MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by YurgenJurgensen | 2025-12-26 00:46:30+00:00
That reasoning doesn’t make any sense. Half a billion litres of Coca Cola are produced every single day, but the chance of a bottle of Coca Cola being made whose quality is similar to that of a good imperial stout is exactly zero, even though they’re both brown carbonated beverages. No amount of quantity can overcome a process intended to standardise for something other than quality. If the algorithm aggressively selects for mediocrity, mediocrity is what will be produced.
by browningstreet | 2025-12-26 00:47:53+00:00
Strawman. Because Apple designed it well. Metal’s not an issue. My legacy 2013 MacBook Air still looks and feels and opens like new.

I was looking at Thinkpad Auras today. There are unaligned jutting design edges all over the thing. From a design perspective, I’ll take the smooth oblong squashed egg.

Every PC laptop I’ve touched feels terrible to hold and carry. And they run Windows, and Linux only okay. Apple
MacBooks are a long mile better than everything else and so I don’t care about upgraded memory — buy enough ram at purchase time and you don’t have to think about it again.

Memory upgrades aren’t priced super well, granted, but I could never buy HP Dell Lenovo ever again. They’re terrible. I’ve had all of them. Ironically the best device I’ve had from the other side was a Surface Laptop. But I don’t do Microsoft anymore. And I don’t want to carry squeaky squishy bendy plastic.

Most of all, I’m never getting on a customer support call with the outsourced vendors that do the support for those companies ever ever ever again. I’ll take a visit to an Apple store every day of the week.
by tom_ | 2025-12-26 00:49:41+00:00
As a data point, running a Python program I've been working on lately, which is near enough entirely Python code, with a bit of I/O: (a prototype for some code I'll ultimately be writing in a lower-level language)

(macOS Ventura, x64)

- System python 3.9.6: 26.80s user 0.27s system 99% cpu 27.285 total

- MacPorts python 3.9.25: 23.83s user 0.32s system 98% cpu 24.396 total

- MacPorts python 3.13.11: 15.17s user 0.28s system 98% cpu 15.675 total

- MacPorts python 3.14.2: 15.31s user 0.32s system 98% cpu 15.893 total

Wish I'd thought to try this test sooner now. (I generally haven't bothered with Python upgrades much, on the basis that the best version will be the one that's easiest to install, or, better yet, is there already. I'm quite used to the language and stdlib as the are, and I've just assumed the performance will still be as limited as it always has been...!)
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-12-26 00:50:33+00:00
> there haven't been enough engineers to fill all the open senior-level positions. Licensure would make that problem worse

Can't really say that since we've never had licensing. Besides, the whole point of the licensing is to make sure they can do the job; hiring people without the licensing means you're hiring amateurs. It's not a good solution. You need more job-training programs, which still work with licensing.

Sure a board can make things more complicated, but because they're trying to improve things. This is a positive.

> should engineers be permitted to pick a language with known poor performance characteristics?

In electrical work, you are restricted to what parts you can use for what work, based on its application/use-case. If it's touching a house or grid it needs to be UL-listed (mandatory testing). If it's outdoor it needs to be NEMA-3X (weatherproof) or better. If it's direct burial it needs to be UF-B (resists common outdoor issues) or better. More than 3 conductors in a raceway requires derating the condutors.

I'm sure when these standards were introduced, electricians were annoyed that they were "being limited in choice". Today we take it for granted.
by websiteapi | 2025-12-26 00:50:46+00:00
I'm not sure I understand your analogy. YouTube has both diversity and quantity at levels tens of orders of magnitude higher than any high-quality-low-quantity good. Given the subjectivity of quality and amounts considered it's simply statistical fact that YouTube will always have things at the highest ends of subjective quality for any category.

The algorithm doesn't select for mediocrity - it selects for viewership, but regardless there are millions of creators at there that aren't optimizing for views anyway. It's the same reason some set of random blog posts or comments on sites such as this one will have quality similar to snippets of the highest quality technical documentation. Sheer diversity and quantity will always win.
by tekne | 2025-12-26 00:51:47+00:00
That's an uncharitable interpretation.

