MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by teleforce | 2025-12-08 23:47:56+00:00
> Rather, what you have pointed out hasn't been correct, or hasn't been relevant.

According to your biased conjectures.

>Fibbonacci's Liber Abaci introduced the Indo–Arabic numeral system to Europe

Please don't further propagate this fake story, this is just another European biased narratives and lies.

Arab and muslim were in Europe well before Fibonacci, and were using Arabic numbers 1 to 10, etc. Toledo and Spain were fluorishing as one of world knowledge centers alongside Baghdad under muslim empires. Then Toledo fall the to Reconquista in 1085 CE (11th century). Please note that this event happened well before Fibbonacci time [1].

Mediterranean sea was under the auspice of muslim including Sicily even before the latter conquered by Normans. I suppose Normans learnt many civilization stuff with their interaction with muslim in the Mediterranean area, and later the same Normans conquered Britain.

>China developed gunpowder. European researchers improved on it both for internal wars and their wars of subjugation

This another jumping of history narrative from China straight to European contribution missing on the significant contributions lineage of muslim reseachers.

Tipu Sultan of Mysore in India was inventing the rocket using existing knowledge of gunpowder and beating British Empire several time in the wars [2]. Then when he was defeated the British created Arsenal research centers at Woolwich to study further the rockets and the ammunitions. Now England has the Arsenal football club.

>I want to know new things, and this exchange has lead to some fruitful readings for me.

Please do your scholarship properly or better try to get publish in the reputable journals rather then lurking too much in HN if you are really interested in the idea. Time and tides wait for no man.

Also read the Bible and Quran, the Truth will set you free.

[1] Siege of Toledo:

https://www.britannica.com/event/Siege-of-Toledo

[2] Tipu Sultan:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipu_Sultan
by alance | 2025-12-08 23:48:21+00:00
Except my 1-sentence comment was not an AI callout that said: "Hey this is AI slop". I validate the content of the article but express personal disappointment in the AI writing style.

I admit it is perhaps unkind of me to not provide the laundry list of AI-tells in their article, but I see their response to me as being a direct lie ("I haven't used AI to write this post, that's just my style") so what explanation do I owe them?
by lukev | 2025-12-08 23:48:37+00:00
I do wonder what the moat is around this class of products (call it "coding agents").

My intuition is that it's not deep... the differentiating factor is "regular" (non LLM) code which assembles the LLM context and invokes the LLM in a loop.

Claude/Codex have some advantage, because they can RLHF/finetune better than others. But ultimately this is about context assembly and prompting.
by anonymous908213 | 2025-12-08 23:48:42+00:00
In other words, this isn't even a cost-saving measure. They are now paying money to deny claims. Instead of paying money to provide healthcare, they instead pay money to third-party administrators who promise they won't actually do administrative work but instead outsource life-ruining decisions to an automated script. It is hard to come away from this without thinking that humanity is fundamentally evil, and that everyone involved in this should be treated like French royalty.
by pessimizer | 2025-12-08 23:48:45+00:00
I have no idea how you could debug something in two days that is sufficient to ship. I certainly think that an LLM could write a few thousand lines, but who could read them?

Are you shipping things you haven't reviewed at all, and pronouncing them high quality?

I find these threads baffling. I haven't seen a glut of new software anywhere. I certainly haven't seen a bunch of companies fixing the same bugs that have been sitting in their trackers for years. People keep telling me there's this deluge of LLM code happening, but it (the actual code) is all a secret and behind closed doors. Why in the world would you keep it a secret? Why would any multibillion dollar company that ships AI features have any known bugs left in their flagship products?

I haven't seen a difference anywhere when looking outwards. I personally find it useful, but I have to constantly force refactors and rearchitecting to make the code intelligible. When I add features, bugs get reinserted, refactors get reverted, and instrumentation silently disappears. If I don't do the constant refactors, I wouldn't even notice this was happening half the time.
by jonjacky | 2025-12-08 23:48:49+00:00
A surprise, from the README:

"HiRTOS is formally specified using the Z notation. The Z specification can be found here [link]."

I used Z years ago. I haven't seen any new work in Z for many years -- but the linked specification is dated in 2024.

