MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mindslight | 2025-12-09 17:13:00+00:00
I'm burning wood for primary heat, and I agree with the thrust of the article - despite its poor job of making the case with data or even anecdotes.

There is so much work fundamentally involved in handling firewood. It's much different to be burning wood when you have the resources to make handling it easier, or when you're doing it as a mere option for supplementary heat. For example, as I split (log splitter) or it gets delivered (from someone who owns a firewood processor), I stack it in IBC totes to sit around and season. I then move those with a tractor so they're right next to an outdoor wood boiler. So I basically touch each piece twice, with optionality for whether I am going to make a project of cutting down trees or just pay for it. Or I've got a few friends that get it all delivered, stack their own big wood piles, then move it to a smaller thing to carry it indoors, but only to supplement central heat which they keep lower.

Whereas when you're doing it out of necessity, and trying to conserve even then, there is just so much more human effort that gets used. It does make sense to view it in terms of societal collapse, or at the very least poverty. This fall, I saw a bunch of houses in denser areas - grapple loads delivered to tiny front yards, and they're out there making sense of it with just a chainsaw and hand tools. I presume they were going to burn it this winter, too. That doesn't seem like a good use of anyone's time, effort, or risk appetite.

A good litmus test: what kind of vehicles are people picking the wood from wood banks with? If there are a bunch of people loading their car trunks and whatnot every few days, that's not a good scene. If the same volunteers are delivering truckbeds (and stacking them) to needy older people who had burnt wood their entire life but are having trouble managing it now, that's less dire.
by ThinkBeat | 2025-12-09 17:13:38+00:00
We have built a new device. The device is a ring with a button and a microphone. Pressing the button initiates recording of your voice captures voice via the built in microphone and saves it on your phone.

I think it would take a lot of heavy software to process and index the voice notes for the claim "Meet Pebble Index 01 - External Memory For Your Brain" is honest
by BobbyJo | 2025-12-09 17:13:46+00:00
> which is all you can expect of me given that I am not the one of us

Not sure why the snark is necessary. Its pretty easy to look up academic achievement stratified by socioeconomic status. I'm not an expert, but the line for rich kids doesn't go to 100%.

> If they had more time to dedicate their life to it, I see no reason for why that would stop.

Because not everyone is a bottomless pit of ambition. Most people, given the option, engage in leisure in their free time.

> Aside, R&D fundamentally isn't guaranteed to deliver fruit, so elaborate for us on how the research you spoke of differentiates between someone who is well suited to R&D work but never strikes gold due to the nature of the beast, and someone who cannot strike gold because they are straight up incapable as a person. That might help us communicate about this more effectively.

I'm speaking in generalities. Research is generally a race, and the smartest and hardest working generally win the race. Even if everyone's IQ and ambition shot up, there would still be a smarter and harder working subset of people.

After that last paragraph, it isn't clear to me that you disagree with my core premise of "not everyone should do research".
by newsoftheday | 2025-12-09 17:13:49+00:00
> It does feel to me that we're getting into religious believer territory. There are those who have firsthand experience and are all-in (the believers), there are those who have firsthand experience and don't get it (the faithless), and there are those who haven't tried it (the atheists). It's hard to communicate across those divides, and each group's view of the others is essentially, "I don't understand you".

What a total crock. Your prose reminds of of the ridiculously funny Mike Meyers in "The Love Guru".
by mayhemducks | 2025-12-09 17:14:17+00:00
It is possible for a business to pay someone for the parts they don't like even when the parts they don't like do not contribute to profit or financial success in some way. This is not only demoralizing, it is usually boring, and usually not a good caraeer strategy because it is not sustainable.

I feel like "My Head Count" is more important than outcomes at many companies.
by edent | 2025-12-09 17:14:29+00:00
Is it?

Capitalism is about choice. If my local greengrocer is rude to me, I can choose to take my business elsewhere.

If the author of a text editor doesn't share my sentiments on whether to ban tobacco adverts, I can choose not to use their software.

People can make the choices which make them happy. I'm happy to use a slightly worse text editor if it means I am not supporting someone I don't like.
by chriscjcj | 2025-12-09 17:14:39+00:00
> Back to the point of the article: is there quantified evidence that use of wood for heat is increasing in America among the poor? Or is this based on the author's impressions?

