MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by al_borland | 2025-12-31 22:05:08+00:00
While I tend to agree with you, to the point that I've never willingly clicked on an ad, this isn't how most people that I've seen operate.

I actively skip over ads in search results, skip whenever possible in video, and pay to remove them completely if it's offered (subscribing to Kagi and YouTube Premium). If I do end up seeing an ad for something that looks interesting/useful, I don't click on it. I search for it separately. I treat ads the same way I would a random text claiming to be my bank. I don't click the link, I go there on my own so I know I'm in the right place free of any funny business. The side effect of this is the merchant loses context on how effective their ad was.

In contrast, when I see almost anyone else using Google, they actively look at the ads first. They treat the ads as if they were the top organic search results. If they search for "Microsoft" and Microsoft paid for a top ranked ad to their homepage, they will click on the ad link instead of the real organic result a few lines down. This makes these people very susceptible to advertisements posing at legitimate websites, yet their behavior never changes. I've said something to multiple people about skipping down to the actual results, and they claim to like the ads, or don't see a difference and just pick the first link that seems like what they want. Many of these people are otherwise tech savvy, some of whom spent decades working in the tech sector.

It seems we are the weird ones for avoiding the ads or losing trust. After watching MegaLag's 2 most recent videos on YouTube about Honey[0], I can start to see why the companies behind all this don't care. Policing these types of issues lowers their profits, which effectively incentivizes scams and fraud. The people hurt are the merchants and the consumers. You'd think they would be the only two who matter at the end of the day when it comes to advertising, but apparently not.

[0]

Part 1 (from 1 year ago): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vc4yL3YTwWk

Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwB3FmbcC88

Part 2.1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCGT_CKGgFE
by 0dKD | 2025-12-31 22:05:52+00:00
I just wrote this and find the conclusion interesting: vibe coding won't mainly benefit the vibe coders. It will increase the speed of product trio craftspeople and activate dormant relentlessly resourceful people that work with other things so that they start to do product trio ish startups. The essay is probably 66% finished. Would LOVE comments/thoughts/attacks/building further on this
by snickerbockers | 2025-12-31 22:06:05+00:00
Isn't the whole point to learn and challenge yourself? If you just wanted to render a 3-dimensional scene there are already hundreds of open source raytracers on github.

Asking chatgpt to "guide" you through the process is a strange middle-ground between making your own project and using somebody else's in which nothing new is created and nothing new is learned.
by jacquesm | 2025-12-31 22:06:32+00:00
I have a cable here that is interesting. When I first saw it I thought how strange, a cable that is multi-stranded bare wire for this application (connecting a camera). Then I looked at it under a microscope and realized not only is it insulated wire, it is shielded wire. Mindblowing. I pity the people that have to handle that stuff.

https://down-ph.img.susercontent.com/file/sg-11134201-7repx-...
by layer8 | 2025-12-31 22:06:41+00:00
“Garbage books” are mass-printed, but aren’t mass-written in a mass production sense. Mass production is about producing fairly exact copies of something that was designed once. The design part has always remained more artisanal than industrial. It’s only the production based on the design (or manuscript) that is industrial.

The difference with software is that software is design all the way down. It only needs to be written once, similar to how a mass-produced item needs only be designed once. The copying that corresponds to mass production is the deployment and execution of the software, not the writing of it.
by 1718627440 | 2025-12-31 22:06:55+00:00
> "abstract into a FOSS library and use in this project"

That is not what I meant. My idea was more like "copy ten lines from this project, then lines from that project, the class from here, but replace every line before the commit ...".

I shouldn't have used the word library, as I did not mean output from the linker, but rather a colloquial meaning of a loose connection of snippets.
by analog31 | 2025-12-31 22:07:45+00:00
My relative is an administrator. One of the things he does is to manually process the flood of requests to override this or that policy because the system for enforcing the complex course selection and graduation requirements (e.g., prerequisites etc) doesn't work perfectly. The other is to adjust those requirements on a real time basis to comply with this or that complex, contradictory, and unclear mandates handed down from above (such as getting rid of all traces of wokeness).

