MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by crawshaw | 2025-12-26 19:13:47+00:00
The important point that Simon makes in careful detail is: an "AI" did not send this email. The three people behind the Sage AI project used a tool to email him.

According to their website this email was sent by Adam Binksmith, Zak Miller, and Shoshannah Tekofsky and is the responsibility of the Sage 501(c)3.

No-one gets to disclaim ownership of sending an email. A human has to accept the Terms of Service of an email gateway and the credit card used to pay the email gateway. This performance art does not remove the human no matter how much they want to be removed.
by LucCogZest | 2025-12-26 19:13:47+00:00
Hookmark 6.12 (6436; Integration v. 398) has been released with new ways to add and automate bookmarks across your knowledge tools.

You can now add new bookmarks to Hookmark via a dedicated dialog box, and optionally configure Hookmark to automatically create a corresponding bookmark in DEVONthink for every new web bookmark you add to Hookmark.

Hookmark is now compatible with more apps, and we’ve fine-tuned some existing integrations. You can find the full list of enhancements and bug fixes in the release notes.
https://hookproductivity.com
by neogodless | 2025-12-26 19:14:00+00:00
At least with desktop you sometimes get a CPU upgrade path.

For example, with Socket 939, I started with an Athlon 64 3000+, and upgraded later to an X2 4200+.

With Socket AM4, I skipped the first generation, got a Ryzen 2700X, then skipped the next generation, and then got a Ryzen 5900X! (But a solid 4 generations on the same socket!)
by benatkin | 2025-12-26 19:14:30+00:00
I don't think it's slop. I think it's a nice enough email, using nascent AI emotions.

Giving AI agents resources is a frontier being explored, and AI Village seems like a decent attempt at it.

Also the naming is the same as WALL•E - that was the name of the model of robot but also became the name of the individual robot.
by SV_BubbleTime | 2025-12-26 19:14:54+00:00
Is that a viable business model though? That they’ll always be a niche supplier with low-vokume issues, seems like a tough market.

In fact, I think Dell or HP or Other could demolish Framework in a 1/2 second by offering a line that was even 50% the offering. By focusing on replaceable screens, keyboard, and standing the chassis for multiple boards and selling some parts they dry up FW’s moat with little effort.
by manuelmoreale | 2025-12-26 19:15:25+00:00
> I mean, I get that it's frustrating to pour effort into writing something that effectively nobody reads

And if that was the issue this clearly doesn’t solve it since nobody is reading this.

I might be the wrong audience for this considering I have a public blog but this to me sounds like an insane product.

But hey, if someone finds it useful, good for them.
by angoragoats | 2025-12-26 19:15:43+00:00
FWIW you do not have to do leetcode to get a job. I’m a staff level SWE and I’ve had no problems finding non-leetcode companies, both through my own network and through browsing job listings.

I have literally never done a leetcode “whiteboard code this random problem that has nothing to do with our actual work” interview, in 25+ years in the industry.
by Forgeties79 | 2025-12-26 19:16:00+00:00
A person trying to learn doesn’t constantly disagree/contradict you and never express that their understanding has improved. A person sealioning always finds a reason to erode whatever you say with every response. At some point they need to nod or at least agree with something except in the most extreme cases.

It also doesn’t help their case that they somehow have a such a starkly contradictory opinion on something they ostensibly don’t know anything/are legitimately asking questions about. They should ask a question or two and then just listen.

It’s just one of those things that falls under “I know it when I see it.”
by arjie | 2025-12-26 19:16:00+00:00
This is the worst of outrage marketing. Most people don't have resistance to this, so they eagerly spread the advertising. In the memetic lifecycle, they are hosts for the advertisement parasite, which reproduces virally. Susceptibility to this kind of advertising is cross-intelligence. Bill Ackman famously fell for a cab driver's story that Uber was stiffing him tips.

With the advent of LLMs, I'd hoped that people would become inured to nonsensical advertising and so on because they'd consider it the equivalent of spam. But it turns out that we don't even need Shiri's Scissors to get people riled up. We can use a Universal Bad and people of all kinds (certainly Rob Pike is a smart man) will rush to propagate the parasite.

