MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kjellsbells | 2025-12-19 05:36:09+00:00
Not a lawyer, but for the last 20+ years I've dragged around (or recreated) a normal.dot file that has all the styles I use with the keybindings I like.

The productivity boost you get from having a consistent environment is insane. You never need to care about the ribbon, your documents look good, and your mouse/keyboard ergonomics are wonderful with a good normal.dot.

It's like people who have their vimrc or emacs config down to a fine art.
by NiloCK | 2025-12-19 05:38:06+00:00
First: a selection mechanism is just a selection mechanism, and it shouldn't confuse the observation of an emergent, tangential capabilities.

Probably you believe that humans have something called intelligence, but the pressure that produced it - the likelihood of specific genetic material to replicate - it is much more tangential to intelligence than next-token-prediction.

I doubt many alien civilizations would look at us and say "not intelligent - they're just genetic information replication on steroids".

Second: modern models also under go a ton of post-training now. RLHF, mechanized fine-tuning on specific use cases, etc etc. It's just not correct that token-prediction loss function is "the whole thing".
by yourdetect | 2025-12-19 05:38:11+00:00
From the comment section:

> To me the more salient questions are how long before (a) we get Rust in a core subsystem (thus making Rust truly _required_ instead of "optional unless you have hardware foo"), and (b) requiring Rust for _all_ new code.

Previously, the position was that C developers would not be forced to learn Rust.

And a few days ago a security vulnerability was found in the Rust Linux kernel code.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46309536
by tommica | 2025-12-19 05:38:47+00:00
> If you hate it, you've lost a weekend. But you won't hate it. You'll wonder why you ever thought web development had to be so fucking complicated.

This part is said really well, and applies to anything. "It's just a single weekend" is a cure to the whole "wasting time" argument/excuse that I guess a decent amount of people have - at least I know I do.

Really well written article, having both when to use and when not to use, is a nicely balanced view.
by anon7000 | 2025-12-19 05:39:45+00:00
AT&T sounds like the same thing, Google sounds different because they theoretically claim to not sell your data, and instead sell ads, and Google can show you an ad you want to see because Google knows you so well. It doesn’t precisely sell you to advertisers in the same way.

Anyways, the whole thing sucks for consumer privacy and needs to be outlawed. The problem is that companies come up with unique, tricky ways of exploiting you, and people can never fully understand it without a lot of effort. Someone might be ok using Google and seeing contextual ads, but wouldn’t be ok if they knew Google was saving a screenshot of their browser every second and uploading and reselling it. The first can feel innocuous, the second feels evil.
by sbuttgereit | 2025-12-19 05:40:42+00:00
Nick Zentner, a geology lecturer at Central Washington University, takes a particular subject and does a relatively deep, discussion oriented, dive into it over the course of 26 sub-topics... his "A to Z" series. In these he does a couple streamed shows a week and includes links to relevant papers and resources. At the end of each session is a viewer Q&A for those watching live. Almost an online continuing education course....

He did "Baja-BC A to Z" 3 years ago:

https://www.nickzentner.com/#/baja-bc-a-to-z/

With the associated reading list: https://www.geology.cwu.edu/facstaff/nick/gBAJA/

Currently he's about halfway through another "A to Z" called "Alaska A to Z" which covers some of that same territory

https://www.nickzentner.com/#/livestream-series-26-episodes/

And the so-far-posted reading list: https://www.geology.cwu.edu/facstaff/nick/gALASKA/

Of central importance to the first half of the current Alaska series is recent paper by geologist Robert S. Hildebrand titled: "The enigmatic Tintina–Rocky Mountain Trench fault:a hidden solution to the BajaBC controversy?"

What's great about these series is that he'll get a number of the geologists writing these papers involved in one way or another. Either contributing interviews or talks specifically for the video series, or like in the case of this Hildebrand centric work in the current series, Hildebrand himself is watching the stream and participating in the live chat with the other viewers, answer questions and the like.
by jhallenworld | 2025-12-19 05:40:51+00:00
I'm not blaming you. By providing links, your citations go beyond what is required for academic papers.

