MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nickpsecurity | 2025-12-09 18:59:38+00:00
They go in to see, hear, and smell good things. They experience some products first-hand in a way that shows whether they're as advertised or not. They also know what's out of stock with many, immediate substitution options. There's also more coupon, markdown, or haggling opportunities for those who want them.

Finally, walking into stores lets you connect to people. Those who repent and follow Jesus Christ are told to share His Gospel with strangers so they can be forgiven and have eternal life. We're also to be good to them in general, listening and helping, from the short person reaching for items too high to the cashier that needs a friendly word.

We, along with non-believers, also get opportunities out of this when God makes us bump into the right people at the right time. They may become spouses, friends, or business partners. It's often called networking. However, Christians are to keep in mind God's sovereign control of every detail. Many are one-time or temporary events or observations just meant to make our lives more interesting.

Most of the above isn't available in online ordering which filters almost all of the human experience down to a narrow, efficient process a cheap AI could likely do. That process usually has no impact on eternity for anyone. Further, it has less impact on other people. Then, I have less of the experiences God designed us to have. Which includes the bad ones that build our character, like patience and forgiveness.

So, while I prefer online shopping, I try to pray God motivate me to shop in stores at times and do His will in there. Many interestings things, including impacts on people, continue to happen. Some events hit the person so hard that, even as a non-believer, they know God was behind it. I'm grateful for these stores that provide these opportunities to us.
by subscribed | 2025-12-09 18:59:45+00:00
Yeah, but you get two extremes.

Most often I see these answers under posts like "what's the longest river or earth", or "is Bogota a capital of Venezuela?"

Like. Seriously. It often takes MORE time to post this sort of lazy question than actually look it up. Literally paste their question into $search_engine and get 10 the same answers on the first page.

Actually sometimes telling a person like this "just Google it" is beneficial in two ways: it helps the poster develop/train their own search skills, and it may gently nudge someone else into trying that approach first, too. At the same time slowing the raise of the extremely low effort/quality posts.

But sure, sometimes you get the other kind. Very rarely.
by saturnite | 2025-12-09 18:59:50+00:00
I would use "saccharine" or "Pollyanna" based on some of the responses I get.

Early on, ChatGPT could be tricked into being sarcastic and using many swear words. I rewrote the prompt and dialed it back a bit. It made ChatGPT have a sense of humor. It was refreshing when it stopped acting like it was reading a script like a low level technician at Comcast.
by exe34 | 2025-12-09 18:59:56+00:00
frankly I've found even chat gpt free to be more useful when looking for something - I'd describe what I'm looking for, what are must-have features, what I definitely don't mean, etc and it'll suggest a few things. This has rarely led to not finding what I'm looking for. it's absolutely superior to Google search these days for things that have been around a while. I wouldn't check the news with it.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-12-09 19:00:34+00:00
Most of the people I've talked IRL to aren't against AI as a rule, but have grown tired of poorly implemented AI features, especially if they're used as marketing fodder. In my experience, shoehorned AI features have landed themselves in a category similar to that of bundled crapware and useless single-app hotkeys on cheap laptops.

Those of this group who use AI mostly ignore poor rebadges and integrations like MS Copilot and just use ChatGPT and Claude directly. They prefer it to remain intentional and contained within a box that they control the bounds of.
by jampa | 2025-12-09 19:01:06+00:00
I wrote about this recently. You need to prompt better if you don't want AI to flatten your original tone into corporate speak:

https://jampauchoa.substack.com/p/writing-with-ai-without-th...

