MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by potato3732842 | 2025-12-22 18:56:29+00:00
On a national scale sanctions aren't there to stop a country from doing things or forcing regime change. They're there to cost enough money to circumvent that it robs them of growth over time to make them into a non-threatening poor backwater over a decades long period.

This is basically what the US did to most of its "makes actual stuff" economy over the past 50yr.

When it comes to banking laws and the like it's not about being watertight. It's about holding enough water that what leaks out is small enough you can crush it with the state jackboot without enough collateral damage to really piss people off and that the cost of circumvention is high enough that you can't make "real money" outside the law at scale.
by clay_shirky | 2025-12-22 18:56:31+00:00
Perl hacker who tried to switch to Ruby before adopting Python here:

Of _course_ boring is better. How could it not be? If you are trying to solve a problem, the last thing you want to be thinking about is the language itself.

The language you adopt to code up a solution should force you to think clearly, but no more than that. Executable pseudocode is as close to an ideal state as you can get for a high-level language.

Perl, meanwhile, was filled with multiple ways to do things -- famously and absurdly thought of as a virtue -- reveled in side effects, and did so much implicit work with variables and flow that perl was often unreadable by anybody else, including the you of three months from now.

"Python did everything other scripting languages did, but in a cleaner and more comprehensible way" tells you most of what you need to know about Python's victory, but the death blow was delivered by the perl community's love of complexity, which led to the disaster that was Raku.

By the turn of the century, it was clear that python 3 was a better plan for the future than perl 6.
by noumenon1111 | 2025-12-22 18:56:48+00:00
You're asking the right question!

1. IBM, as the all-time reigning king of computing is not expected to give up its position any time soon. In fact, I'm observing a swell of new microcomputers called "personal computers," and I fully expect IBM to capitalize on this trend soon.

2. Intel is a great company making microcontrollers and processors for microcomputers. The new 8086 microprocessor seems poised to make a splash in the new "personal computer" segment. I'll eat my hat if my prediction proves to be incorrect.

3. "One of these things is not like the other" Microsoft makes a pretty nice BASIC for microcomputers. I can imagine this becoming standard for "personal computers." But, a tiny company like Microsoft doesn't really stack up next to an industry titan like IBM or even a major, newer player like Intel.

If you'd like me to prognosticate some more, I'm ready. Just say the word.
by jarjoura | 2025-12-22 18:57:17+00:00
It's a shame that my company tied itself to claude-code way too fast. It was like a single week last summer of, "oh what's everyone's favorite? claude? okay, let's go!"

OpenCode has been truely innovating in this space and is actually open source, and would naturally fit into custom corporate LLM proxies. Yet, now we've built so many unrulely wrappers and tools around claude-code's proprietary binary just to sandbox it, and use it with our proxy, that now I fear it's too late to walk back.

Not sure how OpenCode can break through this barrier, but I'm an internal advocate for it. For hobby projects, it's definitely my goto tool.
by yongjik | 2025-12-22 18:57:35+00:00
> As a taxpayer I'm tired of funding everyone's project.

Some Americans took a hard look at the state of America as the world's leader in science, technology, and industry, with a ton of cutting-edge research attracting the smartest from all over the world, and decided "This sucks, can we go back to the simpler times where everyone had a factory job and they all looked and spoke like me?"

...And they might just get their wish, from how it looks.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-12-22 18:57:48+00:00
As with many other things (em dashes, emojis, bullet lists, it's-not-x-it's-y constructs, triple adjectives, etc) seeing any one of them isn't a tell. Seeing all of them, or many of them in a single piece of content, is probably the tell.

When you use these tools you get a knack for what they do in "vanilla" situations. If you're doing a quick prompt, no guidance, no context and no specifics, you'll get a type of answer that checks many of the "smells" above. Getting the same over and over again gets you to a point where you can "spot" this pretty effectively.
by array_key_first | 2025-12-22 18:58:16+00:00
I agree it's not the correct solution because the issue is systemic, not individual. Punishing individual officers won't affect the overlying system.

