MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rdtsc | 2025-12-14 07:41:56+00:00
> I had the same sense. I can see why people like the shows, but to me there's a subtle arrogance to the rich, white American guy just holding court everywhere he goes and explaining local matters as if he's an expert. The food aspect of his shows was often secondary.

My most memorable moment from the show was when Bourdain visited some poor farmer to see how they were harvesting yuca (or maybe yams, I forgot) and he went into the typical (I am paraphrasing) "oh look, this is the life, so perfect being one with nature, etc...". And the farmer shut him up pretty quickly with something like "How about a trade: you stay here and farm yams in the rain, in the perfect unity with the nature, and I go to live in your apartment in New York?"
by ido | 2025-12-14 07:43:13+00:00
I think it's mostly that you're no longer interested in computer games and as such aren't aware of what's currently available. IMO there has never been a bigger and more varied supply of good games as there are today, in pretty much every genre (my personal taste is mostly for small indie games, not AAA). I started playing computer games in the late 1980s myself and have never stopped.
Journaling and Prompting
by grandimam | 2025-12-14 07:44:12+00:00
I used Notion for several years for journaling, but I found the cognitive cost of switching into its DSL wasn’t worth it for me. Notion is built on blocks, things like databases built on top. Even when I exported my notes to Markdown, it still reflected Notion’s internal data structure instead of giving me something clean and portable.

For example, the inline database ends up as a table with href links to other parts of the document - nice, but not very useful when I want plain text I can actually work with.

Meanwhile, I have been doing a lot of prompting, and Markdown makes more sense for my workflow. It is not a journaling tool but it is simple and widely supported - GitHub, VSCode, etc and it eliminated a lot of the context switching that came with using dedicated note-taking apps.

What I would miss probably is the inline database, and other rich content which I have learned to stop using. But, I have optimized my journalling workflows to a lot of my prompting techniques. I use regular tables and split documents more deliberately. I reference them across journals when needed, kind of like having dedicated prompts for each part of a workflow.

I use the a lot of the prompting techniques in journalling as well - instead of creating inline database, I use the regular tables (more flattened and un-linked), and started splitting documents more, and referencing them in my journals.

I also sometimes put YAML frontmatter at the top for metadata and descriptions. That way, if I ever want to run an LLM over my journals - for summarizing the year or building a semantic search - I am already set up. (Might even turn that into a feature for https://gpt.qalam.dev)

I have realised the tool must matter less than how I structure my thoughts.
by phrasecode | 2025-12-14 07:45:36+00:00
Great questions — happy to clarify how deployment and lifecycle work today.

Let me begin by answering: what exactly is this engine? It's simply a computation + cache layer that lives in the same process as the calling code, not a server on its own.

Think of a LinkedQL instance (new PGClient()) and its concept of a "Live Query" engine as simply a query client (e.g. new pg.Client()) with an in-memory compute + cache layer.

---

1. Deployment model (current state)

The Live Query engine runs as part of your application process — the same place you’d normally run a Postgres/MySQL client.

For Postgres, yes: it uses one logical replication slot per LinkedQL engine instance. The live query engine instantiates on top of that slot and uses internal "windows" to dedupe overlapping queries, so 500 queries that are only variations of "SELECT * FROM users" still map to one main window; and 500 of such "windows" still run over the same replication slot.

The concept of query windows and the LinkedQL inheritance model is fully covered here: https://linked-ql.netlify.app/engineering/realtime-engine

---

2. Do all live queries “live” on one machine?

As hinted at above, yes; each LinkedQL instance (new PGClient()) runs on the same machine as the running app (just as you'd have it with new pg.Client()) – and maps to a single Live Query engine under the hood.

That engine uses a single replication slot. You specify the slot name like: new PGClient({ ..., walSlotName: 'custom_slot_name' }); // default is: "linkedql_default_slot" – as per https://linked-ql.netlify.app/docs/setup#postgresql A second LinkedQL instance would require another slot name: new PGClient({ ..., walSlotName: 'custom_slot_name_2' });

We’re working toward multi-instance coordination (multiple engines sharing the same replication stream + load balancing live queries). That’s planned, but not started yet.