Would it be rude to print the link "https://doi.org/10.1016/0005-1098(83)90046-8" but actually link to https://sci-hub.se/10.1016/0005-1098(83)90046-8 when you click it? :-)

The DOI is key, then you can use a browser extension to do it, for example: https://github.com/natir/Redirector_doi_sci-hub
by tsimionescu | 2025-12-19 05:42:36+00:00
And all of that is irrelevant for the AI use case. The NPU is at best slightly more efficient than a GPU for this use case, and mostly its just cheaper by forgoing various parts of a GPU that are not useful for AI (and would not be used during inferencing anyway).

And the examples being given of why you'd want AI in your browser are all general text comprehension and conversational discussions about that text, applied to whatever I may be browsing. It doesn't really get less specialized than that.
by margalabargala | 2025-12-19 05:43:00+00:00
Sorry to hear you can't see it. Let me try to assist you in understanding what you are missing.

Yes I'm making that argument. Because it's true. The temperature of what particles do exist, 500km above the earth, is more likely to be in the thousands of degrees farenheit than below zero farenheit.

The discussion being had, if you read comments above your original, is that it's widely thought that "space is cold" and therefore it's good for cooling.

You're right that heat capacity means that the temperature of space is not relevant to its ability to cool a datacenter. You're wrong that making that argument is a good way to get people to actually change their mind.

Instead, attack the idea at its foundation. Space is not cold, not in the places where the data centers would be. It's much easier to get someone to understand "the temperature at 500km where the auroras are is very hot" than "blah blah heat capacity".

Now you see the point!
by anon7000 | 2025-12-19 05:43:05+00:00
Absolutely yes. My prescribed CPAP came with 5G that uploads data for their app and for your physician to monitor your progress. You basically wouldn’t even know it had one, the plan must be managed by the company and automatically connects where ever you take it.

https://www.resmed.com/en-us/products/cpap/machines/airsense...
by nospice | 2025-12-19 05:44:46+00:00
I'm on the free tier, but I also watch my logs. The vast majority of the traffic I'm getting are scrapers and vulnerability scanners, a lot of them coming through residential proxies and other "laundered" egress points.

I honestly don't think that Cloudflare is on top of the problem at all. They claim to be blocking abuse, but in my experience, most of the badness gets through.
by mattbillenstein | 2025-12-19 05:45:19+00:00
Eh, not letting the language ever evolve is a sure way to death, ymmv.

Forkserver is probably a better default, inheriting file handles, globals, and sockets leads to a bunch of subtle bugs - I'm not sure that's even a good feature, also ymmv.

And fork() is still available, so if it breaks things, the solution would be to explicitly ask for fork() - and I'd say for most casual uses of multiprocessing, a user won't know one way or the other which is what I meant by transparent.
by al_borland | 2025-12-19 05:45:31+00:00
I’m really not a fan of this direction for Apple. One of the differentiators between iOS and Google was a lack of ads, which make the experience feel more premium. Increasing ads, or having them at all, really erodes the user experience.

Apple managed to become the most valuable company in the world without ads. Adding them after hitting that milestone feels either greedy or desperate, maybe a little of both. I know the ads themselves aren’t new, but the steady increase is a worrying trend.

I’d rather pay an extra $100 for the phone than have ads all over it.
by belZaah | 2025-12-19 05:46:41+00:00
I used to think so. But over the past 5-10 years I’ve seen the quality of the mac application go down. Things, that used to work, are buggy. Bulleted lists, indents, even scrolling. Compatibility is going, too. I add pictures to find them not rendering once the file has been opened on a pc. I get files back from the customer with figure references having turned static. I’ve been using Word in some way or another since the beginning and it has never been that bad. Eventually this trend will degrade the usability to the extent a competitor would emerge.
by zeta0134 | 2025-12-19 05:47:18+00:00
I am absolutely paid by the hour to learn stuff. The things I'm learning are mostly messy business domain bits: how does our internal API work, who wrote it, what were the constraints, which customer requested this feature, how much SLA will we lose if we break it to hotfix this CVE...

