MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by siliconc0w | 2025-12-26 23:44:21+00:00
The ideal AI will be able to make the best most compelling arguments for both sides of an issue, offer both, and then synthesize according to a transparent values framework the user can customize.

But yeah I agree Grok is a pretty good argument for what can go wrong - made especially more galling by labeling the laundering Elon's particular stew of incoherent political thought as 'maximally truth seeking'.
by willaaam | 2025-12-26 23:45:02+00:00
Most of my AI coding experience is through Github Copilot (GHCP), mostly because that is available to me professionally. GHCP has improved greatly over the past half year in my opinion. I do use it a lot, burning up my enterprise allowance almost every month working on complex python codebases.

When it comes to models in GHCP, I vastly prefer Claude over Codex. It's not that Codex is bad, it just feels tonedeaf to me. It writes code in its own preferred style and doesn't adjust to the context of the codebase. Additionally, for me, Sonnet and Opus are much less prone to getting stuck in loops for longer or more complex agentic tasks.

I do like Codex for review tasks. When I'm working on something complex, both planning and implementation, I frequently ask Codex to review Claude's work, and it does a good job at that, frequently catching a mistake or coming up with a different angle.

I've toyed with kilocode, cline and the related forks through Claude Opus 4.5 API, but I'd argue my experience with Claude Sonnet/Opus through Copilot has just been... better. More consistent. Faster.

Sometimes I code with local models, when I'm working on highly confidential projects or data. Prefer GPT-OSS 20b or Qwen3-coder-30b then, but without an agentic harness as prompts get big and slow.

I would find it a nice read to work a case and see two models/harnesses duke it out, see whether it matches your expectations and gut feeling.
by worik | 2025-12-26 23:45:10+00:00
I think you miss the point, I looked at that Substack, it is way off point

It is the training of models, is it not, that requires huge quantities of electricity. Already driving up prices for consumers.

OpenAI (that name is Orwellian) wants 25GW over five years, if memory serves. That is not for powering ChatGPT queries

Also the huge waste of gazillion of dollars spent on computer gear (in data centres) that will probably depreciate to zero in less than five years.

This is a useful technology, but a whole lot of greed heads are riding it to their doom. I hope they do not take us on their ride
by okushigue | 2025-12-26 23:45:11+00:00
We present a dual-Starship tethered configuration that provides 0.52g artificial gravity for 30-person Mars transit missions. Two SpaceX Starship vehicles (160 tonnes each) connected by a 300-meter Dyneema tether rotate at 1.76 RPM, generating Mars-equivalent gravity in both habitats. The system achieves 99% mission success probability through triple-redundant life support, dual surgical suites, and graceful degradation modes. With 220 tonnes of ISRU payload capacity, the architecture enables establishment of propellant-producing Mars bases supporting 500+ day surface stays. At 27M per crew member), the configuration delivers 70% cost efficiency improvement over alternative artificial gravity architectures while utilizing 95% flight-proven technology (TRL 8-9). A 2028 orbital demonstration validates the system for 2033 operational deployment, positioning this as the leading architecture for NASA's Moon-to-Mars campaign and SpaceX's Mars colonization objectives.
by slowmovintarget | 2025-12-26 23:45:20+00:00
> ...I would say it decided to do so,

Right, and casual speech is fine, but should not be load-bearing in discussions about policy, legality, or philosophy. A "who's responsible" discussion that's vectoring into all of these areas needs a tighter definition of "decides" which I'm sure you'll agree does not include anything your thermostat makes happen when it follows its program. There's no choice there (philosophy) so the device detecting the trigger conditions and carrying out the designated action isn't deciding, it is a process set in motion by whoever set the thermostat.

I think we're in agreement that someone setting the tool loose bears the responsibility. Until we have a serious way to attribute true agency to these systems, blaming the system is not reasonable.

