MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mapontosevenths | 2025-12-04 14:27:53+00:00
> I think you're wildly underestimating the heritage foundation.

It's possible that I am. Certainly they've had some success over the years, as have other think tanks like them. I mean, they're part of the reason we got embroiled in the middle-east after 9/11. They've certainly been influential.

That said, their problem is that they are true believers and the people in charge are not (and never will be). Someone else in this post described it as a flock of psychopaths, and I think that's the perfect way to phrase it. Society is run by a flock of psychopaths just doing whatever comes naturally as they seek to optimize their own short term advantage.

Sometimes their interests converge and something like Heritage sees part of their agenda instituted, but equally often these organizations fade into irrelevance as their agendas diverge from whatever works to the pyscho of the moments advantage. To avoid that Heritage can either change their agenda, or accept that they've become defanged. More often than not they choose the former.

I suppose we'll know for sure in 20 years, but I'd be willing to bet that Heritages agenda then won't look anything like the agenda they're advancing today. In fact if we look at their Agenda from 20 years ago we can see that it looks nothing like their agenda today.

For example, Heritage was very much pro-immigration until about 20 years ago. As early as 1986 they were advocating for increased immigration, and even in 2006 they were publishing reports advocating for the economic benefits of it. Then suddenly it fell out of fashion amongst a certain class of ruler and they reversed their entire stance to maintain their relevance.

They also used to sing a very different tune regarding healthcare, advocating for a the individual mandate as opposed to single payer. Again, it became unpopular and they simply "changed their mind" and began to fight against the policy that they were actually among the first to propose.

*EDIT* To cite a more recent example consider their stance on free trade. Even as recently as this year they were advocating for free trade and against tariffs warning that tariffs might lead to a recession. They've since reversed course, because while they are largely run by true believers they can't admit that publicly or they risk losing any hope of actually accomplishing any of their agenda.
by basscomm | 2025-12-04 14:27:57+00:00
> You're doing the thing I described: assuming it's all ultimately about personal benefit when they're telling you directly that it's not.

It doesn't matter how much astroturf I read, I can see what's happening with my own eyes.

> The grievance is moral, not utilitarian.

Nope, it's both.

Businesses have no morals. (Most) people do. Everything that a business does is in service of the bottom line. They aren't pushing AI everywhere out of some desire to help humanity, they're doing it because they sunk a lot of resources into it and are trying to force an ROI.

There are a lot of people who have fully bought in to AI and think that it's more capable than it is. We just had a thread the other day where someone was using AI to vibe code an app, but managed to accidentally tell the LLM to delete the contents of his hard drive.

AI apologists insist that AI agents are a vital tool for doing more faster and handwave any criticism. It doesn't matter that AI agents consume an obscene amount of resources to do it, or that pretend developers are using it to write code they don't understand and can't test that they're shoving into production anyway. That's all fine because a loud fraction of senior developers are using it to bypass the 'boring parts' of writing programs to focus on the interesting bits.
by mitthrowaway2 | 2025-12-04 14:28:21+00:00
Yes? I think that's crazy. I just maxed out my new Thinkpad with 96 GB of RAM and a 4 TB SSD and even at today's prices, it still came in at just about $2k and should run smoothly for many years.

Prices are high but they're not that high, unless you're buying the really big GPUs.
by kccqzy | 2025-12-04 14:28:35+00:00
I cannot agree more. That’s also why personally I strongly prefer to work on infra rather than product teams. You get so much insulation from random whims of the leadership or PMs and you get simply pursue technical excellence. I don’t want to contribute to “visible ‘wins’ of a product launch” at all. I’m happy that I currently work at a medium-sized company (head count between 1k and 10k) that has been around for 30+ years and my work involves quietly improving the infra used by other teams.
by afavour | 2025-12-04 14:29:10+00:00
My go to example for stuff like this is the Labour Party in the UK. For hundreds upon hundreds of years it was a two party country, between the Whigs and the Tories, later the Liberals and Conservatives.

At the turn of the 20th century the working class and trade union movement created their own party, the Labour Party. At the time I’m sure many people said it would be impossible to challenge the existing duopoly, that it was a waste of time to even try, etc etc.

