MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by yearolinuxdsktp | 2025-12-20 00:03:57+00:00
I think the technique is important to have in your vocabulary, but I think the examples given are a weak sell.

In the example given, I would have preferred to extract to a method—-what if I want to load the config from somewhere else? And perhaps the specific of strip comments itself could have been extracted to a more-semantically-aptly named post-processing method.

I see the argument that when extracted to a function, that you don’t need to go hunting for it. But if we look at the example with the block, I still see a bunch of detail about how to load the config, and then several lines using it. What’s more important in that context—-the specifics of the loading of config, or the specifics of how requests are formed using the loaded config?

The fact that you need to explain what’s happening with comments is a smell. Properly named variables and methods would obviate the need for the comments and would introduce semantic meaning thru names.

I think blocks are useful when you are referencing a lot of local variables and also have fairly localized meaning within the method. For example, you can write a block to capture a bunch of values for logging context—-then you can call that block in every log line to get a logging context based on current method state. It totally beats extracting a logging context method that consumes many variables and is unlikely to be reused outside of the calling method, and yet you get delayed evaluation and single point of definition for it.

So yes to the pattern, but needs a better example.
by WhyOhWhyQ | 2025-12-20 00:03:59+00:00
I have wondered about that actually. Thanks, I'll read that, looks interesting.

Surely Donald Knuth and John Carmack are genuine masters though? There's the Elon Musk theory of mastery where everyone says you're great, but you hire a guy to do it, and there's the <nobody knows this guy but he's having a blast and is really good> theory where you make average income but live a life fulfilled. On my deathbed I want to be the second. (Sorry this is getting off topic.)
by culi | 2025-12-20 00:04:26+00:00
I'm assuming you're interested in studying Ayahuasca traditions?

I recently learned that traditionally in Shipibo culture, ayahuasca was never meant to be given to "the normal mind". Instead the maestras would be the ones taking the ayahuasca in order to help guide them into diagnosing people dealing with various sicknesses.

These maestras were also ranked by how many different plants they'd done a dieta on. A dieta is kinda similar to fasting. You can't shower with soap, you can't have sex, you can't have too much salt/seasoning, can't be exposed to too much smoke, can't have alcohol, etc. And you use that specific plant throughout your time. Basically you want to eliminate any conflicting variables so you can experience the plant as purely as possible to understand its effects. Traditionally these dietas could last over a year but modern day maestros typically do them for just a few weeks.

I don't really have a point to this. Just found it fascinating how deeply and strictly they study certain plant medicines and wanted to share
by AmbroseBierce | 2025-12-20 00:04:29+00:00
They could add a text box where users have to explicitly type the following words before it lets them interact in any way with the model: "I understand this model was created with old texts so any racial or sexual statements are a byproduct of their time an do not represent in any way the views of the researchers".

That should be more than enough to clear any chance of misunderstanding.
by ctoth | 2025-12-20 00:04:44+00:00
Possible confound (seems important):

"creatives" tend to have a certain political tribe, that political tribe is well-represented in places that have this precise type of authenticity/etc. language around AI use...

Basically a good chunk of this could be measuring whether or not somebody is on Bluesky/is discourse-pilled... and there's no way to know from the study.
by zingar | 2025-12-20 00:06:54+00:00
I’ve found incredible productivity gains writing (vibe coding) tools for myself that will never need to be “productionised” or even used by another person. Heck even I will probably never use the latest log retrieval tool, which exists purely for Claude code to invoke it. There is a ton of useful software yet to be written for which there _is_ no “last 20%”.
by lovich | 2025-12-20 00:07:37+00:00
You are correct. I will walk back the term “anyone” and amend it to “anyone who doesn’t personally trust the employees/mods of the organization and doesn’t assume that an organization involved in investments and VC firms will act with the same level of self interest as everyone else in that industry”

