MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rgoulter | 2025-12-27 01:23:33+00:00
> the engineers who care enough to invest in keyboards like this (1) spend a lot of time investing in their tooling and (2) are extremely productive

I think (1) is true. Whereas, (2) may be less so.

Or at least, "smart but unproductive" is also a class. :) (And I'm sure there are those who have had bad experiences working with such people).

I suppose using a keyboard like this is an expensive signal. As in.. it's fairly easy to buy a typical mechanical keyboard, but more difficult to get one of these small split keyboards. -- But I think this is just "interested in technical excellence", which is somewhat different than "highly productive".

;) As for these keyboards? The most pragmatic & superior tooling part isn't the "36-key keyboard" so much as "each thumb has 2-3 keys" each. That's what allows these keyboards to expressively bring the full functionality of the keyboard to within reach of the hands on home row.
by latexr | 2025-12-27 01:24:01+00:00
> My problem is when this experiment starts wasting the time of people in the real world who had nothing to do with the experiment.

> (…)

> Setting a goal for a bunch of LLMs and letting them loose on Gmail is not a responsible way to apply this technology.

These kinds of takes are incredibly frustrating. What did you think was going to happen?! Of course this is what happened! Of course LLMs will continue to be used irresponsibly, and this won’t even register in the top ten thousand worst uses.

This reads like a gun fanatic who is against gun control saying after a school shooting “my problem is when nuts shoot up schools, that is not a responsible way to employ guns”. No shit. The people who criticise unfettered access to guns don’t have a problem with people who are careful and responsible with guns, keep them locked, and used them only at gun ranges, the problem is what the open access means for society as a whole.
by dkarl | 2025-12-27 01:24:14+00:00
I think the downside, at least near-term, or maybe challenge would be the better word, is that anything richer than text requires a lot more engineering to make it useful. B♭ is text. Most of the applications on your computer, including but not limited to your browser, know how to render B♭ and C♯, and your brain does the rest.

Bret Victor's work involves a ton of really challenging heavy lifting. You walk away from a Bret Victor presentation inspired, but also intimidated by the work put in, and the work required to do anything similar. When you separate his ideas from the work he puts in to perfect the implementation and presentation, the ideas by themselves don't seem to do much.

Which doesn't mean they're bad ideas, but it might mean that anybody hoping to get the most out of them should understand the investment that is required to bring them to fruition, and people with less to invest should stick with other approaches.
by ldenoue | 2025-12-27 01:26:03+00:00
Yes DO let you handle long lived websocket connections.
I think this is unique to Cloudflare. AWS or Google Cloud don't seem to offer these things (statefulness basically).

Same with TTS: some like Deepgram and ElevenLabs let you stream the LLM text (or chunks per sentence) over their websocket API, making your Voice AI bot really really low latency.
by meken | 2025-12-27 01:26:40+00:00
I started in August, but the two books I read were Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson, and East of Eden by Steinbeck.

I tried reading Catch-22, but 50 pages in it just seemed like a bunch of military guys trolling each other by being as autistically literal as possible with absurdist Airplane-style humor. I noped out at the prospect of reading 500 more pages of it. I don’t get why people here recommend it so much.

I recently started reading Moby Dick.
by throwaway150 | 2025-12-27 01:29:03+00:00
> We're animals driven by self-interest. What should civility even mean here

That self-interest has led to cooperation between humans. Humans have evolved to work together, cooperate, form social bonds, and friendships because doing so improves survival and wellbeing over the long run. Civility is part of that toolkit. It is not a denial of self-interest. Civility is part of that self-interest.
by ldenoue | 2025-12-27 01:29:38+00:00
I am not using speech to speech APIs like OpenAI, but it would be easy to swap the STT + LLM + TTS to using Realtime (or Gemini Live API for that matter).

OpenAI realtime voices are really bad though, so you can also configure your session to accept AUDIO and output TEXT, and then use any TTS provider (like ElevenLabs or InWord.ai, my favorite for cost) so generate the audio.
by hirsin | 2025-12-27 01:30:09+00:00
Are you saying those are additional possible meanings of Pennsyltucky, or that you've heard people use it to mean all of those?

