MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Night_Thastus | 2025-12-08 19:11:06+00:00
A currency is fungible, easily accessible, tradable and convertible with little overhead. And in order to function, above all else a currency must have stability and trust.

If people lose faith in a currency's future, then it has no real value.

If people believe a currency (or the government/system which supports it) is unstable, then it has no real value. Real world global trade and investment is done on long timetables. You can't develop a product that won't start selling for 6+ years if you can't predict how currency will behave along that 6 years.

No one had a 'wrong' idea of what currency should be. They saw an opportunity to scam people out of all their money by convincing them that gambling was an investment and that they were much smarter and more clever, and sticking it against 'the man' or 'the system' when in fact they were just being used.

There were only two notable groups in crypto: The scammers and the suckers.
Which of my HN comments get upvoted?
by sema4hacker | 2025-12-08 19:11:55+00:00
I spend too much time on HN posting comments. I can never predict which will be upvoted, so I tabulated them to see if there was any trend:

68 points on 1 comment about Musk vs. OpenAI 39 points on 1 comment about private equity 26 points on 1 comment about Teamshares 24 points on 1 comment about surveillance 23 points on 1 comment about project pitch 19 points on 1 comment about complicated web pages 16 points on 1 comment about fire truck efficiency 15 points on 2 comments about SQLite, elevator cost 13 points on 2 comments about AI coding errors, balancing cube 12 points on 2 comments about domestic garbage, my salary history 11 points on 4 comments about age of study subjects, Las Vegas Sphere, my tech history (2x) 10 points on 4 comments about Waymo, pest contractors, YouTube Dewey decimal, burglars 9 points on 11 comments about productivity, a bad comment, surveillance misuse, TLDR wind turbines, robot litter pick up, human memory, Satoshi, AI authorship, bad businesses, barcode security, my tech history, Windows Cortana 8 points on 5 comments about SQL, POE Switches, writing quality, dieting, my tech education 7 points on 5 comments about formatting, anthropomorphizing AI, AI bubble, tech employment vs. income, Pascal 6 points on 7 comments about ability and available time, influence vs. manipulation, bad customer service, Lisa GUI, satisfaction, recommended books, my salary history 5 points on 6 comments about network providers, accepting credit cards, web page code, old files, robot litter pick up, abandoning Macintosh 4 points on 14 comments about: estimating projects, OOP, AI bubble, bad skyscrapers, debugging, UCSD Pascal, anthropomorphizing AI, cheap trucks, aspirin, Unix history, original article age, football centers, waiters, my tech history Comments with 3 or fewer points are too many to tabulate.

I see no discernible trend or correlation between subject matter, upvotes, writing quality, whatever.
by CodingJeebus | 2025-12-08 19:12:07+00:00
For real. I used think that society really suffered from a fractured media ecosystem compared to the monolithic pre-internet media era until I learned about how the US gov used the media to sway public opinion on invading Iraq back in 2003.

I don’t know if the current media environment is better than what we had then, but it’s pretty foolish to think that it’s automatically worse based on US foreign policy going back the last 50 years alone.
by Marsymars | 2025-12-08 19:12:10+00:00
> Microsoft has a problem that they hire the middle block of talent in the market. They do not chase the top 20% most expensive nor the bottom 20% least expensive.

That's only if you're only looking at the top 10% or w/e of the market in the first place. New grad software engineer salaries at MS are higher than the median software engineer salary in the US.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-12-08 19:12:18+00:00
I would expect Siri to be able to do anything on the iPhone that I can - change settings, report stats, kill/launch apps, etc.

It would be nice if it could control 3rd party apps too, like GMail, but being able to control the stuff that Apple themselves have built doesn't seem a lot to ask.
by reactordev | 2025-12-08 19:12:34+00:00
Again, no sympathy as that’s the route they chose. Rely on Google for everything OS and make a phone whereas Apple made a phone and supplied an OS.