Yes the end result is at some small moment in time a thing that was built. But the value prop of the company isn't the software, it's the ability to solve business problems. The software is a means to that end. Understanding the problems is almost the entire job.
by tsimionescu | 2025-12-19 05:47:18+00:00
You can just look down thread at what people actually expect to do - certainly not (just) text summarization. And even for summarization, if you want it to work for any web page (history blog, cooking description, github project, math paper, quantum computing breakthrough), and you want it accurate, you will certainly need way more than Ollama 8B. Add local image processing (since huge amounts of content are not understandable or summarizable if you can't understand images used in the content), and you'll see that for a real 99% solution you need models that will not run locally even in very wild dreams.
by NicoJuicy | 2025-12-19 05:47:28+00:00
> Completely destroying the US is not ideal for him

Nah.

He wants to be a dictator that extracts wealth from it's citizens.

He has a benefit from following the communist path to extract wealth. Make lives miserable, so they are living off the state ( eg. standing in line for bread), so they can't protest.

Putin is not Trump's friend, but Trump idolises him for extracting enormous wealth from Russia, censoring news ( propaganda) and imprisoning political opponents, ...

Just check the "firehose of falsehoods" ( a Russian propaganda method), it will explain a lot about Trump.
by honkycat | 2025-12-19 05:47:31+00:00
My parents made me do everything, and were so fucking mean about everything, I ended up missing out on the things I actually enjoyed b/c I didn't want yet another thing to get yelled at about.

Specific: guitar and music

To be fair: part of it was to be rid of me and to not have to watch me.

Beauty pagents? Go take a good long look in the mirror. That is pathetic. Is that what you want your kids to value? Passivity? Whatever the fuck beauty pagents encourage?

At least dance is a skill.
by neltnerb | 2025-12-19 05:47:55+00:00
Don't most tech startups lose money for years before they maybe make a profit?

I mean, I agree that such companies are over-represented in thinking about small businesses if that's what you mean. Normal companies have to be profitable quickly for sure.

It feels like tons of companies get valued based on userbase or revenue or theoretical breakthrough rather than ever having to really think about breaking even, but I know that's just because those folks get all the press.
by genuser | 2025-12-19 05:48:01+00:00
The OnePlus 15 has firmly established itself as one of the best mainstream smartphones for gaming enthusiasts. While dedicated gaming phones like the RedMagic 11 Pro exist, they often face limited availability, making the OnePlus 15 an attractive and accessible alternative. Its combination of elite performance, a stunning display, and exceptional charging capabilities creates a compelling package for gamers who don’t want to compromise on daily usability.
by energy123 | 2025-12-19 05:48:07+00:00
Second this but for the chat subscription. Whatever they did with 5.2 compared to 5.0 in ChatGPT increased the test-time compute and the quality shows. If only they would allow more tokens to be submitted in one prompt (it's currently capped at 46k for Plus). I don't touch Gemini 3.0 Pro now (am also subbed there) unless I need the context length.
by staticman2 | 2025-12-19 05:48:25+00:00
Yes I read your post where you claimed "Back in the day, women expected such complements"

Either you meant women expected such compliments broadly (as in a game show) or you meant women expected such compliments if featured in the intro of an IBM OCR documentary where a man shows confusion about a woman on screen.

The latter interpretation is ridiculous, yet here we are.
by tsimionescu | 2025-12-19 05:49:09+00:00
> I'm personally pretty annoyed that no local model (at least that I can run on my own hardware) is anywhere near as hallucination-resistant as the major non-free, non-local frontier models.

