MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Frannky | 2025-12-08 05:02:22+00:00
I am not sure I am doing it the right way or if there's a right way, but what I do is generate small files one at a time, with a functional system of stateless input/output. That way I can focus first on architecture, then on stateless input/output Lego blocks, and just ask the AI to generate the Lego blocks. Like this, everything is easy to keep in mind and update and change after experiencing the tech and having emotions telling me what to change. It has been working great for me. It strikes a good balance between simple and robust, fast to build, plus easy to update. The other thing is that since I haven't spent too much energy on writing the code, it is very easy to detach emotionally from it when reality gives me new info that requires throwing out part of the system.
by nrhrjrjrjtntbt | 2025-12-08 05:02:53+00:00
Right lack of income has to be dealt with UBI, or worse handouts from big companies. Why do big companies hand out? Well... we get to a point where that is ther smarter thing to do than lose consumers altogether. The incentive to be rich is to have your ideas forfilled rather than to own a home and have security (as that can be provided for all).

If you think this is madness, the analogy (yes another) is you are playing uno with people you met. They have no money. You can say well never mind we wont play. Or you can just deal the cards because they are so cheap it costs you nothing just to do that. And that is more fun. This is what post scarcity could look like.
by alephnerd | 2025-12-08 05:03:49+00:00
> I can remember watching videos as early as 2014 showing nomadic tribesmen in Africa using flip phones for mobile payments

Yet internet penetration in Kenya was only 43% [0]. Additionally, countries with significantly higher HDIs (ie. Significantly higher developmental indicators) like Thailand had lower internet penetration in 2014.

Internet penetration was extremely useful in building out infra, but it was just one piece of various other pieces of social infrastructure needed to build human capital.

> The penetration of telecomm into these countries is going to have massive upside in the next two decades, and computer literacy plays a part in that

Most households in developing countries don't have computers [1], so assuming internet penetration implies computer literacy is a fallacy, as most households globally instead use a cellphone as their primary computing device [2].

This is one of the reasons why OLPC failed. Steve Jobs was correct that the smartphone user experience is the best experience for non-technical users.

The organization would have realized this if they tested their hypothesis first, but they didn't. Even Bill Gates called them out for this when they were trying to fundraise in the early 2000s [3]

[0] - https://www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users-by-country/...

[1] - https://datahub.itu.int/data/?e=AGO&i=12046

[2] - https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.CEL.SETS.P2?most_rec...

[3] - https://www.cio.com/article/254451/consumer-technology-bill-...
by rkomorn | 2025-12-08 05:04:41+00:00
The question I originally responded to was "why would you rent and save for a house at the same time?"

I said "because you need to have a downpayment".

You reply "downpayments aren't that high".

Unless you're getting loans zero down, you literally still need to save to have your downpayment. While you're renting.

So where is my brain fried?

Even on a $500k condo, you're putting 10% down, you still need to have that saved up. Noticeably more, in fact, because I'm sure you'd agree "lemme sink every saved cent I have into my house downpayment" wouldn't be wise.
by bittercynic | 2025-12-08 05:05:23+00:00
Dollar General and their ilk are behemoths compared to the shops that might have served these areas before they rolled in. It's possible they're the only game in town because they engaged in dumping or other dirty/illegal tactics to drive out established businesses.

I'm not an expert on the topic, but I don't think it's a reach to think that they might have engineered this situation.
by sirponm | 2025-12-08 05:05:28+00:00
The things you recognize are the tragedies of authoritarianism in all forms to me: nobody can possibly understand the system that well, and central planning simply doesn't work whether it's in a State or a company, because it just cannot and never will recognize each individual person for what they are actually worth as a human.

> It brands you valid or invalid based on values like inherited wealth, social class, race, mental health, etc.

Mostly inherited wealth I would guess, correlated to the other things for sure. Capital is everything in capitalism. Wealth distro follows a power law instead of Normal for this exact reason.
by happymellon | 2025-12-08 05:05:30+00:00
I use the phone voice assistants to set timers, and call people when I'm driving.