But it's important to note that officers are specifically taught to be jumpy and aggressive. That's not a natural response. The reason we see so many accidental shooting is because the training around it encourages it. Accidentally shooting a few innocent people in the pursuit of stamping out crime is a necessary evil in the eyes of American police.

Ultimately, the police only really know how to shoot, and we put them in situations they're not equipped to handle. It's not shocking, then, that people end up getting shot. They truly have no business doing wellness calls, or mental health assistance, or even routine traffic stops.
by Aurornis | 2025-12-22 18:58:25+00:00
> However, I'm also missing the lived experience of what being in the US is like right now,

I’m in the US and this story feels extremely foreign to me. Even hearing a rumor about a gun threat at my kids’ school or any of my friends’ kids’ schools would be a topic of discussion for the next year with parent-teacher meetings, the school communicating with parents to shed light on what happened, action plans, and so on. Fortunately nothing like that has happened, but this is the level of communication that happens for even rumored threats.

The US is a huge place, though. Some times I don’t think outsiders understand how big and diverse this country is.
by btilly | 2025-12-22 18:58:43+00:00
There is knowing, and then there is knowing.

For example suppose that someone likes to work in Markdown using VSCode. To get the kind of Word document that everyone else expects, you just copy and paste into Word. AI isn't involved, but it will look exactly like AI to you.

And there are more complicated hybrids. For example my wife has a workflow where everything that she does, communications, and so on, wind up in Markdown in Obsidian. She adds information about who was at the meeting that includes basuc research into them done by an agent (company directory, title, LinkedIn, and so on - all good to know for someone working in sales). Her AI assistant then extracts out bullet points, cross references, and so on. She uses that to create summaries that she references whenever she goes back to that project. And if someone wants to know what has happened or is currently planned for that project, AI extracts that from the same repository.

There's lots of AI in this workflow. But the content and thought is mostly from her. (With facts from searches that an agent did.) The fact that she's automated a lot of her organizational scutwork to an AI doesn't make the output "AI slop".
by zahlman | 2025-12-22 18:58:54+00:00
> In hindsight I think Python needed to stand on its own right, not just as a better Perl, but yet here we are.

It has. That just wasn't where the foothold was. Python has had several moments propelling it to its current position. "The early days" absolutely did not set an inexorable machine in motion. It took further boosts from fields like data science, machine learning etc. that would likely never have touched Perl even if the Perl 6 story had turned out much better.

> I think hindsight will show we should have considered the defects of Python more deeply.

There are many. I personally find that many of the commonly proposed ones are not that important, while everyone else is ignoring much more serious things. But so it goes. You can say these sorts of things about all the popular languages. "Although practicality beats purity."

> I know the lispers saw them but no one listens to them.

Lisp has had enormous hidden influence on how people write code in other languages, honestly. SICP is a revolutionary work. It just turns out that homoiconicity is not hugely useful the large percentage of the time that you don't need metaprogramming, and that the structure of the code is harder for humans to grok when it isn't explicitly marked with a variety of punctuation (rather than just parentheses).

> If you survey the language landscape now, a language can be much better than Python but never get the chance Python did just because it happened to look a bit better than Perl. Which is absurd to me.

This falls in the category of life not being fair. If you have your own ideas about how to make a Python-killer, I'd encourage you to pursue them anyway.
by brendoelfrendo | 2025-12-22 18:58:57+00:00
> AD has built-in mecanisms where a random person can execute code on the AD themselves

Could you provide an example? I'm sure I know what you're talking about, but the way you put it I'm having a hard time figuring out what you mean.

> Most people are not perfect; Hence, most people have security issue with AD (see the never ending tail of cryptolocked companies)

Yeah, but, how many of those ransomware attacks exploit misconfigured AD environments rather than something more banal like harvesting credentials accidentally checked into Git, or spear phishing for a target? Identity, in general, is hard.
by ArcHound | 2025-12-22 18:59:01+00:00
> If you know in your heart of hearts that you didn’t put the work in, you’re undermining the social contract between you and your reader.

