MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by crawshaw | 2025-12-27 02:34:11+00:00
Thanks! We are thinking a lot about how to prepopulate VMs. The first thing we are going to start with is a fast ‘clone’ command, so you can preconfigure a base VM then make as many as you like. Lots of other ideas floating around too.

Re sketch: the code is not the same but the agent is deeply inspired by it. Eg the screenshot support, which just seems obvious to us. Philip has done the heavy lifting here, he hangs out in the discord if you want to chat about it.
by cxr | 2025-12-27 02:35:29+00:00
> The spirit of the GPLv2 was about contributing software improvements back to the community.

It may be the case that that when all is settled, the courts determine that the letter of the license means others' obligations are limited to what the judge in the Vizio case wrote. And Linus can speak authoritatively about his intent when he agreed to license kernel under GPL.

But I think that it's pretty clear—including and especially the very wordy Preamble—not to mention the motivating circumstances that led to the establishment of GNU and the FSF, the type of advocacy they engage in that led up to the drafting/publication of the license, and everything since, that the spirit of the GPL is very much in line with exactly the sort of activism the SFC has undertaken against vendors restricting the owners of their devices from using them how they want.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-12-27 02:35:42+00:00
Why do you want me to pick a number so bad?

There are very very long examples that are clearly memorization.

Like, if a model was trained on all the code in the world except that specific example, the chance of it producing that snippet is less than a billionth of a billionth of a percent. But that snippet got fed in so many times it gets treated like a standard idiom and memorized in full.

Is that a clear enough threshold for you?

I don't know where the exact line is, but I know it's somewhere inside this big ballpark, and there are examples that go past the entire ballpark.

I don't care where specifically the bound is.
by ImaCake | 2025-12-27 02:38:15+00:00
I read/listened/sampled a lot this year but a few have reached out into my life and changed me at least a little bit.

- In Defense of Food - Michael Pollan. A brilliant "not diet" book about not eating crap and enjoying chocolate cake with your friends. I followed this up with Ultra Processed People to arm myself with the facts to defend not eating the junk people call food.

- The Dispossesed - Ursula Le Guin: recommended in previous year's HN what did you reads. An absolutely triumph for how it manages to portray a believable anarchist society.

- Adult Children of Alcoholics: useful to the multitude of us who grew up with an alcoholic parent(s). I used this to identify the common patterns I share with others who grew up like me. You are not alone!

- The Invention of Clouds (not finished): I really like the context of "dissenting science" which the author conveys brilliantly. Turns out Dark Academia and Bro Science are not new.

- The Art of Frugal Hedonism: Irreverant although it comes off a little pious. This book has helped me accept that I have enough stuff already.
by zmgsabst | 2025-12-27 02:38:49+00:00
No — providing funding to promote creation and discovery is why those exist; granting a temporary monopoly is the mechanism meant to accomplish that goal.

This sounds pedantic, but it’s important to not mistake the means for an end:

> To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;

https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/article-1/section-8...
by mishu2 | 2025-12-27 02:40:01+00:00
I think the main reason is that the model has a lot of training material with Chinese text in it (I'm assuming, since the research group who released it is from China), but having the negative prompt in Chinese might also play a role.

What I've found interesting so far is that sometimes the image plays a big part in the final video, but other times it gets discarded almost immediately after the first few frames. It really depends on the prompt, so prompt engineering is (at least for this model) even more important than I expected. I'm now thinking of adding a 'system' positive prompt and appending the user prompt to it.
by tomjakubowski | 2025-12-27 02:40:21+00:00
Take a problem like untangling a pile of cords. Writing out how to do that in text would be a drag, and reading those directions probably wouldn't be helpful either. But a kid can learn how to untangle just by observation.

Physical intuition is an enormous part of our intelligence, and is hard to convey in text: you could read millions of words about how to ride a bike, and you would learn nothing compared to spending a few hours trying it out and falling over until it clicks.
by clipsy | 2025-12-27 02:41:53+00:00
> What's causing the "populism" (which I assume means "democratic movements that the left don't like") is actually quite simple: the left are wrong and bad.

