MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sunrunner | 2025-12-18 19:50:12+00:00
I’m a fan of Alan Hazelden and Draknek’s work but stating upfront that he a) wasn’t involved with the work directly but b) agreed for it to be used years ago, while then going on to write what seems to read as a light hit-piece for Blow himself, and then using that to launch into a point about how his politics and Blow’s don’t align (not relevant for puzzle game progeny) feels like more like him using the trailer for Blow’s game as a trampoline for his own personal beliefs and politics.

He also used the same thread to mention his own grant fund while not acknowledging that Thekla (Blow’s company) also has (or had at some point) a similar scheme [1]

Meanwhile the various accusations about Blow’s politics beliefs are mysteriously missing, or at least seem to be large extrapolations from other Twitter comments also not cited. Is there something in the thread I missed?

[1] https://www.gamesindustry.biz/thekla-raises-grant-money-for-...
by verdverm | 2025-12-18 19:50:51+00:00
It's not pessimism, but actual compatibility issues

like deno vs npm package ecosystems that didn't work together for many years

There are multiple AGENTS vs CLAUDE vs .github/instructions; skills vs commands; ... intermixed and inconsistent concepts, all out in the wild

When I work on a project, do all the files align? If I work in an org, where developers have agent choice, how many of these instructions and skills "distros" do I need to put (pollute?) my repo with?
by cheese_van | 2025-12-18 19:51:09+00:00
It's less dangerous but man oh man did my life improve when I quit. I now wake up refreshed, my cognition seems sharper and my sleep now generates dreams again, which I suspect is cognitively healthier. I would very much like to see improved education about the various downsides of using this less dangerous drug, as I'm sure lives would be improved by less usage and moderate recreational use instead of habitual overindulgence which was my error.
by vernrVingingIt | 2025-12-18 19:51:24+00:00
Easy; endlessly big little numbers. "Endless" until the machine runs out of real memory addresses anyway.

You all really think engineers at Samsung, nVidia, etc whose job it is to generalize software into mathematical models have not considered this?

We need a layer of abstraction, not Ruby, Python, Elixir, Rails, Perl, Linux, Windows, etc, ad nauseum, ad infinitum... each with unique and computationally expensive (energy wasting) parsing, serializing and deserializing rules.

Mitigation of climate change is a general concern for the species. Specific concerns of software developers who will die someday anyway get to take a back seat for a change.

Yes AI uses a lot of electricity but so does traditional SaaS.

Traditional SaaS will eventually be replaced with more efficient automated systems. We're in a transition period.

It's computationally efficient to just use geometry[1], which given enough memory, can be shaped to avoid collisions you are concerned with.

Your only real concern is obvious self selection driven social conservatism. "Don't disrupt me ...of all people... bro!"

[1] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/2987/1/...
by tgsovlerkhgsel | 2025-12-18 19:51:43+00:00
That actually sounds good to me.

If this place attracts violence, the company can afford bulletproof glass and an alarm button that alerts the police, and I'd rather have the unstable 1% remanded to police at the risk and cost of a rich company than to have them stab a rando on the street later.

Employee protection laws that mandate said bulletproof glass in certain situations already exist in civilized countries.
by mindcrash | 2025-12-18 19:51:50+00:00
The solution for the (as of yet) small group of people who cares about these things is very simple: community driven forks.

With the bonus that you also get a set of great (and per fork different yet handy) features.

These include:

Waterfox (Firefox) - https://www.waterfox.com/

Zen Browser (Firefox) - https://zen-browser.app/

Librewolf (Firefox) - https://librewolf.net/

Helium (Chrome/Chromium) - https://helium.computer/

Ungoogled Chromium (Chrome/Chromium) - https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium

Also as one of the major players, Vivaldi already made a stand against AI and forcefully including (agentic) AI in the web browser: https://vivaldi.com/blog/keep-exploring/. It's a Chromium based browser with a lot of nice features and deep customization options: https://vivaldi.com/
We can't measure LLM reasoning because LLMs don't inhabit a world
by kimounbo | 2025-12-18 19:51:54+00:00
I’ve been frustrated by how hard it is to even define or measure “reasoning” in current LLMs.