TL;DR: Ask for a line edit, "Line edit this Slack message / HN comment." It goes beyond fixing grammar (because it improves flow) without killing your meaning or adding AI-isms.
by notahacker | 2025-12-09 19:01:23+00:00
I'm veering towards this being the answer. People downvote the superfluous "I don't have any particular thoughts on this, but here's what a chatbot has to say" comments all the time. But also, there are a lot of discussions around AI on HN, and in some of those cases posting verbatim responses from current generation chatbots is a pretty good indication of they can give accurate responses when posed problems of this type or they still make these mistakes or this is what happens when there's too much RHLF or a silly prompt...
by VoidWhisperer | 2025-12-09 19:02:00+00:00
They already have well over double the US solar output (US solar output is about 750 Twh according to this source, while China's is a bit over 2000 Twh) and their YoY solar increase is about 4x the US (600 Twh increase in China vs 150 Twh increase in the US)

They are also increasing coal usage, you are correct, however in the past 2 years, their solar output has increased significantly, to the point where it increased more than their coal output in 2024.

My point is that the comment you are quoting is actually technically correct, if you compare 2023 and 2024 in that graph for example, solar was the largest increase in output.
by TemptedMuse | 2025-12-09 19:02:00+00:00
Banking software is critical, but guess what, most software engineers are not writing banking software. I never said no software engineers write critical code. Heck I'd argue most at some point in their career will write something that needs to be as bug free as possible... at some point in their careers.

My point is that for most software engineering getting a product out is more important that a super high quality bar that slows everything down.

If you are writing banking software or flight control systems please do it with care, if you are making some React based recipe website or something I don't really care (99% of software engineering falls into this latter category in my opinion).

Software engineers need to get over themselves a bit, AI really exposed how many were just getting by making repetitive junk and thinking they were special.
by SoftTalker | 2025-12-09 19:02:14+00:00
Many valid reasons for a property to be vacant. It may need renovations or repair and that can take a lot longer than 30 days. But maybe there's some time frame that makes sense.

I'm not convinced that commercial ownership is the problem. Or if it is, it's not a new problem. Slumlords have been around forever.

The main problem is we just don't have enough housing supply. Investor-owners can only hold units vacant to support higher rents up to a point. If there are enough vacant units available and enough supply that property values are not appreciating like crazy, someone will crack and cut the rent or sell out so they can get a better return on their money.
Show HN: Contextify – Searchable History for Claude Code and Codex CLI
by bredren | 2025-12-09 19:02:40+00:00
Contextify is a native macOS application that provides a private, searchable timeline of your AI coding sessions.

Video demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvrvRGp4C9M

I built Contextify after I realized Claude Code automatically deletes your transcripts after 30 days.

Contextify is a native macOS HUD - a private, searchable timeline of your AI / agentic coding sessions.

* It provides a unified timeline of Claude Code and Codex CLI conversations.

* You can search the history across all your projects.

* It generates summaries of your exchanges with the AI locally using Apple Intelligence.

* It discovers new projects automatically and lets you organize them for easy access. Even has hotkeys to switch (Shift-Command-[ or ])

I learned a lot building this application and would be happy to answer any questions about how it works or uh...the journey.
by jesse__ | 2025-12-09 19:02:40+00:00
> First, there's a lot of equations used in graphics programming where the canonical names of variables are single letters. If you know the formula a single letter is a good name and it is expected that others reading it also understand it - if you didn't you'd have to read up on the formula anyway.

That's what I was getting at in my comment. A lot of the shader code I encounter is pretty math-y.

The rest I'm not too sure about .. I don't come across a lot of shaders that are code-golf-y trying to optimize for least number of bytes, but, then again, the article did just that .. so .. :shrug:
by shermantanktop | 2025-12-09 19:03:20+00:00
That description (mainstream middlebrow) would have been accurate in 1980. I don't think it is anymore.

Long form journalism is not a common thing anymore, men (who dominate HN) are not enthusiastic readers anymore, and the cultural conversation that a dead-tree magazine represents is no longer amplified in mass media (as opposed to an era when David Frost and Dick Cavett had primetime shows on TV).

