MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by NotGMan | 2025-12-11 18:57:40+00:00
>> Early programming languages followed similar logic: FORTRAN (Formula Translation), COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language), BASIC (Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code), SQL (Structured Query Language), I believe Lisp stands for list processing. The pattern was clear: names conveyed purpose or origin.

"names conveyed purpose or origin.": no they don't. If I use the authors example of the two people talking: as if saying "BASIC" instead of "Cobra" explained the meaning anything better to a person who never used BASIC.

I've been programming for 15 years+ and never used basic due to my age and I never know, until today, that BASIC stands for "Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code".

Why? Because I don't need to know and it doesn't make the usage of BASIC anything different.
by aeternum | 2025-12-11 18:57:42+00:00
If PBS and NPR had shows of the caliber of Mr. Rogers then perhaps a strong case could be made continuing that funding.

Instead they now focus on messages like this: https://x.com/NPR/status/1491520306036543496

Sell the spectrum and let them compete fairly in the marketplace of ideas. Half the country should not be forced to fund broadcasting they do not agree with.
by verdverm | 2025-12-11 18:58:09+00:00
Drama if I had to pick the symptom most visible from the outside.

A lot of talent left OpenAI around that time, most notably in this regard would be Ilya in May '24. Remember that time Ilya and the board ousted Sam only to reverse it almost immediately?

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/05/chief...
by lr0 | 2025-12-11 18:58:09+00:00
The "Raptor Lake" codename in microprocessors is internal, the product ships with systematic designation. Engineers spec chips by model numbers that encode generation, tier, and performance class.

In Pharmaceuticals, Doctors prescribe "sildenafil," not "Viagra." The generic name describes chemical structure. Brand names are marketing for consumers, not professional nomenclature.

Mythology in chemistry/astronomy has centuries of legacy and connects to human cultural history. Calling an element "Titanium" after Titans carries weight. Calling a SQL replicator "Marmot" connects to... what, exactly? A weekend at the zoo?
by dragonwriter | 2025-12-11 18:58:17+00:00
> Does elevenlabs have a real-time conversational voice model?

Yes.

> It seems like like their focus is largely on text to speech and speech to text.

They have two main broad offerings (“Platforms”); you seem to be looking at what they call the “Creative Platform”. The real-time conversational piece is the centerpiece of the “Agents Platform”.
by hyperpape | 2025-12-11 18:58:22+00:00
> PostgreSQL isn't "Generic SQL Database 47" it's the successor to Ingres (Post-Ingres-SQL).

Indeed. This helps me know that I'm using a database more modern than Ingres. I chose not to use Oracle or SQL Server because they might have predated Ingres.

Just one question: what's Ingres, and why do I care about it? Of course, I don't, which makes Postgres no more useful of a name than "fluffnutz" or "hooxup". That said, over time, I've come to like the name Postgres.
by gipp | 2025-12-11 18:58:44+00:00
Sure, but how many LLM streaming clients are out there?

Namespacing, sure. But is "We use gh:someguy/openai/llm-streaming-client to talk to the backend" (x50 similarly cumbersome names in any architecture discussion) really better than "We use Pegasus as our LLM streaming client"?
by fusslo | 2025-12-11 18:58:54+00:00
are you guys naming your products?

We have an internal name and our product name. Internal names start as something that describes the project/repo/tool. Then within 18 months the name no longer makes sense so we rename it to some random name - state names, lake names, presidents, mountains, etc. It's just a placeholder.

The public facing product name is a compromise of marketing, trademark, and what gets approved by the CEO. Even the company name might change in startup world. No joke: the startup next door had to change their name because it was too masculine, and they realized more than half their projected market was women.
by kens | 2025-12-11 18:58:59+00:00
I did a lot of research on this [1]. I got confirmation from Robert Garner (architect of the SPARC processor) that the NSA did indeed ask for the population count instruction. His story of meeting with the NSA is pretty amusing [2].

