MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zephyreon | 2025-12-27 04:51:14+00:00
The last bit

> supervised by a human who occasionally knew what he was doing.

seems in jest but I could be wrong. If omitted or flagged as actual sarcasm I would feel a lot better about the project overall. As long as you’re auditing the LLM’s outputs and doing a decent code review I think it’s reasonable to trust this tool during incidents.

I’ll admit I did go straight to the end of the readme to look for this exact statement. I appreciate they chose to disclose.
by crote | 2025-12-27 04:52:35+00:00
I don't think this makes a meaningful difference. The installation is a `curl | sh`, which downloads a tarball, which gets extracted to some directory in $PATH.

It currently includes two executables, but having it contain two executables and a bunch of .so libraries would be a fairly trivial change. It only gets messy when you want it to make use of system-provided versions of the libraries, rather than simply vendoring them all yourself.
by zahlman | 2025-12-27 04:52:57+00:00
> Unless memory mapped by the OS with no impact on runtime for unused parts?

Yeah, this is presumably why a no-op `uv` invocation on my system takes ~50 ms the first time and ~10 ms each other time.

> Exactly, so again have no impact?

Only if your invocation of pip manages to avoid an Internet request. Note: pip will make an Internet request if you try to install a package by symbolic name even if it already has the version it wants in cache, because its cache is an HTTP cache rather than a proper download cache.

But even then, there will be hundreds of imports mainly related to Rich and its dependencies.
Ask HN: What Disappointed You in 2025?
by adrianwaj | 2025-12-27 04:53:34+00:00
The issue is that disappointed users are prone to not leave feedback and hence problems may perpetuate.

I asked about it here:

https://www.perplexity.ai/search/why-don-t-disappointed-users-l-SWvPF5iASLeWt1FbwB0_Fw

So what disappointed you this year?

Perplexity.ai not having a shorter domain disappointed me, yet it just told me I can use pplx.ai.

Obviously disappointment varies in nature so really this thread could be just about "Free, unsolicited, negative feedback for anyone/everyone."
by fragmede | 2025-12-27 04:54:18+00:00
You may want to be more goal oriented. If you're just publishing into a void and hoping for things to happen, I mean I'm not an influencer, but the successful ones I do know have specific goals that they're driving towards are not screaming into the void and hoping for the best.

Not looking for you to answer these questions for me here, but ask yourself, what are those dreams specifically? What are the concrete steps you've taken to get there, and how are you going to accomplish them? How long is it going to take you? What are success criteria? What are the risks? What are the failure modes?
by tzs | 2025-12-27 04:54:22+00:00
> The GPL requires the company to send the user a written offer of source code

It should be noted that this is just one of three options that someone who wants to distribute binaries of GPL code can choose from. It's the most commonly chosen one, and one is only available for noncommercial distribution, so the odds are good that this is the option they are using.

The other available option is to accompany the binary with the source code.

That one leads to an interesting possibility where someone could end up with a binary and there is no one obligated to provide source to them. As far as I know this has not actually arisen, but it seems like something that is bound to happen sometime.

Suppose company X decides to make a generic hardware platform that other companies can buy to build their products on. X's platform is basically a small single board computer with WiFi, Bluetooth, dual, USB ports, a couple Ethernet ports, and some GPIO ports. X ports Linux to their hardware.

When X ships a system it comes with an SD card with a Linux distribution installed including their custom kernel. It is configured to boot from the first SD card slot, and then to run a custom login system that looks at the second SD card slot and if there is a card in there it mounts it, looks for an executable on its root name application.exe, and runs that as root. X includes in the box a small thumb drive with a copy of the source code for everything on the SD card.

The idea is that a company Y that wants to make something like a WiFi access point or an air quality monitor can buy these boards from X, put them in a case with whatever peripherals or sensors they need like air quality sensors, write the software for the application, put it on an SD card, and put that in the second SD card slot.

So lets say Y buys 1000 of these systems from X, builds 1000 of their access points or whatever from them, and sells them.

One of their customers asks Y for the source code of the GPL parts. Does Y have to provide it?