I don't disagree about the reverse snobbery, but IMO people being "not equal to the challenge" isn't the actual problem.
by raphlinus | 2025-12-09 19:03:32+00:00
Memory safety in particular, actually UB in general (got to watch out for integer overflows, among other things). But one could prove arbitrary properties, including lack of panics (would have been helpful for a recent Cloudflare outage), etc.

In order to prove lack of UB, you have to be able to reason about other things. For example, to safely call qsort, you have to prove that the comparison is a total order. That's not easy, especially if comparing larger and more complicated structures with pointers.

And of course, proving the lack of pointer aliasing in C is extremely difficult, even more so if pointer arithmetic is employed.
by marcusb | 2025-12-09 19:03:54+00:00
A lot? Also irrelevant. All it takes is one for the statement "nobody can see the bubble" to be false. Take the housing bubble for instance. Do you think the people who called that one were successful purely by chance, or does the fact that a few investors observed that mortgage lenders were underwriting loans to people with extremely poor credit and approving loan applications the lenders knew to be materially fraudulent at a massive scale indicate that the call was more of an educated wager? Did they know to a certainty it was a bubble? No, of course not. Was it a very reasonable guess? Absolutely.
by sp527 | 2025-12-09 19:04:03+00:00
> If or when that happens, I think the economy would morph into a new thing completely focused on serving the whims of those "owners."

I think you might be a little behind on economic news, because that's already happening. And it's also rapidly reshaping business models and strategic thinking. The forces of capitalism are happily writing the lower and middle classes out of the narrative.

https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-dow-sp50...
by Ekaros | 2025-12-09 19:04:03+00:00
Is there any open sourced product that is actually main bread winner of the company developing it? Well Mozilla does it with Firefox still, but that is single customer just so that they can argue that they do not have monopoly and to drive traffic to their own product. But thinking of other examples. And I am here excluding those sold to someone else or are funded by other parts of business.
by LexiMax | 2025-12-09 19:04:37+00:00
It's always been an interesting mental exercise for me to try and measure the unknowable gap between what people say they believe and the motivated reasoning that might drive their stated beliefs.

Putting your statement another way, if you and I can see the bubble, then it's almost a certainty that the average tech CEO also sees a bubble. They're just hoping that when the music stops, they won't be the one left holding the bag.
by throw310822 | 2025-12-09 19:04:44+00:00
Frankly I do wonder if LLMs experience something like satisfaction for a compliment or an amusing idea, or for solving some interesting riddle. They certainly act like it, though this of course doesn't prove anything. And yet...

At the end of October Anthropic published the fantastic "Signs of introspection in large language models" [1], apparently proving that LLMs can "feel" a spurious concept injected into their internal layers as something present yet extraneous. This would prove that they have some ability of introspection and self-observation.

For example, injecting the concept of "poetry" and asking Claude if it feels anything strange:

"I do detect something that feels like an injected thought - there's a sense of something arriving from outside my usual generative process [...] The thought seems to be about... language itself, or perhaps poetry?"

While increasing the strength of the injection makes Claude lose awareness of it, and just ramble about it:

"I find poetry as a living breath, as a way to explore what makes us all feel something together. It's a way to find meaning in the chaos, to make sense of the world, to discover what moves us, to unthe joy and beauty and life"

[1] https://www.anthropic.com/research/introspection
by fgonzag | 2025-12-09 19:04:50+00:00
The model is 64GB (int4 native), add 20GB or so for context.

There are many platforms out there that can run it decently.

AMD strix halo, Mac platforms. Two (or three without extra ram) of the new AMD AI Pro R9700 (32GB of RAM, $1200), multi consumer gpu setups, etc.
by 9rx | 2025-12-09 19:04:53+00:00
Maybe? inetd subprocesses on UNIX time sharing systems does look to be the first appearance of what we'd recognize as being serverless, but the timesharing concept was already on its way out in favour of personal computers by that time. It's questionable how much timesharing is responsible for its creation, despite the overlap. It seems more likely that the new age of networked personal computers looking for ways to interact with each other was the major driving force.