Pay him his professor salary, and he'd never have stepped up to the role.

"All complex systems operate in failure mode 100% of the time." What this means is that systems operate with some of their automatic controls bypassed, and with those processes being carried out manually. The Gimli Glider took off with two broken fuel gauges.

My thought about bureaucracy is that you can automate complex human processes only to a certain point, and then the system needs some manual override capability, and possibly human interfaces, to work. This is what bureaucrats do. The reason why its seems chaotic and inefficient is that the easy stuff has been automated away, leaving only the hard stuff.

I can't vouch for every bureaucratic process, and bureaucrat, being optimally efficient or necessary. But in the past few months, I've observed the hard lesson of what happens when you think you can deal with bureaucracies that you think are wasteful by taking a chainsaw to them. I don't believe in that approach any more, even for dealing with systems that I hate.
by llmslave2 | 2025-12-31 22:08:26+00:00
> One of the riches companies in the world with some very smart people and its ruined by toxic leadership.

Leadership can certainly be blamed, but I think it comes down to their hiring practices. When you prioritise leetcode-isk wrote memorisation and deprioritise intrinsics (like ethics, shocker), you end up with a company full of people who are willing to do anything to achieve their singular goal of making TC go up. Morality or product quality be damned.
by 0dKD | 2025-12-31 22:09:27+00:00
Interesting, I've thought of similar things a lot. My thing has been leveling up from asynch chat to asynch vid before real time meetings. I think this is smart. It's unusual for most, but a great way to get to know someone a bit before seeing if it's necessary to level up to real time. A lot less draining than having a meeting booked
by llmslave2 | 2025-12-31 22:12:20+00:00
> But why do we blame the government? It's completely a problem we create.

Yes but if the government is ineffective at solving the issue with the vast amounts of money we give them, we now have two problems.

Your point basically boils down to "regulators are ineffective, but that's okay because the original problem isn't their fault". Sorry, but I actually care about throwing my hard earned money into the void because it's "ok" that the regulators suck.
by m132 | 2025-12-31 22:12:56+00:00
That really depends on the context. Open your browser's Developer Tools and you'll see logical sizes everywhere. Android, which in my opinion has the best scaling model, and where the PPI wildly varies from device to device, nearly always operates on logical sizes. Windows, GNOME, and KDE on the other hand tend to give you measurements in physical pixels. macOS is a mix and match; Preview and QuickTime tell you the physical resolutions, Interface Builder and display preferences will only show logical dimensions.
by d4rkp4ttern | 2025-12-31 22:14:04+00:00
Amusingly, for a library [1] I’ve been building, 100% of the code is AI-written (with a huge number of iterations of course) and the ONLY part I wanted to write myself is the portion of the README that explains the thought process behind one of the features. It took a lot of thinking and iterations to come up with the right style and tone, and methodically explain the ideas in the right order.

Leaving that to an LLM would have been a frustrating exercise.

[1] https://github.com/pchalasani/claude-code-tools
by phtrivier | 2025-12-31 22:14:34+00:00
But how useful is it as a tool if nothing is implemented in the end ?

What's worst is that, at least in France, there was an elegant solution to the problem : just ask the general population to approve or reject the proposals in a referendum. Even if the referendum was consultative, and even if the lawmakers were to make the law in the end, it would have massively made it harder to ignore the result.

And I would have loved to see the "popular jury" campaign for or against the measures.
by pipes | 2025-12-31 22:14:48+00:00
Ah ok I see, yeah for the hackernews crowd probably not an issue.

Genuine issue I have is my unbelievably well specced work laptop does not run win 11 nicely. It's not just the adverts.

As for moving away from windows, I've been a Linux user in work before, and a casual user on and off for 20 years but it was a combination of windows 11 pain and buying a steamdeck that finally pushed me to just move at least one of my home computers to Linux. But yeah, not for relatives.
by jondwillis | 2025-12-31 22:15:54+00:00
Bro, what? $2k? I just double checked and everything available for less than $2k is awful if you care about, IDK, having a family, a pet, a kitchen, outdoor space, green space, not having to share everything, including peace and quiet, with a revolving cast of characters.

