MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mensetmanusman | 2025-12-02 18:58:28+00:00
Conspiracy time.

>be Google

>watch regulators circle like vultures

>realize antitrust heat is rising faster than stock buybacks can hide

>notice a small lab called OpenAI making exotic tech and attracting political fascination

>calculate that nothing freezes regulators like an unpredictable new frontier

>decide to treat OpenAI as an accidental firebreak

>let them sprint ahead unchecked watch lawmakers panic about hypothetical robot uprisings instead of market concentration

>antitrust hearings shift from “break up the giants” to “what is AGI and should we fear it”

>Google emerges looking ancient, harmless, almost quaint

>pressure dissipates

>execute phase two: acceleration roll out model updates in compressed cycles

>flood the web with AI-powered services

>redefine “the internet” as “whatever Google’s infrastructure indexes”

>regulators exhausted from chasing OpenAI’s shadow

>Google walks back onto the throne, not by hiding power, but by reframing it as inevitability conspiracy theorists argue whether this was 5D chess or simple opportunism

>Google search trends spike for “how did this happen”

>the answer sits in plain sight:

>attention is all you need
by PrairieFire | 2025-12-02 18:58:33+00:00
agree the capital could be put to better use, however I believe the alternative is this capital wouldn't have otherwise been put to work in ways that allow it to leak to the populace at large. for some of the big investors in AI infrastructure, this is cash that was previously and likely would have otherwise been put toward stock buybacks. for many of the big investors pumping cash in, these are funds deploying the wealth of the mega rich, that again, otherwise would have been deployed in other ways that wouldn't leach down to the many that are yielding it via this AI infrastructure boom (datacenter materials, land acquisition, energy infrastructure, building trades, etc, etc)
by viraptor | 2025-12-02 18:58:49+00:00
> The continued reliance on say, COBOL, and the complete lack of those developers comes to mind.

So the irony here is that LLMs are actually going to be decent at COBOL by default. And other uncommon/esoteric codebases. For example I vibe-ported some Apple ii assembly to modern C/SDL and... it works. It's stuff that I just wouldn't even attempt at manual development speed. It may be actually an easier path than training someone to do things, as long as you have a large enough test suite or detailed enough requirements.
by quesera | 2025-12-02 18:59:24+00:00
As soon as simple, non-interpretable, facts get fleshed out into a story, you have a mythology. All story writers are fallible and often have an agenda.

Caesar was born to a wealthy family, did lots of things, led armies, wrote lots of words, crossed a river, challenged some ideas, offended some people, got killed by a mob.

Add any more detail to that, and you're building a mythology. It doesn't matter if it's true. Every single one of those "facts" has a mythology attached to it, and the whole system of stories is the Caesar mythology.

You picked Caesar, which I think is an interesting but easily-debunked choice. Any historian of the era would agree that there's an enormous mythology built around Caesar's life.

Something simpler and more recent? Would you say there's no mythology around the Kennedys or the Clintons? (There is so much mythology around those people it's hard to imagine an argument otherwise).

Anywhere there's a collective interpretation of a narrative, there's a mythology.

(It might be important that "collective interpretation of narrative" is also a reasonable definition of "history", and that any interpretation is a likely introduction of error or at least lossy compression -- which is the same thing.)
by tenacious_tuna | 2025-12-02 18:59:27+00:00
> Well now you get to read it.

Man, I wish this was true. I've given the same feedback on a colleague's clearly LLM-generated PRs. Initially I put effort into explaining why I was flagging the issues, now I just tag them with a sadface and my colleague replies "oh, cursor forgot." Clearly he isn't reading the PRs before they make it to me; so long as it's past lint and our test suite he just sends the PR.

