MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by alisonatwork | 2025-12-10 00:15:06+00:00
This situation is so frustrating to me, and despite my attempts, nobody seems to get why it's problematic. I still have a Facebook account from over a decade ago that I use occasionally to access stuff that is only visible on Facebook, but by the time Insta kicked off I had already decided social media was bad, so I never got one, and it didn't seem like a great loss because I wasn't that interested in looking at other people's photos anyway.

Except now, apparently - and I'm still not exactly sure how - business owners and activist groups and event promoters communicate everything about what is going on via... photos?! I suppose it's the digital version of flyers, except you could see flyers posted up all over town, in all the record stores or cafes you already frequented, friends could hand you them when they saw you out and about, you'd get bombarded with them when you left related events... And none of those situations forced you to enter a heavily-surveilled gated community owned by a spectacularly wealthy foreign company notorious for enabling genocide, live streaming murder etc.

I was at some event a couple weekends ago and an organizer came up to me saying that there was going to be an after and just check the Insta for the address, and I'm like... But I don't have that? Can't you tell me now? And because the site is login-walled even when at some point later in the day the thumbnail did appear, trying to click on it to see the details resulted in the login block and so I missed out.

But I am well aware that I am a teeny tiny minority of people involved in this boycot and so I'm only really hurting myself. The way I've heard it described by activists is that using Insta (or X or YouTube) is like tacitly accepting that we already live in a panopticon and thus all resistance has to take place within full view of the authorities, it just needs to be smart and present itself as something that isn't actually resistance, or that works around censorship using codewords, or this, or that, "just like how it's done in China". And it's like, great, the new generation of western activists who actually still live in a society which grants them some civil liberties have decided they're all doomed to exist under the totalitarian jackboot and practice their resistance accordingly. After all, you can't build a movement out there on the actually free fediverse or the small web where there's only a smattering of nerds.

I don't know if I should be depressed or just suck it up and get that stupid Insta account.
by Kim_Bruning | 2025-12-10 00:15:22+00:00
Possibly a distinction needs to be made between raw llm output, raw google output (like lmgtfy), or any other tool's raw output on the one hand, and a synthesis of your conclusions after having used these tools together, on the other.

Obviously cut&pasting the raw output of a google search or pubmed search or etc would be silly. Same goes for AI generated summaries and such. But references you find this way can certainly be useful.

And using spelling checkers, grammar checkers, style checkers, translation tools or etc (old fashioned or new AI-enhanced) should be ok if used wisely.
by simonw | 2025-12-10 00:15:45+00:00
The fact that pelicans can't ride bicycles is pretty much the point of the benchmark! Asking an LLM to draw something that's physically impossible means it can't just "get it right" - seeing how different models (especially at different sizes) handle the problem is surprisingly interesting.

Honestly though, the benchmark was originally meant to be a stupid joke.

I only started taking it slightly more seriously about six months ago, when I noticed that the quality of the pelican drawings really did correspond quite closely to how generally good the underlying models were.

If a model draws a really good picture of a pelican riding a bicycle there's a solid chance it will be great at all sorts of other things. I wish I could explain why that was!

If you start here and scroll through and look at the progression of pelican on bicycle images it's honestly spooky how well they match the vibes of the models they represent: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/6/six-months-in-llms/#ai-...

So ever since then I've continue to get models to draw pelicans. I certainly wouldn't suggest anyone take serious decisions on model usage based on my stupid benchmark, but it's a fun first-day initial impression thing and it appears to be a useful signal for which models are worth diving into in more detail.
by avianlyric | 2025-12-10 00:16:06+00:00
Personal favourite is from the Gemini shutdown article which has a small quote from the fictional Google announcement:

> "We are incredibly proud of what Gemini achieved. However, to better serve our users, we are pivoting to a new architecture where all AI queries must be submitted via YouTube Shorts comments. Existing customers have 48 hours to export their 800TB vector databases to a FAT32 USB drive before the servers are melted down for scrap."