Apple made a product. Google made a software revenue stream. Entirely different things and now the Android makers are crying foul that they too have to do product engineering support. Nah. This is what you get when you rely on out of house innovation. I hope they all close shop. Not because I like Apple, but because they aren’t in the business of making products, only selling you hardware with bolt on software that it vaguely supports. Like buying a raspberry pi that can make phone calls. Google has them all by the balls.
by bonzini | 2025-12-08 19:13:33+00:00
> FWIW I have heard that IBM used to force their management style on acquisitions in years past

Definitely wasn't like that for Red Hat. We had a CFO with an IBM past which was a really nice guy and never ever felt like he was parachutes from IBM.

Now after 6 years legal, HR and finance will move to IBM starting next January; but my perspective from engineering is that after the acquisition it's been and remains business as usual.

I have no idea how it was for Hashicorp.
by constantcrying | 2025-12-08 19:13:37+00:00
Major commercial airliners have system controllers where the measuring is done as follows: Write into the code some instruction which flips some output bit, hook the system up to a test rig and then get an oscilloscope. With the oscilloscope measure how long it takes between bit flips. The instructions for the measurements get commented out for the final release.

Yes, I have done this. By the way, these measurements of course have to be part of the certification.
by WorldMaker | 2025-12-08 19:13:40+00:00
I think something I disagree with in trying to split the hairs between "token" and "currency" is that it can be a distinction without a sharp difference.

The US penny is a copper (plus specific additives) ingot. It's value as a currency has directly shifted with the cost of copper, to the point of a desire to end the production simply based on copper prices. Copper is still a commodity with commodity markets (and futures markets) and its fungibility to trading is sometimes currency-like.

(Plus we can get into deep weeds discussing things like the Gold Standard where the commodities in the not-so-distant past have been directly tied to currencies. Arguably that is a bad idea, but just because it is a bad idea doesn't mean that it isn't a common or recurring idea because the distinctions are so close to few differences. You can cross-reference the South American experiments with a "Bitcoin Standard" currency even.)

When I say "the currency mechanisms", I certainly mean "the token mechanisms". They are the same, from my perspective. The difference between "currency" and "token" in a cryptocurrency sense doesn't seem to mean anything to me (unless you are explicitly narrowing to "non-fungible token", but that's a different discussion and as far as I can tell you are not), it is a distinction without a difference. Especially in the context of how much cryptocurrencies are and are not isomorphic to scams. In my view Artificial Scarcity (inc., but esp. Premining tactics), Proof of Work, and Proof of Stake all have aspects that are isomorphic to scams, that can be indistinguishable from scams. With present technology/math I do not see a way to build tokens that have any value without those systems. Whether you call those "currency mechanisms" or "token mechanisms" isn't a meaningful distinction when talking about the parts of blockchain tech that are most problematically isomorphic to scams.
by orbital-decay | 2025-12-08 19:14:11+00:00
I'm living in a reality very different from yours, I don't think you can understand. In my country, actual journalism and speaking about certain things are crimes that will put you into the jail for the rest of your life, get you tortured and likely murdered. Access to the knowledge about certain things is blocked. To be able to do journalism or to circumvent the censorship, one essentially has to commit crimes in another (supposedly free) country as well, because there it's considered to be sanctions evading and/or illegal money laundering.

So yeah, of course you can frame it in your way and that would be valid. That was the original ideal of cryptocurrencies - to have a financial system not controlled by the governments. Of course it can be used for fraud and other things we probably both consider bad, by design. Just like gold.
by stopbulying | 2025-12-08 19:14:47+00:00
Trump wanted Ellison to purchase TikTok (from the owners in China that weren't offering to sell it) so that US data would remain in the US.