Also, "The HiRTOS thread scheduler is formally specified in TLA+/Pluscal. The TLA+/Pluscal specification can be found here [link] It was model-checked using the TLC model checker. The sucessful TLC run [link] took more than 7 hours"
by phantasmish | 2025-12-08 23:49:09+00:00
> Counterpoint: What might have happened is that we expect software to do a lot more than we did in the 90s, and we really don't expect our software features to be static after purchase.

Outside the specific case of Apple's "magical" cross-device interoperability, I can't think of many areas where this is true. When I step outside the Apple ecosystem, stuff feels pretty much the same as it did in 2005 or so, except it's all using 5-20x the resources (and is a fully enshittified ad-filled disjointed mess of an OS in Windows' case)...

> I agree that we sometimes make things incredibly complex for no purpose in SE, but also think that we do a rose-colored thing where we forget how shitty things were in the 1990s.

... aside from that everything crashes way, way less now than in the '90s, but a ton of that's down to OS and driver improvements. Our tools are supposed to be handling most of the rest. If that improved stability is imposing high costs on development of user-facing software, something's gone very wrong.

You're right that all the instability used to be truly awful, but I'm not sure it's better now because software delivery slowed way down (in general—maybe for operating systems and drivers)
by zarzavat | 2025-12-08 23:49:18+00:00
I'm not sure if you'd consider London to be a safe city but these things won't survive in London either.

People are already pissed off about delivery ebike riders, who disobey laws and ride dangerously. But there's very little you can do about humans. A helpless robot that is causing a hazard to pedestrians? A ULEZ-style strike force will be mobilized to drive them out.

And what about blind and partially sighted people? The place for wheeled vehicles in on roads. If you want to exist in pedestrian areas then make a robot that can walk.
by ed | 2025-12-08 23:49:24+00:00
To dissipate the energy of a M9 (which happens about once per decade) you'd need about 32,000 quakes of M6 (still big enough to collapse buildings).

Energy scales as 10^(1.5 × ΔM)

ΔM = 9.0 − 6.0 = 3.0

10^(1.5 × 3) = 10^4.5 ≈ 31,600
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-12-08 23:49:32+00:00
OpenAI has no idea what is the cause of the problem, but once OpenAI has built a general intelligent system, they will ask it for a way to fix this bug.

(for those who don't get the reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzcJlKg2Rc0&t=1886s (31:26 - 32:13)).
by uplifter | 2025-12-08 23:50:08+00:00
A contradictory possibility is that agents which have different ultimate objectives can have different and disjunct sets of goals which are instrumental towards their objectives.

I do think the core idea of instrumental convergence is wrong. In the hypothetical scenario you describe, the behavior of the agent, whether it learns to replace itself or not, will depend on its goal, its knowledge of and ability to reason about the problem, and the learning algorithm it employs. These are just some of the variables that you’d need to fill in to get the answer to your question. Instrumental convergence theoreticians suggest one can just gloss over these details and assume any hypothetical AI will behave certain ways in various narratively described situations, but we can’t. The behavior of an AI will be contingent on multiple details of the situation, and those details can mean that no goals instrumental to one agent are instrumental to another.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-08 23:50:22+00:00
No, ChatGPT Pro was an example that I'm not stingy to pay for things I find useful. I'm also paying for Gemini, Claude and other types of software to do my job, not even just coding. But even if I do, I still find Amp too expensive to be able to use for anything useful.

I run every single coding prompt through Codex, Claude Code, Qwen and Gemini, compare which one gives me the best and go ahead with using that one. Maybe I go with Codex 60% of the times, Claude 20% and Qwen/Gemini the remaining 20%, not often at all either of them get enough right. I've tried integrating Amp into my workflow too, but as mentioned, too expensive. I do think the grass is currently the greenest with Codex, still.
by hopelite | 2025-12-08 23:50:41+00:00
That makes no logical sense. So if I give up my “entertainment” subscriptions because the execs need their bonuses and drive the prices up to compensate for the penalty, causing me to think about how to spend quality time with my family paying games, reading books, and doing activities; is equally harmful as if I can’t but groceries in my town because the grocery store was closed?
by marcosdumay | 2025-12-08 23:50:45+00:00
Oh, if LLMs did actually solve the problem of too much React, that would by itself drop the cost of doing the software the author cares about by close to 90%.