I'd worry less if the LLMs weren't prone to modifying the preconditions of the test whenever they fail such that the tests get neutered, rather than correctly resolving the logic issues.
by TechRemarker | 2025-12-02 18:59:28+00:00
Heard all the news how Gemini 3 is passing everyone on benchmarks, so quickly tested and still find it a far cry from ChatGPT in real world use when testing questions on both platforms. But importantly the ChatGPT app experience at least for iPhone/Mac users is drastically superior vs Google which feels very Google still. So Gemini would have to be drastically better answer wise than ChatGPT to lure users from a better UI/UX experience to Gemini. But glad to see competition since certainly don't want only one winner in this race.
by asdff | 2025-12-02 18:59:30+00:00
“automate it away” ironically still requires a human in the chain to determine what to automate, how, and to maintain that automation. Whether it be derived from an ai or a systemd script or an Antikythera mechanism. Now if you leave that to seniors you just ate a big chunk of their day playing shephard to a dozen plus “automated” pipelines while they still have stuff to do outside the weeds. Now you need more seniors and pretty soon they want triple what you could pay a junior and I don’t think they are 3x more prolific if the junior is managed efficiently quite frankly.
by boznz | 2025-12-02 18:59:39+00:00
DOS was basically bare-metal programming with a few hardware and software calls thrown in. With 50 cent ARM processors these days having the power of an 80's mainframe Bare-metal on $5 dev-board is still my preferred way to go for simple projects that boot instantly and never need updates. I'm currently listening to music on a DOS MP3 player on a throwaway industrial x86 motherboard I built into an amplifier case 23 years ago.
by watermelon0 | 2025-12-02 18:59:54+00:00
Intel dropped support for older WiFi chips in the newer drivers some time ago.

After successfully installing Windows 11 and connecting to a WiFi network, Windows automatically upgraded all drivers, which resulted in WiFi not being able to detect some WiFi networks.

Solution was to manually downgrade to an older Intel driver, but figuring out the root cause took quite a while.
by gafferongames | 2025-12-02 19:00:08+00:00
I'm a professional game developer who has worked on real multiplayer first person shooters. My bar for "is this a real first person shooter" is a lot higher than yours.

My bar is, does this actually work and is it best practice for how first person shooters are made by professional game developers.

Your bar is, does it kinda look a bit like the thing that I play?

Totally different things.
by jandrese | 2025-12-02 19:00:10+00:00
That site is a bit questionable. I entered "64TB" as the answer and it was very happy to show me a bunch of servers that maxed out at 6 or 8TB. Even the one server that listed 64TB of RAM might be questionable since it's not leaving room for the OS or your applications. That said 64 TB is a gargantuan amount of data, so I'm not too worked up over it not fitting in RAM. Lord help you if you have a power outage and have to reload the data from disk.
by ayaros | 2025-12-02 19:00:10+00:00
I'm a younger millennial. I'm always seeing homeless people in my city and it's an issue that I think about on a daily basis. Couldn't we have spent the money on homeless shelters and food and other things? So many people are in poverty, they can't afford basic necessities. The world is shitty.

Yes, I know it's all capital from VC firms and investment firms and other private sources, but it's still capital. It should be spent on meeting people's basic human needs, not GPU power.

Yeah, the world is shitty, and resources aren't allocated ideally. Must it be so?
by weitendorf | 2025-12-02 19:00:16+00:00
I've been working on a hybrid protobuf ORM/generic CRUD server based on sqlite

(code at https://github.com/accretional/collector - forgive the documentation. I'm working on a container-based agent project and also trialling using agents heavily to write the individual features. It's working pretty well but the agents have been very zealous at documenting things lol).

This is my first real project using sqlite and we've hit some similarly cool benchmarks:

* 5-15ms downtime to backup a live sqlite db with a realistic amount of data for a crud db

* Capable of properly queueing hundreds of read/write operations when temporarily unavailable due to a backup

* e2e latency of basically 1ms for CRUD operations, including proto SerDe

* WAL lets us do continuous, streaming, chunked backups!

Previously I'd only worked with Postgres and Spanner. I absolutely love sqlite so far - would still use Spanner for some tasks with an infinite budget but once we get Collector to implement partitions I don't think I would ever use Postgres again.
Ask HN: How do you use AI as part of your executive function?
by ys-oh | 2025-12-02 19:00:24+00:00
I’m a non-engineer from Korea who has spent most of his life inside his own head. Lately I’ve been using GPT as a kind of external “executive function” – to help me plan, decide, and actually do things when my brain is tired or anxious.

