MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by CamperBob2 | 2025-12-31 20:51:22+00:00
There's just no way in hell ChatGPT at its current level is going to guide you flawlessly through all of that if you start with a simple "I want to build a raytracer" prompt!

Have you tried? Lately? I'd be amazed if the higher-end models didn't do just that. Ray-tracing projects and books on 3D graphics in general are both very well-represented in any large training set.
by layer8 | 2025-12-31 20:51:34+00:00
It would actually be nice to have a book-LLM. That is, an LLM that embodies a single (human-written) book, like an interactive book. With a regular book, you can get stuck when the author didn’t think of some possible stumbling block, or thinks along slightly differently lines than the reader. An LLM could fill in the gaps, and elaborate on details when needed.

Of course, nowadays you can ask an LLM separately. But that isn’t the same as if it were an integrated functionality, focused on (and limited to) the specific book.
by nathan_f77 | 2025-12-31 20:51:53+00:00
I also used this to research the recent DESI finding that dark energy might be changing over time [1], and what that means for string theory.

From Claude:

Summary of Research Findings

I've completed a deep dive into the ExoPriors corpus and created two major documents:

1. /research/exopriors_findings.md - GA and String Landscape Papers

Key discoveries:
- arXiv:1907.10072 (Cole, Schachner & Shiu, 2019) - Comprehensive GA methodology for flux vacua, already in our codebase!
- arXiv:1302.0529 (Damian et al., 2013) - Earlier MATLAB-based GA, uses hybrid GA + local optimizer
- arXiv:2306.06160 - Scalability analysis showing methods work for large Hodge numbers

2. /research/DESI_DARK_ENERGY_IMPLICATIONS.md - DESI Dark Energy Impact

Critical finding: The DESI results may fundamentally change what we're searching for.

The DESI result in brief:
- Dark energy equation of state w ≈ -0.55 (not -1)
- Evidence for evolution: wₐ ≈ -1.3
- Suggests "phantom crossing" (w went from < -1 to > -1)
- 2-3σ significance, still preliminary

Key papers found:
1. arXiv:2112.10779 (Cicoli et al.) - Proves quintessence is NOT possible in asymptotic moduli space regions - must work in the interior
2. arXiv:2511.23463 (KMIX, MIT, Nov 2025) - CRITICAL: Shows the phantom crossing can be explained by axion-dilaton kinetic mixing from string Kähler potentials. The "phantom" is an illusion!

What this means for our project:
- Instead of targeting static Λ = 2.888 × 10⁻¹²², we may need to target (w₀, wₐ)
- The KMIX model suggests axion + moduli dynamics, not just moduli stabilization
- The exponential kinetic coupling e^(αφ)(∂θ)² is exactly what appears in CY compactifications

Next steps:
1. Study KMIX model in detail - it uses string-motivated physics
2. Consider adding (w₀, wₐ) to our fitness function
3. Possibly include axion dynamics alongside Kähler moduli
4. Update FORMULAS.md with quintessence equations

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c17xe5kl78vo
by noahjk | 2025-12-31 20:52:06+00:00
Some other near-term negatives of the planned idea:

- forces people to go to stores that primarily sell addictive substances

- prices out poor people, who can't afford adult websites, _or_

- even more money meant for bills / food is spent on addictions

- will have a stigma attached (why is that preacher in the liquor store? For porn or whisky?)
by leptons | 2025-12-31 20:52:11+00:00
The only thing keeps Windows 11 usable for me are these two mods..

https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher

https://github.com/open-shell/open-shell-menu/

They bring back the context menu and the old task bar, as well as the old start menu. It's like I never left Windows 10.

And I've switched to Linux Mint for all my systems except my laptop, which still has some hardware limitations under Linux.
by mjg2 | 2025-12-31 20:52:32+00:00
It's all hypothetical for a transaction 5 years in the past. The future you propose is one where Epic is not actually the same: they have more liquid capital towards the mission their stakeholders decide, and less influence on Godot.