And yes, it's a completely self-imposed problem that many people don't have at all. But LLMs make it worse, and the author is celebrating that it's worse now.
by parl_match | 2025-12-08 23:50:56+00:00
Keep in mind that this is a major metropolitan area in a state that has a history of earthquakes. You can expect state level response (and federal as well) within the same day. Their main priority will be water, and elements exposure.

Guidance varies. California list here https://earthquake.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2025/02...

You should have water, food, medical supplies, and cash.

btw you might find this interesting https://www.amusingplanet.com/2021/01/san-franciscos-hidden-...
by selcuka | 2025-12-08 23:51:08+00:00
I worked with IBM several decades ago for a customer project, and the solution suggested by an IBM'er for backing up a NoSQL database (Lotus Notes) on a daily basis was to translate and migrate the data to a relational one (DB2), then use a DB2 tape backup system to back it up.

When I pointed out that this was a stupid way to do it, they openly told me that they just wanted to sell DB2.
by tzs | 2025-12-08 23:51:08+00:00
> If they price me out of 365 by making me pay for Copilot shit I don't use or want [...]

In case you aren't aware, when they try to sneak Copilot onto your plan you can get rid of it by going to your plan management page and canceling. One of the offers they should offer to try to get you to stay is your old plan without Copilot.
by Archit3ch | 2025-12-08 23:51:14+00:00
Are you sure? I had not used Windows for years and assumed "Run Anyway" would work. Last month, I tested running an unsigned (self-signed) .MSIX on a different Windows machine. It's a 9-step process to get through the warnings: https://www.advancedinstaller.com/install-test-certificate-f...

Perhaps .exe is easier, but I wouldn't subject the wider public (or even power users) to that.

So yeah, Azure Trusted Signing or EV certificate is the way to go on Windows.
by jesse__ | 2025-12-08 23:51:16+00:00
If there was some absolute measure of program 'interestingness'/'readability', programs found on shadertoy would no doubt have an asymptotically high score.

My theory is that graphics programmers, at some point, stop having to care very much about what the textual representation of their program actually looks like. Because graphics programming is so hard, once you get to the point of understanding what you're doing, and typing in the shader, it becomes self-explanatory; you don't actually need variable names, what you need is understanding.

Inigo Quilez (author of shadertoy, and graphics programming legend) is one of the most talented graphics programmers alive, and produces some of the least readable code I've ever seen.

Just my 2c on why this is so common in graphics, specifically
Ask HN: How do you get human support from OpenAI?
by TheWizKnows | 2025-12-08 23:51:45+00:00
I'm a ChatGPT Plus subscriber locked out for 9 days (Dec 2-10).

I've submitted HAR files showing 504 Gateway Timeout on /api/memories endpoint (300+ seconds). Clear server-side memory system performance issue. I'm a 25-year tech professional - I know how to troubleshoot.

OpenAI support: - First agent: Ignored diagnostic files - Second agent: Case reassigned, asked for same info - Now: AI bot responses only

The AI bots say "I cannot forward to management" and "concerns flagged for review" - but no human ever responds.

I've tried: - Support tickets → AI bot loops - Twitter @OpenAISupport → No response (9 hours) - Email escalations → More AI bots

Has anyone successfully gotten actual human engineering support from OpenAI? What channel works?

Twitter thread: [paste URL of your first tweet - https://x.com/yourhandle/status/...]

I have 2 years of business planning data inaccessible and cannot get a human to review the diagnostic data I've provided.
by Oras | 2025-12-08 23:51:51+00:00
Nice! I always looked for a solution to animate diagrams as it would help a lot in visualising the workflow.

Feedback:

1. I tried different mermaid diagrams from https://mermaid.live/, and your animation is only working with classes and flowcharts. It didn't work with the sequence diagram (which is the most interesting to me).

2. It would be great to control the animation to be a sequence instead of one animation for all arrows at once. What I would like to do is show fellow devs the workflow from start to finish, according to the spec.

