MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by delichon | 2025-12-30 14:35:53+00:00
They are building too many steam engines. It's a bubble that's going to pop and leave investors empty handed. There are only so many mines to pump water out of, mills to turn, textile machines to crank. And those industries have jumped on a bandwagon that they don't understand, and most will soon mostly revert to good old English laborers. His Majesty's subjects are starting to see the terrible environmental effects of burning so much more coal. As a prudent investor I now recommend a Sell for the stocks of the Boulton & Watt company.
by re_chief | 2025-12-30 14:36:36+00:00
I wouldn't describe the LLM's actions in the example as "solving a problem" so much as "following a well-established routine". If I were to, for instance, make a PB&J sandwich, I wouldn't say that what I'm doing is "real cooking" even if it might technically fit the definition.

If an LLM controlling a pair of robot hands was able to make a passable PB&J sandwich on my behalf, I _guess_ that could be useful to me (how much time am I really saving? is it worth the cost? etc.), but that's very different from those same robo-hands filling the role of a chef de cuisine at a fine dining restaurant, or even a cook at a diner.
by mytailorisrich | 2025-12-30 14:37:11+00:00
That's not actually the case, strictly speaking. Residence in another EU country requires meeting certain criteria even if some countries (like the UK when it was in the EU) do not check or really enforce them. This also means that an EU citizen can be deported from another EU country back to their home country if they don't meet those criteria.

"Permanent residence" is also again different and requires residence under those criteria for at least 5 years.
by the__alchemist | 2025-12-30 14:37:40+00:00
Yea! I love the spirit. Compatibility in computing is consternating. If my code is compiled for CPU Arch X, the OS should just provide it with (using Rust terminology) standard library tools (networking, file system, and allocator etc) , de-conflict it with other programs, and get out of the way. The barriers between OSes, including between various linux dependencies feels like a problem we (idealistically thinking) shouldn't have.
by faidit | 2025-12-30 14:37:57+00:00
Quick, someone found a startup called Vibrary and hire vibrarians (I mean, spin up some agentic tablets on wheels) to generate these books on demand for people who request them, working backwards from the halluci-citations. Lawyers will love it! Forgeries were common for thousands of years after all. The last few hundred years of "truth" was a glitch waiting to be patched.
by Aurornis | 2025-12-30 14:38:11+00:00
The problem in practice is that these programs don’t actually select for diverse ideas, they select for demographic traits like gender or ethnic background.

If the team uses relational databases but someone shows up to an interview with a strongly held belief that NoSQL is the way to go, they’re likely to be rejected because their ideas don’t match the team’s. Diversity programs in practice never even attempt to push diversity of ideas, they ignore all of that and focus on things like gender and ethnic background.

This feels like a dangerous opinion to voice, but the workplace affirmative action programs I’ve seen in practice have been very poor in their implementation. At my last workplace that instituted diversity targets, HR would just start rejecting hires if they thought it would skew the diversity numbers in the wrong way. So you’d hit a wall where the only candidates you were allowed to hire couldn’t be, for example, men or of Asian descent or some other demographic trait they thought was over-represented. None of this improved diversity of ideas, it became a gender or skin color matter.
by tolerance | 2025-12-30 14:38:25+00:00
This was a terrific, reasonable take on this “controversy”. I have to admit that the correspondence set in Calibri looks like something dispatched from a leasing office. Imagine reading the Warren Commission report set in that. The author seems to settle on the consensus that surrounded TNR before this exchange made the news. It’s banal. At times it signals to its original objectives (e.g., Prof. Dr. style websites [1]). But still banal more often than not.

I love Univers. But I don’t think there’s anyone in public office with enough influence and swagger to ever enforce it. At the same time I have a bad feeling about the attention that decisions like this draw and what it may lead to. The article does a great job at portraying the general incompetence in both parties.

I can imagine Beto O’Rourke somewhere dreaming about styling all government communiqués like a page out of Ray Gun. Planning his come back. To set anything issued from Ted Cruz’s office in Zapf Dingbats. War.