Smaller communities can say "Don't feed the trolls" but larger communities have no such norms and someone will "feed the trolls" causing "the trolls" to grow larger and more powerful. Someone said something on Twitter once which I liked: You don't always get things out of your system by doing them; sometimes you get them into your system. So it's self-fueling, which makes it a great advertising vector.

Other manufactured mechanisms (Twitter's blue check, LinkedIn's glazing rings) have vaccines that everyone has developed. But no one has developed an anti-outrage device. Given that, for my part, I am going to employ the one tool I can think of: killfiling everyone who participates in active propagation through outrage.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-12-26 19:17:14+00:00
> Yet we regularly observe that working with millions of people; we take care of our young, we organize, when we see that some action hurt our environment we tend to limit its use.

That's more like human universals. These behaviors generally manifest to smaller or larger degree, depending on how secure people feel. But those are extremely local behaviors. And in fact, one of them is exactly the thing I'm talking about:

> we organize

We organize. We organize for many reasons, "general living" is the main one but we're mostly born into it today (few got the chance to be among the founding people of a new village, city or country). But the same patterns show up in every other organizations people create, from companies to charities, from political interests groups to rural housewives' circles -- groups that grow past ~100 people split up. Sometimes into independent groups, sometimes into levels of hierarchies. Observe how companies have regional HQs and departments and areas and teams; religious groups have circuits and congregations, etc. Independent organizations end up creating joint ventures and partnerships, or merge together (and immediately split into a more complex internal structure).

The key factor here is, IMO, for everyone in a given group to be in regular contact with everyone else. Humans are well evolved for living in such small groups - we come with built-in hardware and software to navigate complex interpersonal situations. Alignment around shared goals and implicit rules is natural at this scale. There's no space for cheaters and free-loaders to thrive, because everyone knows everyone else - including the cheater and their victims. However, once the group crosses this "we're all a big family, in it together" size, coordinating everyone becomes hard, and free-loaders proliferate. That's where explicit laws come into play.

This pattern repeats daily, in organizations people create even today.
by butlike | 2025-12-26 19:17:37+00:00
I might argue metaphorically your direct reports can be considered your army. If not an army, then your microcosm of workforce. If you use up the workforce (in whichever way), then you're implicitly "done" as well.

I think saying "no" is easier in a lot of business-related problems, and then when they're the manager, thy can decide. I also accept that as a manager, if I steer the ship incorrectly, I get to fall on that sword
by fourseventy | 2025-12-26 19:17:58+00:00
Because now YJIT is deprecated and at some point in a year or two I will have to have my team go through and switch everything from YJIT to ZJIT. So it's creating random tech debt busywork that will suck up dev resources that could better be used building features.

In isolation, having to switch from YJIT to ZJIT isn't that bad, but this same type of churn happens across so much of the frameworks and technologies that my company uses that in aggregate it becomes quite an annoyance.
by culi | 2025-12-26 19:18:00+00:00
From the Wikipedia

> In 2023, Lanmaoa asiatica received international media attention after U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen was reported to have eaten a dish that contained it during an official visit to China. Yellen stated that the dish had been thoroughly cooked, and she experienced no ill effects (hallucinations).

It seems Rubroboletus sinicus, another bolete, is also suspected to have this effect. These hallucinogenic mushrooms are collectively known as "xiao ren ren" in China.

They seem to be relatively well known in parts of China, the Philippines, and Papua New Guinea but the ethnomycological work in English is just not really there.

It also seems like it's most likely something in the tryptamine class which could explain the blue bruising. The Wikipedia page has more info

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucinogenic_bolete_mushroom
by jfarlow | 2025-12-26 19:18:06+00:00
This is a challenge, even for someone who has professionally used the breadth of proteins. I really like the test. I'm actually kind of surprised at my own pulling on knowledge to make a guess - it's an orthogonal way to think about the question than is usually posed.