I'd say they do not. They are not making copies or derivative works. They are just receiving physical copies from X and passing those on unmodified to their customers. This should fall squarely under the First Sale Doctrine in US copyright law, and similar rules in other jurisdictions.

How about if they ask X for a copy?

X has made copies and derivative works and distributed them. But X satisfied their GPL requirements by including a thumb drive with the source with each board they shipped to Y.
by move-on-by | 2025-12-27 04:54:41+00:00
I think the staff role varies a lot between companies- so take this with a grain of salt.

> Because I've been out of the daily coding game for three years. I know what I don't know. I need time to rebuild those muscles - to remember what it's like to be in the weeds of production incidents at 2am, to own features end-to-end, to debug race conditions that only show up under load.

I think you’ll find that your management skills transfer easily to the staff role. Staff, at least in my org, has a lot of cross over between management.

Maybe you are given a large ambiguous task and it’s up to you to solve it. You don’t have a team, but you can gather requirements- scope out the work and depending on timelines, you’ll get people assigned. Lots of project management aspects.

Or maybe a project already in progress is going off the rails and you get thrown in the mix to get things back on track. You need to identity why things aren’t going as expected. Is it scope creep? Was it bad estimates? Is the design not working out? Maybe the team just doesn’t have the necessary skills? These are all things that I would expect a staff engineer to be able to identify. It’s a nice option for leadership to be able to add a peer to an engineering manager into a team to get another viewpoint. It would certainly be awkward to add another EM to a team, but a staff can provide assistance without the awkwardness.

> And honestly? I want something to work toward over the next three years while my kids are young.

Well, I have young kids and I can’t say I disagree with you there. I’ve been on this horrible project the past 3 months and I’ve found myself daydreaming of going back to Senior - or just switching companies all together.

Anyways, staff role varies a lot. From my viewpoint if you are a half decent EM, then those skills should transfer just fine for you to be a half decent staff engineer.
by stevenjgarner | 2025-12-27 04:55:36+00:00
I believe the lytro camera was a plenoptic, or light field, camera. Light field cameras capture information about the intensity together with the direction of light emanating from a scene. Conventional cameras record only light intensity at various wavelengths.

While conventional cameras capture a single high-resolution focal plane and light field cameras sacrifice resolution to "re-focus" via software after the fact, the CMU Split-Lohmann camera provides a middle ground, using an adaptive computational lens to physically focus every part of the image independently. This allows it to capture a "deep-focus" image where objects at multiple distances are sharp simultaneously, maintaining the high resolution of a conventional camera while achieving the depth flexibility of a light field camera without the blur or data loss.

Something I find interesting is that while holograms and the CMU camera both manipulate the "phase" of light, they do so for opposite reasons: a hologram records phase to recreate a 3D volume, whereas the CMU camera modulates phase to fix a 2D image.
by bitwize | 2025-12-27 04:55:47+00:00
Ah, Autolisp. Based on an early, early version of XLisp, it's zombie software: not quite alive—Autodesk really wants you to use its COM and .NET integration to program AutoCAD—nor can it truly die. It was also the first Lisp I ever programmed, and back in the mid-90s there was a trend of putting a Lisp, or Tcl, into all the things (Emacs, GIMP, frickin' Abuse...) and Autolisp had prepared me for that world rather well.
by zahlman | 2025-12-27 04:57:10+00:00
I should have mentioned one of the main reasons setup.py turns out not okay for people (aside from the general unpleasantness of running code to determine what should be, and mostly is, static metadata): in the legacy approach, Setuptools has to get `import`ed from the `setup.py` code before it can run, but running that code is the way to find out the dependencies. Including build-time dependencies. Specifically Setuptools itself. Good luck if the user's installed version is incompatible with what you've written.
by xvilka | 2025-12-27 04:57:44+00:00
Only if it exposed to elements. Meanwhile Rust already works on QNX[1][2].

[1] https://www.qnx.com/developers/docs/8.0/com.qnx.doc.neutrino...