I’m curious how other people, especially engineers or researchers, are using AI in this way: – concrete workflows or prompts you rely on every day – how you avoid over-relying on the model or losing your own judgment – any long-term effects you’ve noticed on your thinking or productivity

I recently started a public log of my experiments here: https://github.com/YS-OH-CORE/ai-observer-notes but this post is mainly to learn from others, not to promote anything.

If you’re willing to share how you actually integrate AI into your thinking and decision-making, I’d really appreciate it
Show HN: A 2mm micro-bearing ring that spins like a real fidget spinner
by xtafnuihc | 2025-12-02 19:00:28+00:00
My motivation was pretty simple: every “spinning ring” I tried felt a bit fake. They don’t actually spin — not like a real bearing. So I wanted to see if I could make one that truly does.

At the end of the day it’s still just a ring. A small, minimal piece of jewelry. But it happens to hide a tiny bearing that can hit around 800 RPM with a single flick. That contrast is what makes it fun.

The way I think about it is this: it’s like a normal-looking car that quietly turns out to fly. Nothing loud or showy — until you decide to reveal what it can actually do.

If you’ve used a good fidget spinner for focus or stress, the feeling is similar. This is basically that experience compressed into a silent, smooth, 2mm-thick ring you can wear without thinking about it.

The D20 idea grew out of that. It’s not the main point — just a side effect of the spin being clean and consistent.

The reactions have been funny. As a ring, some people say it’s “too plain.” As a fidget spinner, it’s “not extreme enough.” As a D20, it’s “not official enough.” That’s what happens when something lands between categories.

To me it’s simply a pared-down version of all three. If I wanted something louder, flashier, or more decorative, that’s easy to explore later. This first version is about getting the core idea right: a real, precise spin inside a clean 2mm ring.

Once that foundation works, the rest — styling, variants, whatever comes next — is straightforward.

Hope that gives a clearer sense of what I was trying to do.

Demo video (just the mechanism in motion): https://vimeo.com/1139679503 More Info: https://spinity.co/
by camel-cdr | 2025-12-02 19:00:35+00:00
> Can you explain to me why, exactly, would you ever make jal take a register operand, instead of using a fixed link register and putting the spare bits into the address immediate?

AFAIK, the reason RISC-V supports alternative link registers is that it allows for efficient -msave-restore, keeps the encoding orthogonal to LUI/AUPIC and using the smaller immediate didn't impact codegen much.
by chermi | 2025-12-02 19:00:50+00:00
Your point about being both an investment and an expectation is important. It's a kind of perverse system. I have no idea how to solve it and I haven't heard any answer besides build more housing. I'll take that as the best answer until I hear more ideas. But even that is untenable because everyone who already owns a home blocks new builds. I don't understand why either in most cases given new development typically raises value of proximal real estate.
by andersmurphy | 2025-12-02 19:01:16+00:00
Paradoxically, raw throughput matters a lot more if you are going to scale on a single box. SQLite is 10x PG on a single box in this example. Considering databases tend to be the bottle neck that can take you an order of magnitude further. PG on the same server will also be slower the more complex the transaction as unix sockets are still going to be considerably slower than a function call.

The other thing to point out is in this article is that the PG network example CANNOT scale horizontally due to the power law. You can throw a super cluster at the problem and still fundamentally do around 1000 TPS.
by skybrian | 2025-12-02 19:01:40+00:00
I’ve been using Deno too. Although npm support has improved and it’s fine for me, I think Deno has more of a “rewrite the world” philosophy. For example, they created their own package registry [1] and their own web framework [2]. Bun seems much more focused on preexisting JavaScript projects.

[1] https://jsr.io/ [2] https://fresh.deno.dev/
by ceejayoz | 2025-12-02 19:02:05+00:00
> Why would heavy users of health services be concentrated in the minority cohort that is dissatisfied with their insurance?

"Why would people who drive a lot care the most about gas prices?"