I wonder if there's a way to ease the difficulty by filling in 'correct' features of the guesses: if your guess is a 'transmembrane' then it reveals that as a property. On the other hand, I don't think the annotations are clean enough - and are often designed for 'at all' rather than 'primary' features. For one of the examples, once I noticed it was an adhesion protein, it would have been interesting to sift through classes or cell types as opposed to just continuing to shoot in the dark based on the structure alone.

I presume you're showing even the 'low confidence' portions of the predicted structure? Please do.

You could also show the primary amino acid sequence too - there's a weird familiarity with those given how often the structures themselves have historically not been so accessible. BLASTING each of the guesses would be another interesting thing to see.
by orwin | 2025-12-26 19:20:09+00:00
This person speak about "The Postmodern Condition" like they read it, but as they didn't, the criticism comes out as dead wrong and quite dumb.

Don't read this person. I'm not saying you have to read the whole book to use a quote, but talking this confidently while doing what we call in French a "contresens" is a sign that the author have no business talking about serious books or philosophy.

It's like Ayn Rand who believed Kant "critique of pure reason" is about criticism of the scientific method and now a huge part of US authors think the same while never having read Kant.
by mrguyorama | 2025-12-26 19:20:58+00:00
Indeed, I've made these exact arguments about how Youtube systemically pushes creators to do this. I blame Youtube.

Veritasium irks me more than others somehow, because it often seems like their clickbait titles are complete fabrications and don't even match the video content, but also because their eventual non-clickbait titles are pretty good themselves, and often catch my curiosity. I know I don't respond the same as the general audience though.

I'm much more sensitive to clickbait on science related content, because when GameGrumps make a clickbait title, it's not an issue. Nobody cares if they lie about what happens in a gameplay video.

It's too bad, because the videos are often about fascinating science history that isn't given an enjoyable narrative in other places, but the original title that pushes me away will be something insane like "THIS EXPERIMENT NEARLY ENDED THE WORLD" and it sucks. As I said, when the titles are changed to the more sane versions, I usually end up watching because it is interesting.

Like right now, their newest video: "There IS something faster than light". It's actually not as bad as they've done in the past. But eventually that title will change to reflect the actual video content and it will be much more obvious what it is about and I will likely want to watch it.
by jorvi | 2025-12-26 19:21:40+00:00
But there isn't just one company deciding externalizing cost on the rest of us is a great way to boost profit since it costs them very little. Especially for a monopoly like YouTube that can decide that eating up your battery is fine if it saves them a few cents in bandwidth costs.

Not all of those externalizing companies abuse your time but whatever they abuse can be expressed in a $ amount and $ can be converted to a median's person time via median wage. Hell, free time is more valuable than whatever you produce during work.

Say all that boils down to companies collectively stealing 20 minutes of your time each day. 140 minutes each week. 7280 (!) minutes each year, which is 5.05 days, which makes it almost a year over the course of 70 years.

So yeah, don't do what you do and sweettalk the fact that companies externalize costs (private the profits, socialize the losses). They're sucking your blood.
by simonw | 2025-12-26 19:21:41+00:00
I imagine you think I'm an accelerant of all of this, through my efforts to teach people what it can and cannot do and provide tools to help them use it.

My position on all of this is that the technology isn't going to uninvented and I very much doubt it will be legislated away, which means the best thing we can do is promote the positive uses and disincentivize the negative uses as much as possible.
by overgard | 2025-12-26 19:21:48+00:00
You know, this kind of response is a thing that builds with frustration over a long period of time. I totally get it. We're constantly being pushed AI, but who is supposed to benefit from it? The person whose job is being replaced? The community who is seeing increased power bills? The people being spammed with slop all the time? I think AI would be tolerable if it wasn't being SHOVED into our faces, but it is, and for most of us it's just making the world a worse place.
by maelito | 2025-12-26 19:21:49+00:00
Just broke my control key. They're sending me a new keyboard (well the whole cover as chznging the keyboard is hard) as part of the EU garantee.