[2] https://doc.rust-lang.org/rustc/platform-support/nto-qnx.htm...
by cloverich | 2025-12-27 04:58:17+00:00
Finally read Fukuyama's "Liberalism and its discontents" after reading his much larger the origin of political order previously. I enjoyed its dense, survey like nature; I particularly enjoyed his (actual) breakdown of critical theory which, after knowing only the propagandized takes on it, was refreshing.

In 2026, I hope to pivot slightly and finally read Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. I thought recent authors like Fukuyama obviated the need to read such books, but flipping through its pages, they were so poetic and beautiful, I hope it operates like an antidote to too much dry / reductionist reading (of which tools like ChatGPT are accelerating, at least for me).
by tsujamin | 2025-12-27 04:58:57+00:00
Cutting a long list short, the _best_ thing I read this year was W. Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage.

It’s not a book where the world changes greatly or great things are done, but honestly that’s kind of nice: It’s a compelling story of a life, the characters were engrossing (one in particular stands out for how strongly _dislikeable_ they are) and the I loved the prose.

Also shoutout to Standard EBook’s excellent, public domain edition (and all their volunteers other work!): https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/w-somerset-maugham/of-huma...
by smj-edison | 2025-12-27 04:59:20+00:00
Actually, you might want to check the video again, it has sections and a full transcript on the right side, precisely to make skimming easy!

> video's inferior to text for communicating ideas efficiently

Depends on the topic tbh. For example, YouTube has had an absolute explosion of car repair videos, precisely because video format works so well for visual operations. But yes, text is currently the best way to skim/revisit material. That's one reason I find Bret's website so intriguing, since he tries to introduce those navigation affordances into a video medium.

> The strength of text however is its versatility, especially in an age where text transformers are going through a renaissance. I think 90%+ of the time you want to default to text, use text as your source of truth, and then other mediums can be brought into play (perhaps as things you transform your text into) as the circumstances warrant.

Agree, though not because of text's intrinsic ability, but because its ecosystem stretches thousands of years. It's certainly the most pragmatic choice of 2025. But, I want to see just how far other mediums can go, and I think there's a lot of untapped potential!
by kortilla | 2025-12-27 05:00:23+00:00
The comic artist seems pretty ignorant to think that it’s not meaningful.

What falsehoods people believe and spread about a particular topic is an excellent way to tell what the public opinion is on something.

Consider spreading a falsehood about Boeing QA getting bonuses based on number of passed planes vs the same falsehood about Airbus. If the Boeing one spreads like wildfire, it tells you that Boeing has a terrible track record of safety and that it’s completely believable.

Back to the start menu. It should be a complete embarrassment to MSFT SWEs that people even think the start menu performance is so bad that it could be implemented in electron.

In summary: what lies spread easily is an amazing signal on public perception. The SMBC comic is dumb.
by faidit | 2025-12-27 05:02:26+00:00
>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 author says as much:

"There’s something particularly clarifying about Musk’s approach. Other AI companies hide their value-shaping behind committees, policies, and technical jargon."

...

"The process that other companies obscure behind closed doors, Musk performs as theater."
by getarbiter | 2025-12-27 05:03:40+00:00
Your vector stack costs too much and hallucinates anyway.

I fixed both.

ARBITER compresses 768 dimensions → 72 dimensions.
Same compression ratio as PCA.
11% BETTER similarity preservation.

Plus disambiguation that PCA is mathematically blind to.

What that means for your infrastructure:
→ Storage (100M docs): 286GB → 26.8GB
→ Vendors: 3 → 1
→ Hallucinations: Fixed at the retrieval layer

This isn't a re-ranker you bolt on.

This is the replacement for your entire vector stack.

OpenAI embeddings? Replaced.
Pinecone/Weaviate? 90% smaller.
Cohere rerank? Built in.

One 26MB primitive. Air-gapped. Deterministic. Runs anywhere.

—

I'm focused on vision, roadmap, and closing our current pipeline in defense and biotech.

Now building out the commercial team to go after enterprise RAG.

Looking for 1-2 people who see this and immediately know who needs it and how to close them.

Enterprise sales background. Technical credibility. Startup energy.

Real equity. Real upside. Ground floor.

