MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bitwize | 2025-12-12 00:15:06+00:00
It's already the law in Brazil that online services and "terminal operating systems" must perform age verification in a secure, auditable manner. This presumably includes smartphones and computers, meaning you can't just run an arbitrary Linux distro in Brazil anymore. I expect similar laws to pass in at least a few U.S. states by 2030—places like Texas, Mississippi, Louisiana, maybe Florida...

When I say "the future is signed, verified code from bootloader to application level" I mean it will likely be backed up by force of law. No one complains about the mandatory safety features various governments require cars to come equipped with. The voices of a handful of nerds will go unheard when the law starts insisting computers come equipped with safety features also.
by godelski | 2025-12-12 00:15:13+00:00
I think you're being too conspiracy theorist here by making everything black and white.

Besides, the main problem of how difficult it is to deanonymize, not if possible.

Privacy and security both have to perfect defense. For example, there's no passwords that are unhackable. There are only passwords that cannot be hacked with our current technology, budgets, and lifetime. But you could brute force my HN password, it would just take billions of years.

The same distinction it's important here. My threat model on HN doesn't care if you need to spend millions of dollars nor thousands of hours to deanonymize me. My handle is here to discourage that and to allow me to speak more freely about certain topics. I'm not trying to hide from nation states, I'm trying to hide from my peers in AI and tech. So I can freely discuss my opinions, which includes criticizing my own community (something I think everyone should do! Be critical of the communities we associate with). And moreso I want people to consider my points on their merit alone, not on my identity nor status.

If I was trying to hide from nation states I'd do things very very differently, such as not posting on HN.

I'm not afraid of my handle being deanonymized, but I still think we should recognize the dangers of the future we are creating.

By oversimplifying you've created the position that this is a lost cause, as if we already lost and that because we lost we can't change. There are multiple fallacies here. The future has yet to be written.

If you really believe it is deterministic then what is the point to anything? To have desires it opinions? Are were just waiting to see which algorithm wins out? Or are we the algorithms playing themselves out? If it's deterministic wouldn't you be happy if the freedom algorithm won and this moment is an inflection in your programming? I guess that's impossible to say in an objective manner but I'd hope that's how it plays out
by accrual | 2025-12-12 00:15:17+00:00
Some interesting commentary:

> InfoWorld: As I understand it, JavaScript started out as Mocha, then became LiveScript and then became JavaScript when Netscape and Sun got together. But it actually has nothing to do with Java or not much to do with it, correct?

> Eich: That’s right. It was all within six months from May till December (1995) that it was Mocha and then LiveScript. And then in early December, Netscape and Sun did a license agreement and it became JavaScript. And the idea was to make it a complementary scripting language to go with Java, with the compiled language.
by cbracketdash | 2025-12-12 00:15:36+00:00
Slight tangent yet I think is quite interesting... you can try out the ARC-AGI 2 tasks by hand at this website [0] (along with other similar problem sets). Really puts into perspective the type of thinking AI is learning!

[0] https://neoneye.github.io/arc/?dataset=ARC-AGI-2
by jrm4 | 2025-12-12 00:15:43+00:00
I'll die on the proverbial hill that the absolute worst instance of this has always been GIMP, which could have perhaps eaten Adobe's lunch MANY years ago.

It was and perhaps still is, a solid competitor to Photoshop, but any unfamiliar grownup is, quite reasonably, going to never ever ever trust anything to do serious work with a name like that.
by typewithrhythm | 2025-12-12 00:15:48+00:00
Mostly it costs hundreds of millions to develop a chip; it relies on volume to recover the cost.

NVIDIA also tailor their chips to customers. It's a more scalable platform than their marketing hints at... Not to mention that they also iterate fairly quickly.

So far anyway, being on a specialised architecture is a disadvantage; it's much easier to use the advances that come from research and competitors. Unless you really think that you are ahead of the completion, and can sell some fairly inflexible solution for a while.
by lurk2 | 2025-12-12 00:15:58+00:00
> For you it is just pictures from Internets happening far far away, you never know why do they find themself being drone striked.

I’ve seen more than one begging for his life getting blown up by a grenade dropped out of the sky. The killers then post videos glorifying these executions complete with music and motion graphics.

> What anti-war actions have you done to prevent the end your life by drone striking?