This post argues that the issue is structural rather than cognitive: LLMs don’t inhabit a world where statements persist, bind future behavior, or incur consequences.

I show a minimal, reproducible demo that anyone can run in a commercial LLM session. Same model, same questions — the only difference is a single “world” declaration added at the start.

With that minimal constraint, observable behavior changes immediately: - less position drift - fewer automatic reversals - more conservative judgments - refusal to exit the defined world

This does NOT claim that LLMs think, reason, or approach AGI. It only shows that without a world, reasoning-like properties are not even measurable.

Full write-up (with public session transcripts): https://medium.com/@kimounbo38/llms-dont-lack-reasoning-they-lack-a-world-0daf06fcdaeb?postPublishedType=initial
by yoavm | 2025-12-18 19:52:30+00:00
I am happy with the situation. Firefox still allows me to customize my userChrome, remove features I don't like and it even has vertical tabs. It supports uBlock origin, runs great in Android. It's a really good browser. I don't think there's a problem with complaining; What I find unfair is the reaction when Mozilla finally does the right thing.
by biophysboy | 2025-12-18 19:52:33+00:00
(Apologies to the thread..)

Its not credible: two viral lineages emerged from the market ~1 week apart before the world knew what covid was; they differ by 2 nucleotides; mutation rates are 1e-6 per base per passage; doubling time is about half a week. A group of sick animals better explains the phylogenetics w/ these constraints. Everything points against lab leak: location, timing, and genetics.
by kentm | 2025-12-18 19:52:34+00:00
> These tools are here to stay.

I don't think that these specific tools are here to stay. Categorically, yes, but I expect there to be big changes in interfaces and how they work in the next five years.

I don't think spin up time on LLM technology requires as much investment as the hype claims, nor do I think that the current methodology will be as long lived as they think. Sitting out may be detrimental in the now, but I expect that developers that do so will be able to catch up just fine.
by dxdm | 2025-12-18 19:52:40+00:00
> Most Europeans seem to be fine being under the EU where they don’t get to vote those bureaucrats in.

The political power in the EU comes from the national governments (directly and via the European commission) and the EU parliament. The members of parliament are elected. The national governments are also formed out of elected parliaments. There's also a body of administration and bureaucracy that comes out of these power structures, just like there is, by necessity, in any government ever, democratic or not.

Insinuating that this somehow equates to authoritarian forms of government appears deeply ignorant or dishonest to me.
by moralestapia | 2025-12-18 19:53:10+00:00
Uhm ... I assumed you were on Linux or OS X, if that's the case just open a terminal and paste that, I swear it's not malicious code.

Unsure where that could be if you're using Windows.

You know what would be fun to try? Give Codex full access and then ask it to delete that folder, lol.
by racl101 | 2025-12-18 19:53:17+00:00
This is weird. I viewed this blog post on Chrome and it loaded fine. But I sent the link to my fellow dev and he tried viewing it on Microsoft Edge on MacOS but the browser showed a red page with the "This site has been reported as unsafe" message by the Microsoft Defender SmartScreen.

It highlighted the domain: 'jakesaunders.dev' in the address bar in red text.
by bigyabai | 2025-12-18 19:53:30+00:00
Valve will not do this. First off, there's zero value proposition. Steam Deck, Frame and Machine all make sense as complimentary products to the Steam Storefront. Smartphones are not complimentary to Steam, Steam is complimentary to smartphones.

Secondly, the AOSP already ticks all these boxes while also supporting the apps users expect. Valve is not going to waste money tailoring SteamOS to fill a gap that an APK file could do equally as well. I understand the general disappointment with Google and Apple as smartphone vendors, but you're ignoring Valve's strategy if you're convinced that a Steam Phone is in the cards.
by cthalupa | 2025-12-18 19:54:19+00:00
Again, the entire commentary you have here is all more FYGM.

If the Native Americans had this attitude (and Europe didn't just go to war) we wouldn't be here at all. If earlier European-descendant Americans had this attitude, a huge chunk of us wouldn't be here.

People said all of the same things here that you're saying about Irish, Italian, Chinese, and many other immigrant classes over the years. None of your rhetoric is new or unique.
by socalgal2 | 2025-12-18 19:54:28+00:00
I enjoyed the Witness to a degree.