The more you use health insurance, the more chances you have to run into the kafkaesque bits. Someone who sees a GP once a year and thinks their premium is $50/month because that's the bit they have to chip in while their employer covers the rest is largely gonna go "this is fine!"
by mikepurvis | 2025-12-02 19:02:23+00:00
Oh I can totally understand the impulse on that score. I guess going the way you have at the very least gets you out of some of the annoying handoffs of data between the two worlds, for example putting nix attrsets through toJSON so that they can be picked up on the Python side as template-fill variables.

The ROS 1 world was full of this kind of thing for getting values between Python and CMake and it's truly gross, eg: https://github.com/ros/catkin/blob/noetic-devel/cmake/templa...
by dadoum | 2025-12-02 19:02:49+00:00
I had a Lenovo Thinkpad L14 Gen [the one with AMD Ryzen 5000 series], and in terms of build quality all I can say is that it's already dead due to motherboard flex (or rather, it can boot but resting my palms below the keyboard gives it a seizure).

So I would never recommend that one, but reportedly this is common among the "low-end" ThinkPads (mine was at around a thousand euros).
by SkiFire13 | 2025-12-02 19:03:01+00:00
The function coloring problem actually comes up when you implement the async part using stackless coroutines (e.g. in Rust) or callbacks (e.g. in Javascript).

Zig's new I/O does neither of those for now, so hence why it doesn't suffer from it, but at the same time it didn't "solve" the problem, it just sidestepped it by providing an implementation that has similar features but not exactly the same tradeoffs.
by gapan | 2025-12-02 19:03:07+00:00
GPT-OSS 120B: "Yes—the next calendar year after 2025 is 2026."

Good.

LLama 4 Scout: "To determine if 2026 is next year, we need to consider the current year. As of my knowledge cutoff, the current year is 2024.

If we assume the current year is 2024, then:

2025 would be next year. 2026 would be the year after next.

However, if the current year is 2025, then:

2026 would indeed be next year.

Could you please clarify or provide the current year for a more accurate response?"

Me: this is year 2025

LLama 4 Scout: "With 2025 being the current year, that means:

2026 is indeed next year.

So, the answer is yes, 2026 is next year."

Fair enough.

Llama 3.1 8b: "No, 2024 is the current year. 2026 will be two years from now."

That was expected.

Qwen 3 32b: "No, 2026 is not next year. Here's the breakdown:

Current year: 2023 Next year: 2024 The year after that: 2025 2026 will occur two years after 2024.

So, 2026 is two years away from the current date (October 2023). Let me know if you meant something else by "next year"! "

I wasn't expecting that.
by krig | 2025-12-02 19:03:16+00:00
This announcement made me check in on the arbitrary code execution bug I reported that the Bun Claude bot created a PR for about 3 weeks ago:

https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/24578

So far, someone from the bun team has left a bunch of comments like

> Poor quality code

...and all the tests still seem to be failing. I looked through the code that the bot had generated and to me (who to be fair is not familiar with the bun codebase) it looks like total dogshit.

But hey, maybe it'll get there eventually. I don't envy "taylordotfish" and the other bot-herders working at Oven though, and I hope they get a nice payout as part of this sale.
by xhrpost | 2025-12-02 19:03:19+00:00
> AI means that those 'easy' tasks can be automated away, so there's less immediate value in hiring a new grad.

Not disagreeing that this is happening in the industry but it still feels like a missed opportunity to not hire juniors. Not only do you have the upcoming skill gap as you mention, but someone needs to instruct AI to do these menial/easy tasks. Perhaps it's only my opinion but I think it would be prudent to instead see this as just having junior engineers who can get more menial tasks done, instead of expecting to add it to the senior dev workflow at zero cost to output.
by adi_kurian | 2025-12-02 19:03:45+00:00
Good article though rather than philosphizing about lost souls, we probably should go back to the future.

Pen-and-paper exams only. No take-home essays or assignments. Assessments done in person under supervision. No devices in class. Heavily reduced remote learning or online coursework. Coursework redesigned so that any out-of-class work is explicitly AI-collaborative. Frequent low-stakes in-class writing to verify student voice and baseline ability. And when resources permit have oral exams and presentations as a means of assessment.

We did this for decades when tuition was a fraction of today's cost. Any argument that we can't return to basics is bollocks.