I haven’t done anything, and that’s the point; there is nothing that will compel me to treat my fellow man in the way I have seen men treated in this footage.
by Joker_vD | 2025-12-12 00:16:12+00:00
Another small trick is to use a "reversed" bump allocator, that starts handing out the memory from the end with the larger addresses. Since AST structures are almost always created bottom-up, children before the parents, the root node at the very end on the return from parseProgram/parseModule/etc. function, you will end up with the AST that has most its pointers pointing forward. This means that during AST walks, you'll be going from lower addresses to the higher ones which I think is actually somewhat faster than the reverse order.
by kouru225 | 2025-12-12 00:16:38+00:00
The first iterations of the apple keyboard were perfect. They literally did everything perfectly without any notes.

Then it seems like they’re started teaching to the bottoms of the class and added a bunch of terrible decisions: Substituting touch to select instead of touch to move cursor was a genuinely awful decision that now makes typing a constant chore, and it seems like their autocorrect is overcompensating so hard that it prevents me from writing perfectly good words simply because they’re not common ones.

Side note: anyone else have moments where you can’t press delete once predictive text has shown up?
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-12-12 00:16:44+00:00
Nitpick: Correct me if wrong but I think cat is catenate not concatenate

IMHO, the best names are the ones that are easiest to type. I have read several accounts of authors choosing names for this reason

I sometimes rename other peoples' executables (cf. libraries), not the ones in the traditional UNIX userland, but the ones with goofy names.^1 I will rename them to something I find easier to type and less annoying. I create symbolic links with the original names if I think they will be required^2

With own software, I give every program a number, the source file is named according to the number and the executable name is a short prefix followed by the number. All names are the same length. I have a text file that lists what each program does if I forget

I put a description in a comment at the top of each source file as a sort of header. Then I can do something like

head src/???.l

for a list of descriptions

1. Needless to say, Arthur Whitney's software does not get renamed. No need, he gets it

2. I will also rewrite the argument parsing and "usage:" output if it annoys me

The best way to determine what a program does is to read the source. This is one reason I prefer to compile programs from source instead of using "binary packages"

I also think the names that are chosen for so-called "tech" companies are routinely quite silly, but that's another discussion
by jrowen | 2025-12-12 00:16:58+00:00
> This was a good step. But you will not admit calling it was loaded to call people who prefer legal clarity ornery?

I did not intend to call the person ornery, I was asking if it was that ornery to them to have to care about getting sued, and pay attention to license terms, basically. This is one area where I think there is a meaningful distinction between libraries and end-user products.

> Treating legal documents seriously is not just principle.

Treating them seriously is one thing, automatically dismissing anything that doesn't provide unfettered rights is another. I understand the high value of that in certain contexts, but should those have claim to all of "open source"?
by Libidinalecon | 2025-12-12 00:17:00+00:00
Totally agree. I just got a free trial month I guess to try to bring me back to chatGPT but I don't really know what to ask it to display if it is on par with Gemini.

I really have a sinking feel right now actually of what an absolute giant waste of capital all this is.

I am glad for all the venture capital behind all this to subsidize my intellectual noodlings on a super computer but my god what have we done?

This is so much fun but this doesn't feel like we are getting closer to "AGI" after using Gemini for about 100 hours or so now. The first day maybe but not now when you see how off it can still be all the time.
by SilverElfin | 2025-12-12 00:17:36+00:00
This is great. Just ten cents for a valid fake X account that passes their detection? What I want to know is how many of the racist, supremacist, meme spamming accounts on X are fake or bots, and also how coordinated they are (whether a bot or not). But I assume there’s no way to study or determine this from the outside because the Twitter APIs are gone?
by Amezarak | 2025-12-12 00:17:39+00:00
As we have seen, it is very easy to declare certain beliefs beyond contestation and any disagreement with them as insulting/inciting hate/etc.

That's why freedom of speech must entail the freedom to say things people find offensive, or there's no free communication of ideas at all. The state and ruling elites will determine that there is a set of proscribed ideas and a set of approved ideas and yours fall into the wrong set.

Banning speech and ideas also accelerates extremist - Weimar had very strong hate speech laws and prosecuted and imprisoned Nazis many many times. [1] The Nazis turned around and used the same laws on their enemies. Then the Stasi with similar motives used similar means. Suppressing speech in the name of order seems to be a German cultural value.

[1] https://www.thefire.org/news/blogs/eternally-radical-idea/wo...
by tptacek | 2025-12-12 00:17:55+00:00
Just to add real quick: there is not in fact a meaningful growing deployment of DNSSEC --- in fact, in North America and the western commercial Internet, the opposite thing is true: the number of signed zones has decreased. This is especially stark if you look at the true figure of merit, DNSSEC deployment on popular zones (take the Tranco academic research ranking of popular zones as a model):

https://dnssecmenot.fly.dev/
by estearum | 2025-12-12 00:18:24+00:00
It's not really.

