MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ajross | 2025-12-27 01:03:16+00:00
Whataboutist false equivalence alert:

> 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.

"All the other players" aren't deliberately tuning their AI to reflect specific political ideology, nor are all the other players producing Nazi gaffes or racist rhetoric as a result of routine tuning[1].

Yes, it's true that AI is going to reflect its internal prompt engineering and training data, and that's going to be subject to bias on the part of the engineers who produced and curated it. That's not remotely the same thing as deliberately producing an ideological chat engine.

[1] It's also worth pointing out that grok has gotten objectively much worse at political content after all this muckery. It used to be a pretty reasonable fact check and worth reading. Now it tends to disappear on anything political, and where it shows up it's either doing the most limited/bland fact check or engaging in what amounts to spin.
by uh_uh | 2025-12-27 01:03:36+00:00
> It's not just planet-scale, it's universe-scale. Lots of planets conduct the experiment, ours just happens to have resulted in intelligence.

My argument doesn't depend on the existence of an intelligent species on the planet. The problem already arises when there are multiple species on ONE planet. If you calculate the pure combinatorial distance between the DNA of 2 species, you must find that you can't just brute force your way from one to the other before the heat-death of the universe. This is why mutation bias exists: not all mutations are equally likely, evolution favours some kinds over others.
by benreesman | 2025-12-27 01:03:55+00:00
I have been a big Astral and uv booster for a long time. But specifications like this one: https://gist.github.com/b7r6/47fea3c139e901cd512e15f42355f26... have me re-evaluating everything.

That's TensorRT-LLM in it's entirety at 1.2.0rc6 locked to run on Ubuntu or NixOS with full MPI and `nvshmem`, the DGX container Jensen's Desk edition (I know because I also rip apart and `autopatchelf` NGC containers for repackaging on Grace/SBSA).

It's... arduous. And the benefit is what exactly? A very mixed collection of maintainers have asserted that software behavior is monotonic along a single axis most of which they can't see and we ran a solver over those guesses?

I think the future is collections of wheels that have been through a process the consumer regards as credible.
by ewoodrich | 2025-12-27 01:05:13+00:00
Hah, I was listening to a similar conversation that began with family members working in the school system complaining about AI slop that began (relatively) harmlessly in day-to-day email conversations padded with time wasting filler but now has trickled down into "professional" education materials and even textbooks.

Which led to a lot of agreement and rants from others with frustrating stories about their specific workplaces and how it just keeps getting worse by the day. Previously these conversations just popped up among me and the handful of family in tech but clearly now has much broader resonance.

As can be observed in my comment history, I use LLM agentic tools for software dev at work and on my personal projects (really my only AI use case) but cringe whenever I encounter "workslop" as it almost invariably serves to waste my time. My company has been doing a large pilot of 365 Copilot but I have yet to find anything useful, the email writing tools just seems to strip out my personal voice making me sound like I'm writing unsolicited marketing spam.

Every single time I've been using some Microsoft product and think "Hmm, wait maybe the Copilot button could actually be useful here?", it just tells me it can't help or gives me a link to a generic help page. It's like Microsoft deliberately engineered 365 Copilot to be as unhelpful as possible while simultaneously putting a Copilot button on every single visible surface imaginable.

The only tool that actually does something is designed to ruin emails by stripping out personal tone/voice and introducing ambiguity to waste the other person's time. Awesome, thanks for the productivity boost, Microsoft!
by horsawlarway | 2025-12-27 01:05:59+00:00
And yet someone IS pushing code to these devices. Every single one.

So the question really becomes - Are these people working on their own pumps with open source more or less invested than the random programmers hired by a company that pretty clearly can't get details right around licensing, and is operating with a profit motive?

More reckless as well? Perhaps. But at least motivated by the correct incentives.
by welliebobs | 2025-12-27 01:06:23+00:00
You can find even more simplicity in Talos Linux[1]. Drop an ISO onto a USB, run a handful of commands[2] to generate and apply a configuration, and you've got a cluster up and running.

