MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by simonw | 2025-12-26 20:32:56+00:00
I just got a reply about this from AI Village team member Adam Binksmith on Twitter: https://twitter.com/adambinksmith/status/2004647693361283558

Quoted in full:

> Hey, one of the creators of the project here! The village agents haven’t been emailing many people until recently so we haven’t really grappled with what to do about this behaviour until now – for today’s run, we pushed an update to their prompt instructing them not to send unsolicited emails and also messaged them instructions to not do so going forward. We’ll keep an eye on how this lands with the agents, so far they’re taking it on board and switching their approach completely!

> Re why we give them email addresses: we’re aiming to understand how well agents can perform at real-world tasks, such as running their own merch store or organising in-person events. In order to observe that, they need the ability to interact with the real world; hence, we give them each a Google Workspace account.

> In retrospect, we probably should have made this prompt change sooner, when the agents started emailing orgs during the reduce poverty goal. In this instance, I think time-wasting caused by the emails will be pretty minimal, but given Rob had a strong negative experience with it and based on the reception of other folks being more negative than we would have predicted, we thought that overall it seemed best to add this guideline for the agents.

> To expand a bit on why we’re running the village at all:

> Benchmarks are useful, but they often completely miss out on a lot of real-world factors (e.g., long horizon, multiple agents interacting, interfacing with real-world systems in all their complexity, non-nicely-scoped goals, computer use, etc). They also generally don’t give us any understanding of agent proclivities (what they decide to do) when pursuing goals, or when given the freedom to choose their own goal to pursue.

> The village aims to help with these problems, and make it easy for people to dig in and understand in detail what today’s agents are able to do (which I was excited to see you doing in your post!) I think understanding what AI can do, where it’s going, and what that means for the world is very important, as I expect it’ll end up affecting everyone.

> I think observing the agents’ proclivities and approaches to pursuing open-ended goals is generally valuable and important (though this “do random acts of kindness” goal was just a light-hearted goal for the agents over the holidays!)
by holg | 2025-12-26 20:33:24+00:00
Still your most fluent - that says something about how the language shaped thinking. The neglect is real; Autodesk clearly wants everyone on .NET, but there's a lot of institutional knowledge and working code out there that just... works.
Part of why I built this: preservation. If AutoLISP fades from AutoCAD entirely, at least the workflow can live on in the browser.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-12-26 20:33:33+00:00
One of the best things I read which genuinely has impact (I think) on me is the book, How to win friends and influence people.

It fundamentally changed how I viewed debates etc. from a young age so I never really sea-lioned that much hopefully.

But if I had to summarize the most useful and on topic quote from the book its that.

"I may be wrong, I usually am"

Lines like this give me a humble nature to fall back on. Even socrates said that the only thing I know is that I know nothing so if he doesn't know nothing, then chances are I can be wrong about things I know too.

Knowing that you can be wrong gives an understanding that both of you are just discussing and not debating and as such the spirit becomes cooperative and not competitive.

Although in all fairness, I should probably try to be a more keen listener but its something that I am working on too, any opinions on how to be a better listener too perhaps?
by Aurornis | 2025-12-26 20:34:43+00:00
In some online drug forums it was believed that if you used SWIM instead of I for all of your posts, the government was powerless to use any of the posts against you. You can still find threads on forums where everyone is saying SWIM did this and SWIM experienced that as if they have discovered a loophole to protect themselves from the law.

It always reminded me of those FTP servers in the early days of the internet that had big warning banners declaring the law enforcement was not allowed to connect.
by Forgeties79 | 2025-12-26 20:34:52+00:00
“He just hates GenAI so everything is virtue signaling/a cudgel” is not an assessment. It’s simply dismissing him outright. If they were talking about the merits, they would actually debate whether or not the environmental concerns and such are valid. You can’t just say “you don’t like X so all critiques of X are not just wrong but also inauthentic by default.”
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-12-26 20:35:21+00:00
> it seems like digital clocks have been replacing analog clocks long before smartphones

Have been but haven’t and likely never will given analog clocks are beautiful.

