MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by svara | 2025-12-31 13:21:32+00:00
Yeah, I was thinking about this wrong. I don't think it works.

Edit: I think the strategy does work, but a little differently: if you withhold a block and someone else finds one while you do so, you can still publish yours and win a race with a certain probability, i.e. the expected loss is not as high as one might think.

Then, if you do that and if you have enough hash power, you can end up mining a private chain ahead of the public one often enough, so that the loss you take is less than the loss others take through the hash power they are wasting because of you doing this.
by Anuranjan_Vikas | 2025-12-31 13:23:04+00:00
Good questions and Thanks for asking.

1. Honestly? Nothing. You could type out AI output from another screen and Realwork would record it. The friction helps, most people won't bother, but it's not foolproof. The typing patterns might look different (copying vs composing tends to show), but a determined faker could game it. At some point, if someone's putting that much effort into faking authenticity, that's a social trust problem no tool fully solves. Realwork raises the floor, not the ceiling.

2. Digital art (Figma, Photoshop etc) works already, recording captures the visual process, strokes, layers, iterations. Music and photography are trickier. Music production (Ableton, Logic) could work by tracking DAW activity, but still figuring out what "proof" looks like there. Photography is hardest since it's capture, not creation over time, though editing in Lightroom could apply. Some mediums will translate cleaner than others.
by jvanderbot | 2025-12-31 13:23:47+00:00
I like to look at other skilled professions that became automated.

The steam engine analogy is just garbage imho, because its not like we weren't already automated up to our neck. And each new layer of automation required a new specialized skill set. We aren't horses being driven and to be replaced or miners who refuse to adopt jackhammers or luddite weavers (most of the time).

I think most skilled professions that adopt automation just add new skill demand for each new multiplier of output.

The best analogy I can come up with is CNC machining. A machinist of old was very much a craftsman, making each mill pass according to a drawing and doing lots of measuring and such.

Now machining is front-loaded and automated. You spend all the effort on the model and design, then let one or more machines make parts, and you are there for intervention, smoothing, part repositioning, q/a, etc etc.

This is almost a perfect analogy for my day to day interaction with these agents. I let the process run and design in inspection points, test points etc to make sure it completes according to my spec. If not, it's just as often the right move to chuck the part in scrap and try again.
by Yokohiii | 2025-12-31 13:23:50+00:00
Did Jon state that he intends to release as open source? I am not sure he is the guy to the stressful route. If it all he would probably go long release cycles without considering public feedback too much.

He also stated recently that he doesn't care too much about language design at a syntax level, or better said it's not his top focus as the overarching concepts are more important to him.

I think there is a chance that people may have a hard time to adopt to the language. His strong focus on gamedev will further cut down the audience. It will certainly draw a lot of attention but a massive adoption is highly questionable.
by Tarsul | 2025-12-31 13:25:19+00:00
Yes. It's propaganda, not speech. Also the algorithms favor this sh*t. Also this massive generation of content floods the zone[1]. There is nothing "freedom of choice" about it if it resurfaces all the time. Upvotes/Views count disproportionally in most social media against downvotes/"not interested" (tiktok is better but even there you can't downvote enough AI-videos for them to not resurface. Probably because the algorithm isn't good enough to understand what is AI and what not, so these downvotes often don't count against AI).

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_the_zone
by bsenftner | 2025-12-31 13:25:52+00:00
I think the author of the post envisions more code authoring automation, more generated code/test/deployment, exponentially more. To the degree what we have now would be "quaint", as he says.

Your point that most software uses the same browsers, databases, tooling and internal libraries is a weakness, a sameness that can be exploited by current AI, to push that automation capability much further. Hell, why even bother with any of the generated code and infrastructure being "human readable" anymore? (Of course, all kinds of reasons that is bad, but just watch that "innovation" get a marketing push and take off. Which would only mean we'd need viewing software to make whatever was generated readable - as if anyone would read to understand hundreds/millions of generated complex anything.)
by Denvercoder9 | 2025-12-31 13:26:33+00:00
> why would it be that way?