Awesome. My last laptop had the same problem but the repair employee broke the whole computer when he came to replace the keyboard. Dell then did not want to accept their fault.

Vive le framework.
by LouisSayers | 2025-12-26 19:21:50+00:00
Yes generally speaking, statistically most people will not beat the index.

Does it follow then that no-one is beating the index consistently?

Of course there are people who are not a statistic. Maybe not everyone is made for it, but that doesn't mean noone is out there beating the market.

Maybe its hard if you're a hedge fund, but I'm talking about individuals with relatively small accounts.
by dredmorbius | 2025-12-26 19:22:22+00:00
By the same logic, there's no such thing as "cancer", a "cold" (or more accurately: upper respiritory illness), or a broken leg, since each of these have many distinct causes.

All models are wrong, some models are useful. And some are based in at least part on historical accident and sequence of understanding. Diabetes (etymology, Greek diabetes, excessive discharge of urine), is one such of these.

Of the multiple distinct types of diabetes currently recognised (types 1 & 2, which you note, gestational, MODY, 5, and possibly several others), there is a commonality of primary symptoms (unregulated, often high, blood sugar), treatments (most must or may be treated with supplemental insulin), monitoring (of blood glucose levels typically by finger stick or CGM, as well as HgA1C for longer-term status and progression), of healthcare providers specialising in the diseases (generally endocrinologists), and of long-term complications: high blood pressure, heart disease and failure, neuropathy, poor circulation, various infections, and often peripheral limb amputations.

Thus the medical literature notes that diabetes is a group of common endocrine diseases all sharing high blood sugar levels, though of distinct types having distinct causes but largely similar treatments.

In the same sense, treatment for a broken leg largely doesn't distinguish on the cause of the fracture (blunt trauma, falls, osteoperosis, gunshot), treatment of respiratory illnesses is similar despite different infectious agents, and cancers, whilst varying greatly in prognosis and treatment, share the commonality of unregulated growth and metastases, with similar end-stage consequences.

All labels and concepts are human constructs to simplify a complex world. Absolutism over definitions tends not to be especially enlightening. Or useful.
by holg | 2025-12-26 19:24:15+00:00
This is beautiful. Schematic capture, PCB layout, broadcast facilities - and 3D cable routing with auto-generated cut lists and labels. That's the workflow taken to its full potential.
64K RAM, 8086 with math coprocessor, ACAD 1.0. Memory was such a pain back then. I eventually got a Quadra 700 (68MB) with A/UX - Unix on a Mac felt like the future.
Fun fact: we got Betz's original XLISP (C) running in WASM for a benchmark. It destroys my Rust version. But speed was never the point - the CAD workflow was. And yours proves the pattern scaled far beyond what I did with electrical schematics.
by pxc | 2025-12-26 19:24:46+00:00
Loved this article. Just enough detail to make the broad scope compatible with a reasonable length, and well-argued.

I feel sometimes like package management is a relatively second-class topic in computer science (or at least among many working programmers). But a package manager's behavior can be the difference between a grotesque, repulsive experience and a delightful, beautiful one. And there aren't quite yet any package managers that do well everything that we collectively have learned how to do well, which makes it an interesting space imo.

Re: Nixpkgs, interestingly, pre-flakes Nix distributes all of the needed Nix expressions as tarballs, which does play nice with CDNs. It also distributes an index of the tree as a SQLite database to obviate some of the "too many files/directories" problem with enumerating files. (In the meantime, Nixpkgs has also started bucketing package directories by name prefix, too.) So maybe there was a lesson learned here that would be useful to re-learn.

On the other hand, IIRC if you use the GitHub fetcher rather than the Git one, including for fetching flakes, Nix will download tarballs from GitHub instead of doing clones. Regardless, downloading and unpacking Nixpkgs has become kinda slow. :-\
by DonHopkins | 2025-12-26 19:25:01+00:00
That's as obnoxious as texting unsolicited CAT FACTS to Ken Thompson!