I have only ever heard it used to mean the rural areas between the two cities, in keeping with the saying "Pittsburgh on one side, Philly on the other, and Kentucky in between", which has of course confused people not familiar with the stereotypes or geography.

The other famous use of Pennsyltucky is the character in Orange is the New Black, which I've always taken to mean "she acts like she's from Pennsyltucky".

I guess we need to wait for the term to be used enough to get into a dictionary to get it well defined
by JoshTriplett | 2025-12-27 01:30:31+00:00
> If you have a pacemaker implanted, do you believe you have the right to modify and update the software that operates it?

Yes, of course. It is abhorrent that people have devices implanted into their bodies and are in any way prevented from obtaining every last detail about how those devices operate.

> Separately, do you think it's remotely a good idea?

In rare circumstances, yes. See, by way of example, Karen Sandler's talk on her implanted pacemaker and its bugs, for specific details on why one might want to do so.
by atlasunshrugged | 2025-12-27 01:30:57+00:00
It's a pretty old book, but I think my favorite this year was The Simpsons and Philosophy: The D'oh! of Homer which was great fun for an avid Simpsons fan (of the first 10 seasons at least).

Of course, I'd also be remiss not to mention that I published a book called Rebooting a Nation about how the nation of Estonia modernized post re-independence and became a hub for startups and e-government in a single generation. Foreign Affairs was kind enough to just do a review: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/rebooting-nation-incr...
by mijoharas | 2025-12-27 01:31:35+00:00
Awesome, this sounds cool.

In terms of UX, I kinda want something to paper over the inconsistencies of the different tools I need to use to set up the network etc. (Kinda like the `docker` CLI tool).

When I looked at it the first thing I thought was "the tun/tap setup seems fiddly, and I bet I won't leave things in a consistent state (note, I just glanced at this blog[0]). The copy on write filesystem stuff looks cool too, but also fiddly.

The more I think about it the more I just come up with "just docker but VMs".

[0] https://harryhodge.co.uk/posts/2024/01/getting-started-with-...
by 2ICofafireteam | 2025-12-27 01:32:03+00:00
I have encountered PDFs that would exhibit this behavior in one browser but not in another.

One fun thing I encountered from local government is releasing files with potato quality resolution and not considering the page size.

I had a FOI request that returned mainly Arch D sized drawings but they were in a 94 DPI PDF rendered as letter sized. It was a fun conversation trying to explain to an annoyed city employee that putting those large drawings in a 94 DPI letter size page effectively made it 30-ish DPI.
by jeeeb | 2025-12-27 01:32:12+00:00
> That feels like cargo-culting the toolchain instead of asking the uncomfortable question: why did it take a greenfield project to give Python the package manager behavior people clearly wanted for the last decade?

This feels like a very unfair take to me. Uv didn’t happen in isolation, and wasn’t the first alternative to pip. It’s built on a lot of hard work by the community to put the standards in place, through the PEP process, that make it possible.

What uv did was to bring it all together.
by aaronblohowiak | 2025-12-27 01:33:07+00:00
If python's painpoints don't bother you enough (or you are already comfortable with all the workarounds,) then I'm not sure Rust will do much for you.

What I like about Rust is ADTs, pattern matching, execution speed. The things that really give me confidence are error handling (right balance between "you can't accidentally ignore errors" of checked exceptions with easy escape hatches for when you want to YOLO,) and the rarity of "looks right, but is subtly wrong in dangerous ways" that I ran into a lot in dynamic languages and more footgun languages.

Compile times suck.
by atypicaluser | 2025-12-27 01:34:01+00:00
The author (Victor Mair) of the piece makes two errors:

(1) Omaha and Council Bluffs are not twin cities. The former doesn't think about the latter, and the latter sees the former as workplace, shopping mall and zoo.