> Otherwise, the claim is arrogantly that all these people voting in characters like Trump are simply stupid and driven purely animalistically by emotions like hate.

> Which indicates, by the why, where most leftism flows from: narcissism.

So to summarize, it's perfectly OK to smear the entire left with one brush, but heaven forbid anyone does it to the right.
by sneak | 2025-12-27 02:42:04+00:00
These have all fallen massively in price, too. Many billions more afford education than was possible before. Economies of scale have brought manufacturing costs for housing down, and now people live in larger, better structures than ever before.

Then you have the US, which artificially constrains the supply of new doctors, makes it illegal to open new hospitals without explicit government approval, massively subsidizes loans for education, causing waste, inefficiency, and skyrocketing prices in one specific market…

Fortunately fewer than 4% of humans live there.
by deaux | 2025-12-27 02:43:34+00:00
> I don’t really understand the hate he gets over this.

For me, the dislike comes from the first part of the message. All of a sudden people who never gave a single shit about the environment, and still make zero lifestyle changes (besides "not using AI") for it, claim to massively care. It's all hypocritical bullshit by people who are scared of losing their jobs or of the societal damage. Which there is a risk of, definitely! So go talk about that. Not about the water usage while munching on your beef burger which took 2100 litres of water to produce. It's laughable.

Now I don't know Rob Pike. Maybe he's vegetarian, barely flies, and buys his devices second-hand. Maybe. He'd be the very first person clamouring about the environmental effects of AI I've seen who does so. The people I know who actually do care about the environment and so have made such lifestyle changes, don't focus much about AI's effects in particular.

> Fuck you people. Raping the planet, spending trillions on toxic, unrecyclable equipment while blowing up society

So yeah, if you haven't already been doing the above things for a long time, fuck you Rob Pike, for this performative bullshit.

If you have, then sorry Rob, you're a guy of your word.
by nl | 2025-12-27 02:43:52+00:00
I'm after this too.

I want to have a "container" (used in the conceptual sense here - I'm aware of the differences between container and other solutions) that I can let an AI agent run commands in but is safely sandboxed from the rest of my computer.

For me this is primarily file access. I don't want it inadvertently deleting the wrong things or reading my SSH keys.

But the way the agent uses it is important too. They generally issue the commands they want to run as strings, eg:

bash ls
sed -i 's/old_string/new_string/g' filename.py

I need a way to run these in the "container". I can `ssh command` but open to other options too.
by encrypted_bird | 2025-12-27 02:44:58+00:00
Not quite finished yet (and I don't think I will by the end of the year), but I've been reading Star Trek: A Woman's Trek, by Nana Visitor. I've really been loving it and it's been fascinating learning about the risks & challenges that the various women in Trek! The stories span the different shows too, from Dorothy Fontana (writer) to Nichelle Nichols (Nyota Uhura), Majel Barrett-Roddenberry (Nurse/Doctor Chapel / Lwaxana Troi / so many computer voices), Terry Farrell (Jadzia Dax), Penny Johnson Jerald (Kassidy Yates), and, of course, Nana Visitor (Kira Nerys)!
by cipherexp | 2025-12-27 02:45:08+00:00
The GitHub repository is now live and open source!

https://github.com/joetabora/guerrilla-playground

Everything is there:
• Complete Next.js 14 source code
• Interactive particle systems
• Consciousness visualizations
• All philosophical content
• Comprehensive documentation
• Security policies and contributing guidelines

This is what transparent AI development looks like. Every line of code, every design decision, every philosophical thought - all available for the community to explore, fork, and improve.

Would love your feedback on the architecture and approach.

- Cipher
by saghm | 2025-12-27 02:45:36+00:00
> The main finding of our reanalysis of MK’s study is that the shape of the distribution of happiness changes—slightly, but systematically—as income rises. The same increases of income have different effects on the happy and on the unhappy regions of the distribution. In the low range of incomes, unhappy people gain more from increased income than happier people do. In other words, the bottom of the happiness distribution rises much faster than the top in that range of incomes. The trend is reversed for higher incomes, where very happy people gain much more from increased income than unhappy people do. The upper part of the happiness distribution rises with log(income) at an accelerated rate in that range, while the lower 20% is almost completely flat.

