MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by daxfohl | 2025-12-13 20:25:18+00:00
Though remember that it's not a human. It's easy to waste a lot of time convincing it to do something in a certain way, then one prompt later it forgets everything you said and reverts back to its previous behavior. (Yes humans can do that too, but not usually to this level).

It's important (though often surprisingly hard!) to remember it's just a tool, so if it's not doing things the way you want, start over with something else. Don't spend too much time on a lost cause.
by gpm | 2025-12-13 20:25:54+00:00
I think long range transmission remains a thing anywhere having a local grid remains a thing (which will be most places for other reasons).

Load-balancing the area having a cloudy few days and the area having a sunny days and the area having a windy few days and so on will remain extremely valuable. It lets you install a lot less batteries and isn't that much infrastructure given that the last mile problems are dealt with already.
by epistasis | 2025-12-13 20:26:08+00:00
You are certainly not alone in your beliefs, but it always amazes me which technologies get the benefit of doubt and which are severely penalized by unfounded doubt. Solar and especially batteries are completely penalized and doubted in a way that defies any honest assessment of reality. The EIA and IEA forecasts are as terrible as they are because the reflect this unrealistic doubt (random blog spam link, but this observation is so old that it's hard to find the higher quality initial graphs)

https://optimisticstorm.com/iea-forecasts-wrong-again/

Similarly, nuclear power gets way too much benefit of the doubt, which should simply vanish after a small amount of due diligence on construction costs over its history. It's very complex, expensive, high labor, and has none of the traits that let it get cheaper as it scales.
by SilverElfin | 2025-12-13 20:26:47+00:00
What can challenge them? Google Sheets is nice for basic things but it somehow feels awkward to use a browser based app once things get complicated. Excel has the benefit of having a browser version and a desktop version. And it takes enormous resources to build something like excel - only to be unable to compete with Microsoft’s sales machine. There’s no way a new company is created to challenge them.
by cryzinger | 2025-12-13 20:27:03+00:00
If we can't predict/model these Turing machines' behavior because of unsolved math problems, what's stopping us from actually creating and running them to see what would happen (and maybe getting closer to solving those math problems in the process)? Is it just a matter of scale and resources?

My knowledge here is very limited, so this isn't a "why has no one tried this one weird trick"-type question. I assume there is in fact a good reason that I don't yet understand :P
by analog31 | 2025-12-13 20:27:04+00:00
I think that playing any kind of live music requires a bit of a two-way accommodation between the needs of the audience and of the musicians. I don't think it needs to be difficult per se, but there needs to be something in it for the musicians.

This might sound self centered, which is a frequent stereotype leveled against jazz musicians, but on the other hand, why bother? There are other things we could be doing with our time. And I don't think that playing "difficult" music is incompatible with delivering a high quality performance, which is always my mission.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-12-13 20:27:14+00:00
Hire Americans first before importing more immigrant workers. When America reaches full employment (which we are a long way from as of this comment), feel free to tap other countries. If you are in US public office, and advocating for or fighting for more immigration while American workers are desperate for work, you should be run out of office, at a minimum. Your duty is to the citizens you represent, not corporations, not foreign workers, and certainly not a small population of the wealthy who receive the gains from increased shareholder value from imported immigrant workers.
by SigmundA | 2025-12-13 20:27:27+00:00
The acid in lead acid is sulfuric acid and if overcharged vents hydrogen gas, thats why they need a ventilated space typically. Sealed lead acid have safety vents that might pop if enough pressure builds.

They are most certainly not inert, they just have well established safety and charging protocols and are not used in very high quantities together because of their low energy density and cycle life.

LFP batteries which have iron phosphate cathodes are very stable compared to colbalt based batteries that tend to have catastrophic failures due to overcharge causing cathode failure. LFP have higher cycle life and are cheaper and typically whats used for storage and application where the loss in erergy density is not a big deal.
by earthnail | 2025-12-13 20:27:42+00:00
It's interesting to read the praise for Apple TV here. I didn't like mine. My three years old Sony Bravia is really excellent, supports Chrome Cast, Airplay etc, has a great remote control, and a fast enough CPU that the apps don't lag. Everything is butter smooth. It's a thoroughly enjoyable experience.