If you have cheap, abundant land it makes no sense to build densely.

Look at Houston with ~zero zoning laws and ~infinite sprawl.

"A neighborhood" in a high-sprawl suburb wouldn't be able to support local mixed use amenities because even singular "neighborhoods" are gigantic enough to warrant driving across them. Once you're in the car, why would you go to the place 2min down the road instead of the far superior place 8min down the road.
by iknowstuff | 2025-12-12 00:18:26+00:00
Yes.

Linus Torvalds rips into Hellwig for blocking Rust for Linux:

https://lore.kernel.org/rust-for-linux/CAHk-=wgLbz1Bm8QhmJ4d...

The fact is, the pull request you objected to DID NOT TOUCH THE DMA LAYER AT ALL. It was literally just another user of it, in a completely separate subdirectory, that didn't change the code you maintain in _any_ way, shape, or form. I find it distressing that you are complaining about new users of your code, and then you keep bringing up these kinds of complete garbage arguments. Honestly, what you have been doing is basically saying "as a DMA maintainer I control what the DMA code is used for". And that is not how *any* of this works.

The other person who replied to you is purposefully referencing a different incident.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-12-12 00:18:52+00:00
>I care about good, tight story telling.

Agreed, wake me when that happens.

If we ever get to that point...im still ambivalent. I also get exposed to media to form community. And Ai very explicly wants to tear down communities and create a factory of slop. Even if we can get some good Ai storytelling, I'm not sure if a tree fighting the flood is enough. It's going to topple eventually as the roots get washed out

>In the case of this ad.. it’s okay?

I thought it was cute. I can nitpick, but it gave a feeling of family and community, and how you can't form that by devouring your peers.

The McDonald's ad meanwhile : "the world's going to shit, use McDonald's as your apocalypse bunker! (no loitering tho)". Heck, it feels like the kind of ad Fallout or Outer Worlds would make on an in-game TV.
by gowld | 2025-12-12 00:19:01+00:00
pty is a Pseudo TeletYpe (aka, terminal emulator). It's 50-year-old word.

ptyxis is a word based on the 'pty' base, because it's not the only pty program.

It's a nearly-unique name, which is very good for the task of "discovering what it is".
by LargoLasskhyfv | 2025-12-12 00:20:44+00:00
Edit: Actually the most logic sequence of things to configure would be to first go into System Settings -> Window Management -> Virtual Desktops and configure how much of them you want, and how they should be arranged.

Then activate and position the Pager like I described above, and after that how it presents them.

Nonetheless I'm thinking that could be more integrated, and the pager could be larger, when howering the mouse pointer over it.
by UniverseHacker | 2025-12-12 00:20:55+00:00
> Graduate students, and even post-doctoral researchers, are not the ones cited for breakthroughs from a laboratory.

What you are saying is not true- it is academic misconduct, with formal consequences, to not credit the person that did the work. Typically the grad student or postdoc that actually did the work is the first author listed on a publication, and the PI that advised and obtained funding is the last author. They both get credit for their respective roles in a very tangible way that is usually the deciding factor in career progression. They also personally both get listed on, and obtain a percentage of profits from any patents resulting from the work.

Moreover, no, researchers at a private for profit company like Google are not “academics.” They don’t need to follow strict institutional rules about fairly crediting people for their work, and they don’t need to bring in their own funding in the form of grants. An industry researcher only gets credit if their employer wishes them to, an academic is entitled to get credit for their work through formal rules.
by ryan_lane | 2025-12-12 00:20:58+00:00
You're putting Tate's views in an overly good light with the way you represent it. "traditional gender roles exist for a reason" is the very lightest possible way you can phrase his viewpoint.

He hates women, to the point of trafficking them. He's a predator and he spreads hate, and it reflects poorly on conservatives if they feel that represents their political views.
by esperent | 2025-12-12 00:21:33+00:00
Media is shared information, including text. Traditional media is created by institutions like newspapers and mass broadcast. Social media changed that so that anyone can create the information. When we write comments here, we are creating short pieces of media and sending them out to be read.

I find this conversation, about what social media is, and whether some kinds of social media can be healthy, highly interesting, important even.

I also think it's important that we on HN are aware that we're engaging in social media because any time this conversation comes up, there's lots of people saying that they don't use social media, they only use HN, which leads to feeling superior to people on other forms of social media. I don't think that's valid or healthy.

If you or I use HN for 30-60 minutes everyday and we find utility in that, there's no difference to a teenager using TikTok for the same time, we don't get to feel superior or talk about social media addiction without being aware that includes us.