"Oops, I put a list of email addresses and a random number generator together and it sent an unwanted email to someone who didn't welcome it." It didn't do that, you did.
by NewsaHackO | 2025-12-26 23:45:48+00:00
To me, unless it is egregious, I would be very sensitive to avoid false positives before saying something is LLM aided. If it is clearly just slop, then okay, but I definitely think there is going to be a point where people claim well-written, straightforward posts as LLM aided. (Or even the opposite, which already happens, where people purposely put errors in prose to seem genuine).
by LeonardoTolstoy | 2025-12-26 23:46:35+00:00
I read close to 40 books this year which I assume is up from the previous year, and way more than I used to read prior to starting to do the Rochester Library reading challenge (which I've done for the past two years). I won't get into a lot of it, but after reading Middlemarch three years ago, Napoleon: A Life two years ago, and The Power Broker last year I decided to read two "big" books.

In the first half of the year War and Peace, which obviously was excellent, although I liked Middlemarch more.

In the second half of the year David Copperfield which was very excellent. Just beautifully written. I still think I probably like Middlemarch more... but it might now require a re-read to know for sure.

This year is going to be Tom's Crossing to start as I just got that for Christmas.
by Aerroon | 2025-12-26 23:46:56+00:00
The argument against AI alignment is that humans aren't aligned either. Humans (and other life) are also self-perpetuating and mutating. We could produce a super intelligence that is against us at any moment!

Should we "take steps" to ensure that doesn't happen? If not, then what's the argument there? That life hasn't caused a catastrophe so far, therefore it's not going to in the future? The arguments are the same for AI.

The biggest AI safety concern is, as always, between the chair and the keyboard. Eg some police officer not understanding that AI facial recognition isn't perfect, but trusts it 100%, and takes action based on this faulty information. This is, imo, the most important AI safety problem. We need to make users understand that AI is a tool and that they themselves are responsible for any actions they take.

Also, it's funny that Elon gets singled out for mandating changes on what the AI is allowed to say when all the other players in the field do the same thing. The big difference just seems to be whose politics are chosen. But I suppose it's better late than never.
by teddyh | 2025-12-26 23:47:14+00:00
Yes. I did not cover these cases because approximately nobody does that.

I mean, the absolutely simplest, and cheapest, way for companies to comply with the GPL is to ship the source code together with the software. Stick it in a zip file in a directory somewhere. The company can then forget the whole thing and not worry about anyone contacting them and ranting about source code and the GPL. But no company does that.

The other simple way for companies to comply with the GPL is for companies to provide a link to download the source code at the same place that users download the program itself. If the user did not download the source code when they had the chance, that’s the user’s problem. This will also let the company ignore any GPL worries. No company does this, either.

(The GPL provides a third way for individuals and non-profits, which is not relevant here.)
by colechristensen | 2025-12-26 23:48:02+00:00
And people won't point to the actual causes:

- The COVID free-money needed to be less and to end sooner

- The COVID restrictions needed to be less and end sooner

The disease didn't go away, we just at one point decided we were done with restrictions even though conditions didn't change.

We needed restrictions ONLY during spikes and more consideration needed to be given to the long term economic effects of COVID policies.

An example graph, when restrictions should have been on or off left as an exercise to the reader

https://wgntv.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2022/01/tuedeat...

The problem is it became a non-expert political issue where people who knew meme-facts based on their social bubble only really argued absolutist policies against stone wall opposition.

We needed people in a minmax mode arguing about specific levels of risk vs reward to set optimums, instead you had 0 risk folks screaming at 0 restriction folks screaming back with the middle entirely excluded. (We'll STILL get people on both sides responding here)
by habibur | 2025-12-26 23:48:13+00:00
LGPL allows compiling the whole of ffmpeg into a so or lib and then dynamically linking from there for your closed source code. That's the main difference between LGPL and GPL.

But if you change or add something in building ffmpeg.so that should be GPLed.

