MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by esperent | 2025-12-13 00:35:46+00:00
It seems to me that skills are:

1. A top level agent/custom prompt

2. Subagents that the main agent knows about via short descriptions

3. Subagents have reference files

4. Subagents have scripts

Anthropic specific implementation:

1. Skills are defined in a filesystem in a /skills folder with a specific subfolder structure of /references and /scripts.

2. Mostly designed to be run via their CLI tool, although there's a clunky way of uploading them to the web interface via zip files.

I don't think the folder structure is a necessary part of skills. I predict that if we stop looking at that, we'll see a lot of "skills-like" implementations. The scripting part is only useful for people who need to run scripts, which, aside from the now built in document manipulating scripts, isn't most people.

For example, I've been testing out Gemini Enterprise for use by staff in various (non-technical) positions at my business.

It's got the best implementation of a "skills-like" agent tool I've seen. Basically a visual tree builder, currently only one level deep. So I've set up the "<my company name> agent" and then it has subagents/skills for thing like marketing/supply chain research/sysadmin/translation etc., each with a separate description, prompt, and knowledge base, although no custom scripts.

Unfortunately, everything else about Gemini Enterprise screams "early alpha, why the hell are you selling this as an actual finished product?".

For example, after I put half a day into setting up an agent and subagents, then went to share this with the other people helping me to test it, I found that... I can't. Literally no way to share agents in a tool that is supposedly for teams to use. I found one of the devs saying that sharing agents would be released in "about two weeks". That was two months ago.

Mini rant over... But my point is that skills are just "agents + auto-selecting sub-agents via a short description" and we'll see this pattern everywhere soon. Claude Skills have some additional sandboxing but that's mostly only interesting for coders.
by ncruces | 2025-12-13 00:36:01+00:00
Just because the article mentions median-of-medians, I'd like to call out median-of-ninthers: https://erdani.org/research/sea2017.pdf

I was able to use this to implement practical deterministic linear time median selection in Go: https://github.com/ncruces/sort/blob/main/quick/quick.go
by 00N8 | 2025-12-13 00:36:28+00:00
I'll never buy a car manufactured after about 2014 for this reason. I'm planning to just keep getting repairs & upgrades done on my model year 2006 for at least the next 10-20 years. By then perhaps I will want to switch to electric, but I'll do it by electrifying something older.

Cars from around 1998-2014 usually have side curtain airbags & adequate rollover durability. The only improvements since then that I'd even want at all are better EV batteries & marginal efficiency gains for IC engines, but those can be retrofitted &/or aren't worth the anti features they also added IMO.

If car companies want my business they'll have to remove the telemetry & automatic updates.

I don't care if I end up paying more to drive an old car eventually, but this approach has also been saving me money so far.
by pxc | 2025-12-13 00:36:46+00:00
I don't think it would make much sense to hunt large predators prior to the invention of agriculture, even though early humans were probably plenty smart enough to build traps capable of holding animals like tigers. But after that (less than 40k years ago, more than 10k years ago), I'd bet it was a common-ish thing for humans to try to hunt predators that preyed upon their livestock.

Tigers are terrifying, though. I think it takes extreme or perverse circumstances to make hunting a tiger make any sense at all. And even then, traps and poisons make more sense than stalking a tiger to kill it!
by Kim_Bruning | 2025-12-13 00:36:57+00:00
If 100 top-notch philosophers disagree with you, that means you get 100 citations from top-notch philosophers. :-P

Check out eg Dennett.... or ... his opionions about Searle; Have fun with eg... this:

"By Searle’s own count, there are over a hundred published attacks on it. He can count them, but I guess he can’t read them, for in all those years he has never to my knowledge responded in detail to the dozens of devastating criticisms they contain;"

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/12/21/the-mystery-of-c...
by chickenhun | 2025-12-13 00:38:08+00:00
When rats gaming championships become a thing, I will have the top team for sure! Seriously though, this project took way too much time. We built 2 versions of the setup, lots of hardware, software building, testing. I hope a behavioral lab or hardware enthusiasts would take it over and scale it. I did learn a lot in the process and would gladly support anyone who would continue it. In fact, I have a setup now laying around in my living room up for the taking :D
by venturecruelty | 2025-12-13 00:38:14+00:00
Which is most of us. I'm paid well, and I feel fortunate for the privilege. But even my bills (healthcare, housing, etc.) are bonkers lately, and I live in a sleepy suburb. My health insurance will be much worse next year, and I probably need surgery, so that'll be nice and expensive. Meanwhile, we blew billions on an acquisition and laid off a lot of good senior talent. My colleagues and my friends.