And here you get back to my original point: to get good (or at least better) AI, you need complex and huge models, that can't realistically run locally.
by saghm | 2025-12-19 05:49:24+00:00
I honestly don't understand why it's ever useful to die show relative timestamps over absolute ones. It's not hard to look at a date or time and understand how far back it was; it's not even that I can do the math to figure out the relative time, but that the relative version isn't even worth bothering to calculate because the absolute one is just as intuitive. If it's currently February 20XX and I see a timestamp of July 20XX-1, I know how long it's been since then, and I don't care about the number of months. If it's February and I see the timestamp "7 months ago" I don't immediately know it's July without at least doing some small amount of thinking, like "okay, a year before five months from now, so July" (which is especially silly because now I'm having to lean even more into relative times just to be able to get back to the absolute date). Seeing the exact date and also potentially know other pertinent facts like the season ("that picture was from the summer"), holidays ("it must be from the 4th of July barbecue"), etc.

Is there something I'm missing here about why people might prefer relative timestamps? I genuinely can't tell if everyone kind of universally hates them or if this is one of those things where my brain just works differently than a lot of other people.
by aw1621107 | 2025-12-19 05:50:08+00:00
> I could imagine a world where templates are compiled separately and there is essentially duck typing built into the runtime.

The bit of my comment you quoted was just talking about definition checking. Separate compilation of templates is a distinct concern and would be an entirely new can of worms. I'm not sure if separate compilation of templates as they currently are is possible at all; at least off the top of my head there would need to be some kind of tradeoff/restriction added (opting into runtime polymorphism, restricting the types that can be used for instantiation, etc.).

I think both definition checking and separate compilation would be interesting to explore, but I suspect backwards compat and/or migration difficulties would make it hard, if not impossible, to add either feature to standard C++.

> For example, if the template parameter type is a concept, your type could be automatically hooked up as if it was just a normal class and you inherited from it.

Sounds a bit like `dyn Trait` from Rust or one of the myriad type erasure polymorphism libraries in C++ (Folly.Poly [0], Proxy [1], etc.). Not saying those are precisely on point, though; just thought some of the ideas were similar.

[0]: https://github.com/facebook/folly/blob/main/folly/docs/Poly....

[1]: https://github.com/microsoft/proxy
by NaOH | 2025-12-19 05:51:05+00:00
From another article...

>The project was completed in less than a year, ahead of schedule, and on budget.

>"After more than nine years of planning and work...."

>The overpass is the single largest bridge structure for wildlife in North America and one of the largest in the world at 200 feet wide and 209 feet long covering 41,800 square feet, nearly an acre. 76 girders hold up the bridge deck.

https://governorsoffice.colorado.gov/governor/news/cdot-comp...

So it was basically a decade-long project and in that context $15M doesn't seem that high. Along with the wildlife benefits, it sounds like the economic benefits will be immediate and ongoing since the area has had "an average of one wildlife-vehicle crash a day in the fall and spring wildlife movement seasons."
by heavyset_go | 2025-12-19 05:51:23+00:00
I generally agree with you, but you'd be surprised at what lower parameter models can accomplish.

I've got Nemo 3 running on an iGPU on a shitty laptop with SO-DIMM memory, and it's good enough for my tasks that I have no use for cloud models.

Similarly, Granite 4 based models are even smaller, just a couple of gigabytes and are capable of automation tasks, summarization, translation, research etc someone might want in a browser.

Both do chain of reasoning / "thinking", both are fast, and once NPU support lands in runtimes, they can be offloaded on to more efficient hardware.

They certainly aren't perfect, but at least in my experience, fuzzy accuracy / stochastic inaccuracy is good enough for some tasks.
by kjellsbells | 2025-12-19 05:51:37+00:00
I think the set of values of X in the prediction that "X is the year of the citizen coder" has a lot more members than you think.

fortran in 1955, cobol in 1965, visual basic in 1993, delphi in 1995, visualage in 1998(?), Power Automate in 2022, vibe coding in 2025...
by majormajor | 2025-12-19 05:51:52+00:00
Like with large engineering teams I have little faith people will suddenly get the discipline to do the tedious, annoying, difficult work of building good enough guardrails now.

We don't even build guardrails that keep humans who test stuff as they go from introducing subtle bugs by accident; removing more eyes from that introduces new risks (although LLMs are also better at avoiding certain types of bugs, like copypasta shit).

