MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Thoughts of a Neopagan / the Spirituality
by 5wizard5 | 2025-12-02 23:31:57+00:00
With the advent of the metal ages, there was a profound transformation in the very nature of human relations; copper, bronze, and iron were not only tools for forging utensils but also vehicles of a new social stratification; the earth, which had previously been a common mother and source of shared sustenance, became an object of possession and domination; those who possessed metal also possessed power, and so the inequalities that had once been barely perceptible, like gentle waves on the sea, became insurmountable mountains, with the few who held the wealth of metals rising above the many who remained chained to necessity. But it is not only metal that shapes the fate of men; ideas also change under the weight of power. spirituality, which in ancient times was a means of elevating the soul, a bridge to understanding what is eternal and divine, became a tool of control and standardization; the figures of the gods, who were once perceived as maternal and paternal figures, were distorted by those in power, and religion became a yoke for the common man. Subsequently, there was a further decline with the advent of monotheistic religions, no longer a plurality of gods reflecting the variety of actions and emotions, but a single God, absolute and sovereign, judge of actions and distant legislator. This God is no longer man's companion in his search for happiness; this God stands as a terrible and distant figure who observes from above with severity and imposes laws. Religion thus becomes an instrument of standardization, a dispenser of fear and coercion, no longer a path to freedom of the soul but an invisible chain that binds man to duty and fear.
by margorczynski | 2025-12-02 23:32:44+00:00
The problem for Google is that there is no sensible way to monetize this tech and it undercuts their main money source which is search.

On top of that the Chinese seem to be hellbent to destroy any possible moat the US companies might create by flooding the market with SOTA open-source models.

Although this tech might be good for software companies in general - it does reduce the main cost they have which is personnel. But in the long run Google will need to reinvent itself or die.
Most Agentic AI failures I've debugged turned out to be ingestion drift
by wehadit | 2025-12-02 23:33:22+00:00
Over the last few months, we’ve been working on creating an autonomous Agentic AI, and something unexpected kept showing up. I went in thinking the issues were with embeddings or the retriever, but the root cause was usually ingestion drifting upstream.

Some patterns that kept repeating: • PDFs extracting differently after a small template or export tool change • headings collapsing or shifting levels • hidden characters creeping into tokens • tables losing their structure • documents updated without being re-ingested • different converters producing slightly different text layouts

We only noticed the drift once we started diffing extraction output week-to-week and tracking token count variance. Running two extractors on the same file also revealed inconsistencies that weren’t obvious from looking at the text.

Even with pinned extractor versions, mixed-format sources (Google Docs, Word, Confluence exports, scanned PDFs) still drifted subtly over time. The retriever was doing exactly what it was told, the input data just wasn’t consistent anymore.

Curious if others have seen this. How do you keep ingestion stable in production RAG/Agentic AI systems?
by lechatonnoir | 2025-12-02 23:34:11+00:00
i think in this thread the goalposts were slowly moved. people were initially talking about success being predicted by having the excess necessary to comfortably take many shots on goal. it seems like we've granted that this $250k shot was a one-time thing.

it is true but irrelevant to the original topic that this is more money than the global poor ever see, and that this is more money that most people get to have. i don't think anyone was arguing that this represents zero privilege
by RegW | 2025-12-02 23:34:22+00:00
In my first job out of university in the 80s, I spent all one night playing Knight Lore on the Spectrum with friends. I failed to get up the next morning. My boss drove across Leeds and to bang on the door to see if I was alright. I needed that job so I stopped playing computer games.

In the 90s a later boss called me out for spending my days attached to the Slashdot firehose. I had sort-of known that it was a wasteful time sink, so I resolved to completely stop using the social media of its time, and have avoided most incarnations of it ever since (but here I am).

As a scouter working with teenagers, I feel that most kids with a supportive backgrounds will tame this beast for themselves eventually, so I hate to make hard "no phones" rules. I would rather they come to terms with this addiction for themselves. I know that some simply won't finish school without strong guidance, but delaying exposure to this might just be worse in the long term.
by mcdonje | 2025-12-02 23:35:46+00:00
Racist thought and language is everywhere. People supporting racist institutions and language are everywhere.

These days, bigots are getting their teachers thrown out of school. It just happened at OU.

Universities are dropping DEI because Trump asked them to. Many companies are acting similarly, obviously in some sectors more than others.

Ask minorities if racism and other forms of bigotry are unpopular. You'll probably get a different perspective than the one you gave me. That is unless the only minority folks you know are Clarence Thomas and Vivek Ramaswamy.
by prmoustache | 2025-12-02 23:36:38+00:00
In my case it is Fedora, only problem I had in 10 years was an nvidia driver issue after one uodate on a pro laptop I didn't choose. The only thing I had to do was reboot to the previous kernel and use that n-1 kernel for a few days until the next kernel update.