By 1929 they were the largest party in the House of Commons. In 1945 they won the majority. It wasn’t an overnight victory. But a lot of people put in a lot of hard work because they believed a better future was possible and their effort paid off.
by fullstop | 2025-12-04 14:29:26+00:00
I bought 2x16 (32GB) DDR4 in June for $50. It is now ~$150.

I'm kicking myself for not buying the mini PC that I was looking at over the summer. The cost nearly doubled from what it was then.

My state keeps trying to add Data Centers in residential areas, but the public seems to be very against it. It will succeed somewhere and I'm sure that there will be a fee on my electric bill for "modernization" or some other bullshit.
by nucleardog | 2025-12-04 14:29:59+00:00
> You sometimes see this with real live humans who have lived in multiple counties.

Also very common with... most Canadians. We officially use an English closer to British English (Zed not zee, honour not honor) however geographically and culturally we're very close to the US.

At school you learn "X, Y, Zed". The toy you buy your toddler is made for the US and Canadian market and sings "X, Y, Zee" as does practically every show on TV. The dictionary says it's spelled "colour" but most of the books you read will spell it "color". Most people we communicate with are either from Canada or the US, so much of our personal communication is with US English.

But also there are a number of British shows that air here, so some particularly British phrases do sneak in to a lot of people's lexicon.

See a similar thing in the way we measure things.

We use celsius for temperature but most of our thermostats default to Fahrenheit and most cookbooks are primarily in imperial measures and units because they're from the US. The store sells everything in grams and kilograms, but most recipes are still in tablespoons/cups/etc.

Most things are sold in metric, but when you buy lumber it's sold in feet, and any construction site is going to be working primarily in feet and inches.

If anything I expect any AI-written content would be more consistent about this than I usually am.
by kotaKat | 2025-12-04 14:30:15+00:00
I mean, as a frontline underpaid rural IT employee with no way to move outward from where I currently live, show me where I’m gonna put $5k a year into this budget out of my barren $55k/year salary. (And, mind you - this apparently is “more” than the local average by only around $10-15k.)

I’m struggling to buy hardware already as it is, and all these prices have basically fucked me out of everything. I’m riding rigs with 8 and 16GB of RAM and I have no way to go up from here. The AI boom has basically forced me out of the entire industry at this point. I can’t get hardware to learn, subscriptions to use, anything.

Big Tech has made it unaffordable for everyone.
by KonradFreeman | 2025-12-04 14:30:24+00:00
I wanted to begin a discussion to address what we as next.js users who may or may not be exposed to said vulnerabilities from this new issue and I know that we do not have to worry about a lot at the moment but in the future Vercel and other providers will have to rely on users implementing their own more permanent solutions.

I wanted to explore a couple possibilities in this post first. I wanted to see how full of it I was when I wrote this and see if what I wrote even makes sense and what we as developers should do to address this issue.

Anyway, have a nice day and I hope to engage in discussion below so as to provide a resource for others which will hopefully augment and improve what I have come to so far in the post.
by lukaslalinsky | 2025-12-04 14:30:27+00:00
Look at Go or Java virtual threads. Async I/O doesn't need function coloring.

Here is an example Zig code:

defer stream.close(io); var read_buffer: [1024]u8 = undefined; var reader = stream.reader(io, &read_buffer); var write_buffer: [1024]u8 = undefined; var writer = stream.writer(io, &write_buffer); while (true) { const line = reader.interface.takeDelimiterInclusive('\n') catch |err| switch (err) { error.EndOfStream => break, else => return err, }; try writer.interface.writeAll(line); try writer.interface.flush(); }

The actual loop using reader/writer isn't aware of being used in async context at all. It can even live in a different library and it will work just fine.
by brightball | 2025-12-04 14:30:39+00:00
I don't have strong opinion on the technology itself, but what is the price difference? How likely is it to be added to consumer vehicles? Does the technology have to stick out in every direction or can it be better hidden? Are there negative side effects to having roads too full of lidar in terms of signal congestion?