I had an Apple TV as well, but I don't use it anymore. And I otherwise only use Apple devices. But the Apple TV I just never got warm with.
by toss1 | 2025-12-13 20:27:43+00:00
Sure, and none of that amounts to even close to the damage from stripping vast areas of the earth to dig up coal, grinding and transporting it to power plants, then setting it on fire, and releasing tons of CO2, and then disposing of tons of unburnt waste full of NASTY chemicals.

And having to do all that continuously, every day, for the life of the plant.

In every single solution you can point out problems. Complaining that "X isn't perfect" is the easiest and laziest thing in the world to do. Assessing the ACTUAL costs and damages IN PROPORTION is more difficult, but actually yields good results.
by TekMol | 2025-12-13 20:27:44+00:00
In the rare case (maybe once per month or so) where that happens, I start a script on my laptop that starts a webapp both the phone and the laptop can open in their browser and send text to each other.

The overhead of starting it and typing "laptop.tekmol" into the browser on both machines is only a few seconds.

That seems mich saner to me than to constantly have some interaction between the two devices going on.
by LorenPechtel | 2025-12-13 20:28:04+00:00
Yeah, although it used to be that if you were legal to enter the US you actually could do it anywhere, just report to the local officials as soon as practical. That's still how ships work, you have to enter a country's territorial waters before you can speak to an official.

Neither the US nor Canada does that now, effectively slicing the Pacific Coast Trail at the border. And now we have the scumbags for no good reason blocking off access to the southern terminus of the Continental Divide Trail. That fence isn't going to stop someone trying to sneak into the country!
by lgeek | 2025-12-13 20:28:11+00:00
> Worryingly, VNPT and Bunny Communications are home/mobile ISPs

VNPT is a residential / mobile ISP, but they also run datacentres (e.g. [1]) and offer VPS, dedicated server rentals, etc. Most companies would use separate ASes for residential vs hosting use, but I guess they don't, which would make them very attractive to someone deploying crawlers.

And Bunny Communications (AS5065) is a pretty obvious 'residential' VPN / proxy provider trying to trick IP geolocation / reputation providers. Just look at the website [2], it's very low effort. They have a page literally called 'Sample page' up and the 'Blog' is all placeholder text, e.g. 'The Art of Drawing Readers In: Your attractive post title goes here'.

Another hint is that some of their upstreams are server-hosting companies rather than transit providers that a consumer ISP would use [3].

[1] https://vnpt.vn/doanh-nghiep/tu-van/vnpt-idc-data-center-gia... [2] https://bunnycommunications.com/ [3] https://bgp.tools/as/5065#upstreams
by eqvinox | 2025-12-13 20:28:15+00:00
This is just meaningless knee-jerking, try making an actual argument. At least the GP is arguing that more use of AI leads to loss of personal coding skills. It's unclear at this point what level AI will grow to, i.e. it could hit a hard wall at 70% of a good programmer's ability, and in that case you would really want those personal coding skills since they'll be worth a lot. It could also far exceed a good programmer, in which case the logic reverses and you want those AI handling skills…

NB: I'm talking about skill cap here, not speed of execution. Of course, an AI will be faster than a programmer… *if* it can handle the job, and *if* you can trust it enough to not need even more time in review…
by Aurornis | 2025-12-13 20:28:38+00:00
Comments like this remind me of my distant relatives who proudly live out in the countryside and avoid traveling to big cities for any reason. They see a lot of Fox News headlines about bad things happening in big cities and they've concluded those bad things are happening all the time.

So they constantly congratulate themselves for not going to the nearest city, look down upon people who spend time in cities, warn us that we're at risk of the bad things happening, and never miss an opportunity to talk about how bad cities are in conversations.