Let's say it takes 10 units of work to build a house, and 200 units of resources to build a skyscraper; on average. Let's further assume, after a point, that skill tends to increase quality by a lot more than it decreases resource consumption, so this is "about the best you can do".

A very skilled craftsman/artist can build an amazing house with 10 units. A low quality bargain barrel contractor will build a skyscraper for 200, but it's not going to be pretty.

If new technology means you can now build a skyscrapers for 10, that means that many more exciting and experimental concepts can be tested by building a skyscraper right away, whereas previously they could only be built as a house.

- Some concepts are just better as a house. Even with infinite resources, people will still make houses to this concept; it's not like houses are devalued or less useful or less nice.
- Some concepts would be better as a skyscraper, but are very niche, so they were built as houses as a compromise. These can now be skyscrapers. This is no comment at all on the skill of the builder, only on the resources available to them (time, money, etc.)

I never said:
- houses are worse (or better)
- building houses is a skill issue

I merely said:
- the choice of what to build is not 100% based on artistic merit; resource constraints must also be taken into account

And hence concluded:
- if it becomes cheaper to build things, the choice of what to build depends more on artistic merit now

And speculated:
- since there are all kinds of things that are really cool but really expensive, meaning we often (due to resource reasons) need to substitute a cheaper thing (which can be just as good or even superior for other concepts, just not the particular concept in question), we will likely see a lot more of Really Cool Thing now that it's cheap.

In short, thinking photography will enable a new mass market of images whereas previously paintings were really expensive and difficult to make, while still respecting that:
- a master photographer can be just as skilled as a master painter
- a master painter's work is not necessarily devalued by the existence of photography

And yet noting that
- some paintings might be better as photographs, or would never be made at all because there simply wasn't enough money to paint them even if they in fact would be better as paintings

Think, for example, realistic war photography. Or realistic photography of non-privileged people and cultures. That's just... not painted very often.

Cheap is good for diversity of expression. It does not devalue what used to be expensive, except insamuch as the value was simply a shallow status signal about burning resources rather than real human expression.

Ok, /rant
by lotsofpulp | 2025-12-26 00:52:18+00:00
The quality of Coca Cola can only be compared to other colas. Comparing a soft drink to an imperial stout makes no sense. In my book, the imperial stout always has zero quality, because I would never see a reason to voluntarily drink it, whereas I might indulge in a diet coke every now and then.

But that’s why comparing subjective qualities of different things is a waste of time.

YouTube has many highly educational videos that are better than most professional production tv, especially for the hard sciences.
by neilv | 2025-12-26 00:52:47+00:00
I bet this is it.

I have a first.lastname@gmail.com, and my namesake has firstmlastname@gmail.com (with middle initial, and I think they originally created the GMail username without periods).

So, I sometimes receive emails intended for him, by people who saw firstmlastname and think it's firstlastname.

Maybe around a hundred emails so far, over the years.

I've gotten good at telling at a glance that an email is for him, without reading it, and forwarding and deleting.

Fortunately, my namesake is a very accomplished good-guy, so I'm happy to help.
by ClipNoteBook | 2025-12-26 00:54:00+00:00
I already read many stories on Reddit and some documentaries and articles about it. It feels strange but it can happen. It feels similar to falling in love with someone online that you never met in real life. If you want, check my ClipNotebook playlist. I collected some interesting cases here: https://clipnotebook.com/p/3ae9ac1c-a4e2-4786-87a1-a31b4fbd1...
by vlovich123 | 2025-12-26 00:54:06+00:00
Firstly, the existence of unsafe does not inherently mean the code isn’t memory safe.

Secondly, memory safety does not mean no security vulnerabilities. What it does mean is that 80% of the most commonly found vulnerabilities (as gathered through statistical analysis of field failures) are gone. It means that the price for finding a vulnerability is higher.

And also sudo-rs precisely removes a lot of complexity that’s the source of vulnerabilities in normal sudo. There may be better approaches but it’s specifically not targeting 100% compat because sudo is horribly designed right now.

TLDR: this is a lazy knee jerk critique. Please do better in the future.
by eszed | 2025-12-26 00:54:39+00:00
I've not read enough Corey to form a judgement, but I don't think Jordan has nearly enough literary "heft" to satisfy close reading. Don't get me wrong: the story is fun - I enjoyed every bit of Wheel of Time - and would recommend it to anyone who likes that sort of thing, but the deeper stuff (characters, prosidy, world-building, thematic "meaning") don't bear much examination.