Not that these things are required to “live,” but I certainly am not interested in making these tradeoffs.
by juliangmp | 2025-12-31 22:16:10+00:00
String handling (or arrays in general) has got to be the single aspect of C that I despise the most.
Its clunky to use, often needs unnecessary copying (e.g. atoi) and makes it really easy to invoke undefined behavior.

I still don't get why a simple ptr+size type hasn't made its way into the language. #embed got in but I guess a new type would have been too much... at least we got bool after a few decades.

Also, for those that want the trimming behavior of strncpy but with the null termination, you can replace the strncpy calls with snprintf.
You should also always enable -Wstringop-truncation.
by lizknope | 2025-12-31 22:16:21+00:00
> Don’t take it so personally. I did once too.

This is easier said than done.

The founders of many startups are extremely charismatic. They can get you to sacrifice your personal / family life and work long hours by dangling the big pay day in front of you.

The second startup I worked at let the first 8 employees buy into the company for Class A shares. These in theory were worth more than the Class B shares I was given. This later led to some marital issues when one guy invested $100K into the startup based on the founder taking everyone out to dinner and assuring the wives it was a great idea. Then 3 years later they have turned down 2 possible sales, no exit plan in site, and that $100K would have been useful for the children's tuition who are about to go to college.

I write these posts are warnings to people who get excited about the appeal of working for a startup.

So I would really love to hear the author talk about what his employees thought about turning down the deal and how much money they would have got.
by grayhatter | 2025-12-31 22:16:32+00:00
> The value of that level of abstraction is less clear though. Maybe better testability?

You wouldn't do it to make it easier to test; you would do it to make it easier to reason about. E.g. There's some bug where some users aren't getting charged. You already know where the bug is, or rather, you know it's not in the code that calculates what the price would be. But now, as a bonus, you also can freely modify the code that collects the people to charge, and don't have to worry if modifying that code will change how much other people get charged, (because these two code blocks can't interact with each other).

You know the joke/meme, 99 bugs in the code, take one down, patch it around, 104 bugs in the code? Yeah, that's talking about code like you're describing where everything is in one function, and everything depends on everything else as an intractable web somehow.

> But it's hard to justify what would essentially be tripling the lines of code (one function to pull the data, one pure function to compute actions, one function to execute actions).

This sounds like you're charging per line of source code. Not all code is equal. If you have 3x the amount of code, but it's written in a way that turns something difficult, or complex to understand and reason about, into something trivial to reason about, what you have is strictly better code.

The other examples or counter points you mention are merely implementation details, that only make sense in the context of your specific example/code base that I haven't read. So I'm gonna skip trying to reasoning about the solutions to them given the point of the style recommendations is to write code in a way that is 1) easier to reason about, or 2) impossible to get wrong ...but those really are the same thing
by motohagiography | 2025-12-31 22:16:44+00:00
the conversation about what a privacy enhanced way of relating to tech is hasn't really matured much.

on one hand its being relative to a list of specific threat actors you avoid. on the other, its maintaining a role with leverage vs your devices and services.

privacy doesnt catch on as product because you have to navigate an inferior relationship to those threat actors first, and nobody aspires to that unless they already have a kind of alt cyberpunk underdog mentality and attitude.

the non-punk or normal, leveraged position is like a business or first class lounge for tech. calm, negotiable, amenable, hidden and exclusive power, craft, affiliation and signalling.

most privacy tech and apps are still in the mall ninja cyberpunk mentality, with some slightly self important NGO/public sector affilation signalling with Signal. The aesthetics of privacy need to evolve to drive more meaningful tech imo.
by oh_my_goodness | 2025-12-31 22:16:50+00:00
“It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph, or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a photograph, or a telephone or any other important thing—and the last man gets the credit and we forget the others. He added his little mite — that is all he did. These object lessons should teach us that ninety-nine parts of all things that proceed from the intellect are plagiarisms, pure and simple; and the lesson ought to make us modest. But nothing can do that.”