It is objectively worse at calling people than Assistant was. If I ask you to call someone, don't come up with a scolling list of phone numbers that I have to pick from. At least Assistant called the primary designated number for someone, Gemini just froze and wouldn't take voice commands to pick the number but forced my to pick up my phone.

I turned that bullshit off a couple of days after they forced it on me without asking.
by defrost | 2025-12-08 05:05:39+00:00
Singapore started earlier with national pension schemes - the caning laws and extreme policing aside, the financials of Singapore and support for the population through jobs and life is worth a serious look.

Australia has the 1907 Harvester case that set minimum wage to be indexed at a level which would supposedly allow an unskilled labourer to support a wife and three children, to feed, house, and clothe them. By the 1920s it applied to over half of the Australian workforce. It became known as the ‘basic wage’.

That's been tweaked since, but it still carries weight in wage setting and goes a long way to explaining a lack of tipping culture in Australia.
by nyc_data_geek1 | 2025-12-08 05:05:52+00:00
What are you people talking about. Have you even looked at the article?

The names of the Asian/Indian people GP is referring to, are explicitly stated to be hallucinations in the article. So, high vs low trust society questions aside, the entire assertion here is explicitly wrong. These are not authors submitting hallucinated content, these are fictitious authors who are themselves hallucinations.

You are making up a guy to get mad at
by throwawaypath | 2025-12-08 05:09:59+00:00
>Read "As I Remember London", and put on your reading comprehension hat.

Ironic. Your linked article wouldn't exist if the author had put on their reading comprehension hat.

>If you need help, try this article:

If you need help, try this article:

https://felipec.wordpress.com/2025/09/23/the-ruby-community-...

>DHH is clearly talking about people of color in London

"People of color" are not native to London. If you won't acknowledge that, you're either oblivious or racist (Anglophobic/anti-White). I hope it's the former.
by fallous | 2025-12-08 05:10:00+00:00
You're arguing from an end-user perspective, I'm pointing out that the Internet wasn't designed to solve easy but fragile problems but instead was intended to be a resilient network capable of surviving failures and route around them.

"I want to use a power tool and simply plug it into a wall" is not the same class of problem as "we're using a heart-lung machine during this bypass operation and power loss results in dead patients."

The widespread dependence upon Cloudflare has resulted in the "heart-lung machine" problem of DNS, among other things, being "solved" by a "power tool" class of solution.
by majormajor | 2025-12-08 05:10:04+00:00
>The issue was not that no one found the flaw, it’s that no one could prove it wasn’t there.

Are cars since then required to have formally verified codebases, or is "no one could prove [there are no bugs]" still true?

---

Trying to evaluate what happened based on observation of events alone and stats, in absence of a formal proof of issue or non-issue... the cars didn't just disappear overnight so if there was such an issue... where did it go?
by acituan | 2025-12-08 05:10:46+00:00
If the motivation structure is there I don’t see an inherent reason for people to refuse cultivating themselves. Going with the gym analogy lay people did not need gyms when physical work was the norm, cultivation was readily accomplished.

If anything there is a competing motivational structure in which people are incentivized not to think but to consume, react, emote etc. Information processing skills of the individual being deliberately eroded/hijacked/bypassed is not a AI thing. The most obvious example is ads. Thinkers are simply not good for business.
by westurner | 2025-12-08 05:10:51+00:00
/?hnlog awesome-safety-critical

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45562815 :

> awesome-safety-critical: https://awesome-safety-critical.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

From "Safe C++ proposal is not being continued" (2025) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45237019 :

> Safe C++ draft: https://safecpp.org/draft.html

Also there are efforts to standardize safe Rust; rust-lang/fls, rustfoundation/safety-critical-rust-consortium

> How does what FLS enables compare to these [unfortunately discontinued] Safe C++ proposals?
by chimeracoder | 2025-12-08 05:11:17+00:00
> Six nesting levels for tables?

Hacker News uses nesting tables for comments. This comment that you're reading right now is rendered within a table that has three ancestor tables.