By comparison, why did Trump/Kushner help sell EA (NFL Madden, NBA Live, PGA Tour,) to foreign interests, and why is Trump/Kushner trying to help sell WBD to foreign interests?
by max51 | 2025-12-08 19:14:49+00:00
>LLMs don't do this

They did at the beginning. It used to be that if you wanted a full answer with an intro, bullet points, lists of pros/cons, etc., you had to explicitly ask for it in the prompt. The answers were also a lot more influenced by the tone of the prompt instead of being forced into answering with a specific format like it does right now.
by MPSimmons | 2025-12-08 19:14:50+00:00
PowerToys (https://legacyupdate.net/download-center/powertoys) used to be on my "first software to install" list on a new machine. Between Tweak UI and Deskman, you could _almost_ get a minimal X Windows-like UI. Get those set up and add on LiteStep (http://litestep.net/) and you were pretty much good to go, with the exceptions of the kernel, network stack, and CLI toolset, of course.
by pajko | 2025-12-08 19:15:06+00:00
Both mentioned CVEs seem to be about local privilege escalation. So basically yes, if you don't install crap apps, there's a high chance that you are protected. Problem is that it might not seem to be a crap app, but a nice-looking game, etc. Also an attack can come in with an update of any app you have already installed on your phone.
by Izkata | 2025-12-08 19:15:07+00:00
I have an odd suggestion for learning more of vim: Check out gvim.

It's vim with a GUI, dropdowns for nice discoverability and most importantly the shortcuts on each menu item are the commands to use it in regular vim. It's how I found out vim even had folding waaay back.

For Firefox, I use Tridactyl. After Vimperator died I tried several replacements and found Vimium very limited (IIRC it was the one that was just hotkeys and didn't have modes like vim, no idea how it's grown since then). I have Tridactyl configured to open gvim with the contents of any text input when I hit ctrl+i so I can use vim for them.
by SoftTalker | 2025-12-08 19:15:12+00:00
Was certainly the case in the early years of Google Sheets. For me, the gap is entirely closed. I'm willing to believe that Excel still has the better platform for extreme power users but I've done some pretty slick stuff with Google Sheets and that was four or five years ago. It must be even better today (though I'm not currenlty doing much with spreadsheets).
by skippyboxedhero | 2025-12-08 19:15:14+00:00
The part you have quoted is a written explanation of the DuPont formula. It is nothing to do with reporting periods, it is just a calculation of the return from a business. A high-margin business is not, necessarily, a high-return business (and in the context of the discussion above, high returns is a sign of exploitation...dollar stores are low returns, the shareholders are being exploited not customers).
by fl7305 | 2025-12-08 19:15:45+00:00
>> ChatGPT 3.5 is already a general AI based on the old definition

> It's not. It's a query-retrieval system that can parse human language.

And humans aren't general AI either. They're just DNA replicators. It is very obvious when you realize that humans weren't designed to be intelligent. They were just randomly iterated through an environment which selected for maximum DNA replication.

Until you have a higher being which explicitly designs for intelligence, you'll just get things like LLM query-retrievals, or DNA replicators.
by dewey | 2025-12-08 19:15:52+00:00
Thanks for asking. I think one barrier with self-hosting is still that setting up a database isn't as easy as on DigitalOcean / Supabase. I'm an experienced self-hoster but running my own database still sometimes makes me a bit anxious as I have to set up scripts to do backups, set up scripts to see if my backups are being done correctly, set up metrics to see backups sizes, database sizes etc.

I just wrote this up here, in case someone else can point me to an existing project I'm not aware of: https://blog.notmyhostna.me/posts/what-i-wish-existed-for-se...
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-12-08 19:16:08+00:00
For the Mexico example, China isn't the neighboring USA whose president out of nowhere started talking about taking over it's only other neighbor, or government overthrow in Venezuela. Or the recent attempts to sway elections in other central American countries, pardoning of convicted drug dealing ex-Presidents. Attacks on Columbia's government. Sweetheart deals with central American dictators to illegally house immigration deporties in sub-human conditions with zero due process.
by mitchellh | 2025-12-08 19:16:35+00:00
Non-AMD, but Metal actually has a [relatively] excellent debugger and general dev tooling. It's why I prefer to do all my GPU work Metal-first and then adapt/port to other systems after that: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/Xcode/Metal-debugg...

I'm not like a AAA game developer or anything so I don't know how it holds up in intense 3D environments, but for my use cases it's been absolutely amazing. To the point where I recommend people who are dabbling in GPU work grab a Mac (Apple Silicon often required) since it's such a better learning and experimentation environment.