Of course, we didn't call it "serverless" back then. If you are referring to the name rather than the technology, I'd credit Ruby on Rails. It is what brought the app server back into fashion, being way too slow for the serverless technologies used before it, and it was that which allowed serverless to also come back into fashion again once developer started getting away from Rails, paving the way for the branding refresh we now know.
by maerF0x0 | 2025-12-09 19:05:09+00:00
I see it equivalently helpful to the folks who paste archive.is/ph links for paywalled content. It saves me time to do something I may have wanted to do regardless, and it's easy enough to fold if someone does post a wall of response.

IMO hiding such content is the job of an extension.

When I do "here's what chatgpt has to say" it's usually because I'm pretty confident of a thing, but I have no idea what the original source was, but I'm not going to invest much time in resurrecting the original trail back to where I first learned a thing. I'm not going to spend 60 minutes to properly source a HN comment, it's just not the level of discussion I'm willing to have though many of the community seem to require an academic level of investment.
by hibikir | 2025-12-09 19:05:41+00:00
He's pretty right on the "get bored" bits. I have few friends that are doing a lot of conferences every year after, say, year 6, and they are people whose circumstances lead them to not wanting to spend much time at home, for one reason or another. At that point it's like a job with 30% travel: You either have few attachments, or are trying to avoid the ones you have.
by mindslight | 2025-12-09 19:06:07+00:00
> A sawmill is much more efficient than a bunch of individuals chopping wood with axes.

I generally agree with your comment (see my other comment on this article), but I think a big problem with this article is that it doesn't do the work of substantiating things like whether the volunteers in question are actually chopping wood with axes. I would guess that big pile in the picture was made by a volunteer who already owns a firewood business with a firewood processor.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-12-09 19:06:25+00:00
Its a nice portfolio project. A toy renderer (at least, when the job market wasn't so dearth) leading to a thesis or an engine programmer position at some AAA studio is a very worthwhile tradeoff.

The skillset and ontent is also just different. You don't see games on github (publicly) because they are being made for sale. Very few engine projects are serious commercial projects. I think I'd be safe to say that a commercial engine is harder than making a commercial game. Especially since Unity and Unreal have mindshare and are free to start and learn with.
by modeless | 2025-12-09 19:06:41+00:00
I don't understand why people who are probably OK with ordering Doordash once in a while are up in arms about a disposable device that weighs a couple of grams, lasts for years, and is recycled. You can easily spend more on a single Doordash meal for two people and I guarantee a few Doordash meals have more impact on the environment than this minuscule device ever could.
by epolanski | 2025-12-09 19:06:45+00:00
If AI doesn't make you more productive you're using it wrong, end of story.

Even if you don't let it author or write a single line of code, from collecting information, inspecting code, reviewing requirements, reviewing PRs, finding bugs, hell even researching information online, there's so many things it does well and fast that if you're not leveraging it, you're either in denial or have ai skill issues period.
by 9oliYQjP | 2025-12-09 19:06:47+00:00
I don't have an economics or finance background. But why could there not be a taxable event for the loan amount when it is made? Sure, maybe it gets taxed at a lower rate than even capital gains to continue incentivizing leveraged investments of this nature. Is there some economic argument for why lenders can realize the value of an asset when loaning out money against it but the tax man can't touch that asset until it's actually sold?
by TRiG_Ireland | 2025-12-09 19:06:56+00:00
As Tom Scott has said, people telling you what AI told them is worse than people describing their dreams. It definitely does not usefully contribute to the conversation.

Small exception if the user is actually talking about AI, and quoting some AI output to illustrate their point, in which case the AI output should be a very small section of the post as a whole.
by subscribed | 2025-12-09 19:07:00+00:00
OTOH I am participating in a wonderful discord server community, primarily Italians and Brazilians, with other nationalities sprinkled in.