Apparently they copied some files from ffmpeg mixed with their propitiatory code and compiled it as a whole. That's the problem here.
by tekacs | 2025-12-26 23:48:24+00:00
JetPens in the US has a variety such. Not quite the one here, though.

https://www.jetpens.com/search?q=stamp&v=2

https://www.jetpens.com/Midori-Paintable-Stamp-Pre-Inked-Pla...

https://www.jetpens.com/Nombre-Mizushima-Stamp-Schedule-Week...

https://www.jetpens.com/Shachihata-Daily-Log-Stamp-Weather-a...
by dragonwriter | 2025-12-26 23:48:57+00:00
> Sending emails without consent

Actively exploiting a shared service to deanonymize an email someone hasn't chosen to share in order to email them is a violation of boudnaries even if if it wasn't something someone was justifying as exploration of the capacities of novel AI systems, thus implicitly invoking both the positive and negative concerns associated with research as appropriate in addition to (or instead of, where those replace rather than layering on top of) those that apply to everyday conduct.
by socialcommenter | 2025-12-26 23:50:25+00:00
I won't ask about or speak to the overall message of your first link, I'm interested to digest it further for my own benefit. This is striking to me though:

Throughout this post I’ll assume the average ChatGPT query uses 0.3 Wh of energy, about the same as a Google search used in 2009.

Obviously that's roughly one kilowatt for one second. I distinctly recall Google proudly proclaiming at the bottom of the page that its search took only x milliseconds. Was I using tens-hundreds of kW every time I searched something? Or did most of the energy usage come during indexing/scraping? Or is there another explanation?
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-12-26 23:50:42+00:00
Absolutely, and companies that routinely get requests like this train customer service agents on specific trigger words like "license" or "GDPR" that must be redirected. Without that training, it's not obvious why "it's GPLv2 licensed" is more compelling than the last customer's argument that the device warranty obligates you to drop everything and immediately fix the minor UI bug they reported.
by teddyh | 2025-12-26 23:50:53+00:00
> If that was true, anyone reselling an Android phone could open themselves up to legal liability.

That’s only an appeal to ridicule. If those are valid, here’s an opposing one:

If this is not true, then any company can violate the GPL all it likes just by funneling all its products through a second company, like a reseller.
by adev_ | 2025-12-26 23:51:50+00:00
> The LGPL is a product of a very specific moment: European legalism meeting American corporate compromise

If I tend to agree with the general message of the post, this specific point does not make any sense.

The LGPL and the GPL are 100% American products. They are originally issued from the the American Academic world with the explicit goal of twisting the arm of the (American) copyright system for ideological reasons.

That has zero relation to any European legalism.
by hxtk | 2025-12-26 23:52:10+00:00
Virtually all databases compile queries in one way or another, but they vary in the nature of their approaches. SQLite for example uses bytecode, while Postgres and MySQL both compile it to a computation tree which basically takes the query AST and then substitutes in different table/index operations according to the query planner.

SQLite talks about the reasons for each variation here: https://sqlite.org/whybytecode.html
by apple4ever | 2025-12-26 23:54:20+00:00
No I am using "caring" to mean "caring." I use the words I mean to, so please don't tell me I don't mean what I say.

And while Jobs implementation of "caring" was not as good as it could've been, and he could've solved the same problems a bit nicer, he still "cared" and still solved the right problems.

The people at Apple today don't have the same level of care, especially the senior leadership. If they would, I wouldn't have all these bugs that show it.
by rldjbpin | 2025-12-26 23:55:01+00:00
if you focus out of local LLMs (also served using dedicated apps), the title holds a lot of promise. case in point: WASM and WebGPU

the edge/on-device AI use cases on smartphones can also extend without user friction through web apps built on the above standards. perhaps one day there will be a "WebNPU" or just get supported through existing standards.

there are already some use cases on apps but it usually fallbacks on cpu. perhaps it could be the hw accelerated moment that we saw with video on the web.
by pdimitar | 2025-12-26 23:55:08+00:00
I am very interested by something like this but your README is not making it easy to like. Demonstrating with 2-3 sample apps using RDX might have gone a long way.

So how do I start using it if I, for example, want to use it like a decentralized `syncthing`? Can I? If not, what can I use it for?

I am not a mathematician. Most people landing on your repo are not mathematicians either.

We the techies _hate_ marketing with a passion but I as another programmer find myself intrigued by your idea... with zero idea how to even use it and apply it.
by LeFantome | 2025-12-26 23:56:10+00:00
This depends on the licenses.