I don't know the answer to any of these but it seems like the camera based approach has some advantages to it as well. Doesn't seem that cut and dry.
by IAmBroom | 2025-12-04 14:30:39+00:00
Getting a real Jonathan Coulton "Skullcrusher Mountain" vibe here from the author (where vibe has its traditional meaning)...

"I made this half-pony, half-monkey monster to please you

But I get the feeling that you don't like it

What's with all the screaming?

You like monkeys, you like ponies

Maybe you don't like monsters so much

Maybe I used too many monkeys

Isn't it enough to know that I ruined a pony

Making a gift for you?
Show HN: Fleet Fund – Invest in Machines That Earn
by Justbeingjustin | 2025-12-04 14:30:48+00:00
Hi HN, I’m Justin. I built Fleet Fund to let anyone invest fractionally in machines that earn income. I’m starting with EV chargers, where charging sessions generate passive revenue that can be shared with investors.

This is an early prototype with just a waitlist and a simple demo. I’d love feedback on the concept and where you think this could go next, whether robotaxis, humanoid robots, or AI-managed machine portfolios.
by ethbr1 | 2025-12-04 14:30:50+00:00
It's been happening in all spaces.

There are reputable eBay sellers shipping decomm'd previous-gen servers for bargain basement prices.

If you're fine running last gen (and you should be, for home lab use) then it's worth it to monitor prices over time.

They typically hit a floor, as supply from decomm waves coinciding swamps demand, but the resellers still want to move things as quickly as possible.
by xzjis | 2025-12-04 14:31:04+00:00
It's a political problem: do we, the people, have a choice in what gets prioritized? I think it's clear that the majority of people don't give a damn about minor improvements in AI and would rather have a better computer, smartphone, or something else for their daily lives than fuel the follies of OpenAI and its competitors. At worst, they can build more fabs simultaneously to have the necessary production for AI within a few years, but reallocating it right now is detrimental and nobody wants that, except for a few members of the crazy elite like Sam Altman or Elon Musk.
by salawat | 2025-12-04 14:31:06+00:00
Neither does Congress. Only it's funding. Still does not answer my question. Good of goose, good of gander. If the secret to a "well behaved and ethical" Congress person is more money, then please point out and explain why in the fuck I can't executives or corporations elbow deep in sketchy shit. All I see is the more money can be accrued faster, the less ethical the population a position attracts. Further, if higher wages really were that much of a miracle cure for better performing people, I'd expect to see more profit sharing with employees, whereas I typically see the exact opposite. Wherein an inordinate amount of executive effort is spent trying to maximize information asymmetry, and divide and conquering labor in terms of value extraction from them.
by iterance | 2025-12-04 14:32:29+00:00
The fight for this kind of legislature has been ongoing for many years as part of a broader program that seeks to shape the kinds of information that can be stored, consumed, and propagated on the Internet. Age verification is only one branch of the fight, but an important one to the many who support government control: it is an inroad that allows governments to say they have a stake in who sees what.
by iamnothere | 2025-12-04 14:32:37+00:00
As a culture we just have to come to accept that parents should be responsible for managing kids’ devices, and provide them with the device-level tools for doing so. If a parent lets a 10 year old hang out in a sketchy alleyway every weekend, we would blame them for the inevitable consequences. Why do we not blame them for failing to monitor what their kids are up to online?

And before someone tries to bore me with anecdotes about how your particular kid evaded whatever restrictions you put in place, I think if kids put in thoughtful effort and planning to evade restrictions then parents are off the hook. Same as if a kid stages an elaborate ruse (one that would fool most parents) to get out of the house and drink with friends. That’s not on you. Parents aren’t prison wardens and we shouldn’t ask for a police state to fill in parenting gaps.

Making the state into the parent will affect us all, not just kids. I (and plenty of others) will fight to the end to preserve the last vestiges of the free, open internet. Overlay networks and even sneakernet if necessary. We’re not going to accept authoritarian control of communications no matter how much politicians want it.
by Zigurd | 2025-12-04 14:33:02+00:00
It takes maybe 50% longer to make five portions versus one. It's going to be tough to find similar gains through automation. I've got four servings of pulled pork and five burritos in the freezer, all homemade apart from the brioche buns for the pulled pork and the wrappers for the burritos. Many recipe sites will calculate quantities for 2X and 3X the servings. If you overlap cooking multiple servings, there's enough variety. I'll be making a big pot of curry chicken today.