> — Official Blog Post, October 2034

It’s good to know that AI won’t kill satire.
by maxglute | 2025-12-10 00:17:00+00:00
Now deliver 500 turbines by Q2 2026... oh you can't because you need 4-5 years to build and scale up manufacturing and train a skilled workforce? Well that's better than 5-10 years to build centralized power plants... or just truck in a shit load of low skilled Mexicans to build out island solar and battery to alleviate bottle neck and throw in a bunch of diesel/gas generators.

The problem isn't better turbine, it's lead times that can satisfy data center demands at current rollout timeline. America being america makes large scale centralized infra difficult, building supply chains for essentially aviation turbines may be faster, but not more than just slapping down renewables and diesel/gas generators. You can get all the commodity generators and solar tomorrow.

Like ~85% of of PRC's new power generation this year growth is mostly renewables. It's a new distributed tech stack that can be spung up at scale incredible speed vs centralized generation infra. PRC built out about 300GW of renewables this year, US data centre needs projected at 100GW by 2035 with no sign centralized plants will be online in time. Combine with some dirty generators and US datacentres can survive on islanded utilities until the bubble burst.
by robotresearcher | 2025-12-10 00:17:01+00:00
"AI didn’t just need more turbines—it needed a new and fundamentally better turbine. Symphony was the perfect new engine to accelerate AI in America."

I completely hate that we can't just motivate this in terms of making electricity, the stuff we all use every day for a hundred things. No, it has to be about AI. Bah!
by WalterBright | 2025-12-10 00:17:10+00:00
Oh, one more thing. Keep on hand some of your previous presentations. Often, a speaker won't show up and the conference organizer is panicking and needs a replacement. Be first to volunteer your services! I've done that several times, and the results were always worthwhile.

One time, I didn't have an extra talk with me, but I volunteered anyway and asked for a whiteboard and markers. Frankly, it was the best talk I ever gave. Unfortunately, it wasn't recorded. But it sure was fun! (I simply asked the audience what they wanted me to talk about.)
by moron4hire | 2025-12-10 00:17:10+00:00
That was such a strange aspect. If you will excuse my use of the tortured analogy of comparing programming to wood working, there are is a lot of talk about hand tools versus power tools, but for people who aren't in a production capacity--not making cabinets for a living, not making furniture for a living--you see people choosing to exclusively use hand tools because they just enjoy it more. There isn't pressure about "you most use power tools or else you're in self-denial about their superiority." Well , at least for people who actually practice the hobby. You'll find plenty of armchair woodworkers in the comments section on YouTube. But I digress. For someone who claims to enjoy programming for the sake of programming, it was a very strange statement to make about coding.

I very much enjoy the act of programming, but I'm also a professional software developer. Incidentally, I've almost always worked in fields where subtly wrong answers could get someone hurt or killed. I just can't imagine either giving up my joy in the former case or abdicating my responsibility to understand my code in the latter.

And this is why the wood working analogy falls down. The scale at which damage can occur due to the decision to use power tools over hand tools is, for most practical purposes, limited to just myself. With computers, we can share our fuck ups with the whole world.
by NortySpock | 2025-12-10 00:18:12+00:00
The Spring RTS FOSS engine is an engine, but does not provide the game assets or game-specific code.

Recoil is a fork of the Spring engine (background: Spring made backward incompatible changes; Recoil forked to retain backward compatibility). Beyond All Reason uses the Recoil engine and supplies its own game code, shaders, and assets.

https://recoilengine.org/articles/choose-recoil/

https://recoilengine.org/ (list of games powered by Recoil)

https://github.com/beyond-all-reason

Source: been in the BAR Discord for about a year, have contributed tiny bits of server code to the project, and read a few pull request comments.
by winternett | 2025-12-10 00:18:26+00:00
If you're looking to build and maintain healthy vitamin D levels, D3 is generally the better supplement choice, according to health experts and studies. Consult your doctor to determine your needs and the best form for you, especially if you have a deficiency or dietary restrictions. -Google Gemini

I think it's important to clarify understandings for non-scientific/med community each time these types of technical discussions occur.
by specialist | 2025-12-10 00:18:31+00:00
Yes and:

Recent Volts episode has great overview of China's electro-tech build out, world is at or near peak fossil fuel across all sectors and countries (with 1 notable exception), etc.