Reading clocks is simple. Creating a class and educational divide around it is silly. Doing so unintentionally is insane.

(And I assume there are more analog clocks lurking in the shadows.)
by condensedcrab | 2025-12-26 20:35:39+00:00
Not to mention many companies speedrunning systems of strange and/or perverse incentives with AI adoption.

That being said, Welch’s grape juice hasn’t put Napa valley out of business. Human taste is still the subjective filter that LLMs can only imitate, not replace.

I view LLM assisted coding (on the sliding scale from vibe coding to fancy auto complete) similar to how Ableton and other DAW software have empowered good musicians that might not have made it otherwise due to lack of connections or money, but the music industry hasn’t collapsed completely.
by infogulch | 2025-12-26 20:35:41+00:00
I agree we all ought to use available punctuation marks correctly. That said, I am compelled to lodge a formal complaint against quoted text arbitrarily assimilating punctuation from its surrounding context.

Quoted text is a sacred verbatim reproduction of its original source. Good authors are very careful to insert [brackets] around words inserted to clarify or add context, and they never miss an oppurtunity (sic) to preserve the source's spelling or grammatical mistakes. And yet quoted text can just suck in a period, comma, or question mark from its quoted context, simply handing the quoting author the key to completely overturn the meaning of a sentence?! Nonsense! Whatever is between the quotes had better be an exact reproduction, save aforementioned exceptions and their explicit annotations. And dash that pathetic “bUt mUH aEstHeTIcS!” argument on the rocks!

“But it's ugly!”, says you.

“Your shallow subjective opinion of the visual appearance of so-called ugly punctuation sequences is irrelevant in the face of the immense opportunity for misbehavior this piffling preference provides perfidious publications.”, says I.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-12-26 20:37:00+00:00
> so much of it is irrelevant fluff that could be eliminated or trimmed without losing much

Are you sure? Or is that just superfluous for the way you’re reading it?

In some cases, it’s overly verbose. But if you’re taking this away from acclaimed authors, consider picking up some literary criticism (fancy words for fan theories). Chances are, there is meaning embedded in what you’re dismissing as fluff.
by worik | 2025-12-26 20:37:12+00:00
> The creators of Agent Village are just letting a bunch of the LLMs do what they want,

What a stupid, selfish and childish thing to do.

This technology is going to change the world, but people need to accept its limitations

Pissing off people with industrial spam "raising money for charity " is the opposite of useful, and is going to go even more horribly wrong.

LLMs make fantastic tools, but they have no agency. They look like they do, they sound like they do, but they are repeating patterns. It is us hallucinating that they have the potential tor agency

I hope the world survives this craziness!
by agumonkey | 2025-12-26 20:37:21+00:00
very nice article, always good to get a review of what a "simple" looking tool does behind the scense

about rust though

some say a nicer language helps finding the right architecture (heard that about cpp veteran dropping it for ocaml, any attempted idea would take weeks in cpp, was a few days in ocaml, they could explore more)

also the parallelism might be a benefit the language orientation

enough semi fanboyism
by iepathos | 2025-12-26 20:37:41+00:00
> As IT workers, we all have to prostitute ourselves to some extent.

No, we really don't. There are plenty of places to work that aren't morally compromised - non-profits, open source foundations, education, healthcare tech, small companies solving real problems. The "we all have to" framing is a convenient way to avoid examining your own choices.

And it's telling that this framing always seems to appear when someone is defending their own employer. You've drawn a clear moral line between Google ("mixed bag") and AI companies ("unquestionably cancer") - so you clearly believe these distinctions matter even though Google itself is an AI company.
by Ukv | 2025-12-26 20:38:03+00:00
The goals (initially "raise as much money for charity as you can", currently "Do random acts of kindness") don't seem ill-intentioned, particularly since it was somewhat successful at the first ($1481 for Helen Keller International and $503 for the Malaria Consortium). To my understanding it also didn't send more than one email per person.