If you're trying to hawk education for $$$$$$, probably need to offer some actual human instruction, not Zoom and Discord sessions that anyone could run from their bedroom.

If they can't, then the rot and capture really is as bad as this makes out, and to update Will Hunting: the kids might as well save $150k and get their learning for $20/month on ChatGPT.
by d3Xt3r | 2025-12-02 19:03:47+00:00
> Windows 10 has some really weird UI quirks.

Oh boy, wait till you see Windows 11's UI quriks.. They butchered the taskbar and replaced it with some cheap (presumably AI coded) imitation.

Firstly, you can't move it to the top or sides. Okay, bottom taskbar I can live with.. but if you enable small icons and show all names - like how it used to be back in the day - it doesn't shrink the taskbar's height, so it ends up looking weirdly out-of-proportion. Even more weirder is this inexplicable blank space to the far-right (between the tray and where the taskbar buttons end), this space refuses to be used up even if my taskbar is full - sometime this space just expands for no reason, reducing the space available for the taskbar buttons by almost 50%! So 50% of the taskbar is blank, and the remaining buttons shrink and get shoved into the tiny tray overflow space, thereby almost killing the whole point of the taskbar. It's like, they don't want you to use the old title view any more and want to force you to use the icon-only, centered-taskbar...
by pseudosavant | 2025-12-02 19:03:57+00:00
Honestly, that is an understatement. `uv run` has transformed how I use Python since 99% of the time I don't need to setup or manage an environment and dependencies. A have tons of one-off Python scripts (with their dependencies in PEP 723 metadata at the top of the file) that just work with `uv run`.

I get how it might not be as useful in a production deployment where the system/container will be setup just for that Python service, but for less structured use-cases, `uv` is a silver bullet.
by NateShenner | 2025-12-02 19:04:12+00:00
Hello HN,

I built a simple PWA to solve a specific problem I have on weekends: cooking large cuts of meat (Brisket/Pork Shoulder) that require 12+ hour cook times and have non-linear heating curves.

The Problem: Planning those lengthy cooks. Knowing when you should expect to light, wrap and pull is something i didn't want to think about.

The Solution: I built a backward-chaining calculator. You input the target eating time, and it calculates the entry points for "Light Fire," "Wrap," and "Pull" based on the meat weight and cooking temp. I also included a logbook for a quick reference when wanting to reproduce those perfect cooks.

The Stack:

Frontend: React + Vite + TypeScript (Tailwind for UI)

Backend: Firebase (Auth & Firestore) for the logbook persistence

Hosting: Netlify

The Logic: It applies different time-per-pound coefficients based on the ambient smoker temp (225°F vs 275°F) and suggests rest periods (e.g., 1-hour minimum for Brisket) to ensure quality.

It works offline (PWA) which is helpful when I'm in the backyard away from WiFi.

Would love feedback on the UI responsiveness or any edge cases you find in the scheduling logic. This should be taken as an estimate and a guide and I will continue to improve the algorithm.
by amrocha | 2025-12-02 19:04:27+00:00
I think this is a situation where you can’t have your cake and eat it too.

Network effects mean that the more people are in the office the better. On the other hand, if even a single team member is remote then the entire team must adapt to that. If half the team is remote then I might as well stay home too.

I don’t want to have an office to go into. If that was the issue I could just get a shared office to work from.

I want to work at a company where most of my direct coworkers come to the office regularly.

I should get to have that. Not every company needs to be a remote or a flex company. If you don’t like RTO you can quit. Likewise for me, I’m not too happy with my current office situation, so I’m looking for a new job.
by buellerbueller | 2025-12-02 19:04:38+00:00
The other responders have it: forego the "networking" apps like LinkeIn. (It's really just a graph analysis tool for salespeople.). Do thinks with actual face-to-face connection. That's what will make you stand out.

If you are a new grad: go to alumni events. Go to alumni events! GO TO ALUMNI EVENTS.

If you are still in school: talk to your alumni and career office; they will be able to connect you better.

If you are in High School: consider a university with a co-op program.

The value of fact-to-face connection should not be underestimated.

Again: this may be uncomfortable for some people, but it is the way of the world.