[1]: https://contemporary-home-computing.org/prof-dr-style/
by MORPHOICES | 2025-12-30 14:39:18+00:00
How do you actually learn concurrency without fooling yourself?

Every time I think I “get” concurrency, a real bug proves otherwise.

What finally helped wasn’t more theory, but forcing myself to answer basic questions:

What can run at the same time here?

What must be ordered?

What happens if this suspends at the worst moment?

A rough framework I use now:

First understand the shape of execution (what overlaps)

Then define ownership (who’s allowed to touch what)

Only then worry about syntax or tools

Still feels fragile.

How do you know when your mental model is actually correct?
Do you rely on tests, diagrams, or just scars over time?
by businessmate | 2025-12-30 14:39:21+00:00
This document defines Reasoning Claim Tokens (RCTs) as a governance primitive designed to address this gap. RCTs capture discrete, time-indexed reasoning claims expressed by AI models during inference, without intervening in or explaining internal model logic. They provide a model-agnostic, reconstructable record of expressed reasoning sufficient to support audit, legal review, and risk governance. RCTs are positioned as evidentiary artifacts, not optimization tools, and are intended to govern external AI representations where internal model access is unavailable.
by ramoz | 2025-12-30 14:40:20+00:00
If markdown in a git repository isn’t good enough for collaboration, then why would any plugged in abstraction be better?

You imply you have a solution for current wholistic state. For this you would need a solution for context decay and relevant curation — with benchmarks that prove it is also more valuable than constant rediscovery (for quality and cost).

That narrative becomes harsher once you pivot to “general purpose agents” because you’re then competing with every existing knowledge work platform. So you’ll shift into “unified context for all your KW platforms” - where presumably the agents already have access (Claude today can basically go scrape all knowledge from anywhere).

So then it becomes an offering of “current state” in complex human processes and this is a concept I’m not sure any technology can capture; whether it’s across codebases (which for humans we settled on git) and especially not general working scenarios.
And I guess this is where it becomes a unified multi-agent wholistic state capture. Ambitious and fun problem.
by neillyons | 2025-12-30 14:40:21+00:00
When visiting Ayers Rock in Australia I stayed in Alice Springs. While I was there I learnt that Alice Springs exists because it was a repeater station for a telegraph line that stretched from Southern Australia all the way to London. There would be people listening to morse code, and tapping it out again to the next repeater station. Blew my mind that there was a wire that went all the way to London from Australia!
by t43562 | 2025-12-30 14:40:23+00:00
I've always wondered at the motivatons of the various string routines in C - every one of them seems to have some huge caveat which makes them useless.

After years I now think it's essential to have a library which records at least how much memory is allocated to a string along with the pointer.

Something like this:
https://github.com/msteinert/bstring
by rorschach_3 | 2025-12-30 14:40:27+00:00
nstant navigation for long ChatGPT and Claude chats

Navigate long ChatGPT and Claude conversations with subtle anchor links. Scrollback adds lightweight, hover-based anchors to AI chat messages so you can instantly jump to any part of a conversation without endless scrolling. No tracking, no data collection, no backend.

Key features:
• Quickly navigate long ChatGPT conversations
• Jump between Claude messages with one click
• Clean, minimalist anchor links that stay hidden until needed
• Fast, lightweight, and privacy-first
• No accounts, no analytics, no external requests

Perfect for power users, developers, designers, and researchers who rely on AI chats and want faster navigation without breaking their workflow.
by farazbabar | 2025-12-30 14:40:48+00:00
I am good at software. It turns out that isn’t sufficient, or alternatively stated, you have to be good at a number of other things than just churning code, even good code. So to me, the combination of being good at software, understanding complexity and ability articulate it concisely and precisely, when combined with the latest and greatest LLMs, is magic. I know people want to examples of success, I wish I could share what we are working on, but it is unbelievable how much more productive our team is, and I promise, we are solving novel problems, some that have not been tackled yet, at least not in any meaningful way. And I am having time of my life doing what I love, coding. This is not to downplay folks who are having a hard time with LLMs or agents, I think, it’s a skill that you can learn, if you are already good at software and the adjacencies.
by jcalvinowens | 2025-12-30 14:41:08+00:00
> And PHP is definitely faster than python

That certainly depends on exactly what you're doing...

