MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by akashshah87 | 2025-12-08 19:30:17+00:00
>> I might be unusual in the sense that in my teens I absolutely adored Asimov as a writer of non-fiction rather than as a sci-fi author.

That's because he was only the second-best sci-fi writer but the best science writer in the world at the time [Clarke-Asimov Treaty of Park Avenue|https://sfandfantasy.co.uk/php/the-big-3.php]
by dang | 2025-12-08 19:31:01+00:00
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
by mv4 | 2025-12-08 19:31:26+00:00
What fascinates me is how someone at MSFT managed to get their own button (the Copilot) button approved. Having your own button or tab is a big deal (I remember we debated having our own shopping tab on the Instagram app while I was at Meta - and we had to abandon it when it didn't get the traction we were hoping for).

These people have a UI button AND a hardware button on actual consumer devices, and it doesn't do anything. How?
by swatcoder | 2025-12-08 19:31:28+00:00
The media ecosystem many of us had lived in included that but was not almost entirely that.

We had local newspapers, weeklies, and magazines, with local owners and editors, printing at local print shops, subsidized by local advertisers, dropped in boxes and stacked at local community hubs by local kids. Same for local radio stations and local television networks, although these had such high capital and regulation requirements that many of them were already being soaked up into larger networks more quickly.

As the online stuff emerged, we had local BBS's, and local forums and websites and blogs operated by local people, made known through the above local media channels or just through word of mouth.

Writers and editors and artists and merchants would be real people that circulated in the community, who would encounter readers/viewers/consumers face to face. Earnest small businesses that served a niche in the community could call up and get a reasonable price for an ad slot or classified listing without always having to bid in an auction against against an national brand with an effectively unlimited budget.

The last 10-20 years of the Internet, of social media and consolidation and the "Creator Economy", didn't just "scale up what we already had" -- it scaled up one small thing that we already had and displaced more or less everything else.
by skepti3 | 2025-12-08 19:31:51+00:00
Out of curiosity:

1: If you had to guess, how high is the level of complexity of rustc?

2: How do you think gccrs will fare?

3: Do you like or dislike the Rust specification that originated from Ferrocene?

4: Is it important for a systems language to have more than one full compiler for it?
by PLenz | 2025-12-08 19:32:02+00:00
It's a generalization problem. We can train LLMs that 'know' a lot of stuff in the global sense but the tasks that are interesting to people require the LLM to know a lot about you and your world in a very specific sense. The technical problem is that it's all corner cases and that's impossible to scale right now. No amount of context window is going to get you there either.
by morpheos137 | 2025-12-08 19:32:10+00:00
Thinking can not be separated from motivation. It's really simple. Humans and other organisms fundamentally think to replicate their DNA. Until AI has a similar incentive structure driving it, it won't be thinking. There is no human behavior or thought that can not be explained by evolutionary drives. It is really perplexing to me how people think "intelligence" is some kind of concrete thing that just magically emerges from a certain degree of computational complexity. I argue instead that intelligence is an adaptive behavior emerging from evolutionary drives interacting with the real world. World models are not prerequisite but consequent of such molded apparatus. Machines won't become intelligent until it is adaptive for them to do so. There is no magic just evolutionary drives and physical possibility. Our current top down approach of "pre-training" LLMs is bound to fail because it does not allow for real time emergence of adaptive behaviors such as general intelligence. Mimicking intelligence through predicting the next word is no more intelligence than a photograph of something is an actual thing. Training a combinatorial network to interpolate images and words is not the same thing as adaptive self modifying behavior in the real world of physics such as organisms engage with through the set of behaviors that we call intelligence.
by kevlened | 2025-12-08 19:32:18+00:00
Standard .env is unencrypted, while a dotenvx .env file has plaintext keys and encrypted values. Anyone with access to the repo would also need the DOTENVX_PRIVATE_KEY variable to decrypt the env file.