In fantasy / sci-fi, I'd unreservedly recommend:

- Ursula K LeGuin

- Steven Erickson

- Gene Wolfe

With reservations, I'd recommend:

- Patrick Rothfuss (unfinished)

- George RR Martin (unfinished; sometimes dodgy prose, but occasionally transcendent character and theme)

- Dune (just know it goes downhill fast after the first book)

Elsewhere, but still genre (ie: meant to be entertaining, not uber-serious, self-conscious "literature"):

- Patrick O'Brian

- Arthur Conan Doyle

- Dorothy Dunnet

I'd recommend Rudyard Kipling's short stories, but they're hit and miss, and sometimes out of step with modern mores. Maybe stick with the Jungle Book, and Just So Stories, and if you like those make sure you read Without Benefit of Clergy, They (short stories), and Kim (a masterpiece of a novel).

Once you've got through those, Hemingway is approachable, and the true modernist master. Fiesta / The Sun Also Rises (same book, known by different names in different parts of the world) is ironic and beautiful; A Farewell to Arms is beautiful and almost unbearably sad; his short stories are impeccable.
by Fezzik | 2025-12-26 00:55:00+00:00
The medical community realized early in the pandemic that blood clotting was an “extremely rare” side effect of Covid vaccines. Nobody tried to hide that. Also, monoclonal antibody treatments were limited because 99% of Covid infections were of the Omicron variant and it was clinically demonstrated that monoclonal antibodies were entirely ineffective against that variant.

https://healthcare.utah.edu/healthfeed/2022/09/blood-clottin...

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39354108/
by fenomas | 2025-12-26 00:56:19+00:00
Uh, kind of the opposite :D

The quote (from Dijkstra) is that asking whether machines think is as uninteresting as asking whether submarines swim. He's not saying machines don't think, he's saying it's a pointless thing to have an opinion about. That is, an argument about whether AIs think is an argument about word usage, not about AIs.
by phantasmish | 2025-12-26 00:56:32+00:00
One really appreciates the “pocket” label of this format if one wears suits, sport coats, or blazer jackets, or almost any of several styles of coat that fall under the category of “overcoat”: these books really were pocket size! For those pockets, that is. The thicker ones are pushing it, but the ones closer to 250 pages fit neatly in a blazer pocket. Thicker ones are fine in the cavernous pockets of many overcoats (though, hell, so are trade-size books)

(Phones work better in a jacket, too—I think we made a mistake running away from that clothing style, they’re like wearable purses that also make you look nicer. Sure suits are kinda wasteful with the way the jackets get downgraded if the pants are destroyed, but odd jackets we should have held on to!)
by vlovich123 | 2025-12-26 00:57:28+00:00
By definition, C and C++ are memory safe as long as you follow the rules. The problem is that the rules cannot be automatically checked and in practice are the source of unenumerable issues from straight up bugs to subtle standards violations that trigger the optimizer to rewrite your code into what you didn’t intend.

But yes, fil-c is a huge improvement (afaik though it doesn’t solve the UB problem - it just guarantees you can’t have a memory safety issue as a result)
by piskov | 2025-12-26 00:57:29+00:00
My man, if some Joe went as a salesman with 20 years of experience because every summer he sold some lemonade since he was 5, people would, well, at the very best pat one with “good for you, buddy, good for you.”

Then again, “fake it till you make it” is known to work too, so you do you. Definitely wouldn’t judge you in this economy to employ every trick in the book.

Yet, still a trick
by redbeeswimming | 2025-12-26 00:57:37+00:00
> The website prioritizes programs with 98% safe code over programs with 0% safe code.

Please explain this section of the Rustonomicon.

https://doc.rust-lang.org/nomicon/working-with-unsafe.html

> This code is 100% Safe Rust but it is also completely unsound. Changing the capacity violates the invariants of Vec (that cap reflects the allocated space in the Vec). This is not something the rest of Vec can guard against. It has to trust the capacity field because there's no way to verify it.