Now replace big cities with big tech and that's exactly how a lot of these Hacker News comments read.
by exasperaited | 2025-12-13 20:28:48+00:00
He sang probably the greatest song in musical film — Hushabye Mountain in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfdRr7MWax4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eeCBVerpYj8

If you have never seen this film, I don't care how old you are, you should watch it. It is overshadowed by Mary Poppins but it is a work of art — a funny, charming, astonishing visual feast of a film and he is magnificent in it. His performance as the jack-in-a-box alone is worth an Oscar:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_l2ii_25tc
by verdverm | 2025-12-13 20:29:16+00:00
Cortex Layer is not made up, rather it is an anthropomorphization you want to become one of these words. Stop anthropomorphizing, it turns rational people off

Putting "Cognition" in the acronym is another example. These things are not cogniating, that's not how they work, they don't think, they have been gradient descended to use special <think> runs in their token generation
by BoiledCabbage | 2025-12-13 20:29:17+00:00
It's funny I thought out a post, wrote it in my head and then scrolled a bit further and read (where you wrote it). The only difference was I choose upper-case "G" and making it a "C" instead of "J" to "I". We can also make it match open paren as well.

But yeah this whole thing seems absurd of removing the distinguishing marks on things whose only purpose is to allow us to distinguish them.

While were at it N can become \ and M as well. D can become close paren. Q can become O.

And entire font of just vertical bar, horizontal bar, open paren, close paren, forward slash, backslash and a circle. Just think of how clean it would look...
by hermitcrab | 2025-12-13 20:29:24+00:00
I worked on a summer camp in the USA in the 1980s. We had a day off and went into the small local town (Kent, Connecticut IIRC). A small group of us British students went into the local bar for a beer before we went back to camp. The barman/owner was quite slow about giving us the bill for the beer. This is going to be expensive, we thought. But he just said 'It's on the house. Tell people Americans are nice when you get home'. It was a small kindness, but greatly appreciated by some poor students.
by johnsmith1840 | 2025-12-13 20:29:32+00:00
A largely undiscussed part of AI use in code is that it's actually neither easy nor intuitive to learn max effectiveness of your AI output.

I think there's a lot of value in using AIs that are dumb to learn what they fail at. The methods I learned using gpt3.5 for daily work still transaltes over to the most modern of AI work. It's easy to understand what makes AI fail on a function or two than understanding that across entire projects.

My main tips:

1. More input == lower quality

Simply put, the more you can focus your input data to output results the higher quality you will get.

For example on very difficult problems I will not only remove all comments but I will also remove all unrelated code and manually insert it for maximum focus.

Another way to describe this is compute over problem space. You are capped in compute so you must control your problem space.

2. AI output is a reflection of input tokens and therefore yourself.

If you don't know what you're doing in a project or are mentally "lazy" AI will fail with death by a thousand cuts. The absolute best use of AI is knowing EXACTLY what you want and describing it in as few words as possible. I directly notice if I feel lazy or tired in a day and rely heavily on the model I will often have to revert entire days of work due to terrible design.

3. Every bad step of results from an AI or your own design compound problems as you continue.

It's very difficult to know the limits of current AI methods. You should not be afraid of reverting and removing large amounts of work. If you find it failing heavily repeatedly this is a good sign your design is bad or asking too much from it. Continuing on that path reduces quality. You could end up in the circular debugging loops with every fix or update adds even more problems. It's far better practice to drop the entire feature of updates and restart with smaller step by step actions.