As late as 2016 (possibly even later), they did so in a way that resulted in really tiny text when reading comments on mobile devices in threads that were more than five or so layers deep. That isn't the case anymore - it might be because HN updated the way it generates the HTML, though it could also be that browser vendors updated their logic for rendering nested tables as well. I know that it was a known problem amongst browser developers, because most uses for nested tables were very different than what HN was (is?) using them for, so making text inside deeply nested tables smaller was generally a desirable feature... just not in the context of Hacker News.
by trueno | 2025-12-08 05:11:22+00:00
> I don't really mind that they aren't on the LLM bandwagon

it actually turned out to be the greatest boon in the milky way for me: joe consumer, apple device user.

been watching the copilot saga (in my head the lore is that this is clippy hes back and hes pissed everyone treated him like buttcheeks over a decade ago) over on windows & new samsung fold phones (which look really cool) having no way to fully disable that stuff and man.. i dunno im gonna be kind of pissed if this whole shakeup is just a move to make apple start doing that same shenanigans (please no)
by msla | 2025-12-08 05:11:47+00:00
"We don't care, we don't have to, we're Intel."

Plus, DEC managed to move all of its VAX users to Alpha through the simple expedient of no longer making VAXen, so I wonder if HP (which by that point had swallowed what used to be DEC) thought it could repeat that trick and sunset x86, which Intel has wanted to do for very nearly as long as the x86 has existed. See also: Intel i860

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_i860
by 827a | 2025-12-08 05:12:28+00:00
Look outside the HackerNews/Silicon Valley bubble: Apple is doing very well. Consumers broadly don't care whether their phone has AI, as long as it has the ChatGPT/etc apps. iMessage and FaceTime have a stranglehold on, uh, everyone in America. They sell more iPhones every quarter. Their services revenue keeps going up. Mac sales are up big. Apple Silicon is so far ahead of anything else on the market, they could stay on the M5 platform for three years and still be #1. Apple Watch is the most popular watch brand in the world (and its not close; sensing a pattern?). Airpods, alone, make more money than Texas Instruments or SuperMicro. Yes; Vision Pro and iPhone Air sold poorly. Who cares? They're both obvious stepping stones to products that will sell well (Vision Pro -> Glasses-style AR device, iPhone Air -> thin engineering will help with the iPhone Fold). Apple can afford to take risks and adjust.

Sure, there can be cultural things going on. But at the senior leadership level, the degree to which those would have to be bad, in the absence of major revenue problems, to cause this reaction is... unheard of.
by andsoitis | 2025-12-08 05:12:50+00:00
The simulation hypothesis runs in the Exponential Resource Problem:

To simulate a system with N states/particles with full fidelity, the simulator needs resources that scale with N (or worse, exponentially with N for quantum systems).

This creates a hierarchy problem:

- Level 0 (base reality): has X computational resources

- Level 1 (first sim): needs X resources to simulate Level 0, but exists within Level 0, so can only access some fraction of X

- Level 2: would need even more resources than Level 1 has available.

Every simulation layer must have fewer resources than the layer above it (since it is contained within it), but needs more resources to simulate that layer. This is mathematically impossible for high-fidelity simulations.

This means either:

a) we're in base reality - there's no way to create a full-fidelity simulation without having more computational power than the universe you're simulating contains

b) simulations must be extremely "lossy" - using shortcuts, approximations, rendering only what's observed (like a video game), etc. But then you must answer: why do unobserved quantum experiments still produce consistent results? Why does the universe render distant galaxies we will never visit?

c) the simultation uses physics we don't understand - perhaps the base reality operates on completely different principles that are vastly more computationally efficient. But this is unfalsifiable speculation.

This is also known as the "substrate problem"; you can't create something more complex thatn youself only using your own resources.

Even more devastating is the CASCADING COMPUTATION PROBLEM.

Issue: it is not just that you need resources proportional to the simulate system's complexity, you need resources to compute every state transition.