Copyleft licenses are designed to prevent you mixing code as the licenses are generally incompatible with mixing.

More permissive license will generally allow you to mix licenses. This is why you can ship permissive code in a proprietary code base.

As for linking, “weak copyleft” license allow you to link but not to “mix” code. This is essentially the point of the LGPL.
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-12-26 23:56:56+00:00
> Do you think KiwiFarms deserved to be banned from Cloudflare and all its other former service providers?

I do believe that providers of such services such as cloud, internet, ... have to stay neutral on such purposes under nearly all circumstances. If the team behind KiwiFarms did something illegal, this is a problem for the judicial system.
by jaimefjorge | 2025-12-26 23:58:35+00:00
I sometimes wish that other types of fiction were as easy to read (for me) as sci-fi. I devoured all 6 books of Dune. Loved Hyperion with the canterbury tales structure and the politics - I already know I’m going to like the second book.
I must check The Terror, thank you for the pointer. I have also the Neuromancer waiting for me to eat my literary veggies.
by myrandomcomment | 2025-12-26 23:58:37+00:00
There is existing rules that document the number of days you can be in the state of California, as well as types of assets, accounts that you can have, etc. that determine if you have to pay state income taxes. A large number of people in the past moved to the NV side of Lake Tahoe, traveling into CA for work. They found out quickly that it does not work. When I left CA, I closed all my accounts based in CA and got a new drivers license in WA in the first 30 days, turned in my old one, etc. I still received a letter from CA asking for details of my move.
by QuiEgo | 2025-12-26 23:58:43+00:00
The hope is that with smart switches, no one needs home assistant to work anything in the house either - they get a UI they have had their whole life, a simple switch or toggle button. The smart part is an optional extra guests don't have to worry about, they just use lights the way they've always used lights.

You can't control color easily, but you can get dimmable smart switches. I find for most lights, I don't change the colors pretty much ever. YMMV.
by Nextgrid | 2025-12-26 23:59:19+00:00
> if I spend a few years writing some code, you should get to copy it for your own interests

If you publish the code, there's an argument to be made that yes, others should freely use it: if you could (or did) monetize the code yourself you wouldn't publish it. If you didn't, or failed trying to monetize it, maybe it's better for society if anyone else also gets to try?
by pjc50 | 2025-12-26 23:59:25+00:00
Elon got singled out because the changes he was forcing on grok were both conspicuously stupid (grok ranting about boers), racist (boers again), and ultimately ineffective (repeat incidents of him fishing for an answer and getting a different one).

It does actually matter what the values are when trying to do "alignment". Although you are absolutely right that we've not solved for human alignment, putting a real limit on the whole thing.
by antod | 2025-12-26 23:59:32+00:00
I cargo culted my way into AutoLISP in the R12 era knowing nothing about lisp or funtional programming (BASIC and a tiny bit of Pascal was all I'd done by then). Just using notepad without any assists like highlighting matching parentheses and no deeper theoretical knowledge was tough, but I could see vague outlines of a world of mathematical elegance just out of my grasp.
by encrypted_bird | 2025-12-27 00:00:05+00:00
That's fair, but it makes me wonder if perhaps it's not the resolution that makes it crisper but other factors that come along with that price point, such as refresh rate, HDR, LCD layer quality, etc.

For example, I have two 1920x1080 monitors, but one is 160 Hz and the other is only 60 Hz, and the difference is night and day between them.
by dwohnitmok | 2025-12-27 00:00:09+00:00
This is mildly disingenuous no? I'm not talking about Rob Pike's reaction which as I call out, "makes sense to me." And you are not just talking about legal entities. After all the legal entity here is Sage.

You're naming (and implicitly shaming as the downstream comments indicate) all the individuals behind an organization. That's not an intrinsically bad thing. It just seems like overkill for thoughtless, machine-generated thank yous. Again, can you point me to where you've named all the people behind an organization for accountability reasons previously on HN (or for that matter any other comment from anyone else that's done this? This is not rhetorical; I assume they exist and I'm curious what circumstances those were under)?
by JuniperMesos | 2025-12-27 00:00:10+00:00
> Regarding your first paragraph. Everything you said is true, but that's better than centralizated platforms like twitter and facebook. Yes or no?