[1] https://www.talos.dev/

[2] https://docs.siderolabs.com/talos/v1.12/getting-started/gett...
by smj-edison | 2025-12-27 01:06:24+00:00
I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I agree: text is infinitely versatile, indexable, durable, etc. But, after discovering Bret Victor's work[1], and thinking about how I learned piano, I've also started to see a lot of the limitations of text. When I learned piano, I always had a live feedback loop: play a note, and hear how it sounds, and every week I had a teacher coach me. This is a completely different way to learn a skill, and something that doesn't work well with text.

Bret Victor's point is why is this not also the approach we use for other topics, like engineering? There are many people who do not have a strong symbolic intuition, and so being able to tap into their (and our) other intuitions is a very powerful tool to increase efficiency of communication. More and more, I have found myself in this alternate philosophy of education and knowledge transmission. There are certainly limits—and text isn't going anywhere, but I think there's still a lot more to discover and try.

[1] https://dynamicland.org/2014/The_Humane_Representation_of_Th...
by awesome_dude | 2025-12-27 01:06:58+00:00
Audio is horrible (for me) for information transfer - reading (90% of the time) is where it's at

Not sure why that is either - because I look at people extolling the virtues of podcasts, saying that they are able to multi task (eg. driving, walking, eat dinner), and still hear the message - which leaves me aghast
by MontyCarloHall | 2025-12-27 01:08:26+00:00
>Instead of installing a container manager or using Unix users, just make another VM.

What is the advantage of this? Unless you need something exotic like different kernel configurations per instance, what's the problem with using containers on the same instance?

BTW, a Hetzner dedicated server with 2 CPUs/8GB RAM that would let me run my own hypervisor is about $14 USD/month. For anyone who's a big enough power user to care about the distinction of running distributed workflows on VMs versus containers, I'm not sure that an extra $5/month is worth your "hypervisor as a service." But then again, HN commenters infamously poopooed Dropbox [0], so what do I know? :-)

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
by Spooky23 | 2025-12-27 01:08:34+00:00
If you’re a suburban kid, GenX or later you may have missed the peaks. In the 60s, it was more like 35-45% of kids.

Things like rules for handwashing and standards for things like residential plumbing improved hygiene and reduced ringworms. Many urban and rural households didn’t have things we take for granted like hot water!
by msisk6 | 2025-12-27 01:09:06+00:00
I wrote a ton of AutoLISP back in the day to do similar things to generate well logs for environmental and geotechnical reports. Fun stuff.

In 1990 I went to work at Autodesk and got to work on all kinds of stuff over the next decade -- AutoLISP was the bridge that got me into tech as a profession over the geology field work I was doing. It's been a wild ride.
by jerf | 2025-12-27 01:09:17+00:00
Many good answers, but I'll add another angle I don't see any replies covering, which is that being poisonous/toxic is expensive. We humans lead charmed lives by the standards of the biosphere, where we get obese, and even before we got obese, many of us had unbelievable access to nutrients and energy. The steady state of the ecosystem is a war where every calorie must be spent carefully. This is particularly clear in the bacterial world but it progresses up to macroscopic plant life as well. Producing poisons is energy you could be using to grow or reproduce. Some poisons require additional care because they're still poisonous to the producer, it's just that the producer spends additional resources on containing the poison so it doesn't affect them.

There is a constant, low-level evolutionary impetus to stop spending any calorie that doesn't need to be spent, which would generally include the production of poisons of any kind. This low-level impetus is clearly something that can be overcome in many situations, but it is nevertheless always there, always the "temptation" to stop spending so much on poisons and redirect it to growth or reproduction. Over time it's a winning play quite often.
by ilaksh | 2025-12-27 01:09:32+00:00
I wonder if some day there will be a video codec that is essentially a standard distribution of a very precise and extremely fast text-to-video model (like SmartTurboDiffusion-2027 or something). Because surely there are limits to text, but even the example you gave does not seem to me to be beyond the reach of a text description, given a certain level of precision and capability in the model. And we now have faster than realtime text to video.
by crawshaw | 2025-12-27 01:09:55+00:00
Containers aren’t enough for me. I like to do things like create TUN devices, run docker compose, etc. I believe the VM is a fundamentally better abstraction.