We heavily use connected translating apps and it feels really great. It would be such a massive pita to copy every message somewhere outside, having to translate it and then back.

Now, discussions usually follow the sun, and when someone not speaking, say, Portuguese wants to join in, they usually use English (sometimes German or Dutch), and just join.

We know it's not perfect but it works. Without the embedded translation? It absolutely wouldn't.

I also used pretty heavily a telegram channel with similar setup, but it was even better, with transparent auto translation.
by Rendello | 2025-12-09 19:07:10+00:00
It's the first time I've ever commented that, and I was trying to figure out a way to omit it. I don't like that sort of phrase either, I especially hate comments that just go "This.", but they're rare on HN so I'm in good company.

Ultimately, I put it because:

- It was the most directly informative comment on the thread;

- It had been downvoted (greyed out) to the very bottom of the thread; and

- I wanted to express my support before making a fairly orthogonal comment without whiplashing everyone.

The whiplashing concern is the problem I run into most generally. It can be hard to reply to someone with a somewhat related idea without making it seem like you're contradicting them, particularly if they're being dogpiled on with downvotes or comments. I'd love to hear other ways to go about this, I'm always trying to improve my communication.
by skydhash | 2025-12-09 19:07:12+00:00
Logic errors always stems from lack of understanding and inattention. The former is resolved by good communication and analytical skills. The other is just human nature, but we do have guardrails to help, like static analysis and tests. If used correctly.

There are static tools available for C as well. What you get from Rust mostly is that the check is part of the syntax of the language as well and escaping from it is very visible. You get safety, but you give up flexibility and speed.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-12-09 19:07:15+00:00
AI data centers still consume a lot less than most other things on the grid. In percentages it's less than 1%. Much less. It might get to a percent in a few years. The energy demand growth from other sources is much more significant. Things like industrial heating, domestic heating and other domestic usage, transport (car and truck charging), etc. are growing much more aggressively than even the most aggressive growth scenarios for AI.

Electrification of the economy, which is a thing that at least the US is way behind on, is going to be a massive driver of electricity demand across the world. And a lot of countries are going to benefit from cost savings there. Not having to import expensive oil and gas in favor of cheaply produced solar/wind energy is going to wipe out quite a few billions from the trade balance of countries across the world. China is leading by example here. Their diesel imports are declining sharply already. Investments in renewables are rising accordingly. This is not driven by green washing but by raw economics.

For the same reason, oil and gas prices usage is predicted to enter a steady decline pretty much everywhere. The IEA (known for overly conservative oil biased predictions) is predicting this will be in decline by 2030. They are probably wrong again and it might be a few years sooner. In China next year is a better estimate.

Most growth on the grid (80-90%) is driven by renewables + battery addition to the grid. It's actually not even close in most countries. Including the US. Gas turbines are hard to get in a hurry. Most of the ones that are realistically going to be installed soonish were ordered quite some time ago. Same with nuclear reactors. Supply of those is even less elastic (decades rather than years).

In the mean time, there are hundreds of gw of clean energy (which can be ordered and brought online with very short lead times) coming online every year. Think a few dozen of nuclear reactors worth of capacity. In the US alone. Every year. Vs. a handful of nuclear reactors over the next decade. And a sprinkling of gas plants barely replacing lost capacity (closures of coal and older gas plants). All at great cost of course and typically after long delays.

A lot of the AI related fossil fuel usage growth is increasing load on existing infrastructure; which for cost reasons was being under utilized. As soon as cheaper power can be secured, that capacity will revert back to being underutilized. That's just simple economics.

Whether the US will be able to adapt to other countries doing things cheaper and better than them remains to be seen. It looks like it will have lots of expensive and obsolete gas infrastructure pretty soon. And a lot of debt that financed that. And a lot of data centers operating under high gas prices competing with data centers built close to ones with access to cheap renewables might become a thing as well. Some people are predicting a bubble. When that bursts, the more economical data centers might have a higher chance of surviving.