The cascade:

a) simulated universe at Time T: has N particles / states

b) to compute time T+1: the simulator must process all N states according to physics laws

c) that computation itself has states: the simulator's computation involves memory states, processor states, energy flows. Let's call that M computational states

d) but M > N: the simulator needs additional machinery beyond just representing the simulated states. It needs the computational apparatus to calculate state transitions, store intermediate values, handle the simulation logic itself.

The TIME PROBLEM

There's also a temporal dimension:

- one "tick" of simulated time requires many ticks of simulator time (to compute all the physics)

- if the simulator is itself simulated, its ticks require even more meta-simulator ticks

- time dilates exponentially down the simulation stack

So either:

a) we're in base reality, or

b) we're in a very shallow simulateion (maybe 1 - 2 levels deep max), or

c) the sim uses radical shortcuts that should be observable
by bpt3 | 2025-12-08 05:13:26+00:00
It's not possible to do what you're describing (kanban/XP) for any commercial application or open source project that is intended to be taken remotely seriously without some amount of estimating involved.

I saw elsewhere that you're defining estimating as a very detailed and involved process, which the author of the article did not, the person I originally claimed estimates are impossible did not, and I did not.

I agree that's not necessary in most cases, if not all, to do the level of estimating you described.

And you'll note that I didn't include "people who are doing me a favor" in the list of individuals I'd insist on an estimate from.

You don't sound like you're one of these people, but I personally feel that software developers who act like they're performing special incantations over their keyboard and can't be expected to answer to anyone about their deliverables do us all a disservice, though maybe I should just be happy that they allow me to provide an alternative that is much easier to work with and results in additional business for me.
by OgsyedIE | 2025-12-08 05:14:35+00:00
Under the K-shaped economy it's been reported extensively already that the consumption market share of the public is trending downwards with no side of stopping. The consumption numbers can be kept up entirely off a market adjustment for less food and water and more yachts.

Post-scarcity requires a political choice. Everybody with political power, regardless of affiliation or nation, stands to benefit from reducing the political power of others who may stand to make demands. The economically surplus humans can't make those demands upon the powerful if they aren't around.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-12-08 05:15:15+00:00
I just replied to another comment. I lived in the most exclusive part of Atlanta for awhile where there was a Dollar Store right next to the Publix right next door to our $2500/month apartment.

https://www.yelp.com/search?find_desc=Dollar+Stores&find_loc...

Median home price - $700K

There are a lot of times you want smaller packages.
by ModernMech | 2025-12-08 05:15:16+00:00
> how you quantify and weigh something like "most used" for a programming language.

Define it as # of people who possess the knowledge and resources to effectively use said language to solve a problem they have in their actual lives.

> Fundamentally, the software field is still just so young and we haven't teased apart the "obvious" different domains and domain rules that we have for production of different material goods.

I think we're saying the same thing here from different angles. I said it's developed enough that we can see there are very different ways of doing things. You said it's young enough that we don't know all the different things there are.
by acdha | 2025-12-08 05:16:06+00:00
LLMs are suitable for tasks where it’s cheap to validate the result or the cost of being wrong is low. This is basically the opposite of that: if you fail to redact things, the costs can be high and since these are documents written by humans you need intelligence to handle indirect or obscure language or you’re risking missing a redaction because clues which don’t easily identify someone can be combined to do so. A million dollars is likely to be considerably cheaper than the legal costs of getting it wrong.
by vanous | 2025-12-08 05:17:37+00:00
> error-prone to set a 30-second timer. Oops, I’m tired and I hit zero too many times. That’s a 3-minute (3:00) timer. I typed in 3-0 correctly, but hitting the start button didn’t quite register. Siri misheard. Siri took 10 seconds to respond about a 30 second timer.

I get the diy factor, but still, the smartphone was supposed to be smart...
by resoluteteeth | 2025-12-08 05:17:58+00:00
> My life experience also mimics this. In college I thought I had crippling social anxiety. Turns out I just needed to be around people more to develop my abilities.

I don't understand why you think that the fact that exposure cured you means you didn't have social anxiety?