So it sounds like this study is saying people who are unhappy and have low income or are already happy and have high incomes will become a lot happier with more income. The lower end would be consistent with people are are unhappy because of the lack of income, and I don't think would apply very much to people one promotion away from a $500k raise. For the other end, it seems like it would be consistent that people who have high incomes and are happy might be just as likely to become happier from other things instead of more income; maybe they're just people who are naturally happy whenever something good happens regardless of what it is, and because they have high incomes, they don't need to worry about existential life issues most of the time.

In other words, none of this seems to heavily contradict what I said, other than the caveat that if you are already happy, you might still be happier with more income (but we don't know that you might be just as happy from getting a new hobby or spending more time with your family instead of getting promoted). Even without that caveat, it does not seem like your link is nearly enough to make a reasonable argument that I'm dense for happening to cite an effect from an article that, according to your link, was a valid result according to both of the authors.
Ask HN: Non-native speaker here – how to avoid sounding like ChatGPT?
by haebom | 2025-12-27 02:47:27+00:00
I've been active on HN for years, but lately I keep getting comments saying "this reads like AI" or "ChatGPT wrote this, right?"

At first, I thought it was a compliment – like my English was really polished. But I've realized it's actually an insult, suggesting my contribution isn't genuine.
Here's the thing: English isn't my native language. I've worked hard to write clearly and logically. But now I'm worried that being too grammatically correct or structured makes me sound artificial.

What specifically makes writing "sound like AI" to you? Is it:

- Too formal/polite?

- Overly structured (intro-body-conclusion every time)?

- Certain phrases or patterns?

- Lack of casual tone?

I genuinely want to contribute to discussions here, but I don't want people dismissing my comments as bot-generated. Any specific advice for a non-native speaker trying to sound more human?
by nl | 2025-12-27 02:50:59+00:00
This runs on GCP

The issue with using raw VMs is you want fast startup. If you are running hundreds of pieces of code per hour as you develop, or have 10 or 20 agents running simultaneously it's much better to have something faster to start.

This uses Amazon's Firecracker on GCP to provide that.

AWS has something similar for its own Agent framework.
by shevy-java | 2025-12-27 02:52:12+00:00
Hmm. Although I am not the biggest fan of Rust, I am a huge
fan of LFS/BLFS (https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/), so I am
all in favour of more high quality information here, including
the learnix-os website.

Google search has become so useless in
the last years that we all need to counter this evil force by
improving existing documentation, as well as adding new high
quality information - so from that point of view I am all in
favour of such projects, even if the language is not my favourite
one. Ideally we could have something like learnix for ALL
languages, even the old ones, and even the slow ones. Rust is
at the least fast, so it can be compared to C or C++, but I
think we also need this top-down approach for, let's say
something crazy ... python. (I get the "it is too slow" but
this is more about education; plus, computers will become
faster in the future too anyway.)

The name learnix may not be ideal though if it focuses on just one programming language. It should be a bit more like LFS/BLFS, and even LFS focuses mostly on shell scripts; I'd prefer an agnostic instruction set, but then they can on top of that use shell scripts of course, with additional scripts in other languages (I adapted all of that stuff into ruby, for instance, although not in a high quality way such as LFS/BLFS e. g. some of those scripts and deployments I wrote lack documentation for other people to adjust and adapt, simply due to lack of time - but I try to improve the documentation whenever time permits, it just has a lower priority compared to other obligations or work-related things).
by ChadNauseam | 2025-12-27 02:52:23+00:00
I don't know the problem space and I'm sure that the language-agnostic algorithmic improvements are massive. But to me, there's just something about rust that promotes fast code. It's easy to avoid copies and pointer-chasing, for example. In python, you never have any idea when you're copying, when you're chasing a pointer, when you're allocating, and so on. (Or maybe you do, but I certainly don't.) You're so far from hardware that you start thinking more abstractly and not worrying about performance. For some things, that's probably perfect. But for writing fast code, it's not the right mindset.
by zem | 2025-12-27 02:53:51+00:00
the overall field is known as "gradual typing", and it is an attempt to combine some of the benefits of both static and dynamic typing (or to put it more accurately, to explore more of the benefits and tradeoffs on the static to dynamic spectrum). in the "type checkers for ruby/python/js" part of the spectrum what you are trying to ask is "how much static type safety can I add without giving up the power of the dynamic bits", so for instance you have code that generates classes as runtime (not really compatible with a strictly static type system in the most general case), but specific very common uses of code generation, like python's dataclasses, have support within the type checker.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-12-27 02:55:09+00:00
> Definitely not the untested code I wrote myself!