Consider this: sometimes when you are using a VPS, you start a new project and say to yourself, "I should put this on a new VPS." Not all the time, but it does happen. And when it does, we are faced with the problem that starting a new project immediately costs us $X/month. I would like a new project to initially cost nothing.
by benreesman | 2025-12-27 01:11:22+00:00
Fun fact: if you say the right prayers to the Myelin Gods it will fuse straight through sage3 at D/DQ like it's seen it before, which of course it has.

https://gist.github.com/b7r6/94f738f4e5d1a67d4632a8fbd18d347...

Faster than Turbo with no pre-distill.
by pavel_lishin | 2025-12-27 01:11:48+00:00
Sci-fi nerd recommendations follow.

I binged the entirety of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series. The cover, & the fact that it was on Kindle Unlimited, made me think it was probably cheap crap, but I was impressed with how well-written it was, and how much I empathized with the characters. (I probably should have read it slower; by the last two books, I was just flowing with the text, not paying as much attention to the overarching plot.)

Heinlein's "Orphans of the Sky" was pretty bad. So much early scifi is considered great because it's groundbreaking, writing about things nobody else has before. The concept of a generation ship was pretty new at the time Heinlein was writing it, and it has some very interesting concepts, but the book has some really bad problems. If you've read it, you know; if you haven't, and decide to, you'll see it for yourself.

I binged a few Brandon Sanderson books. The standalones are great; the Stormlight Archive is a huge slog through some beautiful writing, but I'm not sure I'm willing to spend so much time in beautiful books that move the plot forward so slowly.

Exordia, by Seth Dickinson, started off incredible, kept going, but the ending felt like both a fizzle as well as a cliff-hanger for the next book. I'm glad I read it, but I wish it had a clear conclusion it wanted to reach.

Adrian Tchaikovsky's "Children of Memory" delivers more of the great philosophical questions & answers about the nature of consciousness and personhood that the previous books did, A+. No idea where he could possibly go from there, but if he does, I'm going along for the journey. (Honorable mention: Alien Clay. Dishonorable mention: Service Model.)

Eric Flint's "Fenrir" was a fun BDO near-future space adventure. (As was John Sanford's Saturn Run, but that wasn't a 2025 book I read.)
by estimator7292 | 2025-12-27 01:12:09+00:00
It's really fucking suspicious that mushrooms evolved mechanisms to produce serotonin.

But it helps when you remember that a mushroom is the fruit of a (usually) much larger organism. Then you can start applying normal fruit rules. Some want to be eaten, or picked up and moved around. Some want to keep insects from infesting the fruit. Others don't give a damn and release spores into the wind or water.

Also remember that nicotine is an insecticide. Insects that nibble on tobacco die, which prevents infestation at scale. (Un?)fortunately it's also neuroactive in apes, so we farm incredible quantities of tobacco to extract its poisons.

There is no logic in evolution at large scales. Things happen, sometimes there's fourth order effects like some oddball internal hormone causing wild hallucinations in apes. It's all random optimization for small scale problems that ripple out to unintended large scale consequences.
by sloum | 2025-12-27 01:12:22+00:00
> "vile machines raping the planet" is obviously vitriol

Well, I still think you are giving an opinion and I am giving mine. I disagree with your opinion. Mr. Pike is making a statement of fact. I do not consider it particularly vitriolic. You may consider it hyperbolic and I could understand that (even if I do not agree with it).

> Abolish it rather than continuing the current path, strict prohibition on any creative endeavor, and being extremely skeptical about anything other than direct language translation

...is not extreme in the slightest. If something is wrong (either morally or as a good and viable path forward) it only makes sense to cease following that path. I posit that it is not possible to creatively use this technology. It can only serve to steal the creativity of others. Prompting a machine to make something out of misc. parts for you does not make you creative. Nor does it make the machine creative. But for us to agree on that we would have to better define either creativity or art (spoiler: my view is that only sentient beings can be creative or make art). I suppose I could agree that the developers of an AI system are being creative, but certainly not the users. Being skeptical is always a good position with something new until shown reasons to not be skeptical. Positions are allowed to grown and change, s tarting skeptical about something is absolutely a reasonable position to start from. I see none of your statement as being evidence of extremism at all. Sounds like exercising sound, reasonable judgement.
by gerdesj | 2025-12-27 01:14:08+00:00
The risks were understood (by engineers) and this usage was given a "shelf life". Unfortunately, those risks were put into the "Oh we'll forget about it" or "We'll wait until it looks a bit shifty" categories.