---

3. Lifecycle of live queries

The Live Query engine runs on-demand and not indefinitely. It begins to exist when at least one client subscribes ({ live: true }) and effectively cleans up and disappears the moment the last subscriber disconnects (result.abort()). Calling client.disconnect() also ends all subscriptions and does clean up.

---

4. Deployments / code changes

Deploying new code doesn’t require “migrating” live queries.

When you restart the application:

• the Live Query starts on a clean slate with the first subscribing query (client.query('...', { live: true })).

• if you have provided a persistent replication slot name (the default being ephemeral), LinkedQL moves the position to the slot's current position and runs from there.

In other words: nothing persists across deploys; everything starts clean as your app starts.

---

5. Diagram / docs

A deployment diagram is a good idea — I’ll add one to the docs.

---

Well, I hope that helps — and no worries about the questions. This space is hard, and happy to explain anything in more detail.
by potatoman22 | 2025-12-14 07:46:36+00:00
It's technically deterministic, but it feels nondeterministic in chatbots since tokens are randomly sampled (temp > 0) and input is varied. Using the right prompt makes the model perform better on average, so it's not completely dumb.

I like task vectors and soft prompts because I think they show how prompt engineering is cool and useful.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2310.15916

https://huggingface.co/docs/peft/conceptual_guides/prompting
by shekhargulati | 2025-12-14 07:46:43+00:00
I also started building similar tools in early 2025 and have built around 80 of them so far: https://tools.o14.ai/. Recently, I built a data viewer app (https://tools.o14.ai/excel-qa-review.html) where I can upload an Excel or CSV file containing chat queries and answers for quick manual review.

Reviewing data in Excel is painful, especially when answers are in HTML or Markdown, because you don’t get proper rendering. Building small, custom tools that reduce the friction of reviewing data makes life much easier and more pleasant. These days, I use Claude Code for Web to build most of these apps, and they are deployed on Vercel.
by BoxOfRain | 2025-12-14 07:46:49+00:00
> If it is possible, maybe it is what some people supposedly feel as "auras"

For what it's worth, I have a disorder that causes me to see "auras" around people quite often. The nature of the disorder is that my brain can't filter out its own sensory noise properly, giving rise to a lot of visual artefacts that non-disordered brains filter out. These range from 'TV static' to stuff that's not a million miles away from diffusion model artefacts, but the auras around people I see pretty much all the time especially against plain backgrounds. It's not very well-known or studied but fMRI studies have recently implicated the same serotonin receptor psychedelics target, and it's also linked to migraine.

I think this disorder being more prevalent than expected would be a good explanation for auras. It was once thought to be very rare, but many people who have it aren't actually affected enough to seek out a diagnosis. It wouldn't be an unreasonable source for images like auras, saints' haloes, and other things like that since they're just an ordinary part of vision for me. I also think it somewhat vindicates Aldous Huxley's thoughts on the subject.

I really like the idea of electrical fields being somehow important for consciousness, and it's not something I'd rule out off the bat. I just think that disorders of perception are a better explanation for auras and similar phenomena.
by b112 | 2025-12-14 07:47:40+00:00
When I tried (and returned) one of their monitors, it was absolutely horrific with ghosting. This was perhaps 5 years ago.

There was no manual, and it had a closed source application to time or force refresh. Of course, being closed source it wouldn't work on a Pi (arm64), nor did I feel comfortable about unknown code, or it working in a few years on a newer version of Linux.

It was all exceptionally poorly done. Amazon says it was a Dasung E-Ink Paperlike 3 HD Front-Light and Touch 13.3" Monitor.

If the app had been OSS, or it had an open API via the cable, I could have scripted an auto-refresh upon scrolling in vi or some such. Or just hacked into something seeing change scope under X. Point is, I could have made it work for me.

The default modes were terrible.

I hope things are better, but no way will I install some weird closed source client.

I have a fairly new tablet, and it handles refresh incredibly well, but I'm sure that's with strong integration into the display stack. Which is fine, of course, but that doesn't help me with coding.