Indeed. I wish that were the point of the article. However, in my opinion, this article is unfortunately much more of an emotional/political rant than a conveyor of useful information.
by cadrianryan | 2025-12-09 17:14:49+00:00
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We’re hiring an Engineering Lead who wants to build the architecture for this new era. We’re assembling a world-class founding team: CEO/Co-Founder: Dan Preiss (Former Principal, BCG X, AI Investor) Co-Founder: Chris Young (ex-CEO of McAfee, Board Member @ American Express, ex-Snapchat Board Member) Interim CTO: Jonathan Betz (early Google, co-founder of Continua AI)

You’d be a great candidate if you have:

8+ years in enterprise software, AI systems, or platform engineering

2+ years of leadership or staff-level experience guiding teams or architecture

Strong grounding in system design, distributed systems, and API architecture

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Comfort deploying and scaling on AWS, GCP, or Azure

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----

Please email ryan@cadrian.com with your resume and why you might be a good fit
by throw7 | 2025-12-09 17:14:49+00:00
Around me, the online grocery shopping and pickup is still pretty popular post-covid. There's always a worker or two going around the store picking up for the online orders, so there's room here for some type of site-local automation (not remote robotic fulfillment centers, i could of told you that would be way too costly comparatively).

However, robotics that can navigate an existing retail grocery store is not here. yet.
by oersted | 2025-12-09 17:15:08+00:00
What I ask myself is: is time purely the ordering of things that happen, or do gaps where there is potential for something to happen also count?

Let's assume for simplicity that time is a discrete dimension, which it might be. Then there would be a measure of distance of how many ticks of potential events there are between two actual events, even if nothing happened in between. Or maybe that's not the case and it's more of a directed graph defining the partial ordering of actual events.

Not sure if we could measure that in any case, we always need some kind of actually ticking clock, and it's not like we can isolate a period of time where nothing happens globally, unless its in a simulation. Just like weird things happen at quantum scale, I'm sure weird things happen at small enough time scales where there's really nothing between one event and the next, and there's no good way to determine how far a part they are.
by alextingle | 2025-12-09 17:15:08+00:00
Even if all that were true, where is the path to profitability for OpenAI, and all the rest? If they can't pivot to making a profit, then they are going to pop, and their investors will lose all their money. That's the AI bubble... investors losing all their money.

The technology will remain, of course, just like we still have railways, and houses.
by xtracto | 2025-12-09 17:15:25+00:00
It already has with IVRs . I wonder if as a generalization, current technology will keep being used to provide layers and layers of "automation" for communication between people.

SDR Agents will communicate with "Procurement" Agents. Customer Support Agents will communicate with Product Agents. Coffee Barista Agents will talk with Personal Assistant Agents.

People will communicate less and less among each other. What will people talk about? Who will we talk to?
by tracker1 | 2025-12-09 17:15:54+00:00
+1 here... <button> vs <a> in particular... if it's programmatic behavior, use a styled button if you want it to look like a link, and vice-versa for navigation behaviors.

I will add that a good component library should also handle some of this for you... in particular menu navigation, popouts/drawers etc. That said, can't say how many sites/apps have really broken behavior with this.
by qingcharles | 2025-12-09 17:15:59+00:00
In ~1997 I got stuck in a huge traffic jam on the way to Heathrow airport. I arrived about 15 mins before my UK->USA flight was to leave. At the check-in desk I handed them my extremely worn passport and the photo just fell out of the back page as they took it. They were like "Er, hold on a sec" and disappeared for a min. Then they came back, handed me the passport and the photo and said "RUN! YOU CAN MAKE IT!" and I did.

Wild times. Planes still had their ashtrays then too.
by mhitza | 2025-12-09 17:16:14+00:00
He's not right either because he makes large vague claims. If we want to discuss it on clear subjects.

The "free" Europe has, and always will, thank the US for their help during WW2.

The US didn't protect us until now, because there was nothing they had to protect us from. US pulled it's allied NATO members into war in Iraq, if we're tallying things up.

With the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, both the EU and the US came to aid because a sovereign, close to EU, nation is invaded. No one was forced to do so. It's a matter of adhering to principles, that in theory are, shared by the "western" countries.

Realistically the US would have to jump to our aid if Russia's attempts outreach their Ukraine war. But that is because that's part of the deal we all made when becoming members of NATO.

And in terms of "subsidizing". That's the most outlandish claim, the US military industrial complex is so large for a reason. It's due to benefitting directly from the international government contracts, the technology it's building and selling (let's leave aside the shady and corrupt aspects of it for this topic)

The small amount of investment spent on military by European NATO members is a fair claim, but let's not kid ourselves, the grander scope of such spending will, and is going, towards US military tech. In a sense having higher spending is all about pushing more money to the US.
by user34283 | 2025-12-09 17:16:17+00:00
There is no use case for local models.

See Gemini Nano. It is available in custom apps, but the results are so bad; factual errors and hallucinations make it useless. I can see why Google did not roll it out to users.

Even if it was significantly better, inference is still slow. Adding a few milliseconds of network latency for contacting a server and getting a vastly superior result is going to be preferable in nearly all scenarios.