I'm sure it's linked somewhere there but in addition to traditionally debugging, you can actually emit formatted log strings from your shaders and they show up interleaved with your app logs. Absolutely bonkers.

The app I develop is GPU-powered on both Metal and OpenGL systems and I haven't been able to find anything that comes near the quality of Metal's tooling in the OpenGL world. A lot of stuff people claim is equivalent but for someone who has actively used both, I strongly feel it doesn't hold a candle to what Apple has done.
by ksherlock | 2025-12-08 19:16:55+00:00
BRK-B is also a top-10 (currently #10) component in the S&P 500 with a 1.74% weight. They also own ~40 stocks and I think around half of them are in the S&P 500 (including Apple, Amazon, and Google, which are also top 10 components but a combined ~15% weight), so, yeah.
by jcalvinowens | 2025-12-08 19:17:08+00:00
> look at groceries. It's a terrible, single-digit percentage margin business but they sell everything from placement in catalogue to whether the product is in a convenient spot on the shelf. That's a clear case where ads make it _cheaper_ for consumers.

I don't follow... it certainly improves the grocer's margins, but how does that do anything at all for the consumer?
by chasd00 | 2025-12-08 19:17:15+00:00
> The problem is, you have to know enough about the subject on which you're asking a question to land in the right place in the embedding

The other day i was on a call with 3 or 4 other people solving a config problem in a specific system. One of them asked chatgpt for the solution and got back a list of configuration steps to follow. He started the steps but one of them mentioned configuring an option that did not exist in the system at all. Textbook hallucination. It was obvious on the call that he was very surprised that the AI would give him an incorrect result, he was 100% convinced the answer was what the LLM said and never once thought to question what the LLM returned.

I've had a couple of instances with friends being equally shocked when an LLM turned out to be wrong. One of which was fairly disturbing, I was at a horse track and describing LLMs and to demonstrate i took a picture of the racing form thing and asked the LLM to formulate a medium risk betting strategy. My friend immediatately took it as some kind of supernatural insight and bet $100 on the plan it came up with. It was as if he believed the LLM could tell the future.Thank god it didn't work and he lost about $70. Had he won I don't know what would have happened, he probably would have asked again and bet everything he had.
by jandrese | 2025-12-08 19:17:16+00:00
Ada would never have been cool.

Ironically I remember one of the complaints was it took a long time for the compilers to stabilize. They were such complex beasts with a small userbase so you had smallish companies trying to develop a tremendously complex compiler for a small crowd of government contractors, a perfect recipe for expensive software.

I think maybe they were just a little ahead of their time on getting a good open source compiler. The Rust project shows that it is possible now, but back in the 80s and 90s with only the very early forms of the Internet I don't think the world was ready.
by idle_zealot | 2025-12-08 19:17:25+00:00
> Anyone being able to directly reach anyone is a massive change from the gate-kept pre-internet media landscape.

Sure, but how are we supposed to disentangle this change from the concurrent growth of algorithmic feeds driving what people see? I have no doubt that democratization of communication would have social effects on its own, but we don't really know what those would be sans the simultaneous centralizing effect that dominant social media companies impose.
by canopi | 2025-12-08 19:17:34+00:00
Congrats on the launch. The problem is definitely there. I wonder how are you planning to differentiate yourself from Cursor and the like. You mention you are complementary, but Cursor provide similar features to add external doc context for instance to a prompt. I understand you do better in your benchmark, but with the amount of funding they may be able to replicate and improve over it (unless you have a secret thing).
by fatal94 | 2025-12-08 19:17:43+00:00
Ofc, and not everybody needs or cares for all the features Kafka has. Then use another known and tested messaging system. Use NATS or ZMQ. Or any cloud native pubsub system

My main point is, I have zero interest in creating novel solutions to a solved problem. It just artificially increases the complexity of my work and the learning curve for contributors.
by viccis | 2025-12-08 19:18:12+00:00
>understand the essence of views put forth by AR

I've talked to quite a few objectivists (at one point I lived near Austin, which has one of the only, maybe THE only university in the world that treats objectivism as a serious subject of study) and not a single one of them had read a page of her actual writing on metaphysics and epistemology. So for example, they generally can't articulate an answer as to how her ethics of self interest differ from simple hedonism.