Exposure is something a therapist would suggest for social anxiety.

The issue seems to be that you think saying that someone has social anxiety means they are permanently broken (and maybe will give up trying to do anything about it?) but I'm not really sure where you got that idea from.
by faidit | 2025-12-08 05:18:06+00:00
Maybe it's just incompetence, bureaucratic morass etc but it really does feel like the system was designed to fail, and trap us into this false choice of a broken welfare system vs. no welfare at all.

UBI and/or UBS (universal basic services) would be so much better but there was a sustained propaganda campaign to tell people that free things are communism and therefore bad. Now Western countries are becoming ungovernable due to regulatory capture, tax evasion and industrial-scale manipulation of opinion by the elites, so fixing these problems within the current democratic system is an extremely uphill battle. At least Mamdani's election gives us some hope in the US, but there's only so much one city or even one country can do on its own without worldwide changes.
by silisili | 2025-12-08 05:18:07+00:00
It's a bizarrely simpleminded and incorrect meme, then.

The government doesn't know the exact answer - if they did we wouldn't have to file at all. Have a kid? Buy a house? Go to college? Make $60k selling illicit drugs on the black market? Get a $200 bank signup bonus? These all affect taxes. One could argue in a dystopian way that technically "the government" as a whole does know these things, but suffice to say, the IRS doesn't, necessarily.

The whole point of filing is that our tax code is ridiculous. We shouldn't get mad at filing, but at our ridiculous tax code. But it'll never be fixed, there's way too much pork stuffed in it from both sides.

Also, nobody files 100% correct taxes. Show me the person, I'll show you the crime(so to speak). You do not go to prison for making mistakes!
by palmotea | 2025-12-08 05:18:47+00:00
>> The point of jobs is for those who don't own appreciating assets to sell their work in exchange for income in the form of payment from those who do own appreciating assets.

> As an obvious trivial counter-example, plenty of people have jobs doing lawn care for other people who's income also comes from a job.

That's not a counter-example, it's just nit-picking on the phrasing and missing the point: the lawn-care people get their income from "those who do own appreciating assets," just with a middleman or two in between.
by mbreese | 2025-12-08 05:18:53+00:00
Should really be titled "Damn Small Linux 2024", as this is a reboot of an older distro.

I was going to comment that it must have been posted multiple times before 2024, but this is a refresh of the older distro, there are probably different URLs. I'm not sure what's new about it to warrant a post today, the last release is rc7 from June 2024 and the webpage is full of popup ads that are really annoying.

Perhaps someone discovered it for the first time today? If so, this used to be much smaller. 50MB vs 700MB today. I mean, it's a damn small linux that includes Firefox... that doesn't seem quite right to me.

I think the spiritual (and actual) successor to DSL is http://tinycorelinux.net . Which was also discussed here two days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46173547 .
by visarga | 2025-12-08 05:19:15+00:00
> the interpretability research from Anthropic [1] suggests that structures corresponding to meaning do exist inside those bundles of numbers and that there are signs of activity within those bundles of numbers that seem analogous to thought

I did a simple experiment - took a photo of my kid in the park, showed it to Gemini and asked for a "detailed description". Then I took that description and put it into a generative model (Z-Image-Turbo, a new one). The output image was almost identical.

So one model converted image to text, the other reversed the processs. The photo was completely new, personal, never put online. So it was not in any training set. How did these 2 models do it if not actually using language like a thinking agent?

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/G7gTuf8WkAAGxRr?format=jpg&name=...
by notpushkin | 2025-12-08 05:19:43+00:00
Yeah, I don’t fault them either. It’s a shitty situation to find yourself in. That said... they went with a permissive license, so they knew what they’re getting into.

I think the main reason they do that is because AGPL is a turnoff for a noticeable chunk of corporate users, and you do want those users. Dual licensing should work here in theory, and does work in practice for some – no idea why we don’t see it more often. (I have a project-not-quite-startup-anymore [1] under AGPL, but I do keep around a CLA for outside contributors just in case.)

[1]: https://lunni.dev/