All my personal computers using intel and amd graphic cards have been faultless using same distro for the last decade.
by Brass_Hopper | 2025-12-02 23:37:40+00:00
It's interesting to see the difference in how both treat the module. It feels similar to a realm which makes me lean by default to not trusting it for untrusted code execution.

It looks like Bun also supports Shadow Realms which from my understanding was more intended for sandboxing (although I have no idea how resources are shared between a host environment and Shadow Realms, and how that might potentially differ from the node VM module).
by aftbit | 2025-12-02 23:37:59+00:00
If AI suddenly became $10k/month or even $1k/month, I would stop using it. It just doesn't provide that much value to me. If it did, I would probably find a way to use local models or some other approach to drive the cost down.

If home internet became $1k/month, I would pay it. $10k, no - I just don't have the cashflow to support that.

If I had to choose one of the three to give up, AI, home internet, or cellphone, I would give up AI. If I had to choose two, I'd give up my cell plan. Home internet is worth a ton of value and dollars to me.
by cryptonector | 2025-12-02 23:38:07+00:00
Oh GeneralString is madness. It's pre-Unicode madness. It exists because Unicode didn't exist in 1984, but people still wanted to be able to exchange text in multiple scripts, which necessitated being able to "switch codesets" in the middle. It's... yeah, it's.. it's nuts. I've _not_ implemented GeneralString, and practically no one needs to even when specs say to. E.g., in Kerberos the strings are GeneralString, but all the implementations just-send-8 and do not attempt to interpret any codeset switching escapes.
by schiffern | 2025-12-02 23:38:19+00:00
>read NASA's "The Tyranny of the Rocket Equation"

This essay by Don Petit? https://web.archive.org/web/20120503175355/https://www.nasa....

He calls for "new paradigms of operating and new technology," which is what SpaceX delivers. On-orbit refilling gives the advantage of orbital assembly without the cost of separate spaceships. Instead of Petit's "building the pyramids" Shuttle example, SpaceX is cranking out water towers.

Certainly that's a new paradigm vs the old NASA way. Don't forget that NASA was forbidden from working on depots due to a certain senator's conflict of interest.

https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/296094-nasas-space-launc...
by manmal | 2025-12-02 23:38:27+00:00
Well you can’t edit files while Xcode is building or the compiler will throw up, so I‘m wondering what you mean here. You can’t even run swift test in 2 agents at the same time, because swift serializes access for some reason.

Whenever I have more than 1 agent run Swift tests in a loop to fix things, and another one to build something, the latter will disturb the former and I need to cancel.

And then there’s a lot of work that can’t be parallelized, like complex git rebases - well you can do other things in a worktree, but good luck merging that after you‘ve changed everything in the repo. Codex is really really bad at git.
by ben_w | 2025-12-02 23:39:02+00:00
> No, the real risk here is that this technology is going to be kept behind closed doors, and monopolized by the rich and powerful, while us scrubs will only get limited access to a lobotomized and heavily censored version of it, if at all.

Given the number of leaks, deliberate publications of weights, and worldwide competition, why do you believe this?

(Even if by "lobotomised" you mean "refuses to assist with CNB weapon development").

Also, you can have more than one failure mode both be true. A protest against direct local air polution from a coal plant is still valid even though the greenhouse effect exists, and vice versa.
by simonw | 2025-12-02 23:39:02+00:00
There's a detailed description of how they were recovered here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vpNG99GhbBoLov9og/claude-4-5...

Plus these transcripts showing the chats: https://gist.github.com/Richard-Weiss/efe157692991535403bd7e...
by mkup | 2025-12-02 23:39:25+00:00
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by pembrook | 2025-12-02 23:39:31+00:00
Without going too deep on it (I used to be a fan in university as a silly youth), the tendency of the rate of profit to fall is the key aspect of Marx's crisis theory.

Basically dude thought the competition inherent in capitalism would cause all profit to be competed to zero leading to an eventual 'crisis' and collapse of the capitalist means of production.

Implicit in this assumption is the idea that the things humans need and want changes/evolves in a predictable way, and not in a chaotic/fractal/reflexive way (which is what actually happens).

An eventual static basket of desired goods would be the only mechanism by which competition ever could compete profits to zero. If the basket is dynamic/reflexive/evolving, there's constantly new gaps opening between human desires and market offerings to arbitrage for profit. You can just look at the average profit margins of S&P500 companies over time to see they are not falling.

The further we get from subsistence worries (Adam Smith's invisible hand has pulled virtually the entire globe out of living in the dirt), the more divergent and higher abstraction these wants and needs become, and hence the profit opportunities are only increasing -- which is how the economy grows (no, it's not a fixed pie, another Marxian fallacy).
by mywittyname | 2025-12-02 23:39:34+00:00
Tokens are, roughly speaking, how you pay for AI. So you can approximate revenue by multiplying tokens per year by the revenue for a token.