[1] https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/a/8666/4158

[2] https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20...
by burnt-resistor | 2025-12-11 18:59:10+00:00
That's the root problem with all mandated, invasive CSAM scanning. (Non-signature based) creates an unreasonable panopticon that leads to lifelong banishment by imprecise, evidence-free guessing. It also hyper-criminalizes every parent who accidentally takes a picture of their kid without being fully dressed. And what about DoS victims who are anonymously sent CSAM without their consent to get them banned for "possession"? While pedo is gross and evil no doubt, but extreme "think of the children" measures that sacrifice liberty and privacy create another evil that is different. Handing over total responsibility and ultimate decision-making for critical matters to a flawed algorithm is lazy, negligent, and immoral. There's no easy solution to any such process, except requiring human review should be the moral and ethical minimum standard before drastic measures (human in the loop (HITL)).
by granzymes | 2025-12-11 18:59:17+00:00
> It'll be noteworthy to see the cost-per-task on ARC AGI v2.

Already live. gpt-5.2-pro scores a new high of 54.2% with a cost/task of $15.72. The previous best was Gemini 3 Pro (54% with a cost/task of $30.57).

The best bang-for-your-buck is the new xhigh on gpt-5.2, which is 52.9% for $1.90, a big improvement on the previous best in this category which was Opus 4.5 (37.6% for $2.40).

https://arcprize.org/leaderboard
by reactordev | 2025-12-11 18:59:18+00:00
Size of team has no bearing in this argument. Saying they were small so they get a pass at preventing obscene download sizes is like saying “Napster was created by one man, surely he shouldn’t be accountable” but he was.

When making a game, once you have something playable, is to figure out how to package it. This is included in that effort. Determining which assets to compress, package, and ship. Sometimes this is done by the engine. Sometimes this is done by the art director.
by sofixa | 2025-12-11 19:00:26+00:00
No, the only Level 3 self-driving system is Drive Pilot by Mercedes. They have it on the S-Class and EQS sedans, so one ICE/hybrid and one EV.

It even comes with legal liability for the car manufacturer, that's how confident they are in the tech. None of this kind of hopium: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autono...
by verdverm | 2025-12-11 19:00:33+00:00
Yeah, with multiple chrome profiles, you have to be mindful of which one you last had focused before clicking a link from an external application (i.e. tailscale), so that it opens the new tab in the right instance so the account(s) you use in it are available

Def use multiple chrome profiles if you aren't. You can color code them to make visual identification a breeze
by margalabargala | 2025-12-11 19:00:36+00:00
That's...just completely false.

If you lack the middle-school-level understanding of physics to understand why, I'm not going to be able to give it to you in an internet comment.

Think hard about why braking and coasting would wear the tires differently. Here's a hint. Where does the energy go? What is doing the work to stop the car in each scenario?
by airstrike | 2025-12-11 19:00:47+00:00
I just think DRY is overblown. I just let code grow. When parts of it become obvious to abstract, I refactor them into something self contained. I learned this from an ice wizard.

When I was younger, writing Python rather than Rust, I used to go out of my way to make everything DRY, DRY, DRY everywhere from the outset. Class-based views in Django come to mind.

Today, I just write code, and after it's working I go back and clean things up where applicable. Not because I'm "following a principle", but because it's what makes sense in that specific instance.
Show HN: Pipedreamer – AI for Excel
by wennyyustalim | 2025-12-11 19:01:02+00:00
Built an Excel Agent for fun and it turned out to be useful for my sister and her friends. They run small businesses and I'm surprised how much of the world is run on Excel. If this is useful for you too, would love to hear your feedback!

Sample prompt you can start with: "write a sudoku puzzle on the sheet"
by matt_kantor | 2025-12-11 19:01:06+00:00
Problem is, the CSSOM models that more like this:

<rule selector="h1, h2"> <style> <property name="color" value="red" /> </style> </rule>

Perhaps your takeaway from this is "the CSSOM is bad" (and I don't necessarily disagree), but it's what the "mistake" is talking about.
by collinmcnulty | 2025-12-11 19:01:18+00:00
The problem with descriptive names is that they start descriptive but then become proper nouns. At a former employer in the Fortune 100 outside the software industry, everything started with a descriptive name, that then became an acronym. And as every project and tool inevitably developed its own idiosyncrasies, the descriptive name pretty soon didn't tell you anything useful about the project at all.