It allows (among other things) the glibc developers to change struct layouts while remaining backwards compatible. E.g. if function f1 takes a struct as argument, and its layout changes between v2 and v3, then glibc_v2_f1 and glibc_v3_f1 have different ABIs.
by i_am_a_peasant | 2025-12-31 13:28:03+00:00
to this day i don’t know what people mean by “features”.

Lambdas are nice to have, just don’t nest them more than once.

I kinda wish things like std::variant had shorter syntax.

if anything i’m not a fan of c++ introducing language features as long verbose functions than to confidently make it an operator or a keyword.
by immibis | 2025-12-31 13:29:11+00:00
And being 100 things is completely unavoidable when freedom is involved. You can force everyone to use the same 1 thing, if you make it proprietary. If people have freedom to customize it, of course another 99 people will come along and do that. We should probably just accept this is the price of freedom. It's not as bad as it seems because you also have the freedom to make your system present like some other system in order to run programs made for that system.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-12-31 13:29:59+00:00
I do consider dogs to have "general intelligence" however despite that I have always (my entire life) considered AGI to imply human level intelligence. Not better, not worse, just human level.

It gets worse though. While one could claim that scoring equivalently on some benchmark indicates performance at the same level - and I'd likely agree - that's not what I take AGI to mean. Rather I take it to mean "equivalent to a human" so if it utterly fails at something we're good at such as driving a car through a construction zone during rush hour then I don't consider it to have met the bar of AGI even if it meets or exceeds us at other unrelated tasks. You have to be at least as general as a stock human to qualify as AGI in my books.

Now I may be but a single datapoint but I think there are a lot of people out there who feel similarly. You can see this a lot in popular culture with AGI (or often AI) being used to refer to autonomous humanoid robots portrayed as operating at or above a human level.

Related to all that, since you mention protein folding. I consider that to be a form of super intelligence as it is more or less inconceivable that an unaided human would ever be able to accomplish such a feat. So I consider alphafold to be both super intelligent and decidedly _not_ AGI. Make of that what you will.
by estimator7292 | 2025-12-31 13:30:03+00:00
The costs of hardware will take a long time to percolate up to software architecture, if they ever do.

Until current computers cycle out, people will largely keep their 1-3 year old machine with sane amounts of memory. If we start seeing large numbers of machines in the wild with 4GB of memory, then maybe software will adapt. But that won't be for several years yet.
by zoltanse | 2025-12-31 13:30:36+00:00
Sure: A couple of years ago I joined a company doing outsourced system administration. Then it was suggested I should take care of a new client: a manufacturer of weapons with a quite shady reputation.
There were already other issues I had noticed. But this was the red flag for me and I left after four weeks.
My then team lead was pissed and complained I should have told beforehand that I don’t want to go down that route. But it never occured to me before that to compile a blacklist of things I won’t do. And I had been in business for more than 20 years when that happened.
by centamiv | 2025-12-31 13:30:45+00:00
Hi HN,

I wrote a short post demonstrating how vector search works by building a D&D spell finder.

Instead of using a vector DB immediately, I implemented the cosine similarity math manually in PHP to demystify how embeddings actually work under the hood.

The code compares query vectors against a JSON dataset of spells to find matches by intent rather than keywords.
by nchmy | 2025-12-31 13:31:50+00:00
Newsflash! Less happens while people are asleep!

Correlation doesnt say anything about the sensitivity/scaling. (i recognize that my original comment didnt quite make this point, though the correlation is definitely not 100%, so that point does still stand)

can you note the difference between the earth being lit by torches, candles, kerosene lamps and incandescent bulbs, versus LED lights? LED isnt glowing harder, it just wastes less energy.

A rocket stove, or any efficient furnace, can extract vastly more energy from the same fuel source than an open fire. I assume combustion engines have had significant efficiency improvements since first introduced. And electric engines are almost completely efficient - especially when fed by efficient, clean/renewable source.

How about the computing power of a smartphone versus a supercomputer from 1980?