(2) The residents of Omaha didn't coin the term 'Counciltucky.' That privilege belongs to the residents of Council Bluffs themselves.

Reference: a former resident of Council Bluffs who is a current resident of Omaha.
by jackschultz | 2025-12-27 01:34:09+00:00
Reread Story of Your Life again just now, and all it made me want to do is learn Heptapod B and their senagram style of written communication.

Reading “Mathematica - A secret world of intuition and curiosity” as well and a part stuck out in a section called The Language Trap. Example author gives is about for a recipe for making banana bread, that if you’re familiar with bananas, it’s obvious that you need to peel them before mashing. Bit of you haven’t seen a banana, you’d have no clue what to do. Does a recipe say peel a banana or should that be ignored? Questions like these are clear coming up more with AI and context, but it’s the same for humans. He ends that section saying most people prefer a video for cooking rather than a recipe.

Other quote from him:

“The language trap is the belief that naming things is enough to make them exist, and we can dispense with the effort of really imagining them.”
by PaulCarrack | 2025-12-27 01:34:35+00:00
Most people I know who take on side projects do them because they enjoy solving problems. They find them enjoyable, and to many, side projects are like taking a vacation. I wouldn't pay someone to take a vacation for me, that's nonsensical and defeats the purpose of the vacation.

Why would you pay someone to do something you enjoy doing, so you don't have to do (any/some/all) of it? What kind of side projects are we talking about here?
by blibble | 2025-12-27 01:35:39+00:00
> What I find infuriating is that it feels like the entire financial system has been rigged in countless ways and turned into some kind of race towards 'the singularity' and everything; humans, animals, the planet; are being treated as disposable resources. I think the way that innovation was funded and then centralized feels wrong on many levels.

this is how I feel too

as a species we were starting to make progress on environmental issues, they were getting to the point they were looking solvable

then "AI" appears, the accelerationist/inevitablist religious idea is born, and all the efforts go out the window to rape the planet to produce as many powered-on GPUs as possible

and for what?

to generate millions of shrimp jesus pictures and spongebob squarepants police chase videos

it's really quite upsetting

meanwhile the collaborators are selling out all present and future living beings on earth for a chance to appear on stage in an openai product announcement

whilst gas-lighting themselves into thinking they're doing good
by NohatCoder | 2025-12-27 01:36:31+00:00
Lots of things to consider here, but mostly that is not the kind of prompt you would use for coding. Serious vibe coders will ingest an entire codebase into the model, and then use some system that automates iterating.

Basic "ask a question" prompts indeed probably do not cost all that much, but they are also not particularly relevant in any heavy professional use.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-12-27 01:36:56+00:00
Not at all? It's reasonable to point out issues with the implementation as it currently stands (those are abundant and blindingly obvious). However it is also clear that the underlying mechanism works extremely well. A claim to the contrary is quite extraordinary.

Sometimes people do talk about alternatives. State funding and patronage are two of the most common. Both have very obvious drawbacks in terms of quantity and who gets influence over the outcome. Both also have interesting advantages that are well worth examining.
by ANarrativeApe | 2025-12-27 01:37:21+00:00
This is one of those irritating articles where one agrees with the gist, but there are serious flaws in the support.
There are societies, even now, that don't have text. Yes, they represent a tiny fraction of 1% of the global population, but they do exist. And the beauty of text is that this level of nuance can be conveyed, a simplistic, inaccurate, broad brush approach is not needed.
Nor is it the oldest form of communication. Having recently started exploring the cave art record, the text informs me that this is at least an upper middle single digit multiple of the age of text.
Yes, a picture paints a thousand words, which can then be interpreted a thousand ways.
Text has the ability to convey precise, accurate, objective information, it does not, as this article demonstrates, necessarily do so.
by sweetsocks21 | 2025-12-27 01:37:45+00:00
For a computer, text is a binary format like anything else. We have decades of tooling built on handling linear streams of text where we sometimes encode higher dimensional structures in it.

But I can't help feel that we try to jam everything into that format because that's what's already ubiquitous. Reminds me of how every hobby OS is a copy of some Unix/Posix system.