― Mark Twain
by theSuda | 2025-12-31 22:17:34+00:00
Speaking of good cookbooks, Big Vegan Flavor by Nish Vora is actually one of my recent favorites. First of all, the pictures are amazing and make it a very fun read. And it is less of a recipe book and more of a guidebook on how to develop a good sense about cooking. Don't let the word Vegan put you off it's not the pompous kind of vegan stuff.
by naasking | 2025-12-31 22:17:34+00:00
> Okay, so just to be clear, you don't have even a single example of someone being prosecuted

To be clear, I haven't even looked, but being a recent topic of debate, it seems important to clearly establish the letter of the law.

> Why is this not just concern trolling?

Because the law-as-written is what matters, like I said, not the law-as-it-has-been-exercised-so-far. Unless you think people inclined to abuse the law will never be elected.

> I've attempted my own searches but have only encountered the usual suspects: holocaust deniers and their ilk

Depending on the specifics, that already seems problematic. There are also chilling effects that are not clearly visible until after the fact. How long have some people wanted to discuss the over representation of some ethnicities in sexual assault clusters, but couldn't because of these laws?
by mauvehaus | 2025-12-31 22:18:08+00:00
Or if you have an already incomplete set of scrabble tiles: attach magnets to the backs of the ones that spell "dirty" and "clean". Whichever isn't scrambled on the door is the state of the dishwasher.

Or simply don't rinse the dishes before you put them in[0]. I've never had trouble telling.

[0] Exceptions: uncooked eggs, yogurt, and for some reason, salsa? None of which ever come off for me if they sit for long before you run the dishwasher.
by zozbot234 | 2025-12-31 22:18:16+00:00
GPT-4o is parroting back what Soelberg told it before and elaborating on it based on the learned contents of its training set - that's all that a non-thinking model (like 4o) ultimately does. It is scary that this kind of content was not caught by existing safety guardrails, but another key issue here is that average folks with no real technical background or sophistication are being told that a language-processing system is really "intelligent" or even a "superintelligence" that can be trusted to give appropriate responses to user queries. That's really doing a disservice to users.
by cpldcpu | 2025-12-31 22:18:31+00:00
This lists many transistor patents from oldest to newest.

https://patents.google.com/?q=(H03F3%2f16)&sort=old

The Matare/Welker Patent is missing though

https://patents.google.com/patent/US2673948A/en.541

The entire debate is tiring. It would be better if these reviews would put the actual device physics of the different concepts into context.

Is there any report of a reproduction of the device proposed by Lilienfeld in his patents? If he managed to make functional devices back then, it should be possible today? (Note: Cu2S is not a very well controllable semiconductor...)

Edit:

Gemini Deep Research summary here, its quite informative: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jE0wQVeWP9Eiybh_C6zMKeZ5...

Also specifically on Cu based TFT:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_B2x2gBPKgGFVgJyQ0qzPdI4...
by achille | 2025-12-31 22:18:49+00:00
I ran some analysis on the source image — this is almost certainly AI-generated. In addition to the visual markers others noted (no photography in federal court, nonsensical positioning), here's what comes up in the original image:

Filename: ..._simple_compose_01kdcxamjmekery2m9tay43szn.png
- "simple_compose" + LSB common (e.g ideogram) output

Resolution: 1536x1024
- Exact native output of GPT-image-1, Gemini/Imagen, Flux models
- Not a standard camera sensor resolution

PNG encoder fingerprint: 0x78 0xDA | single IDAT | 94.7% Average filter
- Matches PIL/Pillow with optimize=True
- Standard Python ML pipeline output

Steganographic watermark:
- LSB entropy: 3.0/3.0 (maximum)
- Bits 0-3 of RGB channels filled with encrypted payload
- ~1.77 MB of pseudorandom data embedded
by viraptor | 2025-12-31 22:19:07+00:00
That's really not the case overall. My experience: Linux - sure, the battery won't last a week in sleep, but it will revert to hibernation and start anyway. Windows - got 2 laptops which just won't go to sleep automatically since w11 - either force hibernation, or it will overheat in a bag and drain in hours. Mac - constant wakeups to connect to the internet (that I can't disable even though I tried many times) drain the battery in days.
by sieve | 2025-12-31 22:19:25+00:00
This is a typical technical solution to a sociopolitical problem. The powers-that-be are not comfortable with the free-for-all that exists on the internet. All these laws are meant to fix that squeaky wheel, one ball-bearing at a time.