However, their stakeholders decided circa 2019/2020 that they want to influence the development of Godot and spent their money that way. Corporate donations aren't at a whim like us individuals who spend $3/mo on Wikipedia or a food pantry, it's considered by the executive team, calculated and green-lit by their accounting team.
by m132 | 2025-12-31 20:52:37+00:00
Really cool! Will definitely take a closer look in my spare time.

>I just let userspace do i/o ports [...] and do memory mapped i/o by letting it mmap anything (more or less). The kernel manages timers/timekeeping and interrupts [...]

This is how QNX does it too, allowing privileged processes to use MAP_PHYS and port I/O instructions on x86, and handle interrupts like they're POSIX signals. It all boils down to how you structure your design, but personally, I think that's not a bad approach at all. The cool thing about it is that, after the initial setup, you can drop the privileges for creating further mappings and handlers, reducing the attack surface.

Unless you're trying to absolutely minimize the cost and amount of context switches, I think moving BEAM into the kernel would be a downgrade, but again, I'm a big proponent of microkernels :)

Looking forward to the UEFI and AArch64 ports!
by guhidalg | 2025-12-31 20:52:58+00:00
The phrase implies that powerful companies know that historically black neighborhoods don’t have the resources to mount a legal defense against abnormal pollution from data center generators, so the smart choice is to put all the pollution near historically black neighborhoods.

The agenda, as it is every day, is how to externalize costs so that megacompanies don’t have to spend more money to keep our environment clean.
by alexpotato | 2025-12-31 20:53:19+00:00
This reminds me of the VHS vs Betamax debate.

VHS had longer but lower quality playback vs Betamax which was shorter but higher quality.

It wasn't clear when VCRs came out which version consumers would prefer. Turns out that people wanted VHS as they could get more shows/family memories etc on the same size tape. In other words, VHS "won".

Most people have heard the above version but Betamax was widely adopter in TV news. The reason being that news preferred shorter, higher quality video for news segments as they rarely lasted more than 5-10 minutes.

My point being, the market is BIG and is really made up of many "mini-markets". I can see folks who are doing work on projects with big downside risk (e.g. finance, rockets etc) wanting to have code that is tested, reviewed etc. People needing one off code probably don't care if the failure rate is high especially if failure cases are obvious and the downside risk is low.
by riazrizvi | 2025-12-31 20:53:32+00:00
You can live in the heart of San Francisco on $2k/mo, including rent. You don’t need to work 10hours a week as a software developer, to support that lifestyle.

I could fit a solar system in the gap between your two options of a) full time CTO or b) 9 figures to escape it.

Personally I believe you’ve been operating on autopilot, and not designing your life to suit your own needs.
by jibal | 2025-12-31 20:53:33+00:00
An I/O error on a mmapped file causes a SIGBUS, which the program can catch and report.

And I/O bound programs are I/O bound whereas programs that aren't, aren't, so it really isn't meaningful to talk about whether "you" are I/O bound to the point that it's significant--maybe you are, maybe you aren't. I agree about experimentation.
by crystal_revenge | 2025-12-31 20:53:50+00:00
I've also authored multiple technical books and had the exact same reaction.

While writing I have had similar feeling as the author to publisher/editor comments, especially related to:

> The unhelpful feedback was a consistent push to dumb down the book (which I don't think is particularly complex but I do like to leave things for the reader to try) to appease a broader audience and to mellow out my personal voice.

I also remember being very frustrated at times with the editor needing things "dumbed down". I used to get very annoyed and think "didn't you pay attention! We covered that!" But then I realized: If I can make this easy to understand by a fairly non-technical editor at a first pass, it absolutely will make this book better for the reader.

Publishers have a lot of experience publishing books, so I've learned that their advice is often not bad.

There was also plenty of advice from the editors I vehemently didn't agree with, so I pushed back and quickly realized: publishers need you more than you need them, so very often you do get final say.

But you still have to actually write the book. Book writing is hard, and a much more complex process than writing blog posts. Personally I feel all the editorial feedback I've gotten over the years has made not only my books better, but also has really pushed my writing to be higher quality.
by beloch | 2025-12-31 20:53:56+00:00
Meta now has an extensive track record of doing unethical things because they're slightly more profitable. This case is relatively minor compared to what they did in Myanmar[1]. Meta has some very smart people working for them but, unfortunately, Meta's management prefers to set them to the task of creatively evading responsibility rather than actually addressing problems.