Yes, the fediverse ecosystem is strictly better than using one monolithic social media platform run by a world-famous corporation. The fundamental fediverse account model is still fatally flawed though, and can't be a final solution for self-sovereign social media.

> Yes, you're tied to an instance and XYZ - ok, so just pick one of the largest N instances to mitigate that. That's better than having 1 to pick from.

The fundamental problem isn't having instances to pick from, it's being able to switch instances if and when the people running your instance stop allowing you to use their compute resources to post. Your fediverse identity is tied to whatever specific instance you make the account on, and you effectively can't switch it to another instance - you just make a new account and tell people about it manually. Again, strictly better than having no choice other than Twitter, but it doesn't really free you from someone else's control over your social media posting.
by reidrac | 2025-12-27 00:00:24+00:00
I read 14 books this year and my favourite was Eversion by Alastair Reynolds, followed closely by Pushing Ice by the same author. I "discovered" Cory Doctorow this year, reading 4 books (and I have another in my queue), being "Attack Surface" the one I liked most.

The only technical book I read was Programming in Lua (4th edition), and still didn't work for me. I guess I don't like Lua, and that's OK.
by antonvs | 2025-12-27 00:00:32+00:00
Kubernetes is explicitly designed to do what the article describes. In that respect the article is just describing what you can find in the standard Kubernetes docs.

> it is super important to treat a container orchestrator a container orchestrator.

Which products do you think are only “container orchestrators”? Even Docker Compose is designed to achieve a desired state from a declarative infrastructure definition.
by kimixa | 2025-12-27 00:01:14+00:00
I kinda agree. We've been told for years it's a "massive productivity multiplier".

So you expect to see the results of that. The AAA games being released faster, of higher quality, and at a lower cost to develop. You expect Microsoft (one of the major investors and proponents) to be releasing higher quality updates. You expect new AI-developed competitors for entrenched high-value software products.

If all that was true, it doesn't matter what people do or don't argue on the internet, the results will be visible.

So where are they?
by jlawson | 2025-12-27 00:01:38+00:00
> Food is less nutritious

You can buy the exact same diet as decades ago. Eggs, flour, rice, vegetable oil, beef, chicken - do you think any of these are "less nutritious"?

People are also fatter now, and live much longer.

>you have to buy a separate sound system to meet the same sonic fidelity as old CRT TVs

When you see a device like this does the term 'sonic fidelity' come to mind?

https://www.cohenusa.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/blogphot...
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-12-27 00:01:49+00:00
Musk isn't clear at all. He trumpets "free speech" then literally censors objective fact-based criticism which annoys him.

The problem isn't Grok-on-X, it's that Grok is supposed to be a commercial product used by individuals and businesses.

Machines do not usually have values. Now we're being asked to pay for a service that not only has values which affect the quality of its output, but which is constantly being tweaked according to the capricious whims of its owner.

Today it's white supremacy, tomorrow it might be programmed criticism of competing EVs and AI projects, or promotion of narratives that support traditional corporations over threatening startups.

Do you really want to pay for a service that is trying to manipulate your values while you use it, and could potentially be used to undermine you and your work without you being consciously aware of it?
by webstrand | 2025-12-27 00:02:23+00:00
I write scripts in rust as a replacement for bash. Its really quite good at it. Aside from perl, its the only scripting language that can directly make syscalls. Its got great libraries for: parsing, configuration management, and declarative CLIs built right into it.

Sure its a little more verbose than bash one-liners, but if you need any kind of error handling and recovery, its way more effective than bash and doesn't break when you switch platforms (i.e. mac/bsd utility incompatibilities with gnu utilities).

My only complaint would be that dealing with OsString is more difficult than necessary. Way to much of the stdlib encourages programmers to just do "non-utf8 paths don't exist" and panic/ignore when encountering one. (Not a malady exclusive to rust, but I wish they'd gotten it right)

Example I had handy: <https://gist.github.com/webstrand/945c738c5d60ffd7657845a654...>