"Children" gets the Right to march behind you unquestioningly. "Misinformation/Nazis" does the same for the Left. This is now a perfect recipe for a shit sandwich.
by thisgetsit | 2025-12-31 22:19:30+00:00
The syntactic representation will become that. End of day it's just math ops, state sync of memory and display. Even semantic objects like an OSs protected memory is a special case of access control that can be mathematically computed around. There is nothing important about special semantics.

The user experience will be less constrained as the self arrangement of pixels improves and users do not run into designer constraints, usually due to lack of granularity some button widget or layout framework is capable of.

"Artisanal" software engineers probably never were their own self selected identity.

Have been writing code since the late 80s, when Windows and commercial Unix were too expansive and we all wrote shoddy but functional kernels. Who does that now? Most gigs these days are glue code to fetch/cache deps and template concrete config values for frameworks. Artisanal SaaS configuration is not artisanal software engineering.

And because software engineers were their own worst enemy the last decade; living big as they ate others jobs and industries; hate for the industry has gone mainstream. Something politicians have to react to. Non-SWEs don't want to pay middle men to use their property. GenAI can get them to that place.

As an art teacher once said; making things for money is not the practice of a craft. It's just capitalism. Anyone building SaaS apps through contemporary methods is a Subway sandwich artist, not the old timey well rounded farmer, hunter, who also bakes bread.
by nalekberov | 2025-12-31 22:20:07+00:00
> I use Cloudflare's DNS because I trust them more than other companies; purely based on their business and how their incentives align

It's a very naive way of thinking about some businesses. What did Cloudflare do to earn this trust? It's just another VC-backed company and 1.1.1.1 is a free service. So Cloudflare is going to lose money just to protect my privacy? I don't think so.
by hnburnsy | 2025-12-31 22:20:32+00:00
From Andrej Karparthy...

"The first 100% autonomous coast-to-coast drive on Tesla FSD V14.2! 2 days 20 hours, 2732 miles, zero interventions.

This one is special because the coast-to-coast drive was a major goal for the autopilot team from the start. A lot of hours were spent in marathon clip review sessions late into the night looking over interventions as we attempted legs of the drive over time - triaging, categorizing, planning out all the projects to close the gap and bring the number of interventions to zero.

Amazing to see the system actually get there and huge congrats to the team!"
by imtringued | 2025-12-31 22:21:19+00:00
>As C/C++ programmer, the thing I notice is ... the people who complain about this most loudly are the web dev crowd who don't speak C/C++, when some ancient game doesn't work on their obscure Arch/Gentoo/Ubuntu distribution and they don't know how to fix it. Boo hoo.

You must really be behind the times. Arch and Gentoo users wouldn't complain because an old game doesn't run. In fact the exact opposite would happen. It's not implausible for an Arch or Gentoo user to end up compiling their code on a five hour old release of glibc and thereby maximize glibc incompatibility with every other distribution.
by jpdb | 2025-12-31 22:21:22+00:00
> A sharp knife is SAFER than a dull one.

I do a lot of cooking and own quite a few kitchen knives, most of which have bitten me at some point. I understand the idea around sharp knives being safer...but I don't agree.

If a razor sharp 210mm Japanese carbon steel knife touches your finger, it's split open and might need stitches or glue. A less-sharp knife would need more weight behind it to cut effectively which can lead to you completely severing a finger, but simple slices are a much more likely scenario than your finger being completely under the knife to the point where it's effectively a digit-guillotine.