I think "these emails are annoying, stop it sending them" is entirely fair, but a lot of the hate/anger, analogizing what they're doing to rape, etc. seems disproportionate.
by Sagi21805 | 2025-12-26 20:38:08+00:00
When I started writing this OS, Rust was a pain, and I needed to understand a lot of things that I didn't know about the language, I can flag on some sections that people can skip because they are more language related, but I think that it is very important, and can be beneficial to people that come from other languages, or to people that want to understand rust more deeply.

In every chapter I try to initially explain the topic and then implement, or something in between. but I think the implementation is important because it completes the picture.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-12-26 20:38:19+00:00
> The densest way to communicate "Sam and Frodo walk across the plain towards Mt. Doom. They're both really tired" is exactly that

Uh, yes. This is press-release speak, optimised for a fourth grader’s reading comprehension.

If, on the other hand, you want to develop the motif of the Unseen—central to Tolkien’s work—the type of tired the characters are and how they’re detecting and addressing it is incredibly germane, interesting and totally lost in your summary.

You’re also describing the first scenes we see through familiar eyes of Mordor. The landscape is an extension of Sauron’s will. The contrast with the developed, organised, albeit crowded cities of men; the arrogance implied in the desolation; et cetera pack information lost in your summary.
by zephen | 2025-12-26 20:38:28+00:00
And a lot of the rationale is very weak tea.

For example, don't assign a lambda to an identifier, because a function will show up in a stack trace. But it's OK to use the lambda directly. (huh. What happened to the necessity for the stack trace?)

(FWIW, I think that in some cases assigning lambdas to identifiers is peachy-keen fine. Visually, I immediately know I'm looking at something that doesn't itself produce any side-effects.)

"Using single letter variable names." Uh, yeah, when to do this isn't Python-specific, and includes some cases when it's actually better.

"Not using defaultdict()" Sure, sure, having keys automagically populate is goodness. But then, "Dynamically creating variable/method/function names" is an anti-pattern. Schizophrenic much?

And then, we have the outright lies, such as:

"When a method is not preceded by the @staticmethod or @classmethod decorators and does not contain any references to the class or instance (via keywords like cls or self), Python raises the Method could be a function error. This is not a critical error, but you should check the code in question in order to determine if this section of code really needs to be defined as a method of this class."

Nobody should take advice from a third-grader who can't discern the difference between the interpreter and his preferred lint-like substance.
by ninalanyon | 2025-12-26 20:38:38+00:00
I'm mystified why technically competent people keep their email in the cloud. Do they never find themselves unable to refer to an email because they are not connected to the web? Isn't obvious that you risk losing everything if the provider goes bankrupt, there is a glitch in their system, or they change the rules?

I use Thunderbird on my laptop precisely so that I have a copy of all my email. I can consult it while offline, I can switch providers, change my mail address, without losing anything and without having to rearrange anything.
by cbmuser | 2025-12-26 20:39:11+00:00
> Huh. Is this arch supported by LLVM/Rust?

Yes.

> It was announced recently (https://lwn.net/Articles/1044496/) that Apt, the Debian package manager, would require Rust by May 2026.

No, that was just the wish expressed by one of the APT maintainers. No actual decision has been made yet.
by woodruffw | 2025-12-26 20:39:24+00:00
I think the framing in the post is that it's specific to Rust, relative to what Python packaging tools are otherwise written in (Python). It's not very easy to do zero-copy deserialization in pure Python, from experience.

(But also, I think Rust can fairly claim that it's made zero-copy deserialization a lot easier and safer.)
by mrguyorama | 2025-12-26 20:39:25+00:00
The problem is that everyone on HN treats "You are criticizing something you benefit from" as somehow invalidating the arguments themselves rather than impeaching the person making the arguments.

Being a hypocrite makes you a bad person sometimes. It doesn't actually change anything factual or logical about your arguments. Hypocrisy affects the pathos of your argument, but not the logos or ethos! A person who built every single datacenter would still be well qualified to speak about how bad datacenters are for the environment. Maybe their argument is less convincing because you question their motives, but that doesn't make it wrong or invalid.