They all liked her fiction because they, almost all being bright people on the spectrum, derive all their self worth from their intelligence rather than from their interactions with others. So a novel presenting such characters as moral champions under attack from leeching inferiors naturally appeals to someone with an ego driven worldview.

The author of the linked post never really addressed whether he thought about reconsidering his views on Randian self interest as a virtue, which is a perfect way to philosophically ground the kind of exploitative and useless effects of crypto that he described.
by kelseyfrog | 2025-12-08 19:18:13+00:00
And TV prices are down -98% over the same time. Efficiency gains in some sectors distort those without gains. Effectively, the lower prices of some goods mean a larger pool money chasing goods without the same effinciency gains. More money chasing constrained supply means prices in those sectors rise faster.

It's easy to fix, but no one is willing to tax electronics at 10,000%. It would mean fewer dollars chasing supply constrained services like healthcare, education, and childcare. The cure is probably worse than the disease.
by btbuildem | 2025-12-08 19:18:26+00:00
> lack of real integration is basically the core design of most Copilot products

I would wager a month's wages that this is the doing of some internal Security Review, wherein a bunch of out-of-touchers decided that the customers will want to prefer to be Safe and Secure instead of getting some actual value from integrating copilot into shell workflows.

Meanwhile people are yolo'ing it with various janky DIY wires and duct-tape githobbits that mash together whatever open weights model and user-level access to the system (or worse).
by jimbokun | 2025-12-08 19:18:29+00:00
So far all the Champions League games have been available on the app. Serie A is a nice bonus, with a few other competitions as well.

EPL requiring both Peacock and a cable subscription to watch all of the games is extremely annoying. But I do it anyway.

All of those combined let me watch all the Arsenal games except FA and Carabao Cup.
by skepti3 | 2025-12-08 19:19:09+00:00
> They could also have funded developing a free, open source toolchain.

If the actual purpose of the Ada mandate was cartel-making for companies selling Ada products, that would have been counter-productive to their goals.

Not that compiler vendors making money is a bad thing, compiler development needs to be funded somehow. Funding for language development is also a topic. There was a presentation by the maker of Elm about how programming language development is funded [0].

[0]: https://youtube.com/watch?v=XZ3w_jec1v8
by artrockalter | 2025-12-08 19:19:39+00:00
It's so easy to ship completely broken AI features because you can't really unit test them and unit tests have been the main standard for whether code is working for a long time now.

The most successful AI companies (OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor) are all dogfooding their products as far as I can tell, and I don't really see any other reliable way to make sure the AI feature you ship actually works.
by daveguy | 2025-12-08 19:19:42+00:00
The "cross-linked internals" only go one direction and only one token at a time, slide window and repeat. The RL layer then picks which few sequences of words are best based on human feedback in a single step. Even "thinking" is just doing this in a loop with a "think" token. It is such a ridiculously simplistic model that it is vastly closer to an adder than a human brain.
by guywithahat | 2025-12-08 19:19:42+00:00
I think you're misunderstanding; this is a logical exercise. The best is a hypothetical ranking, and to add a independent variable which means we must detract from hiring the best person. To disagree would be to say someone is better strictly because of the color of their skin.

It's like if you were tasked with buying the most powerful engine produced for a locomotive. How you define powerful is arbitrary and is an optimization problem on its own, but if you then say "and the engine block must come from the factory painted red" you are, by definition, no longer optimizing for the fastest engine, you're optimizing for the fastest red engine. Being red is independent from being the best engine.
by transcriptase | 2025-12-08 19:20:31+00:00
You’re assuming that there’s no cost involved in moving a potential victim through the pipeline. I’m sure AI has changed the game, but the general idea was that beyond the initial blast of spam you would have someone actually responding to those who fell for it. Putting in signals that it was a scam filtered out individuals who would waste scammer time because they would eventually figure it out before falling victim. By selecting for people who literally can’t pick up on obvious signs of a scam, you save yourself a lot of time and energy.