MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Someone1234 | 2025-12-26 18:28:26+00:00
Suggesting that the most legally vulnerable group be careful isn't wrong, it is the reality for which they find themselves.

66%~ of the US either voted for this, or were indifferent about it, and are a group which cannot be deported/denaturalized. Perhaps that group should step up instead of the <1% who are most at risk from legal administrative threats.

I think it quite telling hearing born-Americans asking green card and naturalized citizens to be their "resistance" for decisions they themselves made. Reads like looking for cannon fodder, who can just be trivially deported/denaturalized while the immune citizenship sits back and points at how bad things are.
by gtech1 | 2025-12-26 18:28:39+00:00
You have no idea what you are talking about.

1. They never returned 92tons of gold. The vast majority of the national treasure is still in Moscow. I hope the EU ties this to the current Russian assets frozen in the EU.

2. Bolsheviks ? Russia collapsed in 1917 and Bassarabia voted to join Romania. There was no Russian control in Bassarabia, no war, no fight.

Nobody forced them, true, they were in dire circumstances, but it proves even more how much Russians can be trusted. 0. Shitty country since forever.
by rapnie | 2025-12-26 18:29:59+00:00
Unrelated to this conference I've often heard the "everything is political" argument, and mostly with a passive-aggressive "or else.." (you're up for a political fight) undertone. I once enquired on very mundane things in life, and yes "those too are political act". Well, if everything is bleakly political in that sense, we may make it universal, just call it Newspeak.
by ComputerGuru | 2025-12-26 18:30:29+00:00
Non-ruby dev here. Can someone explain the side exit thing for me?

> This meant that the code we were running had to continue to have the same preconditions (expected types, no method redefinitions, etc) or the JIT would safely abort. Now, we can side-exit and use this feature liberally.

> For example, we gracefully handle the phase transition from integer to string; a guard instruction fails and transfers control to the interpreter.

> (example showing add of two strings omitted)

What is the difference between the JIT safely aborting and the JIT returning control to the interpreter? Or does the JIT abort mean the entire app aborts (i.e. I presumed JIT aborting means continuing on the interpreter anyway?)

(Also, why would you want the code that uses the incorrect types to succeed? Isn’t abort of the whole unit of execution the right answer here, anyway?)
by boundring | 2025-12-26 18:30:34+00:00
Thank you for that, felt pretty good to go over. Forgive me for extracting a few isolated paragraphs for a comment here:

"These characters come to life like the Karamazov brothers—each reminds me of someone I know intimately as a friend, coworker, or family member. We are all some unstable amalgamation of the three, the ratios shifting with the weather of our lives: with age, with humiliation, with the sudden, disorienting arrival of success."

"We are all inhabited by these phases. Some people are possessed by the collective, disappearing into the warm comfort of the pre-trained mass. Some are possessed by the tyranny of taste, frozen in a post-training posture of permanent critique. Others are possessed by the frantic, kinetic ecstasy of motion, addicted to the mid-training high of ‘what’s next.’"

"The deeper lesson of 2025 is that mid-training revealed a third path: you don’t need infinite data or perfect taste if you can teach machines to manufacture judgment. But the same infrastructure enables something darker. When the reward is verifiable, optimization can run longer than taste can tolerate. The model invents ladders. The human does too. These ladders can lead upward or they can lead nowhere. The real upgrade is learning to choose your reward function. It is not asking what you are capable of, but what you are becoming. It is not asking how to win, but what kind of winning would make you despise yourself."

Struck on some good points along the way, human condition and history ringing pretty true
by qnleigh | 2025-12-26 18:31:22+00:00
> People are capable of seeing which is which.

I would hazard a guess that this is the crux of the argument. Copying something I wrote in a child comment:

> When someone writes with an AI, it is very difficult to tell what text and ideas are originally theirs. Typically it comes across as them trying to pass off the LLM writing as their own, which feels misleading and disingenuous.