I am obviously very skeptical of any group like this, but not to the point where I would claim a stance like yours is definitionally incorrect. I’m just personally never going to have trust without the transparency given past history
by damiangriggs | 2025-12-20 00:08:01+00:00
Having a faceless more seamless internet is actually a great thing. If everything becomes easier to use and requires less to maintain competition will rise and prices will fall. I would love to type into a chatbot I want to go to Alaska from Oregon what are the best flights? Then have it give me five or so different airlines with competitive pricing. It's always been about controlling the algorithm, game hasn't changed just the user interface has.
by jp8585 | 2025-12-20 00:08:50+00:00
I definitely understand that this is the rational way of viewing it. Leveraging these tools is an incredible feeling, but the sense of dread is always there in the corner. You can just feel a deep sense of angst in a lot of these interviews. In any case, I would rather have them and use them to their full extent than to become obsolete. Becoming Leonardo it is.
by insane_dreamer | 2025-12-20 00:08:59+00:00
> Is TikTok fundamentally different from HN in some way?

absolutely!

- not ad driven - not follower / likes driven (yes, there's karma but there's no concept of following people, notifications for likes, etc.) - not engagement driven - not algorithmically driven (yes, the home page is, but you can just do /active for example, or /new ; I rarely go the home page) - there isn't an endless amount of "new content" - no hosted content (you have to link to something to show it) - no revenue
by layer8 | 2025-12-20 00:09:08+00:00
One issue with AI for creatives is that it’s virtually impossible to get AI to create a specific vision you have in mind. It creates something, but you just have to accept whatever that is, you can only steer it very roughly. It can be useful for getting inspiration, but not for getting exact results. If AI was better suited for realizing one’s own creative vision and working in a detail-oriented fashion, creators would likely embrace it more.
by germinalphrase | 2025-12-20 00:09:12+00:00
This $9B figure is not a serious number; it’s a narrative. The concrete allegations released so far peg the criminal impact closer to $250 million which, let’s be honest, is bad enough.

As a Minnesotan, I’m appalled by the scale of these thefts, but glad they are actively investigating and charging these people for their crimes. If we had an honest and right minded political/justice system, we would be seeking to uncover and prosecute fraud through the nation.
by verdverm | 2025-12-20 00:09:20+00:00
1. it's not just about MCP, if you have 100s of skills, you are going to have the same context issues

2. it was delegation to a subagent to select the tools that should be made available, which sounded like it got the whole list and did "rag" on the fly like any model would

You're going to want to provide your agent with search, rag, subagent context gathering (and pruning/compation/mgmt) that can work across the internet, code bases, large tool/skill sets, past interaction history. All of this can be presented as a single or few tools to your main agent and is the more meta-pattern/trend emerging
by parl_match | 2025-12-20 00:09:38+00:00
> There are a tons of "we bundled all the latest crap" Chrome forks out there. Nobody needs more those.

And it's fine if they want to compete in that space, but they don't even seem to have the drive or desire to excel there.

To this day, I'm surprised that chromium powers electron and firefox hasn't released a compelling alternative.
by crq-yml | 2025-12-20 00:09:39+00:00
I'm pretty sure that it's not exactly about the code, it's a case of having honed skills and techniques from multiple different sources - John Romero was bouncing around the industry and working on both larger and smaller productions, multiplatform ports, and different approaches to engine/content(he got his hands on both Origin's and Infocom's stuff, as well as a few other places) - the number of references he brought to the table could not be underestimated. John Carmack didn't have that same experience but would have been able to take a description from Romero of "at Origin we did it like this" and aim to make a very efficient version of it - his growth into borrowing academic research for inspiration came a little later. And there was also the early influence of Tom Hall who was older, able to communicate what he wanted as a producer and probably steered the programming team away from wrong turns a few times.