Clean electrification is inevitable - A conversation with Kingsmill Bond of Ember Energy. [2025/11/21]

https://www.volts.wtf/p/clean-electrification-is-inevitable
by karpour | 2025-12-10 00:18:34+00:00
It's so refreshing to see a proper website these days, no js, no cookie banners, just hypertext. Your part about still enjoying programming really resonated with me. I still get so much joy out of programming after 20 years of doing it, it's still just as exciting to learn new things, and I am definitely not running out of new things to learn.

I would absolutely love to teach programming to non-programmers. I have also been offered a job at the technical school where I graduated. But remembering how uninterested the vast majority of my classmates were back then discouraged me from even trying. I guess what I'd want is a teach a room full of people excited to learn about programming.
by anon84873628 | 2025-12-10 00:18:46+00:00
That solution will not work as well when the interfaces have not been standardized in a way that makes it so easy to import them into a script as a library.

Coding against every subtly different REST API is as annoying with agents as it is for humans. And it is good to force vendors to define which parts of the interface are actually important and clean them up. Or provide higher level tasks. Why would we ask every client to repeat that work?

There are also plenty of environments where having agents dynamically write and execute scripts is neither prudent nor efficient. Local MCP servers strike a governance balance in that scenario, and remote ones eliminate the need entirely.
by wisty | 2025-12-10 00:18:55+00:00
It's not nessessarily the best benchmark, it's a popular one, probably because it's funny.

Yes it's like the wine glass thing.

Also it's kind of got depth. Does it draw the pelican and the bicycle? Can the penguin reach the peddles? How?

I can imagine a really good AI finding a funny or creative or realistic way for the penguin to reach the peddles.

An slightly worse AI will do an OK job, maybe just making the bike small or the legs too long.

An OK AI will draw a penguin on top of a bicycle and just call it a day.

It's not as binary as the wine glass example.
by Terr_ | 2025-12-10 00:18:57+00:00
> AI guardrails are the first and often only line of defense between a secure system and an LLM that’s been tricked into revealing secrets, generating disinformation, or executing harmful instructions. EchoGram shows that these defenses can be systematically bypassed or destabilized, even without insider access or specialized tools.

All of this is uncomfortably reminiscent of junior developers trying to "fix" SQL injection by grepping input strings... Except here the right way doesn't exist yet either.
by qwe----3 | 2025-12-10 00:19:55+00:00
> It's a new distributed tech stack that can be spung up at scale incredible speed vs centralized generation infra.

When you get too much renewables solar/wind you can get blackouts like spain did. Fast grids fail fast. It's also important to have grid inertia to resist changes in frequency (which you get from due to the kinetic energy stored in spinning generators)
by evanelias | 2025-12-10 00:20:29+00:00
From what I've seen, folks at that level have massive amounts of insider knowledge, a huge network of well-informed connections at every big tech company, and a stock portfolio in the 8 to 9 figure range. Personally I would strongly doubt he's simply aligning with "outsiders ruminating on hearsay and innuendo", but I guess believe what you'd like!
by danaris | 2025-12-10 00:21:13+00:00
From what I can tell, only Apple even wants to try doing any of the processing on-device. Including parsing the speech. (This may be out-of-date at this point, but I haven't heard of Amazon or Google doing on-device processing for Alexa or Assistant.)

So there's no way for them to do anything without sending it off to the datacenter.
by jacquesm | 2025-12-10 00:22:05+00:00
Hehe, that's lovely.