> But, I would argue, if you have a system with python, you should probably write PHP.

That's a new one, I've never heard anybody seriously advocate for PHP as a system scripting language before...

> Python has many uses, I just don't think system scripts or system utilities is one of them. That's C, perl, or bash land, and perl is clearly the frontrunner there.

Having written plenty of all of those in my life, I really disagree. Python is easier and faster to write, and for scripting that matters more than just about anything else.
by yesco | 2025-12-30 14:41:11+00:00
Don't these data centers have pretty elaborate cooling setups that use large volumes of water?

So they're sitting on real estate with access to massive amounts of water, electricity, and high bandwidth network connections. Seems like that combination of resources could be useful for a lot of other things beyond just data centers.

Like you could probably run desalination plants, large scale hydroponic farms, semiconductor manufacturing, or chemical processing facilities. Anything that needs the trifecta of heavy power, water infrastructure, and fiber connectivity could slot right in.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-30 14:41:30+00:00
Nothing has been eroded for me, in fact it had the opposite effect. It's easier to get into new hobbies, easier to develop skills, I value reading on my own more than I did before. At least for me, LLMs act as multipliers of what I can and want to do, it hasn't removed my passion for music production, 3D, animation or programming one bit, if anything it's fueled those passions and let me do stuff within them faster and better.
by Forgeties79 | 2025-12-30 14:41:34+00:00
Whenever you decide to buck general rules in video games you risk coming off as capricious. The only way to make it work IME is to clearly indicate from the beginning that you aren’t playing a game that adheres to typical rules OR you build a system that masks it so convincingly that people start questioning what the rules even are on their own. It’s kind of like going to see a magician: you know magic isn’t real, but when you see a really fucking awesome trick, you allow yourself to suspend your disbelief for at least a split second.

DDLC was cool, then it was cool to hate it, now it’s not a surprise anymore and has landed somewhere in the middle with I think most folks acknowledging it was a cool example of messing with the harem/dating sim formula. What I liked about it was how I spent a lot of the game figuring out what the rules were (I knew it was not a conventional harem game and I knew it had horror elements, but I really went out of my way to go in with as little information as possible). I kind of think that’s where the special sauce is if you want to break the “shackles” of things like outside/dungeon/town. BG3 had that magic for most of the first act I think for a lot of people, which I also think carried a lot of its success (and rightfully so). Once we saw behind the curtain it made a little more sense, but when you first dropped into that game it wasn’t clear what the boundaries or consequences were. The matrix wasn’t laid out before you. That’s the key.
by cxr | 2025-12-30 14:42:17+00:00
"Five years ago" was 2020. What you're asking is, "Have you, at some point in 2025, needed an email from 2019, 2018, etc. (i.e. from some time before that)?"

The answer: Yes, of course. (And I don't understand why anyone other than, say, a university undergrad or someone younger should find that answer surprising.)
by mothballed | 2025-12-30 14:42:17+00:00
It's wild seeing you alternate between having no idea what productive capital is and singling out what you find to be the single weakest isolated sentence and then going completely off of that and then pretending not to understand.

You believe you know exactly what it is, based on your confidence with which you assert your position on 'taxing' these assets. I am not going to entertain this feigned ignorance further by entertaining the false equivalence between a pile of cash or a gold watch sitting somewhere and something like a computer actively crunching the most efficient shipping routes. If you own stocks instead of a personal residence because of its superior productive capability that return you a profit, you already understand this intuitively, in fact I think you understand it more or less completely.

I am also free to leave Iran to not be executed for being an apostate, that doesn't mean it's not a punishment, it just means if you never do the thing under the conditions of punishment you won't get punished for it. Many here explicitly acknowledge this tax is punitive -- they argue the price of living and rent/homes is too high in CA and it'd be better off if many of those who 'gentrify' go elsewhere so the prices will come down.