There's been a lot of social contract undermining lately. Does anyone please know about something that can be done to try and revert back? Social contract of "F you. I got mine" isn't very appealing to me, but that seems to be the current approach.
by chungy | 2025-12-22 18:59:08+00:00
86Box forked from PCem specifically over issues of emulation accuracy. The developers of each had very different motives. PCem was aimed at running a few select games as quickly as possible, while 86Box is aimed at accurately representing real hardware behavior. (I do use past tense purposefully: PCem for all intents and purposes has been abandoned.)

DOSBox is meant to be a lightweight DOS runtime on top of a host operating system with the minimal hardware emulation necessary to accomplish that. Generally it makes running games easier as you don't need to deal with autoexec.bat, config.sys, and all the memory management that comes with real DOS. Under 86Box, your VM is yours to meld in exactly the same way as a real old PC; if you run MS-DOS, that means all the nasty parts come back. (I personally recommend installing Windows 95 at least, running DOS games under 95 tends to be a big relief for these same reasons.)
by prmoustache | 2025-12-22 18:59:18+00:00
Usually in that case you would make it a priority to the right /or left so that everyone only has to look at one side (besides the pedestrians) and in a very busy intersection people with common sense and education naturally do an alternance where you give way to every other car.

I don't know if waymos are programmed for that and it could very well be that there were so many pedestrian crossing it wouldn't apply it anyway.
by marojejian | 2025-12-22 18:59:22+00:00
Sounds like a further improvement in the spirit of HRM & TRM models.

Decent comment via x:
https://x.com/r0ck3t23/status/2002383378566303745

I continue to be fascinated by these architectures that:
- Build in recurrence / inference scaling to transformers more natively.
- Don't use full recurrent gradient traces, and succeed not just despite, but because of that.
by WorldMaker | 2025-12-22 18:59:46+00:00
Installing Internet Explorer 4 on Windows 95 opened up the first version of Windows Update, when it started as a web app with some custom ActiveX plugins. Windows 98 was the first time Windows Update had a bundled link in the OS, and shortly after Windows 98 introduced a "Critical Update" notification that would prompt users to open Windows Update.

Automatic updates arrived in Windows ME.

It's interesting the timeframes on Windows are often earlier than you think they are. Admittedly, a lot of users skipped Windows ME and its strange reputation, so Windows XP may have been their first time seeing automatic updates.
by ProllyInfamous | 2025-12-22 18:59:48+00:00
Vanderbilt University [0] is about to open a "quantum research graduate studies" campus, somewhere near Chattanooga, Tennessee.

I have a degree in chemistry from that institution, and don't have a clue what this means beyond the $1,000,000,000 economic impact this facility is supposed to make upon our fair city, over the next decade.

[•] <https://quantumzeitgeist.com/vanderbilt-university-quantum-q...>

[0] In partnership with our government-subsidized "commercial quantum-ready" fiber network, EPB
by danaris | 2025-12-22 18:59:54+00:00
I don't know the figures for large universities, but at the small liberal arts college I graduated from and the one I've worked at for the last 15 years, the average figure for "full pay" students—which, as the name suggests, is the students who pay, or whose families pay, the full sticker price, either directly or through loans—has generally been between 46% and 53%.

Now, if you have figures showing that what you claim is true on the whole across all of US higher education, please, by all means, post the links. I'm genuinely interested to know just how different it is with the larger universities.
Show HN: TethysRT, a tiny dynamic loader for 32 bit ARM embedded systems
by hotelsw | 2025-12-22 18:59:55+00:00
I’ve been working on a lightweight runtime loader for Cortex-M (and 32-bit ARM more generally) that can load and relocate ELF modules from SD/ flash/ generic storage at runtime. It’s not a dynamic linker in the Linux sense, but it does perform symbol resolution and relocation against a host-defined ABI.