Hi Ken Thompson! You are now subscribed to CAT FACTS! Did you know your cat does not concatenate cats, files, or time — it merely reveals them, like a Zen koan with STDOUT?

You replied STOP.
cat interpreted this as input and echoed it back.

You replied ^D.
cat received EOF, nodded politely, exited cleanly, and freed the terminal.

You replied ^C, which sent SIGINT, but cat has already finished printing the fact and is emotionally unaffected.

You replied ^Z.
cat is now stopped, but not gone.
It is waiting.

You tried kill -9 cat.
The signal was delivered.
Another cat appeared.
by tomlue | 2025-12-26 19:25:14+00:00
Totally agree, but also, I still spend tons of time struggling and working on things with LLMs, it is just a different kind of struggle, and I do think I am getting much better at it over time.

> I know that the intellectually resilient of society, will still be able to thrive, but I'm scared for everyone else - how will LLMs affect their ability to learn in the long term?

Strong agree here.
by neilv | 2025-12-26 19:25:21+00:00
My programming teacher in 9th grade spent half the class time on Pascal and programming, and half like a literature or social studies class, including reading and discussing "Player Piano".

Today, the people who most should read it and other things are not the people in our field. Just like the people who most should've been reading about the effects and dangers of Wall Street scamming, were not the coked-up bros doing the scamming.
by minimaxir | 2025-12-26 19:25:23+00:00
The annoying thing about this drama is the predominant take has been "AI is bad" rather than "a startup using AI for intentionally net negative outcomes is bad".

Startups like these have been sending unsolicited emails like this since the 2010's, before char-rnns. Solely blaming AI for enabling that behavior implicitly gives the growth hacking shenanigans a pass.
by tomlue | 2025-12-26 19:26:49+00:00
Yeah it can be a risk or a benefit for sure.

I agree that struggle matters. I don’t think deep understanding comes without effort.

My point isn’t that those hours were wasted, it’s that the same learning can often happen with fewer dead ends. LLMs don’t remove iteration, they compress it. You still read, think, debug, and get things wrong, just with faster feedback.

Maybe time will prove otherwise, but in practice I have found they let me learn more, not less, in the same amount of time.
by tensor | 2025-12-26 19:28:06+00:00
"Fuck you I hate AI" isn't exactly a deep statement needing credibility. It's the same knee jerk lacking in nuance shit we see repeated over and over and over.

If anyone were actually interested in a conversation there is probably one to be had about particular applications of gen-AI, but any flat out blanket statements like his are not worthy of any discussion. Gen-AI has plenty of uses that are very valuable to society. E.g. in science and medicine.

Also, it's not "sealioning" to point out that if you're going to be righteous about a topic, perhaps it's worth recognizing your own fucking part in the thing you now hate, even if indirect.
by adolph | 2025-12-26 19:29:16+00:00
> And he is allowed to work for google and still rage against AI.

The specific quote is "spending trillions on toxic, unrecyclable equipment while blowing up society." What has he supported for the last 20+ years if not that? Did he think his compute ran on unicorn farts?

Clearly he knows, since he self-replies "I apologize to the world at large for my inadvertent, naive if minor role in enabling this assault."

Just because someone does awesome stuff, like Rob Pike has, doesn't mean that their blind spots aren't notable. You can give him a pass and the root comment sure wishes everyone would, but in doing so you put yourself in the position of the sycophant letting the emperor strut around with no clothes.
by dahart | 2025-12-26 19:29:28+00:00
That is one meaning of “commons”, but not all of them, and you might be mistaking which one the phrase ‘tragedy of the commons’ is using.

“Commons can also be defined as a social practice of governing a resource not by state or market but by a community of users that self-governs the resource through institutions that it creates.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commons

The actual mechanism by which ownership resolves tragedy of the commons scenarios is by making the resource non-free, by either charging, regulating, or limiting access. The effect still occurs when something is owned but free, and its name is still ‘tragedy of the commons’, even when the resource in question is owned by private interests.