I believe your position is an informed one. You are pretending like mine is not. Indeed, I think we both have informed opinions, yours is one intended to drive out productive assets from your state and mine is one intended to bring productive assets to my state. I believe with fewer productive assets our labor becomes less and less competitive; there's no shortage of places on earth with lots of (relatively destitute) smart educated people who can work efficiently -- a golden thing about California is they also have the tools and assets to produce even larger returns on that labor.

In the end the billionaires won't notice the missing 5% in terms of feeling a change in their quality of life, I would agree with you there. But the poor and middle class likely will notice themselves getting poorer after taxing the productive capital of billionaires, and watching some of the life blood from which they make their living float away.
by oersted | 2025-12-30 14:42:22+00:00
I didn't mean it so literally. Having robust taxation and well supported institutions is what I mean by "broad collaboration" and an effective "culture", as in a social operating-system a set of values and habits, that continually support and self-heal such constructions.

I don't meant that everybody should be nice, and that poor countries are somehow culturally nasty, absolutely not. Real collaboration cannot be just founded on morals and good faith, it's not sustainable, it's more about incentives engineering.

In terms of references, the main one that comes to mind is the economics Nobel price from 2024: "for studies of how institutions are formed and affect prosperity".
by antirez | 2025-12-30 14:42:54+00:00
The difference between Win32 and Linux is that the latter didn't realize an operating system is more than a kernel and a number of libraries and systems glued together, but is, indeed, a stable ABI (even for kernel modules -- so old drivers will be usable forever), a default, unique and stable API for user interface, audio, ..., and so forth. Linux failed completely not technologically, but to understand what an OS is from the POV of a product.
by skulk | 2025-12-30 14:43:29+00:00
> This is an excellent resource for people who are less militant about open source and just want to make music.

What a strange jab. People are militant about _freedom_, not getting things for free. If you don't care about freedom then just use Logic or Ableton or whatever, they're probably better than anything on Linux and they're industry standards. But they completely trash your freedoms as a user and that's what many people can't stomach. Plenty of software that respects the users freedoms is sold.
by reedlaw | 2025-12-30 14:45:04+00:00
The first sentence is problematic:

> For decades, we’ve all known what “good code” looks like.

When relatively trivial concerns such as the ideal length of methods haven't achieved consensus, I doubt there can be any broadly accepted standard for software quality. There are plenty of metrics such as test coverage, but anyone with experience could tell you how easy it is to game those and that enforcing arbitrary standards can even cause harm.
by sotix | 2025-12-30 14:45:12+00:00
I don't understand how your inability to understand dialog negates a producer giving appropriate instructions on visual settings? The post was good advice, and your train of thought feels like some sort of fallacy.

To be a bit more helpful, what are you using to listen to the show? There are dozens of ways to hear the audio. Are you listening through the TV speakers, a properly set up center channel speaker, a Kindle Fire tablet, or something else? Providing those details would assist us in actually helping you.
by MORPHOICES | 2025-12-30 14:46:57+00:00
If models aren’t running out of data, what’s the real bottleneck now?

I keep seeing the claim that AI progress is slowing because we’re “running out of data.”

That hasn’t matched what I’ve seen.

It feels less like a data problem and more like:

Diminishing returns from raw text

Harder alignment between data and real-world use

Context quality mattering more than volume

A rough mental model I use:
Early gains came from scale.
Now gains come from structure and feedback.

Curious how others see it.
Where do you think the real constraint is right now—data quality, evaluation, deployment, or something else?
by audunw | 2025-12-30 14:47:02+00:00
Some other brands rely on Mobileye for driver assistance. It’s clear from demos that Mobileye is on the same level as Tesla, the difference is that the don’t use end users as beta testers. I suspect that when actual full self driving is possible, other car companies won’t be as far behind as you’d think based on the features Tesla has in their cars now.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-12-30 14:47:17+00:00
Little free libraries are fantastic when possible. With that said, assuming the final disposition will be a landfill or pulping via recycling, as a last resort the Internet Archive will accept for scanning and long term cold storage books they have not yet archived. They have an app available to scan UPC codes or OCR ISBNs to dedupe.

https://help.archive.org/help/donate-books-app-for-ios-and-a...