I don't think people here truly understand how much people are struggling, even other software developers. I think everyone here thinks every other programmer pulls six figures working at a FAANG, but it's not true. Except now, capital is out for blood, and the Palo Alto is the only place with some fat left to trim.
by snickerbockers | 2025-12-13 00:38:23+00:00
>it doesn't really matter - to quote one of Neil DeGrasse Tyson's best turns of phrase: "the universe is under no obligation to make sense to you"

Right back at you, brochacho. I'm not the one making a positive claim here. You're the one who insists that it must work in a specific way because you can't conceive of any alternatives. I have never seen ANY evidence or study linking any existent AI or computer system to human cognition.

>There's no need or benefit for searching for unnecessarily complicated alternative interpretations.

Thanks, if it's alright with you I might borrow this argument next time somebody tries to tell me the world isn't flat.

>It simply doesn't look

That's one of those phrases you use when you're REALLY confident that you know what you're talking about.

> like we need anything more, in principle, to fully explain the nature of biological intelligence, and consciousness, and how brains work.

Please fully explain the nature of intelligence, consciousness, and how brains work.

>Mind as interdimensional radios, mystical souls and spirits, quantum tubules, none of that stuff has any basis in a ruthlessly rational and scientific review of the science of cognition.

well i definitely never said anything even remotely similar to that. If i didn't know any better i might call this argument a "hallucination".
by moregrist | 2025-12-13 00:39:27+00:00
This might make sense in the late stages of a hiring process (where it can veer into kind of unethical), but for early stages, it’s just not very compelling.

At any stage, if you take more than a couple of weeks to a month, the applicant has probably moved on anyway.

And for early stages applicants, almost no one is going to wait and not taking an offer in the hopes that they’ll hear back from a company that hasn’t given them feedback from a phone screen.
by asveikau | 2025-12-13 00:39:50+00:00
No actually, this doesn't happen the same way on modern Unix. The way symbol resolution works is just not the same. A library asking for an extern called "malloc" will get the same malloc. To use those other allocators, you would typically give them a different symbol name, or make the whole process use the new one.

A dll import on Windows explicitly calls for the DLL by name. You could have some DLLs explicitly ask for a different version of the Visual Studio runtime, or with different threading settings, release vs debug etc., and a C extern asking for simply the name "malloc", no other details, will resolve to that, possibly incompatible with another DLL in the same process despite the compiler's perspective of it just being extern void *malloc(size_t) and no other detail, no other decoration, rename of the symbol etc.. there might be a rarely used symbol versioning pragma to accomplish similar on a modern gcc/clang/elf setup but it's not the way anybody does this.

I would argue that the modern Unix way, with these limitations, is better, by the way. Maybe some older Unix in the early days of shared libraries, early 90s or so, tried what Windows does, I don't know. But it's not common today.
by taxmeifyoucan | 2025-12-13 00:39:50+00:00
For a hacker news article, it misses the crucial option - hacking a smart TV! I have LG OLED jailbroken using rootmy.tv, it was pretty trivial. It's basically a linux computer with a huge screen, you can customize it, SSH into it, map any commands to the remote, etc.

Before I only used monitor, simple DP/HDMI input is all I wanted. But being able to take full control of the tv and connect it with other devices in the house I would normally get Rpi for is pretty convenient!
by bitbasher | 2025-12-13 00:40:22+00:00
Once you use CGO, portability is gone. Your binary is no longer staticly compiled.

This can happen subtley without you knowing it. If you use a function in the standard library that happens to call into a CGO function, you are no longer static.