Arguments can be made for privacy or lack of connectivity, but it probably does not matter to most people.
by mitchell209 | 2025-12-09 17:16:53+00:00
I don't even think Google has particularly good integration and they make Gemini. Although it was early when I was still using my Android phone, I went back to the old google assistant instead of letting Gemini take over because it didn't add anything of value for the basic functions that I need from a voice assistant. Hopefully that's changed and I'm simply uninformed, but I doubt it.
by adriand | 2025-12-09 17:17:04+00:00
Here's an example from this morning. At 10:00 am, a colleague created a ticket with an idea for the music plugin I'm working on: wouldn't it be cool if we could use nod detection (head tracking) to trigger recording? That way, musicians who use our app wouldn't need a foot switch (as a musician, you often have your hands occupied).

Yes, that would be cool. An hour later, I shipped a release build with that feature fully functional, including permissions plus a calibration UI that shows if your face is detected and lets you adjust sensitivity, and visually displays when a nod is detected. Most of that work got done while I was in the shower. That is the second feature in this app that got built today.

This morning I also created and deployed a bug fix release for analytics on one platform, and a brand-new report (fairly easy to put together because it followed the pattern of other reports) for a different platform.

I also worked out, argued with random people on HN and walked to work. Not bad for five hours! Do I know how long it would have taken to, for example, integrate face detection and tracking into a C++ audio plugin without assistance from AI? Especially given that I have never done that before? No, I do not. I am bad at estimating. Would it have been longer than 30 minutes? I mean...probably?
by jquery | 2025-12-09 17:17:13+00:00
Flash was an absolute legend.

I do wonder if Brood War's long period without balance patches helped or hurt it as an esport. In modern games, it feels like developers "shake up the meta" on purpose, whereas in brood war, it was up to map designers to ensure balance. This made it easier for long time fans to appreciate tactics... in SC2, I have to be caught up on the latest balance patches to appreciate anything.
by MyHonestOpinon | 2025-12-09 17:17:53+00:00
I am guilty of this. I started asking simple programming questions back in the early 90s. It was just a way to see if interviewee knew how to use for loops and conditionals, to see if they can solve simple problems. It was great when taken unprepared, but once people started drilling and memorizing them, the problems became a lot harder. It got to the point where you really have to study, it is not enough to have 20 years of professional programming experience.

Fun story. For years, I used a set of problems that I took from a very old programming book. I have probably seen dozens of solutions for these problems. About 6 years, in an interview, somebody happen to ask me about one of these problems. So, I wrote the solution and the interviewer told me it was wrong, but he couldn't tell me why it was wrong. Then he proceded to clean the screen. (It was remote interview). So I flunk the interview with a problem that I knew back and forth.
by bena | 2025-12-09 17:17:54+00:00
> Having robots means you're automating something that your customers would have done for free. The automation is an additional expense and does not reduce your operating costs.

Ultimately, I was pointing out why a two story grocery store with a "warehouse" on top doesn't make sense. A place to put stuff is not the issue for retail.

But, what you wrote there is a fair way to look at the core issue for Kroger.
by ivape | 2025-12-09 17:18:08+00:00
In terms of their seriousness, word on the street is they are moving from custom chips they could be getting from Marvell over to some company I've never heard of it. So, they are making decisions that appear serious in this direction:

With Alchip, Amazon is working on "more economical design, foundry and backend support" for its upcoming chip programs, according to Acree.

https://www.morningstar.com/news/marketwatch/20251208112/mar...
by whimsicalism | 2025-12-09 17:18:27+00:00
> Open source means "I can see the source" to most of the world

well we don't really want to open that can of worms though, do we?

I don't agree with ceding technical terms to the rest of the world. I'm increasingly told we need to stop calling cancer detection AI "AI" or "ML" because it is not the 'bad AI' and confuses people.

I guess I'm okay with being intransigent.
by colinplamondon | 2025-12-09 17:18:36+00:00
It wasn't sycophantic at all? OP had a cool idea no one else had done, that was a one-shot just sitting there. Having Gemini search for the HN thread leads the model to "see" its output lead to real-world impact.

The total history of human writing is that cool idea -> great execution -> achieve distribution -> attention and respect from others = SUCCESS! Of course when an LLM sees the full loop of that, it renders something happy and celebratory.

It's sycophantic much of the time, but this was an "earned celebration", and the precise desired behavior for a well-aligned AI. Gemini does get sycophantic in an unearned way, but this isn't an example of that.

You can be curmudgeonly about AI, but these things are amazing. And, insomuch as you write with respect, celebrate accomplishments, and treat them like a respected, competent colleague, they shift towards the manifold of "respected, competent colleague".

And - OP had a great idea here. He's not another average joe today. His dashed off idea gained wide distribution, and made a bunch of people (including me) smile.