When you have the experience, you already know how long it takes to implement the majority of the game, when we're speaking of these early 2D games using bitmaps, tiles, small animations and some monospace text. The gameplay code is game-jam sized in most instances, so a majority of it was I/O code and asset pipelines. You can chart a safe course to get through one tiny project, and then another, and another, and build a best-of the routines that worked. The coding style would be assembly-like at this time even if they were using C - no deep callstacks, mostly imperative "load and store", which allows for a lower level form of reuse than is typical these days by breaking down the larger algorithm into "load", "mutate", "mutate", "mutate", "store" each as separate routines. So you end up with some tight code when you get to run it through a lot of projects. Softdisk provided the opportunity for building that and getting paid.
Ask HN: Acceleration of a Drop Falling Through Mist?
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-12-20 00:09:59+00:00
Long, long ago, in my college days, I worked the problem of a drop falling through a mist (in a vacuum). As it falls, it sweeps out a volume of the mist, and so the mass of the drop keeps increasing. So you have

mg = ma + v dm/dt

and the surprising result is that a = g/7.

I thought this was a fun problem back then, and I've worked it at least once since, just for amusement value. But now when I try, I'm missing a step.

I know that the mass is proportional to r^3, and the volume swept out is proportional to vr^2. Therefore the volume swept out is proportional to vm^(2/3). I think that's part of the answer, but I don't remember the next step. (I think I'm only missing one piece...)

Before anyone asks: No, I am not some college kid trying to get the internet to do my homework. I passed the class where this problem came up back in 1983. Also, I suspect most universities are on break right now.
by fragmede | 2025-12-20 00:10:22+00:00
If you can predict that hitting “summarize conversation” equals rework, what can you change upstream so you avoid triggering it? Are you relying on the agent to carry state instead of dumping it into .MD files? What happens if your computer crashes?

> so it the model isn't the cause

Thing is, the prompts, those stupid little bits of English that can't possiu matter all that much? It turns out they affect the models performance a ton.
by stackghost | 2025-12-20 00:10:47+00:00
>On the other hand, some of those people are FreeBSD developers who create and maintain code that Apple would like to have the option of using. That relationship is worth something to Apple.

It wasn't that long ago that we used to have to endure HN commenters spamming the same copypasta every time BSD was mentioned: "did you know BSD runs your playstation and netflix and <...>. You should donate money!"

Evidently it's not worth more than the cost of assigning engineers to this, otherwise Apple would already be doing it.
by rapnie | 2025-12-20 00:10:51+00:00
I learned that Turso apparently have plans for a rewrite of libsql [0] in Rust, and create a more 'hackable' SQLite alternative altogether. It was apparently discussed in this Developer Voices [1] video, which I haven't yet watched.

[0] https://github.com/tursodatabase/libsql

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JHOY0zqNBY
by lifestyleguru | 2025-12-20 00:11:05+00:00
Hollywood and media publishers run entire franchises of legal bullies across developed world to harass individuals, and lobby for laws allowing easy prosecution of ISP contract owner. Even Google Books was castrated because of IP rights. Now I have hard time to imagine how this IP+AI cartel operates. Nowadays everyone and their cat throws millions on AI so I imagine IP owners get their share.
by lovich | 2025-12-20 00:11:10+00:00
The mothballed guy is just crazy, trolling, or lying.

I was going to respond to another comments of his in this thread when I realized he was the poster who laid out a false timeline of events by omitting the one comment that made him wrong in another post of mine.

You can also see it with him arguing about how democracy is bad because you’ve been tricked into losing your rights, but also his preferred governmental organization includes being taken advantage of by anyone stronger than you.

His stance is logically inconsistent on even a barest look and his hinting at sovereign citizen arguments and hero’s is telling me the answer is that he’s crazy
by speff | 2025-12-20 00:11:21+00:00
This might be a good place to check the options available for OCR in-place translations. I took a look at OCR3, but it doesn't seem to support my use-case. It looks more tailored towards data extraction for further processing.

I've got some foreign artbooks that I would like to get translated. The translations would need to be in place since the placement of the text relative to the pictures around it is fairly important. I took a look at some paid options online, but they seemed to choke - mostly because of the non-standard text placements and all.