Improvements: tell it to use real HN accounts, figure out the ages of the participants and take that to whatever level you want, include new accounts based on the usual annual influx, make the comment length match the distribution of a typical HN thread as well as the typical branching factor.

> Garbage collection pause during landing burn = bad time.

That one was really funny. Some of the inventions are really interesting. Ferrofluidic seals...
by Saline9515 | 2025-12-10 00:22:05+00:00
Yes because breaking into someone's house, armed, and taking things that you claim are yours is totally a normal thing in normal countries.

More : Armed settlers roam around olive trees and steal the harvest: https://archive.ph/OTQ1V

Settlers break into homes and force villagers to flee: https://www.middleeasteye.net/live-blog/live-blog-update/isr...

Settlers come armed with clubs and smash windows while asking the family to leave the house: https://www.btselem.org/video/20251109_settlers_attacked_a_h...

Armed settlers ask families to leave at gunpoint https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/04/17/west-bank-israel-respons...

50 settlers come into a village and burn houses https://www.timesofisrael.com/dozens-of-settlers-attack-home...

Settlers beat up an old lady harvesting her olive trees https://apnews.com/article/settler-violence-netanyahu-palest...

The last link has hard data about violence (250 attacks per month). You can try to pilpul, but those people are clearly doing a human safari, with no law enforcement and consider Palestinians as animals. Defending this tells me all I need to know about your morality: in practice, you defend an ongoing, slow genocide that you well know it's happening. Everything has been documented, it's not just me that watches tik tok videos (I don't).
by agentultra | 2025-12-10 00:22:25+00:00
The vast majority of software models are trained on have little to no standards and contains all kinds of errors and omissions.

And these are systems that require a human in the loop to verify the output because you are ultimately responsible for it when it makes a mistake. And it will.

It’s not fun because it’s not fun being an appendage to a machine that doesn’t know or care that you exist. It will generate 1200 lines of code. You have to try and make sure it doesn’t contain the subtle kinds of errors that could cost you your job.

At least if you made those errors you could own them and learn from it. Instead you gain nothing when the machine makes an error except the ability to detect them over time.

I think if you don’t know C extremely well then there’s no point vibe coding it. If you don’t know anything about operating systems you’re not going to find the security bugs or know if the scheduler you chose does the the right thing. You won’t be able to tell the difference between good code and bad.
by vkou | 2025-12-10 00:22:28+00:00
Instead of casting stones from glass houses, perhaps the US should look inwardly to its own censorship. A number of states and the current federal regime have their fingers fully into that pie.

Criticism of Israel, lgbtq material, calls for soldiers and police to only obey lawful orders, material critical of the current regime, it's policies, and the personalities that drive it, criticism of college campus trolls like Charlie Kirk, even kneeling at a fucking protest, have all come under attack.

Once we turn the clock back on all that, and the people carrying all that out have been appropriately purged and punished, perhaps Americans should start talking about the EU.
by kreelman | 2025-12-10 00:22:33+00:00
It could be a good, relatively portable gas peaker. Though I would have thought batteries might be a better step for peak load management?

This might sit somewhere between peak load and base load?

Since the CO/CO2 exhaust from this turbine should be able to be captured fairly well, would it be possible to capture it on the spot into tanks of some kind? There are most probably some large thermal issues to deal with here.. I also wonder about the MIT COF-99 (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exotic-powder-pul...) that eats up CO2 very efficiently.

If simply CH4 is being passed to the turbine, is the water generated from the combustion being captured anywhere?

What about the sound characteristics of this beasty? There are cases in the US of people noticing the new AI data centre fans whining at all hours.

There'll be an engineer/physicist out there somewhere who'll come up with a generally efficient way to move heat around (Graphene ?) and he'll start a multi-billion dollar business.
by zmmmmm | 2025-12-10 00:22:33+00:00
I find a good compromise on that front is not to use the chat primarily, but to create files like 'ARCHITECTURE.md', 'REQUIREMENTS.md' and put information in there describing how the application works. Then you add those to the chat as context docs.From the chat interface then you are just referring to those not just describing features willy nilly. So the nice thing is you are building documentation for the application in a formal sense as part of instructing the LLM.
by Libidinalecon | 2025-12-10 00:22:42+00:00
I would think GPT4 probably could have done this.