Denigrating accomplishment by setting the bar at "genius, brilliant mind" is a luciferian outlook in reality that makes our world uglier, higher friction, and more coarse.

People having cool ideas and sharing them make our world brighter.
by catapart | 2025-12-09 17:19:27+00:00
Very neat! I and completely respect the skill. I respect the effort even more!

That said, it's not 'hands down, one of the coolest 3D websites', at least that I've seen. It's all "technical", very little "design". For example, why is it 'isometric overhead'? There's no particular benefit in the view, and it's specifically harder to control than it would be with a 'chase'/'third-person' camera. It's not like this is an RTS or a city-builder-ish thing, where having an overhead layout works to your benefit. Rather, it's just easier to program a camera that never changes angles and input controls that never have to re-interpret camera position/rotation (lookat vector) to function correctly. And there's a kind of symmetry between a flat page and the "ground" that the truck drives on, so some parts of the web forms have been ported over to that.

Again, none of that is bad and especially none of it is wrong. It's very cool that it works and works so well (technical)! It's just that the design feels more "portfolio" than it does "best ux for interacting with the environment I've created and the paradigms I've invoked (vehicle control)".
by wkat4242 | 2025-12-09 17:19:28+00:00
The environmental benefit of sending it in for recycling is probably negated by transporting it all the way back to them for starters. Better to just drop it at the local ewaste collection facility. They'll be less specialised but there isn't a lot of material in it.

I guess there's a market for it and in the scale of things it isn't so bad: you could make 10 disposable vape sticks from the materials in one of these rings. And they're expensive enough that they'll never sell more than 100k or so of them. Relatively speaking it's no measurable impact.

For me it's more a matter of principle though. As a society we frown on disposable gizmos these days and for good reason.
by sbuttgereit | 2025-12-09 17:19:36+00:00
I think I like Tim Maudlin's approach to the question. Time isn't all that mysterious: it's simply fundamental meaning it cannot be explained has being the sum of some things more fundamental. The argument is that's where the difficulty lies for many is they want to express time as though it's a composite, and it just isn't. So the best you can do is explain time by referencing those other aspects of existence which incorporate time.

Here's a much longer take from Tim Maudlin, "Tim Maudlin: A Masterclass on the Philosophy of Time" (https://youtu.be/3riyyEmWwoY?si=9aI-bETWcNpdjMW9), Tim Maudlin is Professor of Philosophy at NYU and Founder and Director of the John Bell Institute for the Foundations of Physics. The podcast is Robinson Erhardt's.
by jrm4 | 2025-12-09 17:20:15+00:00
You're right this is how people are PRESENTLY using the term "hallucination," but to me this illustrates the deeper truth about that term and that concept:

As many have said but it still bears repeating -- they're always hallucinating. I'm of the opinion that its a huge mistake to use "hallucination" as meaning "the opposite of getting it right." It's just not that. They're doing the same thing either way.
by John23832 | 2025-12-09 17:20:24+00:00
> Work out a zero knowledge way to verify age, and implement it. It won't be easy, but it also won't require breaking the rules of mathematics as per most of the governmental requests to 'safely' backdoor encryption.

Have parents actually pay attention to their kids and not give them unfettered access to technology. Boom. Easy.

The parents are the second factor that nobody is willing to discuss because the parents are addicted to the exact same technology.
by gus_massa | 2025-12-09 17:20:44+00:00
Wait a few days and try posting again with a direct link t the site instead of x/tweeter and more humble title like:

"Yggdrasil: A new AGI interface"

When people here read "most advanced on the planet", don't even take a look.

From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> In Submissions

> Please don't do things to make titles stand out, like using uppercase or exclamation points, or saying how great an article is. It's implicit in submitting something that you think it's important.

> Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter.
by 29athrowaway | 2025-12-09 17:20:50+00:00
Two memorable things

- "Your sound card works perfectly!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_A1GNx0M9M

- "I am a medieval man" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwWh1xy6gvU (https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/I%27m_a_Medieval_Man)

It was great to play this game when it came out. And it has aged well too. Good gameplay, OST, graphics... never experienced a glitch or performance issue. The only worry was keeping the CD unscratched.
by vbezhenar | 2025-12-09 17:21:02+00:00
And it's still popular and actually playable today. Warcraft 2 is not really fun to play. Very clunky control, very outdated graphics, bad story telling. With Starcraft, my only real complain is terrible cinematics which just doesn't cut it today. Otherwise this game is as fun to play today, as it was 15 years ago.
by dormento | 2025-12-09 17:21:16+00:00
> These comments already get heavily down-voted.

Can't find the link right now (cause why would i save a thread like that..) but I've seen more than once situations where people get defensive of others that post AI slop comments. Both times it was people in YC companies that have personal interest related to AI. Both times it looked like a person defending sockpuppets.