The goal is to enable extensible firmware platforms without reflashing or statically linking everything into the main image. I’m sharing it both in case it’s useful to others, and to get constructive feedback.
by zephen | 2025-12-22 19:00:55+00:00
The unstated elephant in the room is that you can't possibly know how much thought the originator has given to this.

You can't know if it has been reviewed and checked for minimal sanity, or just chucked over the fence.

So you have to fully vet it.

And, if you have to fully vet it, then what value has the originator added? Might as well eliminate their position.
by gnabgib | 2025-12-22 19:01:07+00:00
Related:

Backing up Spotify (1846 points, 2 days ago, 633 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46338339

Spotify reportedly investigating Anna's Archive's scraping of their library (33 points, 2 hours ago, 52 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46355793
by jandrese | 2025-12-22 19:01:25+00:00
Or the tell that the guy who usually writes fairly succinctly suddenly dumps five thousand words with all of the details that most people wouldn't bother to write down.

It would be interesting to see the history where the whole document is dumped in the file at once, but then edits and corrections are applied top to bottom to that document. Using AI isn't so much the problem as trusting it blindly.
by tripletao | 2025-12-22 19:01:36+00:00
"What should or shouldn’t be a wh-island" is literally a statement of "what words might come after some other words"! An LLM encodes billions of such statements, just unfortunately in a quantity and form that makes them incomprehensible to an unaided human. That part is strictly worse; but the LLM's statements model language well enough to generate it, and that part is strictly better.

As I read Norvig's essay, it's about that tradeoff, of whether a simple and comprehensible but inaccurate model shows more promise than a model that's incomprehensible except in statistical terms with the aid of a computer, but far more accurate. I understand there's a large group of people who think Norvig is wrong or incoherent; but when those people have no accomplishments except within the framework they themselves have constructed, what am I supposed to think?

Beyond that, if I have a model that tells me whether a sentence is valid, then I can always try different words until I find one that makes it valid. Any sufficiently good model is thus capable of generation. Chomsky never proposed anything capable of that; but that just means his models were bad, not that he was working on a different task.

As to the relationship between signals from biological neurons and ANN activations, I mean something like the paper linked below, whose authors write:

> Thus, even though the goal of contemporary AI is to improve model performance and not necessarily to build models of brain processing, this endeavor appears to be rapidly converging on architectures that might capture key aspects of language processing in the human mind and brain.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.26.174482v3....

I emphasize again that I believe these results have been oversold in the popular press, but the idea that an ANN trained on brain output (including written language) might provide insight into the physical, causal structure of the brain is pretty mainstream now.
by mikethe | 2025-12-22 19:01:41+00:00
..thank you..

I am very curious at the moment about why my post shows up a lighter shade of gray than others. I have done some searching, and apparently this can have something to do with people down-voting something, maybe if it seems to contain disparaging comments. I described oberon as "dusty", could that be it? It wasn't meant to be disparaging. You see rust all over the place. If I hadn't been exploring the text editor vis referred to by suckless, I wouldn't have even known oberon existed.

I am -not- trying to criticize oberon. I am not trying to claim that rust is better. I am just looking for a comparison of the two, from the point of view of the particular poster I referenced. I would have responded to his comment directly if I could.

Thank you very much for your tip about ada. I'll check it out!
by array_key_first | 2025-12-22 19:01:49+00:00
> The full term imprisonment is just, and being able to shorten it is a privilege.

Even if you believe this, which I would describe as naive at best and willfully ignorant at worst, you have to understand that the parole is a carrot. It's not real.

Georgia has some of the lowest, if not the lowest, parole stats in the country. They almost never hand it out, even if you are a good little prisoner and work on the field picking cotton for a buck or so an hour. They don't actually want to help society, or prisoners. They just want to siphon money and labor from a population that they know has no options. It's opportunistic. These people are a plague on humanity, a virus of such low lows they must only prey on the most vulnerable. They are the pneumonia of American society.
by jvanderbot | 2025-12-22 19:02:00+00:00
If I discover you fed me AI output, directly from AI, it really makes me wonder what you are doing here. What did you add to this equation when I could have done it myself?