If we had a more general structured format would we say the opposite?
by Ferret7446 | 2025-12-27 01:39:47+00:00
Text is just bytes, and bytes are just text. I assume this is talking about human readable ASCII specifically.

I think the obsession with text comes down to two factors: conflating binary data with closed standards and poor tooling support. Text implies a baseline level of acceptable mediocrity for both. Consider a CSV file will millions of base64 encoded columns and no column labels. That would really not be any friendlier than a binary file with a openly documented format and suitable editing tool, e.g. sqlite.

Maybe a lack of fundamental technical skills is another culprit, but binary files really aren't that scary.
by tqwhite | 2025-12-27 01:41:44+00:00
I am with you 100%. The phrase “intellectual property” is an oxymoron. Intellect and Property are opposite things. Worse, the actual truth of intellectual property laws is not, “I’m an artist who got rich”. It is, “I ended up selling my property to a corporation and got screwed.”

The web is for public use. If you don’t want the public, which includes AI, to use it, don’t put it there.
by deaux | 2025-12-27 01:41:52+00:00
Now y'all finally know what it's like to be vegetarian (I'm not one). So many parallels. And they are expected to relatively keep quiet about it and not scream about things like

> Raping the planet, spending trillions on toxic, unrecyclable equipment while blowing up society

Because screaming anything like that immediately gets them treated as social pariahs. Even though it applies even harder to modern industrialized meat consumption than to AI usage.

Overton window and all that.
by Arainach | 2025-12-27 01:42:27+00:00
> I told some friends about it, and they said, yes, and we have "Pennsyltucky" too. But when I looked that up, it wasn't nearly so demeaning as "Counciltucky". It basically just means Pennsylvania minus the Pittsburgh and Philadelphia metropolitan areas

The size of the area has nothing to do with how demeaning the term is. The term is centered on calling the region, to oversimplify, an underdeveloped poor rural backwater.

Just because Pennsylvania has a larger chunk of land that some would describe that way than Council Bluffs does doesn't inherently change that both terms are demeaning.

I haven't been to Council Bluffs, but I have spent time in parts of Pennsylvania outside the Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and State College metros, and while I'm not going to proclaim wisdom without having lived there I certainly saw where the term and stereotype came from.
by promptfluid | 2025-12-27 01:42:45+00:00
We’ve been building a small system called XCTBL.

It’s an identity layer for tools that require persistent state — but it deliberately separates identity/authentication from recording and retention.

The fastest way to understand it is the new start route here:

https://rcrdbl.com

RCRDBL is the records layer. It accepts signals (files, text, artifacts), retains them permanently, and does not authenticate users.

XCTBL is the external system that creates identities (“Stars”) and manages access to tools that need persistence.

The separation is intentional:

• One system remembers.
• One system authenticates.
• Tools sit on top.

There’s optional narrative framing, but it’s not required to use anything. Tools work without engaging with the story layer.

This is early, opinionated, and intentionally constrained. Curious how others think about permanent records, identity boundaries, and whether this kind of separation makes sense.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-12-27 01:43:32+00:00
> The way to test out this theory is to try out an experiment to see if this is so. If this experiment fails, we'll have to figure out why theory predicted it but the experiment didn't deliver.

If "this experiment" is trying to build a machine, then failure doesn't give much evidence against the theory. Most machine-building failures are caused by insufficient hardware/engineering.
by ecliptik | 2025-12-27 01:44:10+00:00
I've read 51 books this year (just finished Hyperion) which is 50 more than 2024.

I attribute this increase to a few things,

1. Borrowing from Libby puts a 21 day time limit to finish a book, encouraging me to read it before it's due.

2. Not discriminating from reading on my phone. Kindle app syncs between devices, and makes it easier to read a few pages here and there instead of waiting for uninterrupted sessions with my Kindle.

3. Continually updating a To Read list, mostly by going to Barnes and Noble, taking pictures of featured book tables, then adding the interesting ones to my Libby hold list.