The best solution I could come up with is using Google Lens to overlay a translation while I go through the books, but holding a camera/tablet up to my screen isn't very comfortable. Chrome has Lens built in, but (IIRC) I still need to manually select sections for it to translate - it's not as easy to use as just holding my phone up.

Anyone know of any progress towards in-place OCR/translations?
by renewiltord | 2025-12-20 00:12:18+00:00
Everyone is talking in some kind of weird in-group code or in-jokes that I can't understand so I'll decipher it for the rest of us normies.

> Maguire clearly "comes from a culture that lies about everything."

This is a reference to Shaun Maguire's Twitter post where he said that Zohran Mamdani "comes from..."

https://x.com/shaunmmaguire/status/1941135110922969168

> > Maguire is Jewish, with ancestral ties to early Jewish settlers in California.

> Sir, we are going to have to ask you to leave.

This comment appears to be reacting to the first one by assuming the first one is saying that Jewish people lie about everything, and it responds by saying this is unacceptable to say.

I have been off Twitter for 2 months and when I go there I can't understand anything. People are always saying "can I say something?" and "we know what this means" and shit like that and either the 2 months have killed my brain or something because I never know what the first guy isn't going to say and the second guy knows.

Now Hacker News is similarly incomprehensible and I'm starting to think my mind is no longer able to handle human speech. If this is happening to anyone else, then I hope the interpretation helped. If it didn't, then maybe I'm just losing my mind.
by mothballed | 2025-12-20 00:12:20+00:00
Weaver never 'tried' to be an arms dealer. The ATF approached him and asked him to do it. The ATF was the only 'white supremacist' that we even suspect Weaver might have discussed gunsmithing with. And as far as I know, he's never even been convicted of doing so. The only thing Weaver was convicted of AFAIK is not showing up for court, for something he is still presumed innocent of (edit: actually, fully acquitted of).

It's quite possible he didn't even cut the shotgun too short. The barrel of the gun is supposedly in ATF archives somewhere, but no one seems to know where it is. Very convenient.
by mxgrn | 2025-12-20 00:13:06+00:00
I also wanted a frictionless card creation experience, and I didn't want another (mobile) app for that. I'm only using SR for new vocabulary in a foreign language, so I created a multilingual AI-powered Telegram bot [1] that does just that.

Creating a flash card is as simple as sending a word (or expression) you want to learn. The bot takes care of the rest: generates the translation, pronunciation, and examples.

The bot also uses FSRS for SR.

[1] https://lexicorn.ai
by nphardon | 2025-12-20 00:13:09+00:00
I'm a scientist and I mostly agree with the scientist part, but I am definitely collaborating with my bot, I don't view it as "just a tool". I know this because this morning I had to do a forced reboot and my VsCode wasn't connecting to our remote servers, it took like over 5 minutes after reboot to reload my bot chat, and from like minutes 3-5 I had the distinct feeling of losing a valuable colleague.
by ChadNauseam | 2025-12-20 00:13:18+00:00
I didn't realize it was tracked like this, but I have noticed that as of iOS 26, Safari has gotten a huge number of great web features. It has WebGPU of course, but many small things like fixing up missing parts of the OPFS API that make it actually usable now. Now they even have the field-sizing CSS property [0], fixing imo the most glaring ommission from CSS: the inability to make text input boxes grow to fit the input text!

[0]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/P...
by alwillis | 2025-12-20 00:13:26+00:00
> I foresee all of this CSS/HTML stuff as eventually being declared a sort of legacy format and adding a standard way to ship pluggable rendering engines/language runtimes.

I doubt this is going to happen as long as backwards compatibility continues to be W3C's north star. That's why all current browsers can still render the first website created by TBL in 1989.

Sure, official support for certain extensions should happen but HTML/CSS will always be at the core.
by cameldrv | 2025-12-20 00:14:35+00:00
I have one and it's OK for my kitchen with hardwood floors. I have a lot of stairs in my house. In a couple of places, there are just one or two stairs going up or down between rooms, but obviously the Roomba can't do it. Because of that, it's based in the kitchen and mostly stays there. With a bunch of little kids, it's quicker than sweeping the floor every night, and I just keep the cords out of its way.