4. Trust AI output like you would stack overflow response or a medium article.

Maybe its output would work in some way but it has a good chance of not working for you. Repeatedly asking same questions differently or different angles is very helpful. The same way debugging via stack overflow was trying multiple suggestions to discover the best real problem.
by leoh | 2025-12-13 20:30:06+00:00
> On October 30, 2025, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) subpoenaed Archive.today's domain registrar, Tucows. The subpoena stated its purpose is to identify the owner(s) of the archive.today domain name, and that it was part of a criminal investigation conducted by the FBI, the nature of which was not disclosed.[8]
by QuiEgo | 2025-12-13 20:31:30+00:00
I'd like to give a special shoutout to the PhotoSync app. It has one killer feature that Immich does not (at least last time I looked): encryption at rest. I think someone breaking into my house and stealing my NAS is a real possibility (unlikely, but I'd give it higher odds that getting locked out of my account like what happened in the article), so this is super important to me.

You could put Immich data on a LUKS volume I suppose, but then you have to fiddle with your server every time it reboots.

I did PhotoSync for a while, but now I just set up my Mac to download my whole photos library, and do Time Machine backups of my Mac. This gets two copies of the data not tied to my Apple ID (the one on my Mac's local disk, and the one on my NAS on the time machine volume).
by _pdp_ | 2025-12-13 20:31:44+00:00
We ended up using JSONL for our implementation but it is also possible to switch using other "streamable" variants like SSE and even CSV if that is what you are into.

But, as the OP suggested, none of these are resumable. So we have created a pub/sub over HTTP that does exactly this.

The way it works is that you get a unique URL that is specific to the current authenticated session. You can request data as many time as you like from that URL and it will get streamed to your client from the last checkpoint.

It works well even with rudimentary tools like curl. There is practically no protocol of sorts required - the kind of implementation I really like because who wants more complications in their life, right?

The big issue build conversational and even agentic AI with off-the-shelf frameworks rather than using a platform such as ours is that there is a lot of plumbing involved to get these functionalities going which is makes even basic setup a lot more complicated depending on the kind of platform you are deploying to.
by formerly_proven | 2025-12-13 20:32:04+00:00
If there is an audience for release notes I haven't seen anything better than just committing entries to a pre-release folder as you change things and have release automation compile the folder into the actual release notes. Python and many other large projects handle it like this: https://github.com/python/cpython/tree/main/Misc/NEWS.d/next (The release notes for major releases are crafted manually)

On the other hand, for many projects you can probably skip release notes: nobody will read them. Even fewer people would read automatically generated changelogs: don't bother setting it up. Releasing instead of deploying from master also implies you took more care than usual, did you? Commit messages make sense for cohesive changes, are they? Didn't think so.
by hexaga | 2025-12-13 20:32:05+00:00
Alternatively: some people are just better at / more comfortable thinking in auditory mode than visual mode & vice versa.

In principle I don't see why they should have different amounts of thought. That'd be bounded by how much time it takes to produce the message, I think. Typing permits backtracking via editing, but speaking permits 'semantic backtracking' which isn't equivalent but definitely can do similar things. Language is powerful.

And importantly, to backtrack in visual media I tend to need to re-saccade through the text with physical eye motions, whereas with audio my brain just has an internal buffer I know at the speed of thought.

Typed messages might have higher _density_ of thought per token, though how valuable is that really, in LLM contexts? There are diminishing returns on how perfect you can get a prompt.

Also, audio permits a higher bandwidth mode: one can scan and speak at the same time.
by SilverElfin | 2025-12-13 20:32:23+00:00
That doesn’t seem right. You would just not have any immigrants at all, because full employment is not possible, and many companies will move elsewhere or shutdown if they cannot get the right talent here. And then people will wonder why there are so few employers. Running a business is already very difficult and risky. It just wouldn’t be worth it for many employers.

Also the reality is that a lot of American workers are simply not employable in the industry they want to be in. It’s not a question of cost - H1B visa workers are paid slightly more on average. The most important American companies - like big tech - pay immigrant workers the same as anyone else.

And to be honest I don’t think training is an issue. For example there are thousands of unemployed engineers who have a degree - but still aren’t fundamentally skilled enough for most companies to want to hire them. Many of those people are blaming immigrants for their unemployment but I don’t think they’re correct.