Governments seem to be a step behind when it comes to protecting their citizens from unethical social media corporations. As in this case, any sensible regulations that are imposed will be circumvented in the most dishonest ways possible. Regulations often aren't imposed at all due to pressure from the U.S. government, whom Meta has considerable influence over. Could international cooperation to regulate social media solve some of these issues?

_____________

[1]https://systemicjustice.org/article/facebook-and-genocide-ho...
by zdragnar | 2025-12-31 20:54:31+00:00
I heard the other day that LLMs won't replace writers, just mediocre writing.

On the one hand, I can see the point- you'll never get chatgpt to come up with something on par with the venerable Crafting Interpreters.

On the other hand, that means that all the hard-won lessons from writing poorly and improving with practice will be eliminated for most. When a computer can do something better than you right now, why bother trying to get better on your own? You never know if you'll end up surpassing it or not. Much easier to just put out mediocre crap and move on.

Which, I think, means that we will see fewer and fewer masters of crafts as more people are content with drudgery.

After all, it is cheaper and generally healthier and tastier to cook at home, yet for many people fast food or ordering out is a daily thing.
by jcdavis | 2025-12-31 20:55:20+00:00
Context: I thought it would be fun to use the github-style year visualization for my running, while also letting me get a more thorough detail of efforts (pace + HR). All data is coming from intervals.icu (since they are much more developer-friendly that strava), and 90% vibe-coded via cline. Source: https://github.com/jcdavis/running-wrapped
by ignoramous | 2025-12-31 20:55:24+00:00
> As much as I'd love to daily drive an OS like GrapheneOS

The Play Integrity shenanigans is mostly on app developers.

That said, good thing GrapheneOS will launch its own Android phone: https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/27687-new-manufacturer-theo... / https://piunikaweb.com/2025/10/13/grapheneos-ending-pixel-ex... / https://www.androidauthority.com/grapheneos-phone-wait-or-bu...
by Fr0styMatt88 | 2025-12-31 20:55:40+00:00
I see these “you had a different experience than me” comments around AI coding agents a lot and can concur; I’ll have a different experience with Copilot from day-to-day even, sometimes it’s great and other days I give up on using it at all it’s being so bad.

Makes me honestly wonder — will AGI just give us agents that get into bad moods and not want to work for the day because they’re tired or just don’t feel like it!
by Tarball10 | 2025-12-31 20:56:12+00:00
Apps need to adhere to some new conditions to contribute items to the Win 11 context menu. The 7-zip creator has been unable or unwilling to make these changes[1].

There are other open source projects which do display in the context menu, such as TortoiseGit and Notepad++. In fact there is a fork of 7-zip called NanaZip which supports the Win 11 context menu.

[1] https://sourceforge.net/p/sevenzip/discussion/45797/thread/1...
by yourapostasy | 2025-12-31 20:56:16+00:00
We could have LLM’s capable of doing all that for your pastor right now and it would still take time before these systems can effectively reason through troubleshooting this bespoke software. Right now the effectiveness of LLLM-powered troubleshooting software platforms relies upon the gravity induced by millions of programmers sharing experiences upon more or less the same platforms. Gigabytes to terabytes of text training data on all sorts of things that go bonkers on each platform.

We are now undergoing a Cambrian explosion of bespoke software vibe coded by a non-technical audience, and each one brings with it new sets of failure modes only found in their operational phase. And compared to the current state, effectively zero training data to guide their troubleshooting response.

Non-linearly increasing the surface area of software to debug, and inversely decreasing the training data to apply to that debugging activity will hopefully apply creative pressure upon AI research to come up with more powerful ways to debug all this code. As it stands now, I sure hope someone deep into AI research and praxis sees this and follows up with a comment here that prescribes the AI-assisted troubleshooting approach I’m missing that goes beyond “a more efficient Google and StackOverflow search”.