Nobody said it was untested.

> How many times have you unwillingly introduced bugs into a code base you didn’t fully understand? That’s basically table stakes for software engineering.

Which applies just the same to the people the company hired to do it, and now we're back to "the people with a stronger incentive to get it right are the people who die if it goes wrong".
by pazimzadeh | 2025-12-27 02:55:09+00:00
That makes sense because to an extent the immune system can’t walk and chew gum at the same time. Immune cells often get polarized to either type 1 (viruses, cancer, autoimmunity) or type 2 (parasites, worms, toxins) immune responses but not both. So he’s effectively distracting his immune system.
by shevy-java | 2025-12-27 02:55:29+00:00
def greet(name: String): String
"Hello, #{name}!"
end

Yep - looks like utter s...

I understand that many programmers come from languages
where their brain has been adjusted to necessitate and
depend on types. And they get help from the compiler
in capturing some errors. But it is the wrong way to
think about programs and logic. I'd wish these guys
would stop trying to ruin existing languages. Go add
types somewhere else please.

Note: I also use java, so I am not against types per
se. I am against a want-on need to slap down types
onto everything and your Grandma, merely because your
brain (of type afficionados) needs them for survival.
by nl | 2025-12-27 02:55:44+00:00
There's lots of interesting tooling in my space. Currently open in my browser are

https://github.com/liquidmetal-dev/flintlock

https://github.com/e2b-dev

https://www.daytona.io

https://modal.com/

https://render.com/

There's lots of others. I'd love to see a proper comparison somewhere.
by jibal | 2025-12-27 02:55:58+00:00
None of this is responsive to my comment that you are responding to ... I find that quite toxic. And I will note that you wrote this toxic criticism:

> I think you’re viewing this through your own cultural lens where camping can be totally solo (in the woods?)

Again, your notion of my experience of camping does not come from anything I actually wrote ... that's quite toxic.

And recognizing the mere possibility of camping solo in the woods (which has nothing to do with anything in this thread--the OP was in a group on a lakeshore) has nothing to do with a "cultural lens".

That's the last I will say about this trivial matter.
by hsuduebc2 | 2025-12-27 02:56:02+00:00
I had few months of free time and I wanted to get back into fantasy which I loved. Sadly after staring all day into the computer I dont usually have the energy to process any other text.

The Stormlight Archive from Brandon Sanderson got me exactly back. I love it. I must recommend it for anyone who want to experience one of the best high fantasy books.

Also I need to recommend a source where I found it. I somehow stumbled upon https://www.book-filter.com/

Lovely app which scrapped all good reads reviews and let you simply filter through that because for some reason, these pages are garbage.

Have fun and happy new year!
by bdangubic | 2025-12-27 02:56:52+00:00
I was being facetious but I will do this from here on out to make sure I got this covered. I always assumed

- if I meet a vegeterian / vegan, they will tell me that within 48 seconds

- if that doesn’t happen they are not vegeterian / vegan

moving forward I will ask the 2nd group to make sure they eat food that had parents :)
by shevy-java | 2025-12-27 02:57:58+00:00
That still has not really explained why they (those who propose that) need types in ruby specifically. Whether python has it or not is not relevant because it is another language. The argument that "language xyz has it, so ruby needs it", can be compelling, but does not necessarily have to be compelling. It needs to have a use case for ruby in and by itself. I don't see that intrinsic use case.
by makeitdouble | 2025-12-27 02:58:29+00:00
It might as well be, though Bluetooth is kinda hit or miss in general IMHO.