EDIT: one of the things which makes some of these e-ink tablets incredible for refresh, is partial, very well done sectional refresh. So if a small part of the screen changes, BAM!, it's refreshed instantly for ghosting.

Again, I suspect this is tied into the display stack. The monitors I've seen don't seem anywhere as good. I'd love to to be wrong on newer models.
by dansjots | 2025-12-14 07:48:03+00:00
What an incredible article. More than its impressive documented scope and detail, I love it foremost for conveying what the zeitgeist felt at each point in history. This human element is something usually only passed on by oral tradition and very difficult to capture in cold, academic settings.

It’s fashionable to dunk on “how did all this cloud cruft become the norm”, but seeing a continuous line in history of how circumstance developed upon one another, where each link is individually the most rational decision at their given context, makes them an understandable misfortune of human history.
by bostik | 2025-12-14 07:48:27+00:00
There's a corollary to that question: why would China choose not to block Mullvad? We know every large nation with a capable online force maintains a fleet of ORBs, so maybe they consider Mullvad more useful for them as a functioning system?

Some of their own contractors may well depend on Mullvad. Perhaps as long as the overall "civilian" volume and user count remains acceptably low, the cost-benefit estimate may well be in favour of letting it slip by. (And for the civilians that do use a working variant, subject their connections to fine-grained traffic analysis.)
by simonw | 2025-12-14 07:49:59+00:00
Your insistence that LLMs are not useful tools is difficult for me to empathize with as someone who has been using them successfully as useful tools for several years - and sharing in great detail how I am using them.

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/10/html-tools/ is the 37th post in my series about this: https://simonwillison.net/series/using-llms/

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/11/using-llms-for-code/ is probably still my most useful of those.

I know you absolutely hate being told you're holding them wrong... but you're holding them wrong.

They're not nearly as unpredictable as you appear to think they are.

One of us is misleading people here, and I don't think it's me.
by Apocryphon | 2025-12-14 07:50:10+00:00
> All games involve some kind of exploration, but I’m talking about something like Myst, the long-ago graphic adventures by LucasArts and Interplay, where the whole central mechanic of the game was basically “click on everything everywhere.” Today, those games can feel hilariously primitive, and they were probably always pretty boring for the vast majority of people who didn’t start playing videogames until they got an iPhone. But there’s a serenity to Myst that you can’t really find in any major videogame today. It’s videogame Tarkovsky, really: The whole point of the game is experiencing the quiet, looking at everything. So Myst is boring, but only in the way Tarkovsky and Russian novels are boring. (The problem isn’t that they’re slow. The problem is that the world has made you too fast.)

- Darren Franich, "Metal Gear Solid: The strangest great videogame franchise"

https://ew.com/article/2015/09/04/metal-gear-solid-strangest...
by frm88 | 2025-12-14 07:50:16+00:00
I'm certainly in the minority on this site, but I love that they offer noai.duckduckgo.com - I'm really, really tired of AI everywhere. It wouldn't be so bad, if the results were accurate (no idea about duck.ai, since I avoid it) and didn't take up a solid third of screen real estate. Until AI results get vastly better and stop hallucinating, I will suppress them if I can. Please keep this feature.
by RobotToaster | 2025-12-14 07:50:19+00:00
Reminds me of a study I read once on binaural beats[0], that found the effect disappeared when they used pneumatic (non-magnetic) headphones.

[0]the theory that playing a different tone in each ear, that when superpositioned by the brain to produce a low frequency, would entrain the brainwave frequency to the modulated frequency.
by PunchyHamster | 2025-12-14 07:50:20+00:00
> There's not enough information to come to a conclusion as to what the 503s originated from.

It's the MS way. I remember writing some code for MS graph and wondering why the hell it isn't working, I'm doing near same thing that doc example did. Nonsense generic error message. Left for the day, ran code next morning, everything works fine.