One key deployed to your hosts means adding new secrets doesn't take operations effort. Also, the process uses a public/private key pair, so adding a new variable doesn't expose existing variables.
by clbrmbr | 2025-12-08 19:32:28+00:00
Ofc a savings account has risk in real terms. But I assume GP was referring to risk in terms of losing principle in dollars.

There’s still some risk short of a global financial collapse where the FDIC rules are weakened, perhaps by making the $250k limit per individual for example, and then there being some bank failures. Or changing to only covering a certain % of deposits etc.
by array_key_first | 2025-12-08 19:32:36+00:00
Yes but that's a bajillion dollars you could, instead, pocket.

Walmart seems to have no problem staffing their stores with employees who can answer questions, among other things. And they actually sell real hard goods, in meat space.

Scale is a lame excuse. Yes your labor will have to scale with your customer base, that's just how a business works. That's a good thing, actually, because that's how we keep society from crumbling.
by danudey | 2025-12-08 19:32:37+00:00
Imagine a circumstance where Windows Search was as good as Apple's Spotlight, and could integrate with cloud services to index documents, browser bookmarks, web history, maybe podcasts, etc.)

Hey Copilot, where is that document I was reading about the new network diagramming software Jacob is testing out?

Or Hey Copilot, my disk is getting pretty full. What software is taking up a lot of space that I haven't used for a while? Or are there any files I can move to cloud storage to free up space?

But no, instead it's just 'we're going to take screenshots of all your windows, OCR it, and index it, so that when someone infects your machine they can see your credit card numbers and pornography habits.'
by adolph | 2025-12-08 19:32:39+00:00
At what point does Charlie Brown not kick at the ball Lucy offers?

It's been 19 years since "Microsoft Re-Designs the iPod Packaging". [0] Is the disconnect displayed in this message thread that there's always 10,000 new people discovering a fact? [1]

0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUXnJraKM3k

1. https://xkcd.com/1053/
by kart23 | 2025-12-08 19:34:41+00:00
The critiques of 'circular funding' don't really make sense to me. If you invest 20 billion and you get back 20 billion, your profit is the same. Sure your revenues look higher but investors have access to all that information and should be taking that into account, just like all the other financial data.

Michael Burry is betting against AI growth translating into real profits as a whole, not the circular funding.
by chemotaxis | 2025-12-08 19:34:45+00:00
This is not necessarily a fundamental limitation. It's a consequence of a fine-tuning process where human raters decide how "good" an answer is. They're not rating the flow of the conversation, but looking at how complete / comprehensive the answer to a one-shot question looks like. This selects for walls of overconfident text.

Another thing the vendors are selecting for is safety / PR risk. If an LLM answers to a hobby chemistry question in a matter-of-factly way, that's a disastrous PR headline in the making. If they open with several paragraphs of disclaimers or just refuse to answer, that's a win.
Ask HN: Which writing patterns make a post look LLM-generated?
by abnercoimbre | 2025-12-08 19:35:01+00:00
I read a lot of blog posts and some give off an "LLM-generated" style even if the author wrote it themselves. That is most unfortunate because I write blog posts too and don't want my readers feeling suspicious either. A few examples people flag all the time:

- Openers like "let's be real"

- Closing sections with "the bottom line"

- Too many "Not X, but Y" sentences

- Heavy use of em dashes (—)

Where might we find a reputable and up-to-date list? Do we have efforts at tracking this somewhere?

Finally, I'm not claiming we should simply avoid the whole list and call it a day. It's just helpful to be aware.
by cxr | 2025-12-08 19:35:20+00:00
> It's not impossible in literate programming. There's nothing about LP that impedes this, I do it all the time. I have a quick obvious implementation (perhaps a naive recursive solution) and throw it in to get things working. I revisit it later when I need to make that naive recursive one faster (memoization, DP, or just another algorithm all together). It's no harder than what I'd do with an ordinary approach to programming.