"Test your tests" gets very difficult as a product evolves and increases in complexity. Few contracts (whether unit test level or "automation clicking on the element on the page") level are static enough to avoid needing to rework the tests, which means reworking the testing of the tests, ...

I think we'll find out just how low the general public's tolerance for bugs and regressions is.
by farhanhubble | 2025-12-19 05:52:13+00:00
Ability is a combination of aptitude, skills, persistence, and exposure. More importantly, intention matters and it show up in the quality of your work. If the intention is to cut corners, no one can stop you from doing shoddy work. Number of years and titles do not matter much if the other parameters are low.

Aptitude paves the way for exploration: learning languages, paradigms, modeling techniques, discovering gotchas and so on. Skills follow from practice and practice requires a tough mindset where you don't give up easily.

So many software engineers learn to code just to pass exams and interviews. They claim they have strong logical reasoning. However, they have only been exposed to ideas and patterns from competitive programming rut. They have never even seen code more complex than a few hundred lines. They haven't seen problems being modeled in different languages. They haven't had the regret of building complex software without enough design. They have not had the disappointment of overengineering solutions. They have never reverse-engineered legacy code. They have never single-stepped in a debugger. All they have learned is to make random changes until "It works on my machine".

Yes, software is complex, disposable, ever-changing and often ugly but that is no excuse for keeping it that way.
by idiotsecant | 2025-12-19 05:52:37+00:00
Have you ever listened to the 'high water mark' monologue from fear and loathing? It's pretty much just that. It was a unique time and it was neat that we got to see it, but it can't possibly happen again.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUgs2O7Okqc
by protocolture | 2025-12-19 05:53:24+00:00
Quoting myself from another thread.

> I love it. I love going to the AI place and knowingly consulting the AI for tasks I want the AI to perform. That relationship is healthy and responsible. It doesnt need to be in everything else. Its like those old jokes about how inventions are just <existing invention> + <digital clock>.

> I dont need AI on the desktop, in microsoft office, replying to me on facebook, responding to my google searches AND doing shit in my browser. One of these would be too much, because I can just access the AI I want to speak to whenever I want it. Any 2 of these is such substantial overkill. Why do we have all of them? Justify it. Is there a user story where a user was trying to complete a task but lacked 97% accurate information from 5 different sources to complete the task?

Being against the random inclusion of AI in the browser, isnt the same as being against AI completely. It needs to justify its presence.
by why-o-why | 2025-12-19 05:53:39+00:00
I don't support banning the book, but I think it is hard book to teach because it needs SO much context and a mature audience (lol good luck). Also, there are hundreds of other books from that era that are relevant even from Mark Twain's corpus so being obstinate about that book is a questionable position. I'm ambivalent honestly, but definitely not willing to die on that hill. (I graduated highschool in 1989 from a middle class suburb, we never read it.)
by parineum | 2025-12-19 05:53:49+00:00
> However EVs and green-tech are analagous to the XFEL path, they built from scratch and leapt over the competition that was happy to sit on it's existing profitable tech instead.

I'm not convinced Chinese EVs are technologically better. They've just command economied demand and reduced costs via mass production. The technology seems pretty inline with anything available in the West but demand isn't there to take advantage of scale. China is ahead in EVs by metric of quantity for sure but I don't think they're got next gen battery tech they are keeping secret.
by rtpg | 2025-12-19 05:54:41+00:00
> And a few days ago a security vulnerability was found in the Rust Linux kernel code.

was it a security vulnerability? I'm pretty sure it was "just" a crash. Though maybe someone smarter than me could have turned that into something more.

I have no dog in this race, I really like the idea of Rust drivers but can very much understand retiscience at getting Rust to be handling more core parts of the kernel, just because Rust's value seems to pay off way more in higher level code where you have these invariants to maintain across large code paths (meanwhile writing a bunch of doubly-linked lists in unsafe Rust seems a bit like busy work, modulo the niceties Rust itself can give you)