What is more energy efficient, a carpenter working with crude stones or with sharp chisels?

and we can, of course, put aside whether any measurement of economic value is actually accurate/useful... A natural disaster is technically good for many economic measures, since the destruction doesn't get measured and the wealth invested in rebuilding just counts as economic activity

And, Of course, then there's creeptocurrencies which use an immense amount of energy to do something that was previously trivial. And worse, when it is used in place of cash. But even there, some are more efficient than others - not that anyone who uses them actually cares.
by Zopieux | 2025-12-31 13:33:07+00:00
The amount of attention and care that went into the user interface is mind-boggling. I love the (in hindsight obvious) trick of having a 2D value picker with the step size as a second dimension. This is notoriously difficult to get right, especially for creative software: sometimes a 0.001 difference changes everything in your scene, other times you need a 1000 step size to see any effect. Not forcing an opinion on "surely this will be enough granularity for everyone" is refreshing.

Thanks for the ton of OSS work that is going into this and keep it up!
by spwa4 | 2025-12-31 13:33:08+00:00
Yep. It's incredibly annoying that obviously these AI companies are turning the "IQ knob" on these models up and down without warning or recourse. First OpenAI, then Anthropic and now Google. I'm guessing it's a cost optimization. OpenAI even said that part out loud.

Of course, for customers it is just one more reason you need to be looking at every AI outputs. Just because they did something perfect yesterday doesn't mean they won't totally screw up the exact same thing today. Or you could say it's one more advantage of local models: you control the knobs.
by dangoodmanUT | 2025-12-31 13:33:18+00:00
A tool that I made a while back that has become a staple in everything I build, I started wanting kustomize-like functionality within environments.

The use case originally was having a simple overlay of S3 environment variables for testing so that they'd use a shared test bucket to provide agents with files, but otherwise we can use a local S3 (garage) when building.

That turned into "overlay environments": you can overlay them on top of each other just like an overlayfs, but for environment variables :)

HN link seems to strip the URL fragments, here's the direct link to the feature: https://github.com/danthegoodman1/EpicEnv/tree/main?tab=read...
by spwa4 | 2025-12-31 13:34:28+00:00
... and if you look at history you will find this situation, no viable export partners, is the norm and not the exception.

Although I would add that what makes good export partners is not GDP directly, but changes in GDP and that mostly comes from changes in the debt levels of these countries. So, ironically the Russian threat, and the EU debt increase in response to it, can probably be expected to raise the GDP of EU countries by 2-3% or so. So EU-US trade should actually increase, tariffs or no tariffs. Besides, tariffs are a tax on the poor, and it's not the poor importing stuff (just ask the poor in the EU how it's been going). US basic needs manufacturers, like farms, are the ones that are going to lose big, and keep losing big, due to tariffs. Oh, and the poor, of course. I'm sure Trump will make some of his typical eloquent remarks about the poor needing to lose weight and spend less on children.

By contrast, the US will need to do it's very best to not reduce public debt or really increase interest rates they're paying in the next year and a half. Not because of Trump's intentions but because of how he scheduled the massive debt increase last time he was in office. The way he was probably actually fucked by Biden, you know what he was screaming about for years, is that he put a $10 trillion dollar refinancing requirement for the US in for 2025-2026-2027 that he expected to fuck up his successor. Then Biden "stole" most of the good part of Trumps debt increase: the decrease in debt repayments for the US government 2016-2020 ... and delivered the refinancing disaster right back ... to Trump.

That was Trump's financial plan: massive debt increase in 2017, scheduled to come due (require refinancing) ... 8 years later. "Apres-nous le deluge" I believe this principle is called. So Trump's plan was 2017-2021: lots of debt repayment paid by massively increasing US debt, including refinancing debt due in 2021-2025. then 2021-2025, spend the extra income, knowing the bill isn't due until 2025-2029. Then, Biden got to spend the 2021-2025 money ... and send the bill to Trump. Like is often said when it comes to Trump's supposed brilliance: "ooops...".