Do you do it as literate program, which is to say, your text first expounds on a naive solution to the problem, and then later outlines for the reader the complete solution?

Or do you write one literate program, and then update the file containing the text of your program after you realize the better solution—no different from anyone writing conventional programs—thus thwarting the fundamental promise of LP (since the "why" of changes like that—and the absence of answers to those whys—is exactly what makes it such a battle to understand unfamiliar programs).

The author is very obviously talking about the first problem. Your comments and failure to elaborate strongly suggest you're doing the latter.
by gilbetron | 2025-12-08 19:35:28+00:00
I call it the "Persistent Incompetence of Software Development", which is another perspective on estimation, focused more on expertise. A chef that cooks pizzas, cooks the same pizza over and over again and becomes amazing at it. If you are a developer that writes the same code over and over, you are terrible at software development. A good software developer should always be solving new problems, as by the nature of software, once they solve a problem, they never solve that (exact) problem again. So we are persistently incompenent.

Which is why software development can't be estimated, as well. Because it is all, as you say, novel. With infinite error bars.

At this point, I can't take anyone seriously that believes software dev can be estimated.
by freitasm | 2025-12-08 19:36:08+00:00
We have an OS security update that is only release to users of a specific hardware, once approved by their mobile operator. It may be added to vendor-specific OS versions some time later (weeks, month or never). The vendor-specific may not be approved by a telco if the vendor doesn't have a relationship with that telco.

Now think that millions of people use the same OS on many different flavours, on different hardware, on multiple operators.

What an inneficient way of doing things.
by array_key_first | 2025-12-08 19:36:30+00:00
> Why is it not already happening very often?

It is, and it will increase as it becomes more accessible.

> This is the first case I've even heard of.

That's because you're both not paying much attention and this is under-reported.

I would wager maybe a quarter of all content on the internet is bot generated. I'm not the first to propose this.

> Seems like you're already proven wrong, unless you're counting on some future change that isn't here yet?

I kind of am, notably AI both becoming better and more accessible. You're right, it might not.
by zozbot234 | 2025-12-08 19:36:39+00:00
Labor income is very important at the top end. The work a CEO performs in her superintendence of a large company generates what's economically labor income, even when paid as stock grants, options or the like. Basically all professional income (including that of devs) is labor income, not capital income.

(Besides, optimal taxation models also say that capital income should not be taxed at all, and you should concentrate "capital" taxes on sources of pure rent instead, with the rest of the burden falling on labor income and/or consumption! The intuition is that taxing invested capital is basically double taxation, since the apparent "returns" on capital are in fact wholly accounted for by time value and risk. There are important offsetting arguments, but these also become less relevant at the extreme top end of the scale.)
by danudey | 2025-12-08 19:36:50+00:00
"Move fast and break things" is fine if you're a social networking site and breaking things means people can't get their racist memes or browse marketplace for twenty minutes until you push a change.

It's less fine if the things you're breaking are your core operating systems and the office suite that makes you most of your money and it takes you months to get the relevant teams aligned to push out a fix for the bad idea your execs pushed.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-12-08 19:37:05+00:00
GP is correct; I'm not sure why CA gov is calling that a myth (it's not). However keep in mind that it's not necessarily true 100% of the time. Or at least the things it might seem to imply at first glance aren't true - the presence or absence of small quakes in a given period doesn't necessarily tell you anything useful about the future.
by dearing | 2025-12-08 19:37:10+00:00
This is where I sit too. Obviously language is an expression of thought but the Library of Babel is a great example that language without intent is just garbage. You got me thinking of reading before the internet. You'd grab a book and internalize the subject, later refining over time with more books, experiments and other forms of conversation. That journey of developing your own model is undervalued in understanding. That first book could of be absolute shit but you couldn't know that.