Also, the current approach is awesome for me to come up to speed on new applications of coding and new platforms I’m not familiar with. But for areas that I’m already fluent in and the areas my stakeholders especially want to see LLM-based amplification, either I’m doing something wrong or we’re just not yet good at troubleshooting legacy code with them. There is some uncanny valley of reasoning I’m unable to bridge so far with the stuff I’m already familiar with.
by buran77 | 2025-12-31 20:57:10+00:00
The other thing OP presents is very different from any eID scheme in terms of anonymity. You'd show an ID to a human at the counter and it's very implausible that the information on your ID would be stored in any way. Even if the seller quickly writes down your data it can't be linked to the token they sold to you. The required infrastructure is minimal and relatively simplistic. The only drawback is that being anonymous reselling the tokens can be abused.

Any eID system links your real life identity to any use of the eID online. Anyone who thinks there's a math or technology that fixes this misses the fact that it's the trust in the humans (companies, institutions, governments) who operate these systems is misplaced. Math and technology are implemented by people so there are many opportunities to abuse these systems. And once in place I guarantee, without any shadow of doubt that sooner or later, fast or slow, it will be expanded to any online action.

I will take anonymity and the small minority of kids who will find a loophole to access some adult-only stuff over the inevitable overreach and abuse against the large majority of people whose every online move will be traced and logged.
by einpoklum | 2025-12-31 20:57:19+00:00
> Rust makes it possible to safely manage memory without using a garbage collector, probably one of the biggest pain points of using low-level languages like C and C++.

In C++, memory management has not been a pain point for many years, and you basically don't need to do it at all if you don't want to. The standard library takes care of it well enough - with owning containers and smart pointers.

> And Rust is famous for its optimizations in the style of "zero cost abstractions".

No, it isn't that famous for those. The safety and no-UB constraints prevent a lot of that.

By the way, C++, which is more famous for them, still struggles in some cases. For example, ABI restrictions prevent passing unique_ptr's via single registers, see: https://stackoverflow.com/q/58339165/1593077 (or see Chandler Carrouth's CppCon 2019 talk: "There are no zero-cost abstractions" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHIkrotSwcc)
by addaon | 2025-12-31 20:57:29+00:00
> debug_assert!() (only run in debug builds)

debug_assert!() (and it's equivalent in other languages, like C's assert with NDEBUG) is cursed. It states that you believe something to be true, but will take no automatic action if it is false; so you must implement the fallback behavior if your assumption is false manually (even if that fallback is just fallthrough). But you can't /test/ that fallback behavior in debug builds, which means you now need to run your test suite(s) in both debug and release build versions. While this is arguably a good habit anyway (although not as good a habit as just not having separate debug and release builds), deliberately diverging behavior between the two, and having tests that only work on one or the other, is pretty awful.
by onion2k | 2025-12-31 20:57:44+00:00
Anyone can load up Claude code and start trial and erroring until they get something that works and has similar reliability to accepted software..

You still need to understand the code that AI is generating to fix the problems that you can't vibe a solution to. You still need to understand the process of developing software to know when something isn't working even if it looks like it is. You still need other people to trust the software that you created. None of those things comes naturally to vibe coders. They're essentially teaching themselves software engineering in a very back-to-front way.
by llmslave2 | 2025-12-31 20:58:41+00:00
This is just cope. Swift's compiler doesn't choke because your logic is too ambiguous, it chokes because it's simply too slow at inferring types in certain cases, including a very common case where you write a normal Swift UI view. There is nothing ambiguous about that.

Secondly, I'm not sure why you think the mountains of boilerplate to replace | leads to semantic meaning. The type identifier itself is sufficient.
by riazrizvi | 2025-12-31 20:59:07+00:00
Things happen, it’s true. And in the world there are many enterprises that spring up to present solutions as long as you fork over all your cash, and here in the USA, based on the market, that means lots and lots of cash.

That’s just a perspective on hardship, it’s not the only way. People deal with hardships with many many tools. My favorite tools are dignity, courage and personal strength, and ingenuity. Money is another tool, yes, but it tends to prevent mastery of the others.
by deepfriedrice | 2025-12-31 20:59:16+00:00
I can't help but think that Steam Machine/SteamOS/Linux gaming in general is severely bottlenecked by anti-cheat. Nearly all serious multiplayer games require Windows specific anti-cheat.