Probably Trump expected to be out of the office at the start of 2025 and just leave his successor with a massive and difficult refinancing ... and Biden and democrats dropped that hot iron right back into Trump's lap.

So Trump introduced a massive new tax, which of course won't cover the sums he needs. He will raise taxes further.
The "setup tax" on AWS H100s is killing iterative research
by miyamotomusashi | 2025-12-31 13:37:00+00:00
I've been benchmarking the cost economics of fine tuning 70B parameter models on AWS H100 instances versus distributed consumer hardware (RTX 4090s over WAN).

The common assumption is that consumer swarms are too slow due to latency. But my modeling suggests we are ignoring the "setup tax" of the cloud.

The Data:

- Cloud (AWS): For short, iterative runs (1-2 hours), you pay for nearly 45 minutes of dead time per session just setting up environments and downloading 140GB+ weights.

- Swarm (WAN): While inference/training speed is slower (1.6x wall clock time due to network latency), the environment is persistent.

The Trade off: The math shows that for iterative research, the swarm architecture becomes ~ 57% cheaper overall, even accounting for the slower speed. You are trading latency to bypass the startup overhead and the VRAM wall.

I'm trying to validate if this trade off makes sense for real world workflows. For those finetuning 70B+ models: Is time your #1 bottleneck, or would you accept a 1.6x slowdown to cut compute costs by half ?
Show HN: Lindr – Deterministic personality scoring for LLM outputs
by dyllonj | 2025-12-31 13:38:07+00:00
works as a transparent proxy. we extract lexical/syntactic features and compute personality dimensions without calling another LLM. fully reproducible scores, no judge variability.

use case: you want your support bot to stay "warm and professional." lindr tells you when it's drifting toward "cold and robotic."

happy to go deep on the methodology if anyone is curious.
by miningape | 2025-12-31 13:38:45+00:00
Don't have a comparison, but I've written toy languages in a few of them.

I only really feel confident to talk about Rust, Rust stands out when it comes to parsing (functional bros unite), but does suffer when interpreting because of unsafe memory access - although for a compiler that shouldn't be an issue.

Odin is great, but I feel like it doesn't have enough syntax sugar to make languages easy to work on - that being said you can achieve most of what you want in a mostly comparable way if you're willing to write more ugly code. In this way it's very similar to C.
by conartist6 | 2025-12-31 13:38:54+00:00
Yes. I'm not providing advice on how to use it, I'm providing advice on whether or not to use it. A million people cried out that I would be obsolete. I would be replaced: left behind. Career suicide one said LOL.

I think I'm the perfect person to be qualified to stand up and say "if they tell you you can't live without it, they are lying to your face." Only someone who has lived without it as I have would be in a position to know
by drysine | 2025-12-31 13:39:04+00:00
No, as long as it's Russian military who operates them.

However American nuclear sharing arguably is[0]. German pilots and other staff practising handling and delivering the U.S. nuclear bombs don't look good for all nations that were invaded by Germany in 20th century.

And Happy New Year!

[0] https://ieer.org/article/science-for-democratic-action/volum...
by crimsonnoodle58 | 2025-12-31 13:40:10+00:00
So SSR is 50ms and LiveView is 10ms, what test was being performed to achieve these timings? Rendering a sample page or rendering doom?

Also LiveView is described as "Build rich, dynamic user experiences with server-rendered HTML without writing a single line of JavaScript." and their example uses django templating to render the HTML that is returned.

So what are we really measuring here? The speed up seems to solely come from WebSockets, and maybe skipping some Django middleware. Anyone care to elaborate?
Show HN: tintcd – directory-aware terminal theming for PowerShell
by myyke | 2025-12-31 13:40:46+00:00
I built a PowerShell module that hashes directory paths to generate unique background colors. Each folder gets a stable, deterministic tint – no configuration needed.