I've been learning more about roses lately and the amount of information on them varies so much because the world roses live in is equally varied. LLMs make for a better search engine but you still need to develop your own internal models, worse yet - if LLMs continue to be refined off of cul-de-sac conclusions then all the wisdom of the journey is lost both to the consumer and the LLM itself.
by mariusor | 2025-12-08 19:37:16+00:00
If your logical exercise includes "interacting with other people" as a criterion, it would disqualify a lot of the people that you consider to be "the fastest engine", that's why I mentioned "multiple axis".

I do not approve of DEI methods as they usually get implemented in capitalist tech companies, but the underlying idea, encourage more groups with lower representation to participate in tech is sound, and it is what I'm advocating for in this exchange.

Western tech world is biased in favour of middle-class white men due to the fact that it's made out of mostly middle-class white men. You might not agree that's a problem, but most of the world does.
by jfindper | 2025-12-08 19:37:30+00:00
>[...] there is a possible way to launch activities from the background due to a permissions bypass.

https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2025-48572

https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/base/+/...

https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/base/+/...

>"In hasAccountsOnAnyUser of DevicePolicyManagerService.java, there is a possible way to add a Device Owner after provisioning due to a logic error in the code. This could lead to local escalation of privilege with no additional execution privileges needed."

https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2025-48633

https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/base/+/...
by clemvonstengel | 2025-12-08 19:37:57+00:00
Yes, the predictions are much better for people with more hours of data in the training set. Usually, we just totally separate the train and val set, so no individual with any sessions in the train set is ever used for evals. When we instead evaluate on someone with 10+ hours in the train set, predictions get ~20-25% better.

For a given amount of data, whether you want more or less data per person really depends on what you're trying to do. The thing we want is for it to be good at zero-shot, that is, for it to decode well on people who have zero hours in the train set. So for that, we want less data per person. If instead we wanted to make it do as well as possible on one individual, then we'd want way more data from that one person. (So, e.g., when we make it into a product at first, we'll probably finetune on each user for a while)
by Xss3 | 2025-12-08 19:37:59+00:00
Am a young dev but it shocks me how few of my fellow developers actually consider tech from the ground up.

Most just say 'x has y, we can use that', even when x does a thousand other things and we only want y.

They completely skip the design phase of Y because they have X.

If you design something with actual minimal requirements, ignoring frameworks and language choices, you may end up using X to do Y, but youll at least know what your system should be doing under the hood.

The thought of designing something from scratch seems to be an alien concept these days.
by ben_w | 2025-12-08 19:38:34+00:00
> It is unrealistic and immoral to expect people to accept the invasion of their ancestral homelands as some kind of moral good

"Invasion" is somewhat of a Motte-Bailey thing.

"We're being invaded!" "Oh no, how did this happen?" "We literally invited them over to work for us" "And they turned against us?" "No, they settled down and had families" "And became a majority, with their kids working against us?" "No, not yet, we're several generations in to this and the migrants are still a minority, but a large enough minority that they stopped seeming exotic and mysterious. And when they do go into politics, they only win power if they're moderate and friendly, like the Mayor of London, where the Muslim one was pleasantly boring in comparison to his blonde white and very posh predecessor."

Doubly so as one bit of Europe is currently doing a rather more violent invasion of another bit of Europe. The agressor is theoretically Christian.

And for all that I'd be stoned in an actual Sharia Law nation for at least three distinct reasons, medieval Christian values would've burned me at the stake for those same things, and modern American Christian extremism isn't friendly to me either.
by derefr | 2025-12-08 19:39:03+00:00
Apparently Amazon is starting to do something about this. They've recently introduced two filtering toggles:

- a "Premium Brands" toggle, that seemingly filters down to just a hand-curated list of known brands per category

- a "Top Brands" toggle, that seemingly applies some heuristic to filter out listings by companies that haven't accrued enough aggregate "experience points" (some formula like "product-listing-age times product rating", per listing?) across all their listings. Which makes it actively counterproductive to create a new random six-letter fly-by-night brand for each listing, while still allowing new brands to organically "grow into" relevance.
by jph | 2025-12-08 19:39:07+00:00
Critical chain planning has a purpose for the 50%. It's not perfect-- but it's better than other ways, in my experience.