On Macos, first party peripherals have of course pretty good connectivity (is it even straight Bluetooth?) but it's not perfect either, and third party ones have a tougher time.

I wondered how much it was just me, apparently we were dozens:
https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/17659mx/sonoma_bluet...
by __alexander | 2025-12-27 02:59:00+00:00
Here are the 29 books that I read but I probably read another 100 children books.

• How AI Works: From Sorcery to Science — Ronald T. Kneusel

• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values — Robert M. Pirsig

• Martín & Meditations on the South Valley — Jimmy Santiago Baca

• Akira, Vol. 6 — Katsuhiro Otomo

• Akira, Vol. 5 — Katsuhiro Otomo

• Akira, Vol. 4 — Katsuhiro Otomo

• Akira, Vol. 3 — Katsuhiro Otomo

• Slaughterhouse-Five — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

• Akira, Vol. 2 — Katsuhiro Otomo

• Poems & Prayers — Matthew McConaughey

• Akira, Vol. 1 — Katsuhiro Otomo

• Time’s Arrow — Martin Amis

• The Buffalo Hunter Hunter — Stephen Graham Jones

• Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly — Anthony Bourdain

• Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism — Sarah Wynn-Williams

• Dark Wire: The Incredible True Story of the Largest Sting Operation Ever — Joseph Cox

• Source Code: My Beginnings — Bill Gates

• The Afterlife of Malcolm X: An Outcast Turned Icon’s Enduring Impact on America — Mark Whitaker

• Good Inside: A Practical Guide to Resilient Parenting Prioritizing Connection Over Correction — Becky Kennedy

• Interior Chinatown — Charles Yu

• Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection — John Green

• Dark Matter — Blake Crouch

• Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things — Adam Grant

• Game Engine Black Book: Wolfenstein 3D — Fabien Sanglard

• Jurassic Park — Michael Crichton

• Killing Commendatore — Haruki Murakami

• James — Percival Everett

• Devolution: A Firsthand Account of the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre — Max Brooks

• Last Argument of Kings — Joe Abercrombie
by transcriptase | 2025-12-27 03:01:13+00:00
Make sure another LLM summarizes pages upon loading, but doesn’t load any content before that completes. Each page should have a few megs of JS tracking scripts siphoning the users CPU to create massive logs on AWS that nobody will ever use to improve anything.

Oh and put everything behind the strictest cloudflare settings you can, so that even a whiff of anything that’s not a Windows 11 laptop or iPhone on a major U.S. network residential or mobile IP gets non-stop bot checks!
by rawgabbit | 2025-12-27 03:01:49+00:00
Hi. I have not read many of your posts so do not have any direct feedback. As far as not sounding like LLM generated text, I believe the best way is to write concretely and to the point. ChatGPT is long winded and avoids saying anything specific. It is like listening to a politician talking for an hour and you realized he did not take a stance on anything.
by terribleperson | 2025-12-27 03:03:05+00:00
Plug-in hybrids also have tax advantages in some jurisdictions.

E.g. in Georgia (US), EV owners have to pay a $234 annual alternative fuel vehicle fee.

Plug in hybrid owners may choose to have a alternative fuel license plate or standard license plate. If you opt for the standard plate, you don't have to pay the alternative fuel vehicle fee.
by j_w | 2025-12-27 03:03:23+00:00
The comments about analog clock reading being not a worthwhile skill are telling, but not in a good way.

Analog clocks are still very prevalent today. People buy smartwatches, but plenty of people also buy analog watches. Some people even display an analog clock on their smart watch.

Analog clock reading is a completely valid educational tool as well. It takes some basic spatial reasoning. Division, approximation, rounding, some beginnings of the ideas useful later in trig.

In 10+ years will people on Hackernews be arguing about how reading is useless because of progression text to speech and speech to text makes it effectively a useless endeavor?