4. Borrowing with Libby makes it easier to bail out of a book that doesn't intrigue me. Instead of forcing myself to finish something I spent $ on, I can just return it and move onto something else, feeling 0 guilt.
by DrewADesign | 2025-12-27 01:44:44+00:00
> Yet if I spent one hour making my app one second faster for my million users, I can save 277 user hour per year. But since user hours are an externality, such optimization never gets done.

Wait times don’t accumulate. Depending on the software, to each individual user, that one second will probably make very little difference. Developers often overestimate the effect of performance optimization on user experience because it’s the aspect of user experience optimization their expertise most readily addresses. The company, generally, will have a much better ROI implementing well-designed features and having you squash bugs
by PaulHoule | 2025-12-27 01:45:41+00:00
What folks like Fukuyama don't get is that this situation was predicted in the 1960-1970 time frame and looking back seems fated, inevitable.

1962 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Image:_A_Guide_to_Pseudo-e... predicts that television performers will eventually overtake and outclass conventional politicians

1964 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Understanding_Media Marshall McLuhan predicts that 'television' will displace the 'Gutenberg Galaxy' of print but it could do it in the form of ABC/NBC/CBS but take the same (physically, later functionally) screen attached to an image synthesizer and versatile communication network and you get YouTube, which does.

1971 The Information Machines: Their Impact on Men and the Media by Ben Bagdikian reports on studies at the RAND corporation predicting that something like the WWW would come online in the early 1980s -- and technically it did in the form of services like Compuserve and The Source. Bagdikian pitched this vision to leaders in the media industry and was roundly rejected and was the origin story that led to his famous https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Bagdikian#The_Media_Monopo...

In the 1970-1995 period the development of communication networks lagged behind all predictions because incumbents didn't want to make investments -- had they done so, Google, Facebook, Amazon and such would have been strangled in their cribs. The WWW seemed to take over so fast because it was actually delayed ten years and the technology to realize it had been sitting around latent and underutilized.

1975 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legitimation_Crisis_(book) by Jürgen Habermas outlines a conflict between "expertise required to make decisions concerning complex science and technology" and "public participation" that he sees no way to resolve.

---------------

The "legitimation crisis" is the immediate crisis that Fukuyama sees, but connected to it is a long term breakdown in community pointed out by the likes of Nisbet and Putnam which manifests as a breakdown in household formation. We're pressing the panic button right now to save children who are halfway through school but... boy we are in trouble.
by crawshaw | 2025-12-27 01:45:42+00:00
Hello, exe.dev person here.

I have not used E2B (though I really like their web site), though it looks like there are quite a few differences. Our disks are persistent (without manual snapshotting), we have a TLS proxy by default with built-in auth and link sharing.

It also looks like they have many features we do not have (yet).

I believe the target use is also quite different. You can use exe.dev VMs for running your agent. But you can also use it for hosting your site. E.g. blog.exe.dev is an exe.dev VM.
by godelski | 2025-12-27 01:46:14+00:00
Not exactly. You can eat that mushroom but you'll have indigestion problems. Squirrels around me love it though. You can also parboil it and you'll be fine, which it is actually quite tasty.

That mushroom (Amanita muscaria) is also related to the death cap (Amanita phalloides). Though the toxins are different in the death cap and will not be converted/removed by parboiling. Worse than that, you won't show symptoms for over a day.

The death cap is white or yellow, looking quite mundane. Especially compared to Muscaria.
by tombert | 2025-12-27 01:46:30+00:00
People make fun of it, but I think the fact that Unixey stuff can use tools that have existed since the 70's [1] can be attributed to the fact that they're text based. Every OS has its own philosophy on how to do GUI stuff and as such GUI programs have to do a lot of bullshit to migrate, but every OS can handle text in one form or another.

When I first started using Linux I used to make fun of people who were stuck on the command line, but now pretty much everything I do is a command line program (using NeoVim and tmux).

[1] Yes, obviously with updates but the point more or less still stands.