It is an unavoidable reality that knowing something's name gives you very, very little information about what that something is. That's what sentences are for.
by orliesaurus | 2025-12-11 19:01:32+00:00
Watching this unfold... I keep thinking about the supply chain... how many rare minerals go into this custom silicon?

ALSO what happens when the first generation hits end-of-life... will there be a clear path to recycling? I want to believe these platforms will last more than a subscription cycle...

BUT I guess we won't know until we see a teardown...
by porphyra | 2025-12-11 19:01:39+00:00
Rivians have been spotted with giant Velodyne VLS-128 "Alpha Puck"s since several years ago [1]. But from last I checked, Rivian's ADAS is still struggling with ping-ponging in lanes on curved stretches, and it only works on a small set of pre-mapped highways. Highly doubtful that "universal hands free" is coming.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/mqijd2/riv...
by commandar | 2025-12-11 19:01:45+00:00
In particular, the API pricing for GPT-5.2 Pro has me wondering what on earth the possible market for that model is beyond getting to claim a couple of percent higher benchmark performance in press releases.

>Input:

>$21.00 / 1M tokens

>Output:

>$168.00 / 1M tokens

That's the most "don't use this" pricing I've seen on a model.

https://openai.com/api/pricing/
by stego-tech | 2025-12-11 19:01:54+00:00
These models still consistently fail the only benchmark that matters: if I give you a task, can you complete it successfully without making shit up?

Thus far they all fail. Code outputs don’t run, or variables aren’t captured correctly, or hallucinations are stated as factual rather than suspect or “I don’t know.”

It’s 2000’s PC gaming all over again (“gotta game the benchmark!”).
by Lvl999Noob | 2025-12-11 19:02:08+00:00
The various projects that say something is deprecated but then don't give a removal timeline or keep delaying the removal (or even explicitly say it won't be removed, just remain deprecated) are the cause of this problem.

IMO, any deprecation should go in the following steps:

1. Decide that you want to deprecate the thing. This also includes steps on how to migrate away from the thing, what to use instead, and how to keep the existing behaviour if needed. This step would also decide on the overall timeline, starting with the decision and ending with the removal.

2. Make the code give out big warnings for the deprecation. If there's a standard build system, it should have support for deprecation warnings.

3. Break the build in an easy to fix way. If there is too much red tape to take one of the recommended steps, the old API is still there, just under a `deprecated` flag or path. Importantly, this means that at this step, 'fixing' the build doesn't require any change in dependencies or (big) change in code. This should be a one line change to make it work.

4. Remove the deprecated thing. This step is NOT optional! Actually remove it. Keep it part of your compiler / library / etc in a way to give an error but still delete it. Fixing the build now requires some custom code or extra dependency. It is no longer a trivial fix (as trivial as the previous step at least).

Honestly, the build system should provide the tools for this. Being able to say that some item is deprecated and should warn or it is deprecated and should only be accessible if a flag is set or it is removed and the error message should say "function foo() was removed in v1.4.5. Refer to the following link:..." instead of just "function foo() not found"

If the build system has the option to treat warnings as errors, it should also have the option to ignore specific warnings from being treated as such (so that package updates can still happen while CI keeps getting the warning). The warning itself shouldn't be ignored.
by dekhn | 2025-12-11 19:02:14+00:00
Maybe you could take the stat timings, the read timings (both from strace) and somehow instrument Python to output timing for unmarshalling code (or just instrument everything in python).