The first React tutorial I ever did was making a hacker news clone.

It is incredibly well represented in the training data. I am just surprised how many people here obviously must barely use the models to be either overly impressed by this or think it is fake.

Gemini can do WAY more than this.
by eichin | 2025-12-10 00:22:44+00:00
I actually tried this workflow with some ebay'ed microcassette recorders - even the really compact ones are bulkier (though not necessarily heavier) than a modern cellphone, plus being non-connected you basically have to set aside some time to transcribe and erase (doable, but if you're specifically using it as a memory assist then having to remember this isn't great.) They did do a good job of "one press and they're operating, and you can confidently believe it" (but you have to pick them up in the right orientation for that to work.)
by lmm | 2025-12-10 00:23:08+00:00
> But if you look carefully, you will notice that it doesn’t struggle with undefined behavior in C. Or with making sure that all memory is properly freed. Or with off-by-one errors.

Doubt. These things have been trained to emulate humans, why wouldn't they make the same mistakes that humans do? (Yes, they don't make spelling errors, but most published essays etc. don't have spelling errors, whereas most published C codebases do have undefined behaviour).
by jcranmer | 2025-12-10 00:23:49+00:00
> - Forth people defined the IEEE754 standard on floating point, because they knew how to do that well in software.

IEEE 754 was principally developed by Kahan (in collaboration with his grad student, Coonen, and a visiting professor, Stone, whence the name KCS draft), none of whom were involved with Forth in any way that I am aware. And the history is pretty clear that the greatest influence on IEEE 754 before its release was Kahan's work with Intel developing the 8087.
by crote | 2025-12-10 00:24:54+00:00
Because big companies have a habit of growing layers of bureaucracy. If a cert is valid for three years, a decent bunch of them will invent a three-month process around cert renewal, involving two dozen stakeholders, several meetings, and sign-off from the CTO.

The side-effect of this is that they become incapable of doing it any faster during an emergency. Private key compromised? Renewal takes two months, so better hope the attackers can't do too much damage before that. CAs in turn have large (=profitable) customers which such processes who they really don't want to lose, so historically when they've failed to renew in time during incidents CAs have granted those customers exceptions on the revocation rules because they are "business critical" and doing it by-the-book would cause "significant harm". No CA is willing to be strict, because they'd lose their most valuable customers to their competition.

The only way to solve this is to force companies into adopting efficient renewal processes via an industry-wide reduction of certificate validity time. When you have to renew once a month you can't afford to have a complicated process, so you end up automating it, so there's no reason for CAs to delay cert revocation during incidents, so the internet is more secure. And because every CA is doing it, companies don't gain anything by switching to more lenient CAs, so the individual CAs have no incentive to violate the industry rules by delaying revocation.
by pron | 2025-12-10 00:25:25+00:00
It's possible, but I don't see any reason to assume that it's more likely that machines will be able to code as well as working programmers yet not be able to come up with requirements or even ideas as well as working PMs. In fact, why not the opposite? I think that currently LLMs are better at writing general prose, offering advice etc.., than they are at writing code. They are better at knowing what people generally want than they are at solving complex logic puzzle that require many deduction steps. Once we're reduced to imagining what AI can and cannot do, we can imagine pretty much any capability or restriction we like. We can imagine something is possible, and we can just as well choose to imagine it's not possible. We're now in the realm of, literally, science fiction.
by maccard | 2025-12-10 00:25:29+00:00
https://www.quooker.co.uk/ - these are the only "boiling water" ones (as in 100 degrees C), but if you're ok with 98C, then you can get https://www.screwfix.com/p/swirl-danube-3-in-1-instant-boili... instead for 25% of the price.