Books that have been scanned can be shipped using the below info.

https://help.archive.org/help/how-do-i-make-a-physical-donat...

(no affiliation)
by rigrassm | 2025-12-30 14:47:43+00:00
> It becomes a moral imperative to pirate it and continue seeding it for others to also acquire, as a mean to help preserving something you cared about, apparently more than the owners of the IP/rights themselves care.

Your words brought me right back to my teenage years sitting at the family computer at 12am babysitting a couple of song downloads to burn onto a CD for my friends to listen to on the bus ride.

Kinda random and only tangentially related but the thought brought a smile to my face and I just felt like sharing and saying thanks!
by Aurornis | 2025-12-30 14:47:48+00:00
> 1. How easy it is to start fresh and shed your past reputation if you get caught doing something bad.

True, but this is a necessary feature of a society or workplace to discourage cheating and abuse.

If a person could easily shed their reputation and start over on an equal footing with everyone else, cheating would be a zero-cost option. Cheat until you get caught, then start over and repeat.

This is why trust and reputation are built over time and are so valuable. It’s frustrating for newcomers or those who have lost reputation somehow, but it’s a necessary feature to discourage fraud and cheating.
by juliangmp | 2025-12-30 14:47:50+00:00
Stable interfaces and not being in versioning hell (cough libc) would actually be good for FOSS as well.

If you make a piece of software today and want to package it for Linux its an absolute mess. I mean, look at flatpack or docker, a common solution for this is to ship your own userspace, thats just insane.
by lotsofpulp | 2025-12-30 14:47:59+00:00
> Is there just too much content now?

I would guess this is the reason. Before there was unlimited content or ways to entertain yourself on a screen, having additional content on a disc would have been a marketing point to make people feel like they’re getting more for their money.

But now, I doubt even 1 in 1,000 people would respond to that, since there is always something else that can be instantly switched to watching or playing, so why go through the effort?
by the_real_cher | 2025-12-30 14:48:21+00:00
I just find it odd that Mark Zuckerberg runs a multi-billion Dollar business without an MBA.

He just kind of taught himself that in his spare time.

I guess some people get alot of value out of the 'knowledge' you gain from an MBA..

I view it as a signal to other MBAs as to the type of manager you are.
by sotix | 2025-12-30 14:48:32+00:00
A YouTube video is likely a single track of audio or a very minimal amount. A movie mixed for Dolby Atmos is designed for multiple speakers. Now, they will create compromised mixes for something like a stereo setup, and a good set of bookshelf speakers will be able to create a phantom center channel. However, having a dedicated center channel speaker will do a much better job. And using the TV's built in speakers will do a very poor job. Professional mixing is a different beast than most YouTube videos, and accordingly, the sound is mixed quite different.
by gwbas1c | 2025-12-30 14:48:48+00:00
The problem is that a lot of content today is mixed so that effects like explosions and gunshots are LOUD, whispers are quiet, and dialog is normal.

It only works if you're watching in a room that's acoustically quiet, like a professional recording studio. Once your heater / air conditioner or other appliance turns on, it drowns out everything but the loudest parts of the mix.

Otherwise, the problem is that you probably don't want to listen to ear-splitting gunshots and explosions, then turn it down to a normal volume, only to make the dialog and whispers unintelligible. I hit this problem a lot watching TV after the kids go to bed.
by teleforce | 2025-12-30 14:49:10+00:00
Fun facts, the subsea telegraph network cables coating were made from Gutta Percha [1].

Unlike normal rubber, it is a type of thermoplastic and it's a popular organic plastic before the petroleum based modern plastic become pervasive [2].

[1] The legacy of undersea cables:

https://blog.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/the-legacy-of-underse...

[2] Gutta-percha:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutta-percha