(6.29 10^16 tokens a year) * ($10 per 10^6 tokens)

= $6.29 10^11

= $629,000,000,000 per year in revenue

Per the article

> "It's my view that there's no way you're going to get a return on that, because $8 trillion of capex means you need roughly $800 billion of profit just to pay for the interest," he said.

$629 billion is less than $800 billion. And we are talking raw revenue (not profit). So we are already in the red.

But it gets worse, that $10 per million tokens costs is for GPT-5.1, which is one of the most expensive models. And the costs don't account for input tokens, which are usually a tenth of the costs of output tokens. And using bulk API instead of the regular one halves costs again.

Realistic revenue projections for a data center are closer to sub $1 per million tokens, $70-150 billion per year. And this is revenue only.

To make profits at current prices, the chips need to increase in performance by some factor, and power costs need to fall by another factor. The combination of these factors need to be, at minimum, like 5x, but realistically need to be 50x.
by danans | 2025-12-02 23:39:46+00:00
> Which makes me think they are getting the strategy exactly backwards

The strategy is to take an admittedly cool technology and spin a dramatic story around it to raise capital, while providing a rationale for workforce reductions. Remember that investment chases stories, not actual results (whether financial or societal).

When enough capital is there, it will be considered "too big to fail". Maybe it's already there.
by bamboozled | 2025-12-02 23:40:12+00:00
I think it's just because China makes it's money from other sources, not from AI, and from what I've read, the advantage of China killing the US's AI advantage is killing it's stock market / disrupting.

Seems like it may have a chance of working if you look at the companies highest valued on the S&P 500:

NVIDIA, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Meta Platforms, Broadcom, Alphabet (Class C),
by benjiro | 2025-12-02 23:40:13+00:00
> Well that's just dqlite.

Far from it, as now your not just dealing with network but also with raft consensus... So each write is not just a network trip, its also 2x acknowledging. And your reads go over the leader, what can mean if somebody accessed node 1 app but node 2 is the leader, well, ...

Its slower on reads and writes, then just replications that PostgreSQL does. And i do not mean async but even sync PostgreSQL will be faster.

The reason dqlite exists is because canonical needed something to synchronize their virtualization cluster (lxd), and they needed a db with raft consensus, that is a lib (as not a full blown server install like postgres). Performance was not the focus and its usage is totally different then most people needs here.
by felixfurtak | 2025-12-02 23:40:20+00:00
Good question. Salesforce does well because they provide the application layer to the data.

The WWW in the 1990s was an explosion of data. To the casual observer, the web-browser appeared to be the internet. But it wasn't and in itself could never make money (See Netscape). The internet was the data.

The people who build the infrastructure for the WWW (Worldcom, Nortel, Cisco, etc.) found the whole enterprise to be an extremely loss-making activity. Many of them failed.

Google succeeded because it provided an application layer of search that helped people to navigate the WWW and ultimately helped people make sense of it. It helped people to connect with businesses. Selling subtle advertising along the way is what made them successful.

Facebook did the same with social media. It allowed people to connect with other people and monetized that.

Over time, as they became more dominant, the advertising got less subtle and then the income really started to flow.

Salesforce is similar in that it helps businesses connect with and do business with each other. They just use a subscription model, rather than advertising. This works because the businesses that use it can see a direct link to it and their profitability.
by cycomanic | 2025-12-02 23:40:25+00:00
Some correction here. FMCW lidar does not need fiber lasers. In fact most fiber lasers are actually very difficult to frequency sweep internally. Typical lasers used in swept wavelength interferometry (which is really the same thing) are so-called external cavity lasers, which rely on photodiodes + external cavity e.g. through a wavelength selective feedback (still comparably expensive though).

Baraja selling point was AFAIK that they used a integrated swept laser source (they typically have lower coherence but you can work around that in DSP).
by RandallBrown | 2025-12-02 23:40:33+00:00
Are students really allowed to be on their phones during class at a lot of schools?

When I was in high school, we didn't have smartphones, but we had game boys, flip phones, and graphing calculators that could play games.

If we were ever caught playing with any of these things we got in trouble. That seemed sufficient at the time, but is that not the case anymore?
by ayaros | 2025-12-02 23:41:24+00:00
I've used embedded SVG images in CSS encoded as base64, and I'm not ashamed. In general, I really wish I could apply page styles and CSS3 variables to the internal CSS of SVG files. I'm sure there's a good reason why this context isn't shared, but it would be cool and useful to dynamically change the style of SVG files.