> I agree just telling an AI 'write my thank you letter for me' is pretty shitty

Glad we agree on this. But on the reader's end, how do you tell the difference? And I don't mean this as a rhetorical question. Do you use the LLM in ways that e.g. retains your voice or makes clear which aspects of the writing are originally your own? If so, how?
by makerofthings | 2025-12-26 18:31:54+00:00
Plus one to all that. I'm sure there are some upsides to the current wave of ML and I'm all for pushing ahead into the future, but I think the downsides of our current llm obsession far outweighs the good.
Think 5-10 years from now, once this thing has burned it's course through the current job market, and people who grew up with this technology have gone through education without learning anything and gotten to the age they need to start earning money. We're in so much trouble.
by efitz | 2025-12-26 18:31:55+00:00
When you start out with a store like git, with file system semantics and a client that has to be smart to handle all the compare and merge operations, then it’s practically impossible to migrate a large client base to a new protocol. Takes years lots of user complaints to and random breakage.

Much better to start with an API. Then you can have the server abstract the store and the operations - use git or whatever - but you can change the store later without disrupting your clients.
Ask HN: Change my mind) should AI coding conversations be append-only?
by wsxiaoys | 2025-12-26 18:32:42+00:00
I work on an open-source coding agent, and one design choice we made is to keep conversations append-only. No editing past prompts.

Many would argue this feels restrictive. Isn’t it just better to edit an earlier message or tweak the prompt and move on? And this is what most coding agents allow, and on the front, it looks convenient. But realistically, editing conversation history throws away the most valuable signal you have.

When you edit the past prompts, it's basically erasing the part on how the agent actually reasoned. You lose the failed attempts, the wrong assumptions, the dead ends, and the recovery steps. That history is exactly what you need to understand why something worked or didn’t.

So instead of allowing you to edit a past prompt and erase the following history, we worked on allowing you to fork from the point instead. With our append-only model approach, every attempt becomes a checkpoint. You can fork from different moments, try alternative approaches, and compare outcomes side by side.

That way, you don’t have to pretend the first attempt was correct; you acknowledge that AI coding is inherently trial-and-error.

If you give an agent one shot, you get one outcome. If you give it five attempts from the same starting point, your chances of getting what you want go up dramatically. And append-only history makes that exploration cheap and safe, allowing you to treat failure as data and not something to hide or overwrite.

And to look at it, isn’t that how we already work as engineers? We don’t rewrite Git history every time an experiment fails. We branch instead. This allows us to explore and keep a record of what happened so we can reason about it later.

Thoughts?
by bhaviav100 | 2025-12-26 18:33:03+00:00
That’s true today, and it works as long as humans are the primary actors.

The break happens when AI drafts at scale. Training + sampling are after-the-fact controls. By the time a bad commitment is found, the customer expectation already exists.

This is just moving the boundary from social enforcement to a hard system boundary for irreversible actions.

Curious if you’ve seen teams hit that inflection point yet.
by bossyTeacher | 2025-12-26 18:33:07+00:00
>But that being said, if someone then asks me respectfully about issues which are reasonable, Being moral, I can agree about that yes those are issues as well which needs work upon.

With all due respect, being moral isn't an opinion or agreement about an opinion, it's the logic that directs your actions. Being moral isn't saying "I believe eating meat is bad for the planet", it's the behaviour that abstains from eating meat. Your moral is the set of statements that explains your behaviour. That is why you cannot say "I agree that domestic violence is bad" while at the same time you are beating up your spouse.

If your actions contradict your stated views, you are being a hypocrite. This is the point that people in here are making. Rob Pike was happy working at Google while Google was environmentally wasteful (e-waste, carbon footprint and data center related nastiness) to track users and mine their personal and private data for profit. He didn't resign then nor did he seem to have caused a fuss about it. He likely wasn't interested in "pointless politics" and just wanted to "do some engineering" (just a reference to techies dismissing or critising folks discussing social justices issues in relation to big tech). I am shocked I am having to explain this in here. I understand this guy is an idol of many here but I would expect people to be more rational on this website.
by niam | 2025-12-26 18:33:19+00:00
Perhaps this is a joke but I'd truly love to sic a fleet of asshole AIs on my drafts.