If that's you → DM or founder@traut.ai
getarbiter.dev — try it live, no signup.
by Scaevolus | 2025-12-27 05:03:50+00:00
Auto-vectorization is consistently one of the least predictable optimization passes, which is rather awful, since when it doesn't trigger your functions are suddenly >3x slower. This drives people to more explicit SIMD coding, from direct assembly like in FFMPEG to wrappers providing some cross-platform support like Google's Highway.

It's just really hard to detect and exploit profitable and safe vectorization opportunities. The theory behind some of the optimizers is beautiful, though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polytope_model
by cyberax | 2025-12-27 05:04:00+00:00
Dijkstra was wrong on this one. Breaks and continues help to keep the code more readable by reducing the amount of state that needs to be tracked.

Yes, from the purely theoretical standpoint, you can always rewrite the code to use flags inside the loop conditions. And it even allows formal analysis by treating this condition as a loop invariant.

But that's in theory. And we all know the difference between the theory and practice.
by xvilka | 2025-12-27 05:05:00+00:00
> They lost their developer base. Support of open source tools on QNX stopped.

Right. These days it's better to invest into Redox OS[1] as a potential substitute for it (if work on real time capability). And with real time patches merged into Linux mainline[2] QNX doesn't stand much chance today too.

[1] https://doc.redox-os.org/book/microkernels.html

[2] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/09/real-time-linux-is-o...
by exabrial | 2025-12-27 05:05:57+00:00
> An Arizona man was sentenced Friday to 15 years in prison and ordered to pay more than $452 million in restitution for conspiring to defraud Medicare and other federal health care benefit programs of more than $1 billion by operating a platform that generated false doctors’ orders used to support fraudulent claims for various medical items.

I wish all headlines read like this instead of "here's why you should be scared"
by DonHopkins | 2025-12-27 05:06:18+00:00
When people say /I'm not (.*?), but (.*)/, they invariably are what they're claiming they aren't. That's what that phrase means. For example, we've all heard it a million times from people defending their vote for Donald Trump. There's even a wikipedia page about it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%27m_not_racist,_but...

If you really mean $2, then just say $2, you don't have to preface it with "I'm not $1, but". That's a waste of words, beating around the bush, a rhetorical shield, that reveals that you really are $1 and you feel the need to be defensive about it.

The word "but" in that context means the thing before it is false, just air escaping from the folds of your fat, and you can ignore everything before the "but".

"But" is a contrastive conjunction, signaling the clause before "but" is expected, socially required, or reputationally protective, and the clause after "but" is the actual communicative payload. It means to discount or ignore $1 and evaluate the speaker by $2. Saying “I’m not $1, but $2” does not strengthen $2, it does't make $2 safer or clearer, it just signals defensiveness, and undermines credibility.

Again, this is a discussion about psychedelic mushrooms, fairytale-like hallucinations, and machine elves, so woo away all you want!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aO2dPIdEaR4
by devmor | 2025-12-27 05:07:59+00:00
> I struggle to find this argument compelling, as it sounds more of a straw man argument than a legitimate complain.

Dude, there are entire websites dedicated to using diffusion models to rip off the styles of specific artists so that people can have their "work" without paying them for it.

You can debate the ethics of this all you want, but if you're going to speak on plagiarism using generative AI, you should at least know as much as the average teenager does about it.
by funnyfoobar | 2025-12-27 05:08:17+00:00
Yes, there will be always someone who is needed to program stuff. Totally agree with that.

But my question is "how many of those will be needed", because I am not saying that programmers are not needed.

When less numbers are needed, there will be so much competition in finding those jobs, esentially would also mean not able to find the work, as there will be always someone who would be willing to the job at lower wage and come to work with more youthful energy.

Just speaking out loud.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-12-27 05:09:09+00:00
I read escapist “junk.” Proud of it.

I re-read Dave Duncan’s A Man of His Word[0], and A Handful of Men series[1].

I followed up by re-reading The Great Game[2], by the same author.

I re-read the original 10 (+1) books of Chronicles of the Black Company[3], by Glen Cook, again, as he just released a couple of new books, after many years (and has 4 more, on the way). I also recently read Lies Weeping[4] (the latest one).