Why? I always have several terminal windows open in different folders. I'd alt-tab back, squint at the prompt, and wonder if I'm still in the right place. The prompt alone wasn't enough. I wanted something low-effort: no manual config, no color-picking — just instant "wait, wrong folder!" recognition or a warm and fuzzy "ah yes, this one."

https://github.com/ymyke/tintcd
by aw1621107 | 2025-12-31 13:41:01+00:00
> Again, could you please explain how compiler can decide to remove call to a function in an external dynamically loaded library, that is not known at compile time, simply based on the name of the function (i.e. not because the call is unreachable)? I do not see any such language in the standard.

> And yes, calling unknown function from a dynamically loaded library totally is a side effect.

The thing is that malloc/free aren't "unknown function[s]". From the C89 standard:

> All external identifiers declared in any of the headers are reserved, whether or not the associated header is included.

And from the C23 standard:

> All identifiers with external linkage in any of the following subclauses (including the future library directions) and errno are always reserved for use as identifiers with external linkage

malloc/free are defined in <stdlib.h> and so are reserved names, so compilers are able to optimize under the assumption that malloc/free will have the semantics dictated by the standard.

In fact, the C23 standard explicitly provides an example of this kind of thing:

> Because external identifiers and some macro names beginning with an underscore are reserved, implementations can provide special semantics for such names. For example, the identifier _BUILTIN_abs could be used to indicate generation of in-line code for the abs function. Thus, the appropriate header could specify

#define abs(x) _BUILTIN_abs(x)

> for a compiler whose code generator will accept it.
by prmoustache | 2025-12-31 13:41:52+00:00
Ultimately hosting is not the most critical part as long as backups are stored in places other members of the projects have access to (and one copy could be in their own home, I don't think the f-droid repos have grown to be that big they can't be hosted on commodity NAS).

What is usually more critical is who has the credentials for the domain management.
by tgv | 2025-12-31 13:42:09+00:00
There are more great improvisers, in other traditions, e.g. Sietze de Vries (1), who's Dutch and improvises mainly in Northern German Baroque style (the video has an improvised fugue), and Wolfgang Seiben (2), who's German and improvises more in late Romantic/early 20th century style.

However, these improvisations differ quite a bit from theatrical improvisations. All are virtuoso, but the classical traditions emphasizes structural elements, such as a uniting theme, counter-point, and development, whereas movie accompaniment is more fragmented, and builds on common musical experience, usually popular, to evoke the right mood, and is restricted by the visuals.

Playing styles also differ quite a bit. E.g., theatre organs have all kinds of bells and whistles (literally), a complex registration system, and sometimes extra techniques such as a "second touch" which allows to play dynamic accents, which is almost impossible on church organs.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWswgz3vLaA

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62g9LT2Ezs0
by card_zero | 2025-12-31 13:43:06+00:00
OK, and my anecdote is that for forty years I used no toothpaste at all, brushed only before bed, didn't floss, never went to the dentist, and had perfect teeth. The conclusion of this limited study is: whatever.

I guess I should admit that eventually I got lazy and skipped a night, and immediately got a cavity that led to having a tooth removed, and now I use toothpaste and floss. But still, anecdotes, what are they worth.
by fuzzfactor | 2025-12-31 13:43:39+00:00
Shelf life is one of the major factors allowing treatment more similar to nonperishable commodities.

I think some people do instinctively feel like all different kinds of software have different shelf lives or useful lifetimes for different reasons.

But there's always so much noise it's not very easy to get the expiration date correct.

Mass production is pretty much a given when it comes to commodities, and things like long shelf life are icing on the cake.

The inversion comes when mass production makes the highly processed feed more affordable than the unprocessed. After both have scaled maximally, market forces mean more than the amount of labor that was put in.

Strange indeed.
by whytevuhuni | 2025-12-31 13:46:45+00:00
Not quite, because depending on the compiler implementation / memory model, other things can also lead to UB, and thus be unsafe, e.g.:

* data races in a multi-threaded program

* type-casting to the wrong type (e.g. via unions) with compiler optimizations that rely on proper types

* assuming values are absolutely never aliased (shared xor mutable) when there's actually a way to create aliased values (e.g. unsafe {} and raw pointers)

* creating objects out of a sequence of bytes that is not valid for their type

...and likely many others I can't remember.