (and god knows what else).
by pizlonator | 2025-12-26 14:49:20+00:00
> Are you saying you somehow inhibit the optimizer from injecting a security vulnerability due to UB ala https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2009-1897 ? I’m kinda curious how you trick LLVM into not optimizing through UB since it’s UB model is so tuned to the C/C++ standard.

Yes that is inhibited. There’s no trick. LLVM (and other compilers) choose to do those stupid things by policy, and the policy can be turned off. It’s not even hard to do it.

> Fil-C is more an independent dialect of C/C++ (eg you do have to patch some existing software)

Fil-C is not a dialect. The patches are similar to what you’d have to do if you were porting a C program to a new CPU architecture or a different compiler.

> By this argument no language is memory safe because every language has bugs that can result in memory safety issues.

You rebutted this argument for me:

> any safety issues within the language spec or implementation are a bug to be fixed

Exactly this. A memory safe language implementation treats outstanding memory safety issues as a bug to be fixed.

This is what makes almost all JS implementations, and Fil-C, memory safe.
by oblio | 2025-12-26 14:49:33+00:00
Are we comparing for example a SMTP server hosted by Google, or frankly, any non-GenAI IT infrastructure, with the resource efficiency of GenAI IT infrastructure?

The overall resource efficiency of GenAI is abysmal.

You can probably serve 100x more Google Search queries with the same resources you'd use for Google Gemini queries (like for like, Google Search queries are cached, too).
by neogodless | 2025-12-26 14:49:34+00:00
Current items in my possession that are still in use and use USB-A

* keyboard

* mouse dongle

* webcam

* microphone

* mouse charging cable

* smart watch charging cable

* SATA hard drive dock

* 32GB and 64GB USB memory sticks

Things that use USB-C

* new SD card reader

* new headphones dongle

* smart phone charging cable

Some of the above could maybe be replaced with a USB-C equivalent, but they are still working and I'm still using them. Why waste money and create waste replacing them?
by phatfish | 2025-12-26 14:49:53+00:00
"Separately, LLMs have been an unbelievable life improvement for me. I’ve found that most people who haven’t actually played around with them much don’t know how powerful they’ve become or how useful they can be in your everyday life. They’re the first piece of new technology in a long time that I’ve become insistent that absolutely everyone try."

Yeah, I'll not waste my time reading that.
by nbaugh1 | 2025-12-26 14:49:55+00:00
I think the response would be something about the value of enjoying art and "supporting the film industry" when streaming vs what that person sees as a totally worthless, if not degrading, activity. I'm more pro-AI than anti-AI, but I keep my opinions to myself IRL currently. The economics of the situation have really tainted being interested in the technology
by MontyCarloHall | 2025-12-26 14:50:07+00:00
This dedicates at least as much time to discussing the eccentricities of the underlying Rust implementation (and the Rust language itself) as it does to discussing the underlying low-level hardware/software concepts. Since this is very much still a work-in-progress (only the first three sections have been fully fleshed-out), I have a suggestion to make: please make it more language-agnostic, with a greater focus on the fundamentals versus the implementation.
by simonask | 2025-12-26 14:50:10+00:00
I’m sorry, but this really gets to me. Your writing is not improved. It is no longer your writing.

You can achieve these things, but this is a way to not do the work, by copying from people who did do the work, giving them zero credit.

(As an aside, exposing people with dementia to a hallucinating robot is cruelty on an unfathomable level.)
by jabedude | 2025-12-26 14:50:29+00:00
I think it's incredibly obvious how it connects to his "argument" - nothing he complains about is specific to GenAI. So dressing up his hatred of the technology in vague environmental concerns is laughably transparent.

He and everyone who agrees with his post simply don't like generative AI and don't actually care about "recyclable data centers" or the rape of the natural world. Those concerns are just cudgels to be wielded against a vague threatening enemy when convenient, and completely ignored when discussing the technologies they work on and like
by data-ottawa | 2025-12-26 14:51:17+00:00
This is by a long way the worst thread I’ve ever seen on hacker news.

So far all the comments are whataboutism (“he works for an ad company”, “he flies to conferences”, “but alfalfa beans!”) and your comment is dismissing Rob Pike as borderline crazy and irrational for using Bluesky?

None of this dialogue contributes in any meaningful way to anything. This is like reading the worst dredge of lesser forums.

I know my comment isn’t much better, but someone has to point out this is beneath this community.
by 29athrowaway | 2025-12-26 14:51:59+00:00
They claim they have net zero carbon footprint, or carbon neutrality.

In reality what they do is pay "carbon credits" (money) to some random dude that takes the money and does nothing with it. The entire carbon credit economy is bullshit.

Very similar to how putting recyclables in a different color bin doesn't do shit for the environment in practice.