No message saying "hey the thing behind it is down", just error that was generic enough that it could be my inputs being wrong.
by samdoesnothing | 2025-12-14 07:50:44+00:00
There are some obvious tells like the headings ("Markdown is nice for LLMs. That’s not the point", "What Lee actually built (spoiler: a CMS)"), the dramatic full stops ("\nThis works until it doesn't.\n"), etc. It's difficult to describe because it's sort of a gut feeling you have pattern matching what you get from your own LLM usage.

It sort of reminds me of those marketing sites I used to see selling a product, where it's a bunch of short paragraphs and one-liners, again difficult to articulate but those were ubiquitous like 5 years ago and I can see where AI would have learned it from.

It's also tough because if you're a good writer you can spot it easier and you can edit LLM output to hide it, but then you probably aren't leaning on LLM's to write for you anyways. But if you aren't a good writer or your English isn't strong you won't pick up on it, and even if you use the AI to just rework your own writing or generate fragments it still leaks through.

Now that I think about it I'm curious if this phenomenon exists in other languages besides English...
by d--b | 2025-12-14 07:51:19+00:00
I have built several small websites in the past that were updated by non tech people.

I have tried, believe me, to make CMS work. I really did. But every time the customer came back with “can I do this or that” and inevitably, it fell in a blind corner of the CMS engine I was trying to use.

In the end, I developped something where the structure of the site matched a folder structure, setup a dropbox auto sync, and let the customers write anything they needed using markdown for content and yaml for metadata.

Sure, it didn’t do a hundredth of what the cms did, but it did what the customers needed. it took me less time to build this than to actually install/understand a cms system.

If I did have AI back then, it would have been even faster for me to build that stuff.

At some point, it just helps you get shit done.
by TheAlchemist | 2025-12-14 07:51:22+00:00
This is pretty exciting. When I first saw Mojo, it was announced as a 'python superset' with C++ performance. This announcement seems somewhat more modest, but still seems like a big step - open sourcing it should be very good for adoption.

Any feedback from people using it already ? Is this the right moment to jump in, or better wait a year or two ?
by PunchyHamster | 2025-12-14 07:52:39+00:00
I remember having same problem with Linux, tried to compensate with Monit but it never just worked quite right.

Systemd might add a bunch of unnecessary complexity in places, but for a sysadmin it's a fucking blessing. Just write one simple file, set binary, user, done, add some limitations and dependencies if you want to be fancy, set auto restart to true and It Just Works.

Can even set some memory limits if you want to be fancy so any memory leak won't get you into too much trouble but just gets the service restarted
by tgv | 2025-12-14 07:53:41+00:00
> It's proven that humans can just barely sense large-scale magnetic fields

It's tentatively proven that humans react to large magnetic fields. The reaction can come from simple interference, without ever being processed as a sense.

But there's so much more bullshit. That an MEG measurement was decoded only means that the brain produces a magnetic field that correlates with the information it is processing. So there's no Faraday cage in our head. Great. But the brain already knows what it is doing. All that information is there, very fast and reliable. Why should it try to decode its much less detailed and very weak magnetic field then? Where are the sensors? MEG needs super-conduction to work, and doesn't work when there's any disturbance. In the institute where I worked, it was forbidden to use carts (for moving equipment or coffee or whatever) on all floors in the corner where the MEG was located when there was an experiment going on, because it would disturb measurements. A few crystals aren't going to overcome those problems.

> The easier-than-expected problem of consciousness

OMFG. There's really no point in reading this.
by dohyeondk | 2025-12-14 07:53:48+00:00
I'm in love with Zed Editor, and I wanted to get the clean PDF doc so I could read it on my iPad.

Zed doesn't provide a PDF version of their docs, so I thought I could just save each page as PDF one by one. Then I realized that their site has some specific CSS styles that make it difficult to save to PDF—sidebars, navigation bars, and TOC containers that clutter the output. So I added some custom CSS to hide those.

Then I realized I needed to do this for many pages. Like, all of them. And I wanted them merged into a single PDF with a proper table of contents that actually works (clickable bookmarks and everything).

So I ended up vibe coding this script.
by epolanski | 2025-12-14 07:54:14+00:00
The abstract of the review is interesting and honestly reflects my (negative) experience with cannabis.