I just finished Tsalmoth[5], and I’m currently reading Lyorn[6], the latest book in Steven Brust’s Vlad Taltos series.

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/series/53081-a-man-of-his-word

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/series/40824-a-handful-of-men

[2] https://www.goodreads.com/series/42347-the-great-game

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Company

[4] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/222376544-lies-weeping

[5] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60820532-tsalmoth

[6] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/127278352-lyorn
by tototrains | 2025-12-27 05:10:28+00:00
Worth mentioning: I had claude code find a crypto miner on an infected system which had been running for ~5 months undetected. Up-to-date windows 10 machine. Single prompt saying "This PC is using too much power or fans, investigate". Took minutes, completely cleaned up the infection (I hope) and identified its source. Fantastic use-case.
by rewgs | 2025-12-27 05:11:35+00:00
> China experimented with having no enforced Intellectual Property laws, and the result was that they were able to do the same technological advancement it took the West 250 years to do and surpass them in four decades.

Are you seriously ignoring the fact that China wasn't developing new technology, but rather utilizing already-existing technology? Of course it took 6x less time!
by indymike | 2025-12-27 05:12:26+00:00
> If you did not receive such a written offer, the GPL, in itself, makes no guarantee that you have the right to the source code

Wrong. The requirement to provide source code under the GPL is primarily governed by Section 3 of the GNU General Public License v2 and Section 1 of the GNU General Public License v3. The whole point of the the GPL is to make it so users of software could get source code to the software.
by Sargos | 2025-12-27 05:12:33+00:00
Testing the theory of whether psychedelics are just inside our heads or whether our consciousness travels somewhere objectively really is why this Tales From The Trip video is my favorite videos. Both men see the same blue woman which is very interesting!
https://youtu.be/P_34oNWmNsc?si=_k2CG5b-TVuDaFvM
Ask HN: What was the hardest bug you tracked down in 2025?
by varshith17 | 2025-12-27 05:16:49+00:00
We talk a lot about shipping features, but I want to hear the war stories.

I spent almost a month chasing a silent data corruption issue that turned out to be floating-point non-determinism between x86 and ARM chips. It completely changed how I look at "reliable" memory.

What was your "white whale" bug of the year?
by transpute | 2025-12-27 05:17:42+00:00
$100M+ last quarter, split between QNX and endpoint device software, https://www.panabee.com/news/blackberry-earnings-q3-2025

275M cars with QNX, https://roboticsandautomationnews.com/2025/12/19/blackberry-...

AI/robotics, https://qnx.software/en/industries/robotics
by nutjob2 | 2025-12-27 05:17:48+00:00
OK so you think it's a conspiracy.

But how do you know it's "overrepresentation"? It's media not a strict reflection of population.

Anyway, so you don't like gay people, but tough luck. Just like you can like or dislike whoever you want, people can like and talk about whoever they want. Sorry to break it to you but its not a conspiracy it's just modern society.
by tomzx | 2025-12-27 05:17:54+00:00
Seems we have a common goal here of being able to search history on ChatGPT/Claude.

Check this project I've been working on which allows you to use your browser to do the same, everything being client-side.

https://github.com/TomzxCode/llm-conversations-viewer

Curious to get your experience trying it!
by ilvez | 2025-12-27 05:18:04+00:00
First the minimum time:
- audiobooks while commuting (mostly walking to work). Even if it's like 30-40 minutes some day at most, it still adds up.
- add to that lets say ~15 minutes each night before sleeping.

And on top of that:
- sleepless nights, when you want to get back to sleep: 30 minutes - ...
- just having a good series to grind through.
- audiobooks during some manual labor (home restoration works for example).

So for me audiobooks + capability to read at night without disturbing others (dark mode + backlight on e-reader). And from that it adds up.
by vlovich123 | 2025-12-27 05:18:11+00:00
I’ve met one who asked me a question like this and he’s still at Apple having been promoted several times to a fairly senior position. But the question was only half hearted because the question was “how much CO2 would we save if we made something 10% more CPU efficient” and the answer even at Apple’s current scale of billions of iPhones was insignificant.

So now you and I both have come across such a manager. Why would you make the claim most engineer’s don’t come across such people?