Wikipedia: "The justification for using the 50% estimates is that half of the tasks will finish early and half will finish late, so that the variance over the course of the project should be zero... Because task duration has been planned at the 50% probability duration, there is pressure on resources to complete critical chain tasks as quickly as possible, overcoming student's syndrome and Parkinson's Law."
by array_key_first | 2025-12-08 19:39:10+00:00
I think where we disagree is the "roping people in" thing.

If you're part of an organization, you're gonna be roped into their organization standards. Whether that be for behavior (no cursing on their forums), or for outreach, or whatever.

Joining the organization is optional, and if you feel, say, the python foundation doesn't align with your own beliefs, then just don't join. That's always been allowed.

As for working with people you might not want to, that's also just a part of organizations.
by aiipassword | 2025-12-08 19:39:40+00:00
Here is a list of all the sites which I have tried to make money online and which will benefit to all. Keep an eye on it as the list gets updated with new sites and apps :)

Please note that these sites will never gonna replace your employment income so take it as side hustle and spend your other time building skills, doing freelancing on Fiverr, Upwork or creating business or creating your brand using content on social media.

Also, These sites does not require much skills so everyone can do it. You just need to be good in English and have good understanding and communication skills rest you will learn by working.
by baranul | 2025-12-08 19:39:41+00:00
Mr. dang, that does not appear to be true (about restrictions), based on facts and reviewing profiles: 1) Hacker News gives the impression of specifically having restrictions against certain languages, that looks to result in bans, shadow bans, and censorship. 2) You have obvious accounts that have been strongly promoting their languages on Hacker News (with posts numbering into the thousands), for many years.

Examples of accounts using Hacker News for language and site promotion: 1) AndyKelley (Zig creator and profile promotes full throttle), 2) kristoff_it (profile clearly states he's the VP of Zig Software Foundation), 3) gingerBill (Odin creator), 4) lerno (C3 creator and numerous submissions), pcwalton (many comments about Dlang, however, submissions are very varied), etc...

Speaking of which, the number of Zig and Rust posts and submissions on Hacker News are insane (per search). Absolutely insane! Rust is not even in the top 10 of programming languages, and Zig is the lower part of the top 50 languages. It's to the extent we are left to wonder if Hacker News is financially linked to them or perhaps submissions about languages other than Zig or Rust can be quietly ghosted or treated like a bannable offense. If we submit something other than about Zig or Rust, it should not be interpreted as excessively promoting that language.

I just study about many languages (emphasis on many) and gave some opinions. Have no allegiance to any language organization. Unlike the accounts previously mentioned, who may even advertise their affiliations on their Hacker News profiles. Links I have submitted (which are few), were for and about many different languages, not just only one. Stealth censorship is something dastardly and gives the impression of a hidden approval list, and those languages not on it (and any supporters or submissions) are subject to being censored.
by kelnos | 2025-12-08 19:39:57+00:00
We can't know for sure, but my guess is that Itanium still could have failed. I could imagine an alternative universe where, even with HP-UX and WinXP running on it, no one wanted to deal with porting their application software. And its emulation of 32-bit code (both in hardware and in software) was atrocious, so running existing, unported code wouldn't really take off either.

Eventually Intel gives up after motherboard/desktop/laptop makers can't build a proper market for it. Maybe Intel then decides to go back and do something similar to what AMD did with x86_64. Maybe Intel just gives up on 64-bit and tries to convince people it's not necessary, but then starts losing market share to other companies with viable 64-bit ISAs, like IMB's POWER64 or Sun's SPARC64 or whatever.

Obviously we can't know, but I think my scenario is at least as likely as yours.