At least a "Generated by AI, reviewed and edited by xyz" tag would be some indicator of effort and accountability.

It may not be wrong to use AI to generate things whole cloth, but it definitely sidesteps something important and calls into question the "prompter's" contributions to the whole thing.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-22 19:02:07+00:00
When I receive something that either I suspect an LLM wrote 90% of, or the author is up front about it, I always ask "Did you check all of this yourself to verify before I pick it up?" and maybe half of the times I get a no, and then they return a day later with a new document and some fixes. Other half the time people say yes, I start digging into it, start finding bunch of weird stuff and send it back to the person.

I don't really care if it's a person or the LLM getting it wrong, if you're sending me stuff that you checked or haven't checked but it's wrong/ambiguous anyways, I'm sending it back to you to fix.
Show HN: What Might Adding Pictures to Text Programming Languages Look Like?
by tchn | 2025-12-22 19:02:27+00:00
Fun With Python and Emoji: What Might Adding Pictures to Text Programming Languages Look Like?

We all mix pictures, emojis and text freely in our communications. So, why not in our code?

Slides, Python notebook available at:
https://github.com/tedconway/pydataboston2025
by graypegg | 2025-12-22 19:02:51+00:00
I guess there's two ways to read a ratio like that. Either A) the false positive rate rounds to 100.00000%, or B) the correct positive rate rounds to 100.00000% and the few that slip through are great tragedies due to "just not investing enough", thus making the false positives worth it.

I'm glad B) at least wasn't made /explicit/ in the article, but damn... they do point at it by implication. You're totally right about the juxtaposition being manipulative.

> The company isn’t aware of any school shootings where its tech was deployed.

A thing that happens 50 times a year, across the entire US has not occurred at any of the small number of pilot schools... where apparently "threats" occur multiple times a day?

EDIT: confirming I agree, emphasis on /explicit/.
by maxglute | 2025-12-22 19:03:15+00:00
1Country2Systems is still in place, just the version that was always meant to be, not the lie western propaganda sold.

HK failed their half of 2System by not implementing national security law on their accord after 20 years of failures and it became obvious they were never going to do it out of own volition. Frankly if local preferences is to be under national security umbrella and be free to commit treason their preferences should be completely nullified because that's unserious position. Hence PRC, after UNREASONABLE patience had shove it down their throats under 1C mandate (1C supercedes 2S) - HK only ever had "high" degree of autonomy, not full autonomy. It was always in Beijing's prerogative to force HK to eat their vegetables, it just took 20 years of HK incompetence before Beijing ran of patience. AKA the 1C2S muh HK has full autonomy under Sino British declaration tier of retarded western propaganda fed to useful idiots was a lie and got dispelled.
by danaris | 2025-12-22 19:03:15+00:00
> Overseas students are not immigrants.

> It is in the United States best interest to retain the best students

Yeah? Tell that to the US government.

As it stands, foreign student enrollment has dropped precipitously year-on-year. The international students are scared, and with good reason.

If ICE happens to roll up to campus, do you really think they'll be checking each student's visa status? Not on your life. They'll just round up everyone who doesn't look white enough, and if they're very, very lucky, they might just get sent back home in a speedy manner. If they're not, they'll get put in camps for indeterminate amounts of time, denied any access to the legal system, and treated worse than animals.
by dragonwriter | 2025-12-22 19:03:24+00:00
> My gut feeling is that it succeeded due to escaping scrutiny.

Basically every languages mostly escapes scrutiny except from very niche corners (usually people deeply committed to other languages that aren't actually considering alternatives, but criticizing everything that isn't their preferred language for not being their preferred language) until it succeeds, because there are enough of them that basically no one cares to put the time into scrutinizing them until they achieve a critical mass.

That's not why Python succeeded against other languages.