This happens with things like os.UserHomeDir or some networking things like DNS lookups.

You can "force" go to do static compiling by disabling CGO, but that means you can't use _any_ CGO. Which may not work if you require it for certain things like sqlite.
by godelski | 2025-12-13 00:40:46+00:00
Acidwolf, Human Action Network, FlexE and his wiki lists some more and might want to check here[0].

I don't remember what website it was (it's probably redacted anyways, but I'm sure he does and others do now) but I remember him once getting joking that someone uploaded his album before he could.

> The Flashbulb is good shit

For those interested, he has a wide range so it can change dramatically between handles and even within albums. For example look at the difference between Lawn Wake I, If Trees Could Speak, and Lucid Base II on Red Extensions of Me. His earlier work tends to be more glitch. (Acidwolf is less glitch but still trippy) But then gets more melodic like in Arboreal and Opus at the End of Everything. I'm pretty sure I've heard Tomorrow Untrodden (from Aboreal) in a car commercial some years ago (was it Undiscovered Colors?).

I'd recommend trying these. I doubt people will like all but I think these are all approachable and have good coverage.

- Terra Firma, on Terra Firma - If Trees Could Speak, on Red Extensions - Passage D, on Kirlian Selections - Piano variant on Old Trees (Not on Spotify [1]) - Precipice, on Piety of Ashes - Undiscovered Colors, on Arboreal - Three Hundred CC, on Hardscrabble - Dishevel, on Krilian Selections - Coinage, is this even in an album?[2] Dude makes a fucking song out of dropping coins. - Or watch what he does with a fucking straw...[3]

I've been listening to the guy for over a decade now and he keeps producing great stuff. I also suggest listening to full albums rather than on random.

Side note: he isn't anti-AI. As a ML researcher myself I actually generally like his takes. Use AI to better us, not replace us, not further harm (like Flock), and to make it an extension of us rather than to offload. There's a fuck ton of cool stuff that ML/AI can do and I'm really not sure why we're so hyper-fixated on having it create slop. But hey, I don't get the fixation with human generated slop either. There's two paths we can go with this technology. Either we can use it to drive costs down and produce lower quality stuff quicker or we can use it to make higher quality stuff at the same rate (there's a spectrum of course). I'm already frustrated by the low and declining quality of things, maybe we shouldn't just strap a jet engine to the train already moving that direction...

[0] https://www.discogs.com/artist/67855-The-Flashbulb

[1] https://bennjordan.bandcamp.com/album/old-trees-1999-2011

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyIu2-dSNyY

[3] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ZLPCGEbHoDI
by lovich | 2025-12-13 00:40:48+00:00
If I ghosted an employer it’s because I got a better opportunity already.

About half of my jobs would refuse to rehire anyone who quit out of spite, whether or not they gave notice.

No employee gives a shit about those threats anymore because, as this article points out, employers are already nearing the bottom of treating employees like disposable pieces of trash already.

Threats don’t have any power when you’ve already done them
by baubino | 2025-12-13 00:40:49+00:00
Industrial unions organize by shop; craft unions organize by trade. Industrial unions have much greater leverage because they can (theoretically) change conditions for the entire workplace, not just for one group of workers in the workplace. Historically, this meant, for example, organizing everyone in the auto factory in one union as “auto workers” instead of having machinists in one union, engravers in another union, mechanics in another, etc.
by CerryuDu | 2025-12-13 00:41:03+00:00
Thanks for the answer.

I disagree because I've seen closures shine (in OCaml) and suck terribly (in C++). Same concept, extremely different programming experience and debuggability. Syntax matters, language psychology matters. Closures naturally and obviously suit programming languages that are genuinely functional, or at least manage memory transparently for you. C is neither, and so "alloca", "defer", the cleanup attribute, closures -- all stick out sorely. The whole selling point of C is explicitness. The tedium of C is the price we pay for the great control that C offers us with a relatively simple vocabulary. I couldn't be more content with that deal.

C++ is impossible for any single person to learn, there is so much insanely complicated implicit behavior in it. C can mostly be learned by a single (persistent) person, but it's been getting harder.