> Because it relies on invariants of a struct field, this unsafe code does more than pollute a whole function: it pollutes a whole module. Generally, the only bullet-proof way to limit the scope of unsafe code is at the module boundary with privacy.

If 2% code means that, wildly spitballing, 50% code has to be manually reviewed, it's not quite as impressive.

And it might be worse regarding memory safety than the "status quo" if one accepts the assumption that unsafe Rust is harder than C and C++, as many Rust developers do.

https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1amlfdj/comment/kpmb2...

> It may be even less safe because of the strong aliasing rules. That is, it may be harder to write correct unsafe {} Rust than correct C. Only use unsafe {} when absolutely needed.

https://chadaustin.me/2024/10/intrusive-linked-list-in-rust/
by AlotOfReading | 2025-12-26 00:57:55+00:00
If you're writing C/C++ and you don't care about memory safety, you're taking one of a few possible positions:

1. "I don't care what my program does."

Why write it though?

2. "I don't care what the standard says, I've put text into a compiler and it gave me a binary that does the thing."

What if you want to put the same text into a different compiler in the future, or the same compiler again? Are you certain the binary is going to continue doing the thing? Have you even fully tested the binary?

3. "I use a special runtime that makes memory unsafety defined again."

One, I don't believe you unless you're part of a very small group of people and two, why are you accepting the serious drawbacks (performance, process death, all the broader issues of UB) that come with this?

It's genuinely hard for me to understand why you wouldn't think memory safety is important Don't you want to write code that's portable and correct? Don't you want to execute other people's programs and trust they won't segfault? Doesn't it frustrate you that the language committees have spent years refusing to address even the lowest-hanging fruit?
by poemxo | 2025-12-26 00:59:16+00:00
Sorry for slow response. Snitch sounds like a tool that will do intercepting or alerting. Little Snitch is perfectly named in this regard. When it pops up prompting you for action, it feels like it just snitched on an app.

What you have here isn't a snitch, it's more like a full map of traffic. I don't have any other suggestions unfortunately.

Just my 2c
by Zenbit_UX | 2025-12-26 00:59:17+00:00
First of all, I don’t recommend going through life yucking someone else’s yum.

Second of all, I took TFA advice and read that article with the slowness and deliberate attention it recommended and found it to be trite and difficult to distinguish from AI slop… but if that’s what brings this person joy, good for them.

Who cares if the GP eats their cookies in one bite and listens to their audiobooks at 2.25x speed? Because one self help guru turned blogger said it’s a bad idea?
by xthe | 2025-12-26 00:59:46+00:00
The diskless systems point is a good one — the convenience is real, but the loss of resale, lending, and long-term ownership adds up more than reviews usually acknowledge.
Do you think that trade-off was obvious at purchase time, or did it only start to feel painful once storage filled up and the library grew?
On the Apple Watch side, was the battery issue something you noticed early, or did it become frustrating over time as usage increased?
by DetectDefect | 2025-12-26 00:59:58+00:00
Here is a list of processes which have attempted to contact Apple in the past 24 hours, according to Little Snitch. I am certain this is not even a complete list, because macOS is closed source and likely can bypass application firewalls altogether:

akd -> gsa.apple.com
nsurlsessiond -> gateway.icloud.com
nsurlsessiond -> mesu.apple.com
nsurlsessiond -> gdmf-ados.apple
nsurlsessiond -> gdmf.apple.com
adprivacyd -> bag.itunes.apple.com
CloudTelemetryService -> gateway.icloud.com
cloudd -> gateway.icloud.com
amsondevicestoraged -> bag.itunes.apple.com
tipsd -> ipcdn.apple.com
parsec-fbf -> fbs.smoot.apple.com
parsec-fbf -> swallow.apple.com
com.apple.geod -> gspe1-ssl.ls.apple.com
identityservicesd -> init.ess.apple.com

Again, I have never used iCloud/Apple services, turned off all available telemetry options and did not open any Apple applications while all this took place (I only use Firefox and iTerm). Almost all of these processes lack a man page, or if they have one, it's one-line nonsense which explains nothing. This is beyond unprofessional, bordering on adversarial.
by binsquare | 2025-12-26 01:00:11+00:00
Great idea - took a bit to figure out how to implement this.