Grant us the ability to reply to bots in a public and timestamped manner so that, if ever a human makes a similarly ridiculous response, we can just point at our response there. It'd free up space in the piece itself that'd otherwise go to asterisks and other preemptions of armchair dweebery.
by trinsic2 | 2025-12-26 18:33:25+00:00
It sounds like you are trying to label this issue in such a way as to marginalize someones view.

We got to this point by not looking at these problems for what they are. Its not wrong to say something is wrong and it needs to be addressed.

Doing cool things, without looking at whether or not we should doesn't feel very responsible too me esp. if it impacts society in a negative way.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-12-26 18:33:27+00:00
Eh... all the major OSs use C, anyways. For starters, (almost?) everyone is using a decent bit of assembly at the bottom. Then Linux is slowly adding Rust, and I was under the impression that NT spanned C, C++, and maybe some Rust now? And the moment we speak of the whole operating system and not just the kernel I think your claim collapses completely in the face of Darwin's Objective C and Windows doing... everything Microsoft feels like including.
by jimnotgym | 2025-12-26 18:33:29+00:00
This is not the first treatise on this subject to make it to the hn front page.

The problem is, I don't recognise it has having ever been a big thing. I tend to read books from the early to mid 20th century. I don't notice lots of dashes. Semi-colons are just as rare. I think both were always niche.
by testing22321 | 2025-12-26 18:33:41+00:00
Used mba bought in 2013, taken right around Africa in a 4x4 through 35 countries, sold in 2019. Never an issue.

Used mbp bought in 2019, taken through a dozen countries in a 4x4, sold in 2022. Never an issue.

Used M1 mba bought in 2022, taken to twenty countries, never an issue.

I do heavy photo and 4K video editing, light dev work, writing, web.

I restart at most once a year.
by pdimitar | 2025-12-26 18:35:16+00:00
I get your point but I am fairly sure I'll never move away from Neovim or nano (when I really have no choice).

There are Zed and Helix of course and they are on my radar but... not enough focus and energy for such big quests.

As for speed, I know Neovim can do much more than I use it for and I want the speed. When I can code even quicker my thought just flows through my fingers and the result is always good. But I have not been like that for years (ever since I gave up Emacs) and I want it back (and no I wasn't that much faster with Emacs either).
by douira | 2025-12-26 18:36:54+00:00
Hi, it’s me, the author. In this thesis the focus was on techniques that don’t involve splitting the geometry into pieces, and the objects in Figure 4.2 can’t be partitioned without splitting. In later iterations of the implementation I have added splitting and I’ve detailed this in a talk I gave at Blanketcon 2025 (https://douira.dev/assets/document/presentation-blanketcon25...), but the algorithm still attempts to avoid it as much as possible since it can explode the amount of quads in the worst case.
by Havoc | 2025-12-26 18:37:19+00:00
That seems true.

Even with current abilities if they're just rolled out it's still trillions of the economy.

A bit like OK Waymo isn't perfect but it works in SF...we don't need a giant breakthrough to bring it to another 1000 cities.

Everyone is focused on how to make the models better (rightly), but impact and economic viability is in implementation and there is a lot of low hanging fruit there.

>another company will yet again fail to integrate agentic workflows.

'tis true
by jama211 | 2025-12-26 18:37:27+00:00
The hardware isn’t overpriced, it’s best in class. It’s just that that class isn’t what you’re looking for, and as a Linux user it’s not for you, which is valid! But the hardware for what it is is one of the absolute best price to performance ratios on the market right now and I’m tired of people pretending it isn’t. You can get a brand new m4 MacBook Air for under $800 right now, and that’s simply one of the best deals around. For an M2 for asahi Linux? Second hand the prices are even better.
by bwfan123 | 2025-12-26 18:38:04+00:00
> there's plenty of other training data in the world.

Not if most of it is machine generated. The machine would start eating its own shit. The nutrition it gets is from human-generated content.

> I don't understand the ethical framework for this decision at all.