I don't want C to be fashionable, or attractive. I want it to remain minimal. If someone feels hamstrung by it, there are so many other languages to choose from. I simply want the particular tradeoff that C offers (or used to offer) to remain in existence. And that is what's been going away, with each issue of ISO C being the only official standard (obsoleting/superseding all earlier issues of the standard).

Why give people closures or "defer" or ... whatever ... when they can't even remember the concept of the usual arithmetic conversions? Which has been standard since C89? Have you met a "practitioner" (= any C programmer with no particular interest in the standard proper) that could explain the effective type rules? Why make it more complicated?

I apologize -- I guess this is just my semi-diplomatic way to say, "please, get off my lawn". (Not to you personally, of course!) I'm very sorry.

EDIT: for more of the same sentiment, see the reddit thread: https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1pk3whx/the_co...
by ablob | 2025-12-13 00:41:32+00:00
It definietly includes myself, I don't have the interest to stay updated here.

For that matter I have no opinion on if AI does think or not, I simply don't care. Therefore I also really can't answer your question in what more a model has to do to establish that they are thinking (does being able to use all major forms of reasoning constitute the capability of thought to you?). I can say however, that any such proof would have to be on a case-by-case basis given my current understanding on AI is designed.
by ProllyInfamous | 2025-12-13 00:42:04+00:00
I absolutely love my Aorus 48" OLED-type display (w/ DisplayPort).

I tried a 48" TFT-type television (attempting use as a computer display) and the refresh rate just wasn't there, along with typical backlight splotching (but it cost a fifth as much, so...).

My only caution is OLED can experience burn-in (unlike the smaller Aorus 45" using a VA-type panel), but it is otherwise a much better experience
by Animats | 2025-12-13 00:42:52+00:00
> In 1994, came the Pentium with its FDIV bug: a probably insignificant but detectable error in floating-point division. The subsequent product recall cost Intel nearly half a billion dollars. John Harrison, a student of Mike’s, decided to devote his PhD research to the verification of floating-point arithmetic.

No mention of the effort by Boyer and Moore, then at their Computational Logic, Inc., to do a formal verification of the AMD FPU for the AMD5K86TM. The AMD chip shipped with no FDIV bug. [1]

[1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1109/12.713311
by oceanplexian | 2025-12-13 00:43:18+00:00
> This does nothing to protect working US citizens from AI alien (agents) coming to take their jobs and displace their incomes.

Where did you get the idea that banning new technology that could eliminate jobs is even remotely an American value?

Going back to the Industrial Revolution the United States has been 100% gas pedal all the time on innovation and disruption, which has in turn created millions of jobs that didn't exist before and led to the US running the world's largest economy.
by lacker | 2025-12-13 00:44:12+00:00
I'm not sure if I have the right mental model for a "skill". It's basically a context-management tool? Like a skill is a brief description of something, and if the model decides it wants the skill based on that description, then it pulls in the rest of whatever amorphous stuff the skill has, scripts, documents, what have you. Is this the right way to think about it?
by deravish | 2025-12-13 00:45:07+00:00
MIBOOKO is an AI-powered personalized children’s storybook platform that turns your child into the hero of a custom, emotionally meaningful story. Our psychologist-guided approach helps support confidence, empathy, resilience, and a love of reading—without the “random” feel of generic story generators. Parents can create a unique story in minutes by personalizing key details and choosing themes like bedtime, adventure, travel, mystery, and special moments. Delivered instantly as a premium digital download, it’s ideal as a personalized gift for kids and families.
by fragmede | 2025-12-13 00:45:17+00:00
The author also gets a cut of this, no? It is the author's prerogative to sell their books to be read on a Kindle and they get compensated, maybe perhaps unfairly, when I choose to buy the book. Whatever happens after that, other then copying it and sticking it on Anna's archive is basically free game as long as I'm making derivative works and making money off them. Anything short of that, I'm good.

That's my thoughts on that, anyway.
by thomastay | 2025-12-13 00:45:26+00:00
This is really cool! It's like Excel's goal seek but can also handle the case of arbitrary input cells. Goal seeek can only handle one input and one output cell.