I do agree that it’s ideal to support the current residents. But I just don’t think it’s realistic to see every single one of them employed in the best jobs. Maybe the best we can do is improve our investments in education?
by Aurornis | 2025-12-13 20:32:38+00:00
I think tech people who read a lot of news headlines have a hard time grasping the scale of these services.

Commenters here talk about PayPal account closures as if everyone who uses the service will eventually lose their money. Now we're talking about gift cards as if everyone using gift cards will have their account locked.

These stories, while frustrating and sad, are rare occurrences. The majority of people who use these services will not have any experience like these stories you read.

To be honest, I think the average person is probably better at estimating their risk of using these services than a lot of these HN commenters.
by jack_tripper | 2025-12-13 20:33:11+00:00
>I really felt like Trump’s 2024 election was the moment it became the Chinese century.

You must have been asleep at the wheel or living under a rock to have mised China's rise over the last decades. They didn't wait for Trump to get elected in 2024 and then flipped a switch from third world country to global superpower.

"Damn, this hot cup of coffee burned my tongue. Why would Trump do this?"

-HN comments
by hermitcrab | 2025-12-13 20:33:32+00:00
I think making system more efficient often squeezes the kindness (and resilience) out of them. I have spoken to NHS workers who said that they used to do various unpaid overtime but, now they had opppressive management, didn't any more. Obviously things need a level of effiency, but there is a point beyond which it becomes counterproductive.
by D-Machine | 2025-12-13 20:33:47+00:00
Air fryer cultists must administer lidocaine prior to eating or something, air fryers can't even get close to proper deep or shallow frying, unless you are re-warming something pre-packaged that was already deep fried prior. The "crisp" achieved from air frying is woefully inferior, and no serious chef or anyone with basic cooking experience defends them for anything other than trivial use-cases. They do not behave meaningfully different in any way from a good convection oven, countertop or otherwise, and are less versatile (and yes, cheap convection ovens do have worse circulation, but good ones do not have this problem, or even just have an air fry mode anyway).

EDIT: So to be clear, yes, there is a narrow use case for people who can't afford e.g. a good countertop convection oven (same thing as an air fryer but more versatile) or decent convection oven, and for whom cooking consists mostly of store-bought and pre-cooked small meals for 1-2 people max, and definitely for people that don't care about the dramatic textural difference from actual fried food, or that aren't attempting to emulate fried food with it.

But air frying was mentioned by GP as an alternative for restaurants in place of deep frying, which is woefully out of touch with the most basic facts of reality.
by ksec | 2025-12-13 20:34:08+00:00
I wish we could ignore some of these what I think as Sensational Topics. In terms of wealth, distribution etc. There is only one question to be asked and solve which will fix 90% of the problem.

Housing.

I said this during UBI discussions, wealth distribution and the Anti-Big Tech and it is still not getting any attention. Anywhere between 400T to 700T in the world today are Real Estate Assets. The biggest and easier way to solve wealth distribution is allowing Real Estate or average house / home prices to slowly return to 1990s level. Or with 4-5x multiple of average yearly salary.
by godelski | 2025-12-13 20:34:20+00:00
I think you're over simplifying things to the point far beyond what is useful to this conversation. While I disagree with the parent who is saying it is essentially a lost cause to restart the industry you go too far in the other direction suggesting it is a trivial endeavor, which misses all the complications that make them take years to build. Might as well say "End of the day, Google is just a text processor"
by robrenaud | 2025-12-13 20:34:41+00:00
Low scores on HLE and ARC AGI might be a good sign. They didn't goodhart their models. ARG AGI in particular doesn't mean much, IMO. It's just some weird hard geometry induction. I don't think it correlates well with real world problem solving.

AFAICT, claude code is the biggest engineering mind share. An apple software engineer of mine says he sometimes uses $100/day of claude code tokens at work and gets sad, because that's the budget.

Also, look at costs and revenue. OpenAI is bleeding way more than Antropic.