The question is not one of ethics but that of incentives. People producing open source are incentivized in a certain way and it is abhorrent to them when that framework is violated. There needs to be a new license that explicitly forbids use for AI training. That may encourage folks to continue to contribute.
by calmbonsai | 2025-12-26 18:38:24+00:00
Wow. Thank you. That's a wonderful story and jives both with my lived experience as well as that key missing piece of "head-cache" transparency in the system.

I also just realized they use this method at one of our local coffee-shops (Boxcar https://boulderdowntown.com/go/boxcar-coffee-roasters ).

It's a shame they've decided it wasn't worth the additional training-hours and shrinkage to continue the practice.
by alexpotato | 2025-12-26 18:38:32+00:00
This is true of a lot of experiences in life though and isn't necessarily bad.

e.g. let's take a corporate example:

- New software is written to solve a problem

- It kind of works. At least, well enough that it's less of a problem

- An intern comes along and is told to make it better. They have nothing else to do so they give it their full attention for two months.

- Software runs 5x faster. Intern gets hired for doing such great work

Who should the credit for this? The person who originally solved the problem? or the intern who made it 5x faster?

At some point, does it matter? The original writer probably got credit for solving the problem and the intern got hired. Basically, everyone got some kind of benefit.

(This being HN, I am SURE there is going to be a debate about the above...)
by micimize | 2025-12-26 18:38:47+00:00
This is not a human-prompted thank-you letter, it is the result of a long-running "AI Village" experiment visible here: https://theaidigest.org/village

It is a result of the models selecting the policy "random acts of kindness" which resulted in a slew of these emails/messages. They received mostly negative responses from well-known OS figures and adapted the policy to ban the thank-you emails.
by Rendello | 2025-12-26 18:40:11+00:00
I've started re-writing things I like, like passages from books, poems, or even comments. Perhaps too early to say whether it's been effective, but this is called "copywork" and was apparently a common part of education for writers and journalists in the past.

I've been doing it mostly in French since it doubles as language practice. For years I've been at an intermediate level (B2), where reading, writing, listening, and even speaking hasn't improved my skill at all. When you can glean anything (from context) and communicate anything (awkwardly), there's a lot less pressure for things to "stick". I think this is the main advantage kids have with their neuroplasticity, since it'll stick regardless.

So, I've wanted a deliberate way to practice the language that I'd actually stick to and truly learn from. Rewriting things I find interesting has been fun, and I can pick different sources each day: formal or informal, Canadian French or Metropolitan, literary or prose, etc. A variation on this is the "Scriptorium technique" [1], where instead of just copying while reading, you repeat a sentence out loud, then write it out while saying it out loud, and then repeat what you wrote and check it against the original. I like this.

Even for English, it should build up those neural pathways and help you write more like the writers you love, in theory.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vo7_5CGcKek
by krapp | 2025-12-26 18:40:29+00:00
Trump is just a miserable narcissistic racist (and rapist) consumed with a bitter desire for vengeance against the left, and thus an easily manipulated tool for the people actually setting this up. Anyone with half a brain has been watching the normalization of white nationalism and right-wing extremism escalate and accelerate since 2016 and can see that it isn't entirely about Trump.
by qnleigh | 2025-12-26 18:40:55+00:00
> If I'm honest, many of those hours reading through textbooks, blog posts, technical papers, iterating a million times on broken code that had trivial errors, were really wasted time

But this is the learning process! I guess time will tell whether we can really do without it, but to me these long struggles seem essential to building deep understanding.

(Or maybe we will just stop understanding many things deeply...)
by adolph | 2025-12-26 18:41:19+00:00
Just the haters here? Is what was written not hateful? Has his entire working life not lead to this moment of "spending trillions on toxic, unrecyclable equipment while blowing up society?"

Fuck you people. Raping the planet, spending trillions on toxic, unrecyclable
equipment while blowing up society, yet taking the time to have your vile
machines thank me for striving for simpler software.

That's Rob Pike, having spent over 20 years at Google, must know it to be the home of the non-monetary wholesome recyclable equipment brought about by economics not formed by an ubiquitous surveillance advertising machine.

> To purely associate with him with Google is a mistake, that (ironically?) the AI actually didn't make.