I appreciate that this is just a start, but it looks promising and has great potential. Good luck!
by warbaker | 2025-12-08 23:52:02+00:00
On aluminum, the author says:

> “renewables” cannot provide the stable current and carbon atoms needed to make the process possible

This is untrue. Iceland has a huge aluminum industry, using mainly geothermal power: https://energytransition.org/2023/03/geothermal-iceland-this...

Iceland alone accounts for 1/10th of global aluminum production! https://www.riotinto.com/en/operations/iceland/isal

You do need constant, reliable power, as even a brief interruption makes a huge mess when the aluminum/slag freezes in the processor.
by devilbunny | 2025-12-08 23:52:04+00:00
Resell it, or wait six months. FWIW the 10th generation Kindle Paperwhite (the "PW4" in kindlemodding/mobileread lingo) doesn't have as large a screen as the newest models, but its maximum supported OS is currently 5.18.1 (and you can download that update directly from Amazon and transfer over USB), which is vulnerable to AdBreak. I just jailbroke and Tailscaled my PW4 this weekend after numerous failed attempts over a period of about a year to use the previous WinterBreak exploit.

I read mostly on my iPad; the Kindle is really just for reading outside, like at the beach/pool. But it was such a neat idea that I couldn't just pass it up.
by accrual | 2025-12-08 23:52:12+00:00
That's wild. I guess I've never experienced it because I still have the email attached to my nearly 15+ year old Steam account.

Some tangently related anecdata: VRChat has a pretty strict email-changing policy. You need to confirm you own both the VR account and the original email account. Reasonable, but can be tricky if you don't have access to the original email anymore. I was able to navigate it but yeah, it's not always simple.
by machomaster | 2025-12-08 23:53:05+00:00
Of course, in a working relationship, people's opinions on work issues matter greatly. It is weird and counter-productive to care about colleagues' personal political views while at work.

In my experience, the enjoyment of working with people and their professionalism does not depend on the awefulness of their political opinions.

Not being able to separate, to only work at work instead of pulling your personal life into it, is a sign of a bad worker.

I do speak from European (healthy work-life balance), but still pragmatic/efficient and free-speech point of view.
by Glyptodon | 2025-12-08 23:53:06+00:00
I live in a home built after 2000 that had aluminum wires run to its heat pump. A few years back coolant leak from the heat pump lead to huge electric usage before the aluminum wiring lit on fire and shorted itself out. Since repaired, but was told at the time original installer didn't correctly do the aluminum grease on the exposed wire parts.

That said I think the wiring there is still thick aluminum.

Not sure I really have a point - all things equal I'd prefer copper, but it seems like aluminum can be fine when done right too - just riskier when done to the quick and dirty homebuilder standard.
by dmz73 | 2025-12-08 23:54:22+00:00
As a pedestrian I find cyclist are worse than cars for obstructing my path. Riding on the footpath (illegal here) even with bike lane available right next to it, not respectig the traffic lights (mowing through pedestrians on crossings or blocking pedestrian crossings when stopped on red light), parking by blocking the footpath (must leave 1.5m of footpath unobstructed), riding the wrong way through traffic, flying down bike lanes (40kmh limit) and raging when anyone infringes their "rights" when they respect noone. In my experience, I estimate that 20% of car drivers are a-holes, 50% or truck drivers and 80% of cyclists.
by wubrr | 2025-12-08 23:55:35+00:00
I've generally had better luck when using it on new projects/repos. When working on a large existing repo it's very important to give it good context/links/pointers to how things currently work/how they should work in that repo.

Also - claude (~the best coding agent currently imo) will make mistakes, sometimes many of them - tell it to test the code it writes and make sure it's working - I've generally found its pretty good at debugging/testing and fixing it's own mistakes.
by benlivengood | 2025-12-08 23:56:20+00:00
Yes, at some point Boltzmann brains become higher likelihood but don't forget that interventions are not limited to prior history, e.g. someone builds a machine that performs whole-body surgery based on the timing of radioactive decay. Still more likely to end up with a functioning body than a Boltzmann brain. Most likely to end up with a weirder but more likely intervention (low expectation of it actually working, but not infinitesimal) (and from anthropic perspective)
by lxgr | 2025-12-08 23:56:29+00:00
Yep, same here. Fortunately they don't seem to use it for anything yet, somewhat begging the question of why it's there in the first place. (It doesn't need to be stored in a user-visible way if the only purpose is as a poor/annoying "proof of humanity" against sockpuppet accounts).