* spoiler *

I did not notice the environmental puzzles, even after the obvious one at the top of the mountain looking down. I didn't get that that wasn't a one off. Someone had to point them out. I've had other friends who also missed that. It's arguably the game's single biggest reveal / surprise. It was pretty amazing!

That said, only found maybe 20 of them and was not compelled to keep looking for all of the rest.
by rgovostes | 2025-12-18 19:54:38+00:00
Hah, in California I used to have HX.

The short plate came back to bite me: Years after I had moved to another state, an automatic license plate reader on a toll road (91 Express Lanes) in Los Angeles misread someone else's plate as mine. It was kafkaesque: My public records request for photographic evidence was blocked because, if I was correct that the offending driver was not me, the law prohibits the release of records revealing others' driving patterns.

The other plates available when I did a similar search were BO and IR. In retrospect IR wasn't a bad choice.
by tensor | 2025-12-18 19:54:48+00:00
IMO tech suffers pretty horrible title inflation. If you reach "senior" after only two years and "principle" after 5, what is left for the next 20 years? It's pretty ridiculous. But this sort of thing is really typical. The average tenure of someone in tech is probably about 2 years and each year the expectation is to see "big" career progression. Very often "When is my title going to change" is asked literally in the first year performance review.
by MarkusWandel | 2025-12-18 19:55:12+00:00
So they're finally nuking rc.local altogether.

Probably no biggie to google the necessary copypasta to launch stuff from .service files instead. Which, being custom, won't have their timeout set back to "infinity" with every update. Unlike the existing rc.local wrapper service. Which, having an infinity timeout, and sometimes deciding that whatever was launched by rc.local can't be stopped, can cause shutdown hangs.
by stopping | 2025-12-18 19:55:23+00:00
It's worth learning from people even if we deeply disagree with them, but we still have the choice to not offer them our patronage. I see nothing wrong with pointing out how prominent figures choose to exercise their influence. People should be informed about what their spending supports. I would go so far to argue that this is one of the only remaining effective ways for individuals to collectively shift the cultural needle.
by egorfine | 2025-12-18 19:55:26+00:00
Yeah, I managed a major service back in the day and I can confirm all you say is absolutely correct (except maybe #3, but that's legal).

One thing I do not understand however is why wouldn't companies offer paid appeal process perhaps with refund in case the termination decision is indeed overturned. I would gladly pay $100 to have my Apple/Google/etc account properly reviewed in order to get it back once it is inevitably flagged by yet another AI. Seems like win-win all around.
by andrenarchy | 2025-12-18 19:55:51+00:00
CEO of EMS Press here (publisher of the European Mathematical Society). Like most society publishers, we really care about our discipline(s) and want to support researchers regardless of whether they or their institution can afford an astronomical APC or subscription rates.

Good publishing costs money but there are alternatives to the established models. Since 2021 we use the Subscribe to Open (S2O) model where libraries subscribe to journals and at the beginning of each subscription year we check for each journal whether the collected revenues cover our projected costs: if they do we publish that year's content Open Access, otherwise only subscribers have access. So no fees for authors and if libraries put their money where their mouth is then also full OA and thus no barriers to reading. All journals full OA since 2024. Easy.
by tgsovlerkhgsel | 2025-12-18 19:55:53+00:00
> the judge would side with you

The judge would likely never see the case, because the legal department would make sure it gets escalated to someone who can unfuck the problem before it gets that far.

Suing companies can legitimately be the easiest way to resolve issues, especially where small claims courts exist: It turns the issue into something that they can't "resolve" (for themselves) simply by ignoring and stonewalling you, so it becomes cheaper to actually fix the issue.
by kentm | 2025-12-18 19:55:57+00:00
> Did the models from 2 years ago produce more bugs, fewer bugs or the same bugs as today's models?

Is anyone actually tracking that with a methodology not prone to fine-tuning? Specifically, I know a lot of the tests have the problem that you can train the AI to pass the test, so a higher score is not indicative of overall higher performance. I'm not actually being rhetorical here to make a point; I'm genuinely interested if anyone has derived a methodology that gives confidence behind these claims.