Breakfast is usually eggs or oatmeal or toast and jam, which entails only a few minutes of preparation. I even brew coffee a big pot at a time and that lasts for three days reheated.

The critical robot in this scenario is the dishwasher.
by al_borland | 2025-12-04 14:34:28+00:00
They’ve introduced a $5/month intro plan, which is half the cost of the previous low tier.

They also added in AI chat at no additional cost, charging based on usage, while everyone else is trying to charge $20 for that alone.

They are pretty transparent on billing, at least for their highest cost items. At the start they would show you how much your searches cost them vs your bill. At one point I cost them more than I paid, so I tossed them some extra money to not be a drain. Now they show how much you cost them in AI tokens, and if you cost them more than you paid, you pay the difference, which feels fair. I think I use the Assistant a lot and only ever use $1-2 in a month.

With search, it did seem like scale came with per-search savings, but my hope with that was it created more margin for them to be healthy, since it didn’t seem like they had much based on what they showed in the settings. And now AI is eating into those margins a bit. I’m pretty happy with how they have handled all that. It’s probably the best $10 I spend each month.
by zzzeek | 2025-12-04 14:34:35+00:00
never give an LLM to your junior engineers. The LLM itself is mostly like a junior engineer and will make a complete mess of things if not guided by someone with a lot of experience.

Basically if people are producing code or documentation that looks like an LLM wrote it, that's not really what I see as the model that makes these tools useful.
by ridethelightnin | 2025-12-04 14:35:10+00:00
This has so many unintended consequences for LLM over the next four years I would think.

"JavaScript" tokenizes to 2 tokens (BPE). "ECMAScript" tokenizes to 3. No biggie here.

But the real cost isn't training—it's inference. Every time an LLM has to reconcile "ES6" with "JavaScript," explain the naming, or reason through "user said JavaScript but docs say ECMAScript"— Hidden chain-of-thought overhead. Clarification tokens.

Back of envelope: ~376M JS-related LLM queries/day globally. ~30% trigger some clarification overhead. That's ~5B extra tokens/day, ~1.85T tokens/year.

At ~0.000025 kWh/token inference cost, that's ~46 GWh/year.

~23,000 tonnes CO2 annually. ~200,000 tonnes over 4 years, based on rough growth of LLM use, and terms sticking around on both names over 4 years - probably wrong here too.

Sources

Token counts: OpenAI tiktoken cl100k_base encoder 2.5B ChatGPT queries/day: Sam Altman, July 2025 [1] ~4.7B total LLM interactions/day: aggregated from ChatGPT + Gemini (2B monthly AI Overviews users) + Copilot + Claude + others [2][3] JS = 62% of developers: Stack Overflow 2024 Survey [4] 8% of queries JS-related: my estimate based on language prevalence 30% clarification rate: my estimate - probably way off Energy/token: ~0.000025 kWh blended from Luccioni et al. and Patterson et al. inference estimates [5]

CO2: 0.5 kg/kWh global grid average

[1] techcrunch.com/2025/07/21/chatgpt-users-send-2-5-billion-prompts-a-day [2] demandsage.com/chatgpt-statistics [3] sqmagazine.co.uk/chatgpt-vs-google-gemini-statistics [4] survey.stackoverflow.co/2024 [5] arxiv.org/pdf/2211.02001 (BLOOM carbon footprint paper)
by turnsout | 2025-12-04 14:35:11+00:00
If you can't find a use for AI, you probably haven't given it much of a try. Just one random example: I needed to find experts in a technical field, and gave the problem to Claude Code. Claude put together a comprehensive research plan, dug deep into industry working groups, and produced a prioritized list of experts along with their bios, rationale and LinkedIn profiles.

Completely possible for me to do, but it saved me at least a couple hours of Googling.
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-12-04 14:35:36+00:00
https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript/blob/main/LICENSE.tx...