Either way, at least on my system with cached file attributes, python can startup in 10ms, so it's not clear whether you truly need to optimize much more than that (by identifying remaining bits to optimize), versus solving the problem another way (not statting 500 files, most of which don't exist, every time you start up).
by ComputerGuru | 2025-12-11 19:02:19+00:00
Wish they would include or leak more info about what this is, exactly. 5.1 was just released, yet they are claiming big improvements (on benchmarks, obviously). Did they purposely not release the best they had to keep some cards to play in case of Gemini 3 success or is this a tweak to use more time/tokens to get better output, or what?
by zelphirkalt | 2025-12-11 19:02:25+00:00
3 or 4 can very easily accumulate. For example: HTML, CSS as must know, plus some JS/TS (actually that's 2 langs!) for sprinkles of interactivity, backend in any proper backend language. Oh wait, there is a fifth language, SQL, because we need to access the database. Ah and those few shell scripts we need? Someone's gotta write those too. They may not always be full programming languages, but languages they are, and one needs to know them.
by llbbdd | 2025-12-11 19:03:26+00:00
I can't say I'm not tempted looking at the Spark, I could probably save some cash on heating my house with that thing. Though yeah unless there's some good software already built around a similar LLM workflow I could use it'd probably be wasted on me, or spend its time desperately trying to pay for itself with crypto mining.

Adding Claude to my rotation is starting to look like the option with the least amount of building the universe from scratch. I have to imagine it can be used in a similar or identical workflow to the Copilot one where it can create PRs and make adjustments in response to feedback etc.
by dragonwriter | 2025-12-11 19:03:42+00:00
No, he wrote that it was marketed that way because that is what the “AI boom is really about”, in opposition to something else, which I also discuss in the post you excerpted this from. Not sure if you didn’t read the whole post and just kneejerk reacted to the first part of the first sentence out of context, or if you just didn’t understand how it sharply differs from the claims in the post it responds to.
by potatolicious | 2025-12-11 19:03:54+00:00
I share your skepticism. This feels like an attempt to tap the trainloads of money piling into "AI", for a company that is in pretty desperate need of more cash to stay alive.

In a vacuum there are potentially some advantages to doing your own silicon, especially if your goal is to sell the platform to other automakers as an OEM.

But custom silicon is pricey as hell (if you're doing anything non-trivial, at least), and the payoffs have a long lead time. For a company that's bleeding cash aggressively, with a short runway, to engage in this seems iffy. This sort of move makes a lot more sense if Rivian was an established maker that's cash-flow positive and is looking to cement their long-term lead with free cash flow. Buuuuut they aren't that.
by lr0 | 2025-12-11 19:04:34+00:00
> Say you wanted to rename `fish` to `a-decent-shell`

You just made my argument. Renaming is hard precisely because you shipped with the wrong name. That's why you should get it right from the start.

Every cost you listed [distro packages, configs, scripts, docs, domain] exists whether you rename to something descriptive OR another random word. The migration pain is identical. "Fish" → "decent-shell" costs the same as "fish" → "zephyr." My argument was that this renaming won't be necessary if you started by picking up the proper name at the first place, and it's very unlikely to have the need to rename it. We shouldn't be optimizing to avoid renaming. That's trading a rare maintenance event for permanent cognitive overhead.
by SV_BubbleTime | 2025-12-11 19:04:56+00:00
I get that. But I think the AI-deriders are a bit nuts sometimes because while I’m not running around crying about AGI… it’s really damn nice to change the arguments of a function and have it just go everywhere and adjust every invocation of that function to work properly. Something that might take me 10-30 minutes is now seconds and it’s not outside of its reliability spectrum.

Vibe coding though, super deceptive!
by TehCorwiz | 2025-12-11 19:05:21+00:00
The author should read up on the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_hedgehog_protein or maybe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boaty_McBoatface both of which are actually scientifically important things.

Amiga famously had a custom ASIC called "Fat Gary" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_custom_chips

I really could go on about this. Names are only useful for distinct identification. They need to be distinct within their domain. Otherwise they're just an index into a list.
by margalabargala | 2025-12-11 19:05:27+00:00
The oscillation you mention does exist, it's just small enough that it's tough to pick out visually watching the car. But it can be felt within the vehicle, and the small oscillations are certainly enough to wear tires more than the ICE alternative.

If you have any friends with motion sickness, ask them if it feels different to be a passenger in an EV.

Alternately go to a tire shop and ask whether EVs wear tires faster.

All this isn't to say EVs aren't better than ICE vehicles. They are, in many ways. It's just that tire wear isn't one of them.
by kerkeslager | 2025-12-11 19:05:58+00:00
No--the goal was to break the API so users noticed, with an easy fix. A lot of users weren't even checking the HTTP status codes, so it was necessary to not return the data to make sure the API calls broke.