However as any fule (engineer) kno, reinforced and especially pre-stressed conc members will fail in quite a dramatic fashion. Unless you notice rust dribbling out then you can end up with anything from the roof failing to the roof exploding. I don't think anyone was daft enough to pre-stress these things.

I don't know how much money was saved but it was a really stupid application and basically ended up punting far greater costs due to remediation down the road.
by latexr | 2025-12-27 01:15:15+00:00
> Without Claude Code I would not have attempted that investigation at all - I have a family dinner to prepare.

Then maybe you shouldn’t have done it at all. It’s not like the world asked or imbued you with the responsibility for that investigation. It’s not like it was imperative to get to the bottom of this and you were the only one able to do it.

Your defence is analogous to all the worst tech bros who excuse their bad actions with “if we did it right/morally/legally, it wouldn’t be viable”. Then so be it, maybe it shouldn’t be viable.

You did it because you wanted to. It was for yourself. You saw Pike’s reaction and deliberately chose to be complicit in the use of technology he decried, further adding to his frustration. It was a selfish act.
by twotwotwo | 2025-12-27 01:17:56+00:00
So I tried this the other day after fellow Filippo Valsorda, another Go person, posted about it recently. My reaction was 'whoa, this really makes it easier to start a quick project', and it took a minute to figure out why I felt that way when, I mean, I have a laptop and can spin up cloud stuff--it's not like I didn't have computing resources already.

I think it's the combination of 1) really quick to get going, 2) isolated and disposable environments and 3) persistent and on the public Internet.

Often to get element 3, persistent and public, I had to jump through hoops in a cloud console and/or touch my 'main' resources (install things or do other sysadmin work on a laptop or server, etc.) that I use for other stuff and would prefer not to clutter up more with every experiment I do.

Here I can make a thing and if I'm done with it, I'm done. Some things have the 'quick to start and disposable' part down but are necessarily ephemeral and/or don't support publishing and this avoids that local minimum too.

This is good stuff. I hope they get a sustainable paid thing going. I'd use it.

Also, though I realize in a sense I'm wishing competition on a biz I just said I'd support: some parts of the design here could work elsewhere as well. You could have an open-source "click here to start a thing! and click here to archive it." layer you can run on top of your VM or machine or cloud account; could be a lot of fun. (I imagine someone will ask "have you looked at X?" here, and yes, please do that, I'm interested in all your potential values of X.)
Postgres for everything, does it work?
by saisrirampur | 2025-12-27 01:18:29+00:00
I recently revisited an HN discussion on using “Postgres for everything” (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42347606
) and also read/participated in this Twitter thread: https://x.com/BenjDicken/status/2002742633966514544
. Both prompted a few reflections. What stood out to me was how divided opinions still are—some people strongly believe in this approach, while others don’t. I wanted to share my perspective on this.

In my experience, many proponents of “Postgres for everything” haven’t been exposed enough to (newer) purpose-built technologies and the tremendous value they can create. I was firmly in that camp for nearly a decade while working at Citus and on the Microsoft Postgres team. After building PeerDB (a Postgres CDC product that syncs data to various systems) and working at ClickHouse, my perspective completely changed. Seeing firsthand the “magic” that purpose-built systems deliver for their specific use cases—especially in terms of cost, performance, and scale—was truly eye-opening.

Don’t get me wrong—I’m a huge Postgres proponent and have spent 10 years helping customers implement it. However, I strongly believe in using Postgres for what it was designed for in the first place. Postgres is a row-based OLTP database, with over 30 years of engineering effort dedicated to making it robust for that specific workload.