Tiktok has a bad rep but it has some pretty great content too, informative, well produced. Same with YouTube.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-12-12 00:22:03+00:00
Computers are too powerful, too subversive for us citizens to have access to.

Give citizens computers and they can copy at will, making a mockery out of things like copyright, they'd wipe out entire sectors of the economy if left unchecked.

Give citizens computers and they will have cryptography which can defeat police, judges, governments, spies, militaries.

They cannot tolerate it. They will eventually lock everything down. PCs were left out because everyone is on mobile these days, not because they are opposed to locking them down. They will close the loophole if it becomes an issue. Besides, with remote attestation they can just designate those devices as untrustworthy and ban them from everything.

It's a politico-technological arms race. They make some law, we make technology that subverts it. Due to technology, they must continuously increase their own tyranny in order to enjoy the same level of control they had before. The end result is either an uncontrollable population or a totalitarian state. We're heading towards the latter. I was hoping the government's limits would be discovered along the way, some set of basic principles it'd refrain from violating in its quest for control, thereby reaching the fabled "the ideal amount of crime is non-zero" state. Turns out governments know no limits.
by keeda | 2025-12-12 00:22:06+00:00
Maybe I'm misinterpreting your point, but this makes it seem that your standard for "intelligence" is "inventing entirely new techniques"? If so, it's a bit extreme, because to a first approximation, all problem solving is combining and applying existing techniques in novel ways to new situations.

At the point that you are inventing entirely new techniques, you are usually doing groundbreaking work. Even groundbreaking work in one field is often inspired by techniques from other fields. In the limit, discovering truly new techniques often requires discovering new principles of reality to exploit, i.e. research.

As you can imagine, this is very difficult and hence rather uncommon, typically only accomplished by a handful of people in any given discipline, i.e way above the standards of the general population.

I feel like if we are holding AI to those standards, we are talking about not just AGI, but artificial super-intelligence.
by patcon | 2025-12-12 00:22:16+00:00
I suspect you're more right than wrong. I'm a strong believer in this sort of thing -- that humans are best understood as a cyborg of a biological and semiotic organism, but mostly a "language symbiont inside a host". We should perhaps understand this as the strange creature of language jumping between hosts. But I suspect we're looking at a mule of sorts: it can't reproduce properly. But this mule could destroy us if we put it to work doing the wrong things, with too much agency when it doesn't have the features that give us the right to trust our own agency as evolved creatures.

You might be interested to look into the Leiden Theory of Language[1][2]. It's been my absolutely favourite fringe theory of mind since I stumbled across the rough premise in 2018, and went looking for other angles on it.

[1] https://www.kortlandt.nl/publications/art067e.pdf

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbiosism

> Language is a mutualist symbiont and enters into a mutually beneficial relationship with its hominid host. Humans propagate language, whilst language furnishes the conceptual universe that guides and shapes the thinking of the hominid host. Language enhances the Darwinian fitness of the human species. Yet individual grammatical and lexical meanings and configurations of memes mediated by language may be either beneficial or deleterious to the biological host.

EDIT: almost forgot the best link!

Language as Organism: A Brief Introduction to the Leiden Theory of Language Evolution https://www.isw.unibe.ch/e41142/e41180/e523709/e546679/2004f...
by Yokohiii | 2025-12-12 00:22:23+00:00
I found my issue, I was creating a 256 item fixed array of a 2*uint8 struct in my code. That was enough to cause newstack calls. It now went down from varying 10% to roughly 1%. Oddly enough it didn't change the ns/op a bit. I guess some mix of workload related irrelevancy and inaccurate reporting or another oversight on my side.
by macNchz | 2025-12-12 00:23:57+00:00
A lot of my notes and tasks wind up having bits of code and sometimes large data files associated with them, so I've landed on a similar path of using plain text/org mode files, but aided by a little shell function `today` that creates-if-not-exists a new subdirectory named for the date whenever I use it:

function today() { TODAY_DIR="$HOME/today/" DATE_DIR=$(date +'%Y-%m-%d') if [ ! -d $TODAY_DIR$DATE_DIR ]; then mkdir -p $TODAY_DIR$DATE_DIR fi; echo $TODAY_DIR$DATE_DIR }

So I just do something like `emacs $(today)/tasks.org`. Easy to grep across time, copy things forward (I guess I could do with having `yesterday` and `tomorrow` as well). It's really nice to just use basic CLI tools and little scripts to manage notes and todo lists. Project specific stuff gets a subfolder name every day so it's easy enough to glob ~/today/*/{project}/....

It's a sort of landing zone for all of the miscellaneous artifacts I might deal with on a given day as well:, e.g. `wget -P $(today) https://site.net/cooldata.gzip`.