The license is Apache 2.0. With the trademark, they can tell everyone not to call their thing TypeScript but at this point, given the license, they can't tell them not to copy it and change it and distribute that new thing (assuming the new distributors do so under the correct conditions).
by yet-another-guy | 2025-12-04 14:35:58+00:00
This is just trying too hard. "Servant Leadership" is a buzzword invented to divert the general opinion from the power mechanics that hierarchical organizations are funded upon, i.e., the boss (sorry, leader) commands and the direct reports execute. Being "servant" basically just means being a decent human being, as per putting people in the right condition to carry out their duties, not coming up with unrealistic expectations, and do the required 1:1 coaching/mentoring for career development.

Hand-helding employees as this "blocker removal" interpretation of servant leadership seems to imply is just the pathway to micromanagement. It's ok to shield your juniors from the confusing world of corporate politics, but if your direct reports need you to do a lot of the sanitization/maturation of work items and requirements then why should you even trust their outputs? At that point you're basically just using them as you would prompt an AI agent, double- and triple-checking everything they do, checking-in 3 times a day, etc.

This "transparent" leadership is the servant leadership, or what it's intended to be anyway in an ideal world. Some elements of it are easily applicable, like the whole coaching/connecting/teaching, but they also are the least measurable in terms of impact. The "making yourself redundant", i.e., by avoiding being the bottleneck middle-man without whose approval/scrutiny nothing can get done is fantasy for flat organizations or magical rainbowland companies where ICs and managers are on the exact same salary scale. And it will continue to be as long as corporate success (and career-growth opportunities) is generally measured as a factor of number of reports / size of org. managed.
by vintermann | 2025-12-04 14:35:59+00:00
There are a lot of self-described experts who I'm sure you agree are nothing of the sort. How do I tell you from them, fellow internet poster?

This is a political topic, in the sense that there are real conflicts of interest here. We can't always trust that expertise is neutral. If you had your subject matter expertise from working for FSB, you probably agree that even though your expertise would then be real, I shouldn't just defer to what you say?
by vessenes | 2025-12-04 14:36:20+00:00
It was definitely on the order of hours for large code bases - the Microsoft Excel team passed out punishment “suckers” for those who broke the build - causing 100+ people to not have a new working build to look at and test.

Linux kernel compiles in the 1990s were measured in hours, and that codebase was tiny compared to many. So, yep, builds were slow, slow enough to have an entire xkcd comic written about them.
by verelo | 2025-12-04 14:36:32+00:00
Couldn’t agree more (but frustratingly due to HN’ shitty mobile experience i downvoted this, sorry!)

In a past life i used to complain that people only praised my work after i fucked up and subsequently fixed it. I’d go month on month of great execution and all I’d hear would be complaints, but as soon as i “fixed” a major issue, i was a hero.

I’ve learn that setting appropriate incentives is the hardest part of building an effective organization.
by zozbot234 | 2025-12-04 14:36:57+00:00
> Their "build server" ran overnight, you'd check in your code in the late afternoon and get your compile errors back in the morning.

This. Let's keep things in perspective when people complain about long Rust compile cycles. And even that's a whole lot better than filling in paper-based FORTRAN or COBOL coding forms to be punched into cards in the computing room and getting back line-printed program output (or a compiler error) the next week.
by dfxm12 | 2025-12-04 14:37:08+00:00
On the one hand, confirming a new piece of information with a second source is good practice (even if we should trust our family implicitly on such topics). On the other, I'm not even a dog person and I understand the etiquette here. So, really, this story sounds like someone outsourcing their common sense or common courtesy to a machine, which is scary to me.

However, maybe she was just making conversation & thought you might be impressed that she knows what AI is and how to use it.
by samsolomon | 2025-12-04 14:37:22+00:00
While most seemed to prefer Counter-strike, my childhood gaming was dominated by an Unreal Tournament mod called Tac Ops. While the games looked similar, the mechanics felt very different than Counter-strike. It was a much faster-paced game.

There were a ton of servers with wacky mods. I spent a ton of time on the low-grav servers. There were also some that made the top-scoring player huge. Those odd game modes were a blast.

EDIT: Also looks like people are still playing!

https://www.gog.com/dreamlist/game/tactical-ops-assault-on-t...

https://tactical-ops.eu/