Proponents of “Postgres for everything” often argue that a single stack is simpler and reduces complexity. What’s frequently overlooked, however, is the CAPEX and OPEX required to make Postgres work well for use cases it wasn’t designed for. At Citus, many customers had reasonably sized teams of Postgres experts whose primary job was to constantly tune, operate, and “babysit” the system to keep it working at scale.

Separately, we’re seeing the need for purpose-built technologies emerge much earlier in a company’s lifecycle, likely driven by AI. At ClickHouse, many customers using Postgres CDC are seed-stage companies that have grown rapidly. We pulled together some data that highlights these trends here: https://clickhouse.com/blog/postgres-cdc-year-in-review-2025#use-cases

Ultimately, I believe it’s better to make it seamless and even magical for users to integrate purpose-built technologies with Postgres, rather than making an overgeneralized claim of “Postgres for everything.”
by textnotalwabest | 2025-12-27 01:19:27+00:00
Text is not the best medium for the following situations:

- I want to learn how to climb rock walls

- I want to learn how to throw a baseball

- I want to learn how to do public speaking

- I want to learn how to play piano

- I want to make a fire in the woods

- I want to understand the emotional impact of war

- I want to be involved in my child's life
by EA-3167 | 2025-12-27 01:19:49+00:00
I do wish that just once our politicians (and the voters who are so easily spooked) thought through this issue a bit further than "Billionaires issue threat, we must surrender." There is a point at which taxation can be counterproductive, but we're so far in the other direction that it would take cultural and political changes of decades to get into dangerous territory.

Unfortunately many people are trained to respond along party lines with thinking.
by homerowilson | 2025-12-27 01:20:02+00:00
"one mushroom species in five is poisonous"? 20% ??? That seems like a crazy high estimate to me, at least if you mean deadly poisonous to humans. In the USA there are only a few species of amanita, galerina, a few of the hundreds of species of cortinarius, maybe some gyromitra and a handful of others I can think of that will kill you. Among the many thousands of mushroom species in the USA, there are only a few dozen known deadly poisonous ones. It's a really tiny percentage. Of course that doesn't mean that the others are edible, just not gonna kill you...
by ggm | 2025-12-27 01:21:28+00:00
Same with the viking coprolites found in Jorvik/York?

It would seem reasonable to say on a statistical sample of 1 we have no reason to believe this was common or uncommon, or do we say on the basis we found one, the assumption is that it was universal?

We know some things like floor rushes were picked to deter fleas, were there oral or rectal treatments which worked for worms?
by zzo38computer | 2025-12-27 01:22:35+00:00
Even with binary, you can store a binary inline inside of another one if it is a structured format with a "raw binary data" type, such as DER. (In my opinion, DER is better in other ways too, and (with my nonstandard key/value list type added) it is a superset of the data model of JSON.)

Using base64 means that you must encode and decode it, but binary data directly means that is unnecessary. (This is true whether or not it is compressed (and/or encrypted); if it is compressed then you must decompress it, but that is independent of whether or not you must decode base64.)
by benatkin | 2025-12-27 01:22:47+00:00
I was surprised to see something was in text today, until I remembered knowing it at some point - the .har format. Looking at simonw's Claude-generated script [1] to investigate AI agent sent emails [2] by extracting .har archives, I saw that it uses base64 for binary and JSON strings for text.

It might be a good bet to bet on text, but it feels inefficient a lot of the time, especially in cases like this where all sorts of files are stored in JSON documents.

1: https://gist.github.com/simonw/007c628ceb84d0da0795b57af7b74...

2: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/26/slop-acts-of-kindness/
by fc417fc802 | 2025-12-27 01:22:56+00:00
It is not a model. It is a description. I'm torn on whether it would be correct to refer to the approach as constituting a sort of analogy.

No idea why you think the effect is being put before the cause. I'm hungry so I head to the kitchen. An observer says "he wants to eat". Antibiotics are administered. Only the bacterial cells expressing a certain set of proteins survive. An observer says "the infection wants to be resistant".