I admit, I really like cannabis, and when I was a 20 year old occasionally smoking with friends at parties it was a "healthier" alternative to getting wasted on alcohol. Share few joins with friends, have fun, laugh a lot.

Then as I got financially independent and I started solo consumption (mostly to get rid of stress) I really started appreciating the cons: lack of energy, disruption of sleep, negative impact of my cognitive abilities, increase in anxiety. I'm glad the study confirms those to be statistically common.

I was very lucky to have a SO who really disliked me smoking and made me realize that I was just doing it to "not think", and it had really 0 positive effects on me. I'm sure I would've quitted eventually anyway, but support and criticism sped up the reality check.

Eventually this is all anecdotal experience, and I'm sure there might be occasional users who can have a mostly positive experience, but the fact that a review points out how statistically common are the negatives and how uncommon are the positives honestly reflects what I've seen on myself and friends.
by scellus | 2025-12-14 07:56:21+00:00
In other words, permanent instructions and context well presented in *.md, planning and review before execution, agentic loops with feedback, and a good model.

You can do this with any agentic harness, just plain prompting and "LLM management skills". I don't have Claude Code at work, but all this applies to Codex and GH Copilot agents as well.

And agreed, Opus 4.5 is next level.
by sitharus | 2025-12-14 07:57:17+00:00
This paper is very much a case of read past the abstract, especially the limitations of the study. As always it’s important for a clinician to explain the risks and current evidence when prescribing, no matter the substance. A lot of medicines have limited evidence, but they still work for some people.

Personally I use prescribed pharmacutical cannabis oils as I have much lower levels of a couple of important enzymes than most people which renders opioids mostly ineffective, even intravenous morphine as I recently found out after surgery. High CBD cannabis oil works, as does paracetamol but that’s way more dangerous.
by integralid | 2025-12-14 07:57:31+00:00
ASan does not make your code memory safe! It is quite good at catching unintentional bugs/oob memory writes in your code, and it is quite reliable (authors claim no false positives), but it has false negatives i.e. won't detect everything. Especially if you're against someone who tries to corrupt your memory intentionally.

ASan works by (simplifying a lot) padding allocations and surrounding them with untouchable "red zone". So with some luck even this can work:

char *a = new char[100]; char *b = new char[1000]; a[500] = 0; // may end up in b
by anovikov | 2025-12-14 07:58:30+00:00
The only real problem about capitalism (and the rise of the right, as well as far left in some countries), is that everyone and their dog can vote.

If voting was limited to property owners that have individual economic agency not being dependent on earned income, like it was in the old days, democracy won't be threatened at all with periodic, normal and unavoidable economic crises, and these crutches supporting capitalism won't be needed.

Just take inflation. It is utterly irrational that inflation causes political upheaval it does. Because it is economically neutral - it's simply a convenient tool for the crooks to manipulate the masses by brewing their anger. If only the economically independent property owners could vote, inflation won't be a concern at all and economy could develop a lot better.
by famouswaffles | 2025-12-14 08:02:25+00:00
I did not even remember you and had to dig to find out what you were on about. Just a heads up, if you've had a previous argument and you want to bring that up later then just speak plainly. Why act like "somebody" is anyone but you?

My response to both of you is the same.

LLMs do depend on previous events, but you say they don't because you've redefined state to include previous events. It's a circular argument. In a Markov chain, state is well defined, not something you can insert any property you want to or redefine as you wish.

It's not my fault neither of you understand what the Markov property is.
by nunobrito | 2025-12-14 08:02:49+00:00
You must be kidding, right? The article you mention is the same as claiming that a car is "secure" because you look at it from the outside and base the audit on their own statements.

That is not a serious review.

There is no way you are supporting +300 people per month, which equates to a minimum of 36 million USD per year without even counting infrastructure expenses, fancier salaries for management and associated costs for business building.

By all means feel free to present more detailed documentation about your expenses and sources of income. I'll wait, will even grab a chair to avoid getting tired after waiting a few more years.

All dodgy.