If I had a robot vacuum that could climb stairs, it would be a whole different ballgame, but no one has cracked that code so far to my knowledge.
by caymanjim | 2025-12-20 00:14:40+00:00
I feel sorry for this guy. His Reddit inbox is probably fucked, and he's absolutely going to get doxxed and hounded by news people, and I wouldn't be surprised if even worse things happened to him.

Good on him for reporting what he saw. He also went to the police the next day and reported it directly. But now the media machine is going to make him regret he ever said anything, which is unfortunate.
by Havoc | 2025-12-20 00:15:05+00:00
Think we'll have the first job niche shock from AI that the wider public notices. A bit like online translation market just vanishing...except big enough for people to go "oh". Probably transport or warehouse related.

US democracy fundamentally breaks (more).

Substantial global turmoil directly resulting from US losing it's way. Will take time for an alternate order establishing itself in that void.
by weedhopper | 2025-12-20 00:15:30+00:00
Here’s a simple one: a social media for people, one that doesn’t analyse, sell, or train on my data, and a one that people use as a social media—with their own name (remember when facebook required academic login?).

BeReal was close, it was unique, caught up with hype but it suffered from incompetent management (it was buggy as hell), and later sold out for data scraps.

I wish an already popular actual social media site existed.
by temp0826 | 2025-12-20 00:15:35+00:00
Yes essentially. I've got a few resources cobbled together over the last few years but it'd be really nice to have this reference (my Spanish isn't the best, and running to the translator for a definition can be a little annoying). Also to share with fellow learners/apprentices I know. There are a couple of classes out there (which are actually geared more toward the ceremonial/icaro language, not purely conversational Shipibo, which is a bit simpler as you don't need to worry as much about conjugation and other complexities) which I might look into eventually.

(Fwiw I've accumulated a couple years worth of dieta under my belt and am well aware of the restrictions! It's indeed very fascinating, been pretty serious about it the last few years and I've barely scratched the surface)
by lovich | 2025-12-20 00:15:58+00:00
I saw a claim that DeepSeek had piggybacked off of some aspect of training that ChatGPT had done, and so that cost needed to be included when evaluating DeepSeek.

This training part of LLMs is still mostly Greek to me, so if anyone could explain that claim as true or false and the reasons why, I’d appreciate it
by barfoure | 2025-12-20 00:16:45+00:00
Take a look at her campaign donations, where she flies, how often, where she stays, which restaurants she attends and everything else involved.

It’s millions and millions. She did a good job of keeping her husband out of the spotlight.

$49 to $125k sounds like a fictitious “we don’t know” number. It’s amusing. And politicians will lie directly to you.
by klabb3 | 2025-12-20 00:17:40+00:00
> Eufy would be better if they'd fix their roller brush design and didn't lean so heavily into making you buy their replacement components. It's designed around buying Eufy refills.

FWIW there are 3p replacements that are super cheap for roller brush, side brush, filters, bags etc. As for detergent for the mop, I first thought I was smart to buy 3p detergents meant for robot vacuums because they were cheaper. Turns out they clogged the tubes which was tricky to fix, but I did it. After that I bought Eufys original, and lo and behold, it was much more concentrated, which meant it was actually significantly cheaper than the 3p ones (and smells better).

Navigation is spot on. Obstacle avoidance sucks though (to be fair my floor is patterned stone - hard to see anything) and cat toys sometimes get stuck in the roller brush.

Btw what’s the alternative to roller brush?
by pezezin | 2025-12-20 00:17:55+00:00
The article mentions the language and cultural barriers, and the rigid hierarchy with old bosses who demand blind obedience, even when the rules are counterproductive.

I have been living in Japan for years now and I have had the same experience, so I am inclined to believe the article. Mixing Western workers with East Asian management is extremely difficult, to put it mildly.