We did roll this out in our test environment a month in advance, so that users using our test environment saw the break before it went to prod, but predictably, none of the users who were ignoring the warnings for the year before were using our test environment (or if they were, they didn't email us about it until our breaking change went to prod).
by xpe | 2025-12-11 19:06:07+00:00
Here is one sentence from the referenced prediction:

> I don't think there will be any more AI winters.

This isn't enough to qualify as a testable prediction, in the eyes of people that care about such things, because there is no good way to formulate a resolution criteria for a claim that extends indefinitely into the future. See [1] for a great introduction.

[1]: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/prediction-market-faq
by CodingJeebus | 2025-12-11 19:06:09+00:00
If true, this seems like a massive win in the long run, obvious risks aside.

I’ve been using a simple Claude prompt to review team PRs specifically looking for IDORs, XSS, SQL injection, etc. and it’s been really solid so far. Every once in a while it turns up a false-positive, but the signal-to-noise ratio has been excellent.

With the automated exploit frameworks out there, it seems like a logical next step to throw a frontier model at a codebase and let it pentest all day long.
by arscan | 2025-12-11 19:06:13+00:00
> “But memorable names help with marketing!”

> Sure, if you’re building a consumer product. Your HTTP client, cli utility helper, whatever library is not a consumer product. The people who will ever care about it just want to know what it does.

——

It sounds like the author doesn’t view themselves as a consumer in this relationship, that they are immune to marketing, and that what they are advocating for isn’t just another marketing tactic. I’m not sure if any of those are true.

My experience with areas that use functional names to describe things is that you end up in a sea of acronyms (the functional-based names are a mouthful!) and you end in an arguably worse situation (did you say ABDC or ADBC, those are two completely different things).
by pessimizer | 2025-12-11 19:06:21+00:00
You saved me from posting this. Strict word order makes a lot of things easier that have to be done through morphology in the vulgar Latins.

> Languages with richer morphology may also have smaller vocabularies. To be fair, this is a contested conjecture too.

I agree with the criticism of this to an extent. A lot of has seemed to me like it relies on thinking of English as a sort of normal, baseline language when it is actually very odd. It has so many vowels, and it also isn't open so has all of these little weird distinguishing consonant clusters at the end of syllables. And when you compare it to a language conjugated with a bunch of suffixes, those suffixes gradually both make the words very long, and add a bunch of sounds that can't be duplicated very often at the end of roots without causing confusion.

All of that together means that there's a lot more bandwidth for more words. English, even though it has a lot more words than other languages, doesn't have more precise words. Most of them are vague duplications, including duplicating most of Norman French just to have special, fancy versions of words that already existed. The strong emphasis on position in the grammar and the vast number of vowels also allows it to easily borrow words from other languages without a compelling reason.

I think all of that is enough to explain why English is such an outlier on vocabulary size, and I think you see similar in other languages that share a subset of these features.
by eurekin | 2025-12-11 19:06:31+00:00
> - To their PC not reboot and BSOD (was a case few months ago)

I was just about to replace my gpu (4090 at that!), I had them 3 times a session. I did sink a lot of hours to debug that (replaced cables, switched PSUs between desktops) and just gave up. After few weeks, lo and behold, a patch comes out and it all disappears.

A lot of people just repeat hearsay about the game
by legitster | 2025-12-11 19:06:32+00:00
I get where carmakers are coming from though.

Cars used to compete on distinctions between driving experience/fuel economy/reliability/etc. In comparison, differences between electric cars is mostly superfluous. They're very interchangeable.

For the next generation of car buyers, infotainment and features are going to be the main features. And if you are handing all of that away to the tech companies, your entire company is going to just become another captive hardware partner of the tech giants.
by dietr1ch | 2025-12-11 19:06:33+00:00
> Renaming is hard precisely because you shipped with the wrong name. That's why you should get it right from the start.

No, it's just because the goddamn string Id appears in way too many places and you can't sed-replace the entire world at once. It doesn't matter if the string was cute, fancy, or you found it to be a good name.