If I'm hand coding a page or writing a stylesheet, it's convenient to be able to embed things. Often, I'll embed a style tag until it grows large enough to be worthy of its own file. The same goes for scripts; it's useful to have the option if you're quickly prototyping something.
by SchemaLoad | 2025-12-02 23:41:35+00:00
It's not pricey if you are a serious business making good money. It's a huge price if you are say a part time artist just wanting somewhere to store a price list, gallery and contact form.

I'm just surprised there is nothing that fills the gap between github pages and a full hosted solution with a ton of junk you don't need. All it really needs is maybe a locally running app that can handle generating the static pages and uploading them for you.
Show HN: TrailWrightQA – local-first, AI-assisted Playwright UI testing
by marktl | 2025-12-02 23:42:06+00:00
I built TrailWrightQA to let developers, QA teams, or business-analysts generate browser UI tests without writing code. It runs locally and requires an API key from OpenAI / Gemini / or Anthropic. All test code and data remain on your machine — no external servers beyond the LLM call.

Because it’s open-source and self-hosted, each test run is free (beyond the LLM cost). That eliminates recurring per-run fees typical of many automated-testing services.

It’s rough around the edges, especially for complex UI flows — but I'm limited on dev time and so releasing it publicly in case others have similar needs or want to contribute. Feedback, pull-requests, or issue reports welcome.

Repo: https://github.com/marktl/TrailWrightQA

— Mark
by prmoustache | 2025-12-02 23:44:08+00:00
OTOH I reveived a password protected zip file at work on win11 today and I had to install 7zip because explorer couldn't present me the password dialog to extract it.

Also it is true there are features that exist but are half assed. Like virtual desktops. I use them all the time on Linux but on windows they are so inconvenient and unpractical especially if you have multiple monitors. One simole example is you can't move a window from one screen to another while also moving it from one virtual desktop to another, you have to do it in 2 pass.
by palmotea | 2025-12-02 23:44:22+00:00
> The problem with that dystopia is how those people would remain rich if nobody below them could afford their products.

That's not actually a problem with it.

For a business owner, customers and employees are actually just a means to an end (customers yield profit, which is money, which is power and control within capitalism; employees are the means of converting money to power and control).

AGI could let a select group of well-positioned business owners to skip straight to power and control. There will probably be a transition state while they suck the resources out of the rest of society by providing some product or service, but once that's done they can just use AGI to use those resources for their own ends without needing anyone else.

An economy with AGI would be a radical change from our current economy, and would work very differently.

Basically: imagine Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos owning all the vast majority of all resources of the world, made invincible by AGI drone-swarms, harnessing those resources to build whatever whim they have. Does Musk want cover New York City with massive pyramids built in his honor? AGI will demolish it, mine the needed materials, and build them for him.
by danielodievich | 2025-12-02 23:45:18+00:00
Last week there we had a customer request that landed in our support on a feature that I partially wrote and wrote a pile of public documentation on. Support engineer ran customer query through Claude (trained on our public and internal docs) and it very, very confidently made a bunch of stuff up in the response. It was quite plausible sounding and it would have been great if it worked that way, but it didn't. While explaining why it was wrong in a Slack thread with support engineer and another engineer who also worked on that feature, he ran Augment (that has full source code of the feature) which promptly and also very confidently made up more stuff (but different!). Some choice bleeding eye emojis were exchanged. I'm going to continue to use my own intelligence, thank you.
by observationist | 2025-12-02 23:45:45+00:00
Right, just saying things like that -- aren't immediately apparent unless they're pointed out to you. The extended palette of alt+123 keycodes, unicode characters, stuff like that requires "exotic" macros or keypresses to type out. Despite decades of extensive experience with writing, writing software, programming, etc, I never crossed paths with em-dashes. They were a niche thing prior to AI making them a thing. I basically thought they were a font or style choice prior to ChatGPT. Most people wouldn't have a clue unless they went through classes that specifically trained on the use of emdashes.

I like them as an AI shibboleth, though -- the antennae go up, and I pay more attention to what I'm reading when I see it, so it raises the bar for the humans that ostensibly ought to be better at writing than the rest of us.

Edit: Interesting. I tried using -- and it doesn't work for me. I'd have to go change settings somewhere, or switch the browser I'm using to elicit an em-dash. I don't think I've ever actually written one, at least intentionally, and it wasn't until today that I was even aware of hyphen-hyphen.

Edit again: I had to go into system settings and assign a compose key — after that, I can now do em-dashes. Having degrees° will be nice, too, I guess.
by skeeter2020 | 2025-12-02 23:45:49+00:00
A huge part of the above-water corporate iceberg is the people and your interactions with them, so the company does take on a proxy "emotional signature" based on with whom you interact and the context of the situation. I don't see how a computer program trained on the human knowledge corpus does anything more than parrot observed behaviours without the backing biological systems. Mirroring pretty much the opposite of genuine emotion.