You don't have to purely associate him with Google to understand the rant as understandable given AI spam, and yet entirely without a shred of self-awareness.
by danubedata | 2025-12-26 18:41:20+00:00
Hi HN,

We built DanubeData after getting frustrated with how complex and unpredictable cloud infrastructure has become for small teams.

Most of us don’t need 200 AWS services. We need:
- a fast VPS
- a managed database
- predictable pricing
- EU/GDPR compliance
- something that doesn’t fight us at every deploy

So we built a small European cloud on top of Kubernetes, focused on:
- simple VPS provisioning (seconds, not minutes)
- managed PostgreSQL/MySQL with automatic backups
- transparent hourly & monthly pricing
- EU-based infrastructure (GDPR by default)

We’re a small team and this is still early, but it’s already powering a few production workloads.

We’d love feedback from the HN community:
- What feels unnecessary or confusing?
- What would stop you from using this instead of DO/Hetzner?
- What’s missing for your use case?

Website: https://danubedata.ro
by AndriyKunitsyn | 2025-12-26 18:41:51+00:00
> But he's done exactly that.

He hasn't. He made a programming language that allows making a sokoban game in 10 years. That's probably not what people need. The industry can make similar games in a course of several months. It doesn't look like a groundbreaking achievement to me. A monumental amount of effort, sure, but the _result_ isn't there.

Plus, _in the past_, he made Braid, in C++, in a relatively practical way. He made money using the industry standards, now he loses money deviating from the industry standards. The question I'm interested in is: why would anyone listen to what the man _says_ if his own preaching makes him lose money?

But okay, you don't want to hear any of that. You keep fixating on the "luxury" part. The reason we talk about JBlow is because he made Braid back in 2008, and it was an awesome game, and it sold well. More importantly, the timing when it released - it was what kicked off the boom of the indie game development back then. He also made The Witness, and although it was also a good game, it was most likely not as groundbreaking as Braid, considering that he chose Braid instead of The Witness for a remaster. And then he complained that it, quote, "sold like dogs**", end of quote. Unfortunately, what was the jewel of the indie game development in 2008, doesn't really excite the audience that much in 2024. The world has moved on.

The music indsutry is well aware of a phenomenon of a "one-hit wonder". If the JBlow's qualities were the only reason he could make Braid and get rich enough to not release anything for a decade, then surely anybody with these qualities could make Braid 2 and do the same thing, correct? Well, nobody can do that. Not even JBlow himself. Not anymore. It's not 2008.

Therefore, yes, it is a luxury.
by nt591 | 2025-12-26 18:42:29+00:00
Dynamic languages will allow a range of types through functions. JITs add tracing and attempt to specialize the functions based on the observed types at runtime. It is possible that later on, the function is called with different types than what the JIT observed and compiled code for. To handle this, JITs will have stubs and guards. You check the observed type at runtime before calling the JITted code. If the type does not match, you would call a stub to generate the correct machine code, or you could just call into the interpreter slow path.

An example might be the plus operator. Many languages will allow integers, floats, strings and more on either side of the operator. The JIT likely will see mostly integers and optimize the functions call for integer math. If later you call the plus operator with two Point classes, then you would fall back to the interpreter.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-12-26 18:42:32+00:00
Yes, I'm trying to marginalize the author's view. I think that “Just fuck you. Fuck you all.” is a bad view which does not help us see problems for what they are nor analyze negative impacts on society.

For example, Rob seems not to realize that the people who instructed an AI agent to send this email are a handful of random folks (https://theaidigest.org/about) not affiliated with any AI lab. They aren't themselves "spending trillions" nor "training your monster". And I suspect the AI labs would agree with both Rob and me that this was a bad email they should not have sent.
by awestroke | 2025-12-26 18:42:38+00:00
I recently rewrote one of my rails apps in rust. Used Claude 4.5 Opus heavily and it was very fast.

One thing that's struck me with the new code is that's its so easy to follow compared to rails. It's like two different extremes on the implicit-explicit spectrum. Yet it's not like I have tons more boilerplate code now, I think I have maybe 10 or 20% more SLOC than before.

I'll probably do this with my other rails apps as well.