(Aside: Its not a huge stretch to claim that they're getting better, but it mostly seems anecdotal from this point, or using methods that have the above problem I stated)
by JeremyNT | 2025-12-18 19:56:24+00:00
Same experience here.

I see people gushing over these codex models but they seem worse than the big gpt models in my own actual use (i.e. I'll give the same prompt to gpt-5.1 and gpt-5.1-codex and codex will give me functional but weird/ugly code, whereas gpt-5.1 code is cleaner)
by mistercheph | 2025-12-18 19:56:35+00:00
Whether intentionally or unintentionally, these researchers have cultivated a public perception that the classical statues we admire looked totally ridiculous and were actually hideous. It is difficult to interpret it as unintentional, when the more absurd your reconstruction, the likelier you are to get press attention and get invited to special events at international galleries.

https://journals.openedition.org/techne/2656?lang=en

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/true-colors-1788...

https://www.npr.org/2022/07/12/1109995973/we-know-greek-stat...

https://bigthink.com/high-culture/greek-statues-painted/

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/29/the-myth-of-wh...

https://steemit.com/news/@beowulfoflegend/greek-statues-were...
by KittenInABox | 2025-12-18 19:56:44+00:00
> Men are, on average, just more willing to put in the hours of social neglect in order to become good at such things as programming, or also gaming, or whatever other fringe unsocial hobby.

It is much easier to put in the hours of gaming when you're not repeatedly called for your rape or have someone trying to stalk you or similar aggressive behaviors towards people perceived as female in these spaces. I pretended to be a woman in gaming spaces for some time just to see if these women had a point and the level of harassment I experienced is way more than even my most unmoderated cod xbox days. It's a simple voice modulator in chat.
by jonahbenton | 2025-12-18 19:56:54+00:00
Uh, irrelevant to highlight sqlite and "local first" if it assumes talking to gemini. The data does not stay on the machine. Support llama.cpp, etc.

I do like the idea of a home made book workflow but no one needs a new bookstore. There are plenty of these.

I think a related area is incorporating tts for interviews esp of older family members. Support photos and audio and have some ai magic around those. Produce a family member history. That is a pdf or richer media artifact, and does not go into any bookstore. Absolutely needs local ai in that case too.

I would pay $50 for an oss fully local authoring tool (and I do pay for others like zettlr).
by slg | 2025-12-18 19:57:00+00:00
>books that schools refuse to carry in their libraries

You are just fundamentally wrong on the facts here. This list is specifically books that were removed from libraries due to outside forces. I'm not worried about school librarians deciding that a book's content makes it unsuitable for their students. These are situations in which parents or government officials are telling the school to remove a book already present.

https://pen.org/book-bans/book-bans-frequently-asked-questio...
by kragen | 2025-12-18 19:57:41+00:00
It seems that the "covid trutherism" or "spreading covid misinformation" claim is unjustified. Here's Blow's original tweet:

> If a state entity does an oopsie in a lab, then forces its citizens to undergo an experimental treatment because of the oopsie, while suppressing news of side effects, and also denying that the oopsie is anyone's fault ... that's just abusive?

Unfortunately Blow was unwilling to come out and state his position here, relying instead on innuendo, so we have to kind of guess what he was trying to say. I interpret him as making four claims here:

1. The COVID-19 pandemic originated in a lab leak.

2. Some Chinese people were forced to accept experimental vaccinations.

3. The government of the PRC suppressed news of the side effects of the vaccines.

4. The government of the PRC worked to prevent investigations into the cause of the pandemic.

Claim #4 is plainly true; the WHO and several other countries have protested this at great length.

Claim #2 probably depends on your threshold for "experimental" and "forces". https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sinopharm_BIBP_CO... explains that emergency vaccination was available in China in July 02020, and there are plausible claims that Chinese state employees and students traveling abroad were required to take it. This was before results were in from clinical trials, which I think qualifies for most people's definition of "experimental"; the WHO wouldn't add it to its list of authorized emergency vaccines until May of the next year.