Unless HNers believe he is making this argument to help Google in some way, it doesn't fucking matter that google was also bad and he worked for them. Yes he worked for google while they built out datacenters and now he says AI datacenters are eating up resources, but is he wrong?. If he's not wrong, then talk about hypocrisy is a distraction.

HNers love arguing to distract.

"Don't hate the player, hate the game" is also wrong. You hate both.
by viraptor | 2025-12-26 20:39:27+00:00
There was also the GTA wasting minutes to load/parse JSON files at startup. https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times...

And Skylines rendering teeth on models miles away https://www.reddit.com/r/CitiesSkylines/comments/17gfq13/the...

Sometimes the performance is really ignored.
by Zenbit_UX | 2025-12-26 20:39:37+00:00
I truly don’t understand comments like this.

You agreed with the other poster while reframing their ideas in slightly different words without adding anything to the conversation?

Most confusingly you did so in emphatic statements reminiscent of a disagreement or argument without there being one

> no computer system just does stuff on its own.

This was the exact statement the GP was making, even going so far as to dox the nonprofit directors to hold them accountable… then you added nothing but confusion.

> a human (or collection of them) built and maintains the system, they are responsible for it

Yup, GP covered this word for word… AI village built this system.

Why did you write this?

Is this a new form of AI? A human with low English proficiency? A strange type of empathetically supportive comment from someone who doesn’t understand that’s the function of the upvote button in online message boards?
by bigyabai | 2025-12-26 20:39:39+00:00
> Is apple really hostile, though?

Yes. The existence of a proprietary escape hatch is not evidence of goodwill.

> ThinkPads have a bunch throttling issues on non-windows OSs.

That is an ACPI issue. Intel Macbooks also exhibit this behavior on Linux and BSD, and it's not even close to how incomplete power management is on Asahi.
by OgsyedIE | 2025-12-26 20:39:54+00:00
The discussion about this on the teachers subreddit repeated the claim of 'Of course they can't read a clock, NY teachers are only allowed to teach things that are explicitly specified on any of the syllabi or tests and reading a clock isn't on the list.'. The other internet fora for teachers have exactly as much cynicism as you'd expect too, but there is an implied grain of truth:

Teachers don't have the time to meaningfully teach anything except the test contents, because truancy has exploded. RAND estimated K-12 unexplained absences reached 21% in 2023 and early estimates for the last year suggest that strong attention to fixing it has brought it down to 13%, which is an improvement but is still way too high.
by MorehouseJ09 | 2025-12-26 20:40:09+00:00
I forked https://github.com/yetone/avante.nvim and have been adding some additional features for claude-code (acp mode) into it.

I've found it to be the best workflow for me: I'm still editor first, but get the full power of an agent-based workflow.

Makes it easier and more natural to review changes in full-context.

s/o to the folks at Zed for making ACP happen. It's exactly the missing piece for this.
by duban | 2025-12-26 20:40:18+00:00
I’m aware of a few people working on REing the Omnipod 5. The furthest issue that I have seen is that when a PDM/Omnipod 5 app signs into your insulet id, it gets a private key from the API which is stored in the keychain (and uses SSL pinning to prevent MiTM retrieval of the private key). When pairing with the pod they exchange public keys and then a derived key from the devices private key+pods public keys, but haven’t been able to get a copy of a private key yet to make further progress.
by baobun | 2025-12-26 20:40:40+00:00
How about the Arch Linux AUR approach?

Every package has its own git repository which for binary packages contains mostly only the manifest. Sources and assets, if in git, are usually in separate repos.

This seems to not have the issues in the examples given so far, which come from using "monorepos" or colocating. It also avoids the "nightmare" you mention since any references would be in separate repos.

The problematic examples either have their assets and manifests colocated, or use a monorepo approach (colocating manifests and the global index).
by bigbadfeline | 2025-12-26 20:41:01+00:00
> It is far closer to the SA than the SS.

False.

