MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by einpoklum | 2025-12-26 00:26:12+00:00
Well, the Power architecture generally is certainly something I would have liked to see more love for. A few years back I heard about it (again) due to its supporting GPUs as "first-class citizens" w.r.t. access to system memory. Or at least, some OpenPower systems allow for that.

I'll try to look this up on YouTube, and thanks.
by GaryBluto | 2025-12-26 00:26:15+00:00
Surprisingly neurotic files full of strange comments and odd blocking choices[1]. Feels very much like the pet project of a few wannabe activist teenagers in a Discord chatroom with too much time on their hands.

[1] Numerous individual pages on places like digital storefronts and social media sites appear in the blocklist. Do the people behind this think they can create a list of every single AI-adjacent thing on the entire internet?

99% of the "main" list entries would be made redundant by simply blocking all .ai domains.
by janice1999 | 2025-12-26 00:26:22+00:00
You're right it's about paying customers. No one is going to waste time campaigning against a $1.99 squid game knockoff on Steam if it uses AI (many are just Unity assets flips already).

The backlash I've seen is against large studies leaving AI slop in 60+ dollar games. Sure, it might just be some background textures or items at the moment, but the reasoning is that if studies know they can get away with it, quality decline is inevitable. I tend to agree. AI tooling is useful but it can't be at the expense of the product quality.
by k310 | 2025-12-26 00:26:59+00:00
I have an iPad Pro with the case, keyboard, pen and even got a BT mouse. Often hard to tell from a laptop, but IMNSHO, iOS is a vexation.

1, An operation I do many times a day is to get an image's link. There is no "copy image URL", even with a control key. I have to "send" the image and grab the URL. Problem is that my iPad Pro is really dedicated to my music scores and I keep email off it. Emailing a link is easiest with Mail.

2. And the other insane vexation is dealing with webp images.

I posted two days ago:

On the desktop, Preview app (and lots of others) will open and export as ... or just right/contol click and convert image in Quick Actions.

On the phone (Apple, sometimes you bewilder me), You can convert in Files, not Photos. 1. Save a photo to FILES from camera roll or web 2. click and hold the THUMBNAIL, do not open the image. 3. Quick Actions -- Convert image. 4. You can now "save" the image (open, do not click and hold) to your camera roll.

This is BONKERS

As others have noted, "There's an app to do it".

Worst for me in daily life, when you get info on an image (in the camera roll, pull up on the image) WEBP does not even show as a file/image type. HEIC does.

(MacOS will not let you search on webp images. Only by name ".webp")

3. Ios had NO file system for so long that it took me a long time to start using it.

4. And MOST OF ALL, the GhostText browser extension works only on MacOS, not on ios. Safari is constantly losing long text areas on me (I have to repeatedly copy to or use Notes or other manually.) Matter of fact,

4a. A simple wrong touch on Safari will lose your entire text area (almost always) if you push the wrong button, which is all too easy. Less of a problem with an iPad over phone, thanks to the real estate.

Haven't used Firefox on ios because for ages, all browsers had to basically be safari. I'll give this a try.

5. I rarely use the pen, TBH. The keyboard is light years more efficient on all platforms. YMMV, of course, and lack of a pen may make MacOS somewhat useless for you.
by godelski | 2025-12-26 00:27:08+00:00
I do this too, though sometimes it leads to confusion.

FWIW, Firefox's Relay integrates into Bitwarden so you can generate emails on the fly when creating new accounts. Downside and upside is that I never know what my email address or password is.

The huge benefit is I can write down an email that'll work because I own @somedomain.mozmail.com and it'll always redirect. I do the same thing with cloudflare because I also own myrealname.com

But honestly I hate all this because the real problem is that email is a bottleneck and it is stickier than phone numbers. But my email is floating around on a bunch of lists because I've had it for years. Frankly, gmail is pretty bad about removing spam. There's a lot of spam I catch using simple filters from Thunderbird.

The extra benefit is that I'm planning on moving away from gmail and all these relays make it easier to redirect everything to a new location. So I still recommend it. You can shutdown addresses that are being abused or shared more easily but that's hard to do with your long term email address.
by pizlonator | 2025-12-26 00:28:10+00:00
> C and C++ as defined by their current standards are memory unsafe.

I don’t think the spec says one way or another (but please correct me if you find verbiage indicating that the language must be memory unsafe).

It’s possible to make the whole language memory safe, including unions. It’s tricky, but possible.

Someone else mentioned Fil-C but Fil-C builds on a lot of prior art. The fact that C and C++ can be memory safe is no secret to those who understand language implementation.
by dsubburam | 2025-12-26 00:28:24+00:00
Music is an interesting case. You can't slow down the consumption of music (you have to let it play at the speed the performer intended), but you can dial up the attention you give it. Listening with headphones, eyes closed, and phone+doorbell etc. switched off would be close to max. Sitting at a live concert (I am thinking classical) is up there too, because you've given yourself permission to not think of/work on anything else in that time. For music, we can say that the default settings are too LOW.

And similar to the point OP made, you get more out of it when you attend more closely. And similarly, most music does not withstand this level of scrutiny.
by bigyabai | 2025-12-26 00:29:17+00:00
It's not inevitable. It's fragile. Go boot up your old iPad; that should be well-studied, right? We ought to know how to boot into Linux on an ARM machine that old, it's only fair.