I came up with a plausibility check based on the model's memory requirements: https://github.com/BinSquare/inferbench/blob/main/src/lib/pl...

So now on the submission page - it has a warning + an automate flag count for volunteers to double check:

```This configuration seems unlikely

Model requires ~906GB VRAM but only 32GB available (28.3x over). This likely requires significant CPU offload which would severely impact performance.

You can still submit, but your result will be flagged for review.```
by mikestorrent | 2025-12-26 01:00:15+00:00
I've not braved reading them LOTR yet, but my sons are still getting read to even as one's about to become a teenager; it's some of my favourite time in the evening and it allows me to force them through books just slightly too advanced, with lots of them stopping me to explain (or me stopping to editorialize, and provide historical context etc).

I don't know how long they'll let me keep doing it for, but I don't see any reason to stop
by websiteapi | 2025-12-26 01:00:29+00:00
that's a funny example, because something like Cobra Kai literally began on YouTube, there are others like Hazbin Hotel.

anyway, as for the statistics, for the case of YouTube since there are is no forced directive to which all videos must follow (creatively), you can treat all videos as random attempts. then it's just stats to show that such a distribution will have outliers that match or exceed in subjective quality the gate kept works (traditional tvs or literature).
by araes | 2025-12-26 01:00:33+00:00
This entire article sounds suspiciously familiar. Like CDO (Collateralized Debt Obligation) / CDS (Credit Default Swap) 2.0. They're even using the "squared" terminology again.

The article's available at: https://archive.ph/mQzlF

Lets take a bunch of sketchy investments, package them into difficult to comprehend risk packages, sell ourselves dividends and fees based on debt loading, and then try to shuffle them off to somebody.

Except now, apparently the debts and the equity available look sketchy enough, that it's turning into "continuation vehicles". Nobody external will actually buy the private equity that's for sale. Backlog of 31,000 companies and interest rates that make all the debt look bad.

So make a different fund and sell the old equity to the new fund. Basically selling themselves their own companies and then pulling in new investors based on rewriting the valuation. The "squared" is doing that again and again with all their held equity.

In the example provided, Clearlake bought Wheel Pros at $420 million in 2018, and then sold it to themselves at $2300 million in 2021. Meanwhile, they loaded on debt and went on a buying spree "buy(ing) up almost every competitor that made accessories for the wheels of cars and trucks". Shiny hubcap market crashed and Wheel Pros went bankrupt.

There's "supposed" to be external independent review of the valuation, yet obviously that's not happening the way it's supposed to all the time. Another example provided, Energy & Minerals Group, "forced investors to vote on the sale on short notice, provided different data to different investors and would not allow the investors to confer with each other about the deal. (how that's even enforced)"

Looks super sketchy, and agree with the people from the Alaska Permanent Fund and Texas Teachers Retirement.
by nxobject | 2025-12-26 01:00:51+00:00
Wow, that makes so much sense - thank you! It sounds like it essentially "vibed up" the parts it didn't understand, which is amazing.

Just as an experiment, I fed the resource fork to GPT-5.2 to see whether it could render the windows/dialogs in the resource fork - it did a fairly okay job. I think the fundamental limit it ran against (and acknowledges) is that lot of Mac's classic look and feel was defined programmatically, literally, down to calls to RoundRect(...).

https://chatgpt.com/s/t_694dddb290308191babcb07a72367e97

Thanks for posting your experience.
by eszed | 2025-12-26 01:01:32+00:00
I can't wait to read LOTR to my (now four-year-old) son. Been looking forward to it since we started trying for a kid. Seriously, peak fatherhood moment. I'll savor it. That (and a few others are) on the embargo list: he's not allowed to see the film before we read the books. I wish I'd got Winnie the Pooh on there in time.
by kotodama_R | 2025-12-26 01:01:45+00:00
I’m looking into persona drift in long-running LLM systems.

Kotodama OS is an attempt to treat this as an external behavior-layer problem,
rather than solving it with more prompting or fine-tuning.

I opened a GitHub issue to collect real-world cases
where persona drift actually caused problems,
and to discuss possible integration patterns.