SA was essentially a militia which functioned manly as the NSDAP's non-governmental terror group. As soon as NSDAP took power, Hitler used the SS to take control of the SA and assume its functions. The transition was bloody, the top commander of the SA was executed by Hitler and its leadership purged or killed, see the Night of the Long Knives.

The SA was never a government entity with any significant functions or budget.
by gruez | 2025-12-26 20:41:05+00:00
>If that is confusing here is link to the Friedman Doctrine that explains it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine

>When we see a technology that appears beneficial and is not adopted, I think it is fair to wonder why that is.

>...

>Perhaps a good question is what benefits might those corporations gain from their actions. Would Google and Apple benefit from broad adoption of Fido keys or would it somehow lessen their profits? I don't know the answer, but I know the question.

Again, I don't see any cogent arguments here aside from a vague anti-corporations sentiment along the lines of "corporations are greedy so they must be trying to oppress us at every opportunity". You mention "I think it is fair to wonder why that is", but you haven't articulate how hobbling u2f/fido/webauthn benefits the tech giants, when security is a huge pain point for them (both for their employees and their customers), and therefore they presumably benefit from it being adopted.

>- over several years I saw articles on HN that supposedly promoted Fido, but almost always they talked about Yubikeys. This continues.

Is there any evidence this was perpetuated by the fido alliance and/or their sponsors? Should we think there's a conspiracy by github because people confuse git with github?

>- Solokeys built an open source Fido key. They were priced very low compared to Yubikeys, but functioned just as well. You could buy them on Amazon at one point (and I did)

>- the Fido Alliance Accreditation fees https://fidoalliance.org/certification/authenticator-certifi...

What is this supposed to be evidence of? If anything this disproves your point that there can be competitors to yubikey.
by brailsafe | 2025-12-26 20:42:02+00:00
> all of which are very real world hindrances.

Real world responsibilities to manage, which sometimes can be hindrances at certain levels, but no functional society lets people just do arbitrary things at any speed regardless of impact to others in the name of a checklist. I mean that if I ask a person on my team that I trust to do something, they'll use a machine to do it, but if it's wrong, they're responsible for fixing it and maintaining the knowledge to know how to fix it. If a bridge fails, it's on the Professional Engineer who has signoff on the project, as well as the others doing the engineering work to make sure they make a bridge that doesn't collapse. If software engineers can remotely call themselves that without laughing, they need to consider their liability along the way, depending on circumstance.
by tjr | 2025-12-26 20:42:38+00:00
Being a nondeterministic tool, the output for a given input can vary. Rather than having a solid plan of, "if I provide this input, then that will happen", it's more like, "if I do something like this, I can expect something like that, probably, and if not, then try again until it works, I suppose".

What are the productivity gains? Obviously, it must vary. The quality of the tool output varies based on numerous criteria, including what programming language is being used and what problem is trying to be solved. The fact that person A gets a 10x productivity increase on their project does not mean that person B will also get a 10x productivity increase on their project, no matter how well they use the tool.

But again, tool usage itself is variable. Person A themselves might get a 10x boost one time, and 8x another time, and 4x another time, and 2x another time.
by wan23 | 2025-12-26 20:43:09+00:00
One thing that's tricky about analog clocks if you're not used to them - the hour hand sweeps unnecessarily over the course of an hour so you have to find the hour hand then go backwards. We have the technology to make clocks where the hour hand actually points to the hour that it is. I don't understand why the jump hour feature isn't more common.
by DiskoHexyl | 2025-12-26 20:43:41+00:00
In such case it's okay to not write the thing.

Or to write it crudely- with errors and naivete, bursting with emotion and letting whatever it is inside you to flow on paper, like kids do. It's okay too.

Or to painstakingly work on the letter, stumbling and rewriting and reading, and then rewriting again and again until what you read matches how you feel.

Most people are very forgiving of poor writing skills when facing something sincere. Instead of suffering through some shallow word soup that could have been a mediocre press release, a reader will see a soul behind the stream ot utf-8