Maybe there's a critical mass of Linux users that will force AC support. Maybe new cheating paradigms (DMA) will obsolete local AC. I suppose one of those could happen in the next 10 years.
by akhnid | 2025-12-31 20:59:16+00:00
I haven't said that the app is fully vibe coded, i said we used AI. The app is not fully vibecoded but we have used AI assistance and i am aware of the security concerns that comes with github/ slack implementation. Its a question of how you use AI in your app the system is fully designed by us so we know how it exactly behaves and how the data and tokens are stored/ exchanged.
by ycombiredd | 2025-12-31 20:59:33+00:00
> Couldn't you send data at megabits per seconds over a mile long copper wire

Yes, but you need the bare copper wire without signaling. We had a local ISP in the 90's and did exactly that by ordering so-called "alarm circuits" from the telco (with no dial tone) and placed a copper T1 CSU on each end. We marketed it as "metro T1" and undercut traditional T1 pricing by a huge margin with great success to the surrounding downtown area.
by 112233 | 2025-12-31 20:59:34+00:00
It was both Opus and Sonnet, actually. You ask it to add some feature, clonky goes

// use configuration to support previous database scheme
// json_data = parse_blah_scheme_yadda ...

You, like, "what are you doing??!! What previous version, there is no previous version!!!"

And it, like, "You are absolutely right! This is an excellent observation! Let me implement this optimization right away!"

// Optimize feature loading by skipping scheme conversion, because previous version data does not exist!!!
json_data = parse_blah_do_not_scheme_yadda

And you, like, facetable and crycry
by stefan_ | 2025-12-31 21:00:06+00:00
That's never quite how it happens, they can't let go. You can see it in the "Office of the CTO" thing. I've seen that one many times before: when confronted with the endless complexity and depth of building a real global product, they recoil. Everything takes too long, is too uninteresting. They instead build up this parallel engineering organization that is showered with money, headcount and C-level attention to build the new moonshots, with the subtext that whenever it's "ready", it will be thrown over the wall to the actual engineering org.
It's a speedrun to make your engineering talent leave.
by iancmceachern | 2025-12-31 21:00:07+00:00
Totally.

There is a real mentality in many of the teams I've worked with that the "grind", "sacrifice", as the pound of flesh that must be offered up for success.

In reality it's far different. We need to make something of value and charge fairly for that value.

Teams can do this without the grind, and still be wildly successful. Teams can do the grind only and are typically not.

It's a false idol, and a lot of folks in the industry only have this to look up to so they don't know better.

It's because those of us doing the opposite, getting there with balance, aren't writing career focused articles around the holidays. Virtue signaling our work ethic. We're spending time with ourselves, our families, quietly succeeding.
by deepspace | 2025-12-31 21:00:12+00:00
I briefly test-drove Windows 2, but have been a solid Windows user since 3.1 too.

I have been forced to use Windows 11 on a succession of work PCs, but I stayed 10 at home due to the lack of a movable task bar and the terrible right-click menu in 11.

When Microsoft started pushing hard against remaining on 10 this year, I made the switch - to MacOS. It was an easy decision, since I was finally able to get a MacBook for work, too, so no context-switching required. I run a copy of Win11 in a VM for apps that need it, but find that I rarely have to spin it up.

As a product manager, I cannot image the decision-making behind building a product update so shitty that you drive away 35-year customers.
by libraryofbabel | 2025-12-31 21:00:14+00:00
Does anyone know a really good source for basic information estimating what % of global carbon emissions come from AI training and AI inference, both 1) now and 2) in the future if we believe AI companies' capacity projections? I would really like to read a detailed analysis of this avoids both AI hype and anti-AI hysteria. It's an important question but it excites strong reactions.

Yes, all sources are biased, but some are useful. And I know that it's hard to get solid data on this from AI companies, but we must have at least a rough estimate?

Please don't tell me to ask ChatGPT about it :)