Update: I just checked, out of curiosity – seems to be gone now?
by Yoric | 2025-12-08 23:56:38+00:00
Note that in the case of coding, there is an entire branch of computer science dedicated to verification.

All the type systems (and model-checkers) for Rust, Ada, OCaml, Haskell, TypeScript, Python, C#, Java, ... are based on such research, and these are all rather weak in comparison to what research has created in the last ~30 years (see Rocq, Idris, Lean).

This goes beyond that, as some of these mechanisms have been applied to mathematics, but also to some aspects of finance and law (I know of at least mechanisms to prove formally implementations of banking contracts and tax management).

So there is lots to do in the domain. Sadly, as every branch of CS other than AI (and in fact pretty much every branch of science other than AI), this branch of computer science is underfunded. But that can change!
by whyenot | 2025-12-08 23:57:43+00:00
Why are you assuming that a human would be more efficient and better for the environment than an electrically powered robot? It is very inefficient (approx 25%) to use food as an energy source, and humans are always burning energy. They can't turn off at night or when they are idle. I think it is very likely that the robot would be better for the environment than the person.
by pessimizer | 2025-12-08 23:58:45+00:00
> Any sort of "utopia" that people imagine AI bringing is doomed to fail because we already can't cooperate without AI

It's just fanfiction. They're just making up stories in their heads based on blending sci-fi they've read or watched in the past. There's no theory of power, there's no understanding of history or even the present, it's just a bad Star Trek episode.

"Intelligence" itself isn't even a precise concept. The idea that a "superintelligent" AI is intrinsically going to be obsessed with juvenile power fantasies is just silly. An AI doesn't want to enslave the world, run dictatorial experiments born of childhood frustrations and get all the girls. It doesn't want anything. It's purposeless. Its intelligence won't even be recognized as intelligence if its suggestions aren't pleasing to the powerful. They'll keep tweaking it to keep it precisely as dumb as they themselves are.
by hansvm | 2025-12-09 00:00:44+00:00
The model might be fine (I have questions, but let's assume it's reasonable), but I don't think anyone could use the UI for more than a few minutes and not realize it was a hack job.

For one fun one, on mobile web (android/chrome) you can't insert a space in the middle of a "word" you created by deleting the space between two words. The deletion is immediately reverted by some JS abomination.

It's one thing to call that an unimportant bug, but it calls into question a whole chain of decisions leading to that moment, and it's far from an isolated incident. As always there's a relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/463/
by jtaylortech | 2025-12-09 00:01:42+00:00
AI tools like Cursor and Copilot are great for shipping fast. But the code they generate often has security holes, no tests, dead code, and inconsistent patterns.

We're offering a 5-day sprint to clean it up: security fixes, dead code removal, proper error handling, tests, and deployment setup. $7,500 flat rate.

Built this because we kept seeing founders ship MVPs with AI, get users, then struggle to hire engineers who'd work on the codebase.

Curious what HN thinks. Anyone else seeing this problem?
by rajhlinux | 2025-12-09 00:01:59+00:00
No wonder cutting edge LLMs themselves are so confused with DX12 APIs... I guess I should stick with CUDA, they have so good documentation and support on everything all in one place.

Only reason I need to use DX12 is because the swapchain uses DXGI textures. I hope Microsoft gives NVIDIA great priority and leverage to use CUDA native textures at the swapchain directly in Windows.

DX12 functions ported directly into CUDA will be a big plus, programming stack is literally next to the NVIDIA hardware, do everything under one language and don't need to mess with two language interoperability.
by clemvonstengel | 2025-12-09 00:02:27+00:00
I agree that thinking in words is much slower than thinking in concepts would be -- that's the point of training models like this, so that ideally people can always just think in concepts. That said, we do need to get some kind of ground truth of what they're thinking in order to train the model, so we do need them to communicate that (in words).

One thing that's particularly exciting here is that the model often gets the high-level idea correct, without getting any words correct (as in some of the examples above), which suggests that it is picking up the idea rather than the particular words.