Claim #3 seems almost guaranteed to be true, but I don't have direct evidence. The government of the PRC routinely suppresses news, and there are numerous well-documented instances of this happening in connection with COVID, and there are always some subjects in clinical trials of vaccines who have major health problems such as death which may or may not be caused by the vaccine. BBIBP-CorV seems to have been, in the end, pretty safe, but it seems inconceivable that there weren't at least some news of people dying or having terrible health problems after receiving it which were deleted from Weibo or other media ("suppressed"), and that these deletions were carried out because of state policy of the PRC.

Claim #1 seems like the most debatable one, but even that isn't an open-and-shut case. At the time, the lab-leak case was fairly weak, and it certainly hasn't been proven, but it hasn't been disproven either; see https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/practically-a-book-review-r... for an extensive summary of the debate. Because of the truth of Claim #4 it seems unlikely that it will ever be disproven.

More generally, I find deplorable the polarization on partisan political grounds of fields like puzzle games, genetics, and quantum physics. Artistic development, understanding the world, and extending technology are necessarily collaborative endeavors, and rejecting Blow's games because he criticizes the Chinese government seems akin to refusing to use the Schrödinger equation because Schrödinger sexually victimized teenage girls.
by bri3d | 2025-12-18 19:57:46+00:00
Proxying from the "hot" domain (with user credentials) to a third party service is always going to be an awful idea. Why not just CNAME Mintlify to dev-docs.discord.com or something?

This is also why an `app.` or even better `tenant.` subdomain is always a good idea; it limits the blast radius of mistakes like this.
by IshKebab | 2025-12-18 19:57:46+00:00
I'm not sure I follow you but it wasn't a joke. Shell scripts are notoriously error-prone. I absolutely do not trust shell script authors to get everything right.

Also the shell isn't even "the primary interface of your OS". For Linux that's the Linux ABI, or arguably libc.

Unless you meant "human interface", in which case also no - KDE is the primary interface of my OS.
by harperlee | 2025-12-18 19:57:50+00:00
I was just speaking generally, I also don't have a side there. But for clarity, what I meant is that templates to the tune of "[subset of people with X characteristic] are more / less prone to [Y characteristic]" can construct blatantly false sentences, and also sentences that, irrespective of whether they are true (or that they are falsifiable at all, as you add), have a heavy political penalty.

I also don't think that's bad - you can say blatantly racist things with that template, and I'm ok with those things not allowed to be said in lots of contexts.
by homebrewer | 2025-12-18 19:58:06+00:00
According to Mozilla's own stats, most Firefox users do not have any extensions at all:

> Has Add-on shows the percentage of Firefox Desktop clients with user-installed add-ons.

> December 8, 2025

> 45.4%

https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/usage-behavior

Note that language packs are counted as extensions.

Some have disabled telemetry, of course, but how many? Here we can only rely on our own observations, and of all Firefox users I know, it's zero.

(I keep it enabled because I want my voice to be counted — people who have never lived in an autocracy tend to have peculiar views on this.)
by specialp | 2025-12-18 19:58:10+00:00
It is almost unanimously agreed upon that impact factor is a flawed way of assessing scientific output, and there are a lot of ideas on how this could be done better. None of them have taken hold. Publishers are mostly a reputation cartel.

Clarivate does control it because they tend to have the best citation data, but the formula is simple and could be computed by using data freely accessible in Crossref. Crossref tends to under report forward citations though due to publishers not uniformly depositing data.
by LollipopYakuza | 2025-12-18 19:58:10+00:00
That's interesting! I didn't know this could be such a barrier. Is this because of the potential impact on mental health? Or just because people wouldn't like to be publicly associated with NSFW content in any way?

While job hunting years ago, I got approached by a company running adult websites. They seemed to be pretty relaxed about it and they were multiple candidates for the position. There were advertising through LinkedIn as just any similar small business.
by tgsovlerkhgsel | 2025-12-18 19:58:11+00:00
> but it would take some time to explain exactly why not...

Not really:

"I'm churning credit cards for the rewards points. Here is the receipts where I use $10k from account A to purchase $10k worth of gift cards. Here is the statements where I deposit $10k of gift cards into account B. Here is the statement for the $10k wire from B to A. And here are the receipts for the next round of gift cards I purchased. Any further questions? I have $10k of gift cards to redeem."