But how do you handle the case where multiple variables can be changed? If multiple input cells is the key difference from Goal seek, i think some more rigor should be placed into the algorithm here

e.g. setting A1 + B1 and wanting the result to be 5. Currently it bumps both A1 and B1 equally. What's the thought process behind this?
by keeda | 2025-12-13 00:45:39+00:00
Technical debt and understanding is exactly why I still review the code.

But as I said, it's getting rare that I need to change anything the AI generates. That's partly because I decompose the problem into small, self-contained tasks that are largely orthogonal and easily tested -- mostly a functional programming style. There's very little that can go wrong because there is little ambiguity in the requirements, which is why a 3 line prompt can reliably turn into dozens of lines of working, tested code.

The main code I deal with manually is the glue that composes these units to solve the larger computer vision problem. Ironically, THAT is where the tech debt is, primarily because I'm experimenting with combinations of dozens of different techniques and tweaks to see what works best. If I knew what was going to work, I'd just prompt the AI to write it for me! ;-)
by tstrimple | 2025-12-13 00:45:50+00:00
Given different printings and formats for books, I’d be very surprised if asking about a specific page number works reliably at all across books. I don’t even know if epub has page numbers embedded to keep track because the number of words on a page of an ereader is entirely arbitrary. My wife has her kindle in grandma mode or something. Only about 50 words fit on a page.

I would expect much more reliable results from chapter numbers though.
by kyboren | 2025-12-13 00:46:45+00:00
You have that luxury. Israel doesn't.

With civilians under constant rocket and ATGM fire (actual, real war crimes BTW), under threat of Oct 7th-style infiltration and invasion, with tens of thousands of civilians displaced and numerous civilian casualties, Hezbollah had forced this war upon Israel. And they forced it on Oct 8th, in coordination with the IRGC and Iran's "Ring of Fire" proxies.

Israel had a legitimate right to self defense and any country in Israel's position would be obligated to defend their citizens from such aggression. And any objective observer would admit that Hezbollah's actions went beyond mere casus belli to just simply open war--including constant actual war crimes--against Israel.

So Israel had not just a right to wage war against Hezbollah, but a duty. The next question is: How best to prosecute the war?

The traditional prosecution of this war would have resulted in tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties. These exquisitely targeted small (3g of PETN) explosions short-circuited that war and undoubtedly saved thousands of innocent lives.

Far from terrorism or war crimes, these attacks indirectly saved many innocent lives, spared hundreds of billions of dollars worth of Lebanese infrastructure, were highly targeted at combatants, and even direct civilian casualties were minimal.
by DetroitThrow | 2025-12-13 00:47:09+00:00
>All with the goal of enabling users to build fast analytics from the Postgres layer itself but still using the power of ClickHouse!

That would be incredible! So many times I want to reach for ClickHouse but whatever company I'm at has so much inertia built into PG. Pleease add CTE support.

And yes I'm aware of PeerDB or whatever that project is called. This is still or even more helpful.
by godelski | 2025-12-13 00:47:14+00:00
Oh, I hope you don't take this as me being upset. I'm super happy and totally get the motivation. I a fan of the adage "better to do something half assed than no assed" (not that this is half-assed). Just wanted to make the comment to help drive motivation and let you know there's a demand. Releasing the sources could really help too just so people don't have to work with the mesh.

But on the rat part, that is super interesting! I was suspecting they might not like Doom because shooting a gun might be such a foreign concept to them that it breaks immersion. But it seems like you say they like running around in the simulated environment? (Time for Cheeze-Doom? lol)

Again, super cool and thank for releasing things! This is that crazy stuff I just love to see people exploring.
by bigyabai | 2025-12-13 00:47:34+00:00
macOS is XNU-based. There is BSD code that runs in the microkernel level and BSD tools in the userland, but the kernel does not resemble BSD's architecture or adopt BSD's license.

This is an issue for some industry-standard software like CUDA, which does provide BSD drivers with ARM support that just never get adopted by Apple: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/unix/