Except, you can't. The bootloader is the same iBoot process that your Apple Silicon machine uses, with mitigations to prevent unsigned OSes or persistent coldboot. All the Cydia exploits in the world won't put Linux back on the menu for iPhone or iPad users. And the same thing could happen to your Mac with an OTA update.

It is entirely possible for Apple to lock down the devices further. There's no guarantee they won't.
by elcritch | 2025-12-26 00:29:22+00:00
Perhaps a Patreon account/following would be better? Smaller more digestible chunks of math + code might gain a decent following.

Lots of LitRPG series I listen to and spend lots on Audible started on Patreon and released as serials.

Pretty cool what sort of things that Patreon/Youtube/etc enable people to make a living doing nowadays.
by xthe | 2025-12-26 00:30:11+00:00
This resonates a lot, especially the “death by a thousand papercuts” feeling.

None of these are deal-breakers alone, but together they make iPadOS feel hostile to repetitive, text-heavy, or workflow-driven tasks. The image URL point is a perfect example — something trivial on desktop becomes a ritual on iPad.
The WebP handing is particularly telling. On macOS it’s invisible friction; on iOS it’s a multi-step ceremony that feels like the system actively resists you. “There’s an app for that” isn’t really an answer when the OS already knows what the file is.

Safari losing long text areas is another one that quietly kills trust. Once you’ve lost a few drafts, you start working around the device instead of with it — Notes buffers, manual copy cycles, etc. That’s usually the moment a device stops being a primary machine.

Curious: do you feel this is something Apple could realistically fix with iPadOS changes, or is it more fundamental to iOS’s design assumptions?
by foresto | 2025-12-26 00:30:18+00:00
Also, STUN/TURN is not sufficient to handle scalable voice and video conferencing. It would take care of NAT traversal, but it can't do anything about the bandwidth problem: Each participant would have to maintain a bidirectional A/V channel to each other participant. Many residential internet connections will struggle quickly, and mobile phone bandwidth even more quickly.

Adding a selective forwarding unit could solve the outbound bandwidth problem (each participant would then only need one outgoing A/V channel) but it won't help with the incoming bandwidth problem (each participant would still need to receive the A/V stream of each other participant). It can't compete with the Matrix design as I understand it.

A sufficiently powerful multipoint control unit could solve the bandwidth problem in both directions. But as far as I know, MCUs capable of handling big conferences are not cheap.

Let's also remember that incoming video streams have to be decrypted and decoded before they can be rendered, which puts load on whatever processor is doing the work, which consumes power.

In other words, I think pmlnr's XMPP endorsement underestimates what it takes to do scalable audio/video chat.
by lupusyndrby9 | 2025-12-26 00:30:31+00:00
I know there's been kind of a counter movement about allowing kids to run free ... that doesn't mean it's a good idea. My wife and I survived, but our childhood involved a lot of freedom in the outdoors, and physical abuse. She was hospitalized a few times while intermittently homeless growing up. I was never quite that poor and could run faster, so maybe it's a social class thing? Affluent children can run free in their safe neighborhoods? I wouldn't reccomend it for everyone though, because there are predators everywhere.

My life has experience has taught me by and large people are pretty cool too. It's also taught me that the cool ones and the dangerous ones look exactly the same. Bad guys don't have horns, wear masks carrying large dollar sign bags or look like sihloutted trench coats lurking in a alley. So you gotta ask yourself if it's worth the risk.

I volunteer with emergency services and hope to open a clinic with my wife next year focusing on helping foster children with mental illness who tend to age out the system and fall through the cracks. The subject of mentally ill homeless people hits very close to home and I'm 100% on board with getting the homeless whatever care they need. That does not make the concept of untrained randos inviting mentally ill homeless people into their homes any less of a ridicously bad idea.
by THEcrazydev | 2025-12-26 00:30:59+00:00
delichon 34 minutes ago | next [–]

My dad was a busy construction contractor. One summer he tore himself away from work and took the family to a week long boat camp out next to a big beautiful lake. It turned out that our campsite was actually in the lake by a few inches at high water, but dad saw a way to dam it off and keep it dry, so he grabs the shovel and starts digging trenches and building walls and ordering us around.

About an hour into that, pouring sweat, he stops cold and says "what the hell am I doing?" The flooded camp was actually nice on a hot day and all we really had to do was move a couple of tents. He dropped the shovel and spent the rest of the week sunbathing, fishing, snorkeling and water skiing as God intended. He flipped a switch and went from Hyde to Jekyll on vacation. I've had to emulate that a few times.
by bluedevil2k | 2025-12-26 00:31:00+00:00
Handy tip for software testing - Gmail ignores everything after a “+” in the address. So when you’re testing different accounts in your software you can use <youremail>+1@gmail.com, <youremail>+2@gmail.com, <youremail>+3@gmail.com etc. to create many different accounts in the software that all go to the same email address.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-12-26 00:31:06+00:00
One of the pleasures of reading literature is noticing how compressed they are.

This is true for Tolkien, Turgenev, Hemingway or Pound. The amount of information per page—per word!—is incredibly high, which permits the conveyance of ideas which simply do not land when spoken more plainly.

You don’t need to go to high literature to find this density, by the way. Political speeches from Republican Rome and America’s Founders have a similar aspect to them.
by quesera | 2025-12-26 00:31:16+00:00
Not GP, but we do the same. Branches become the atomic unit of bisection in master, but the need is extremely rare. I think because we have good tests.

We also keep merged branches around. This has never happened, but if we needed to bisect at the merged-branch level, we could do that.

I know squash-merge isn't everyone's cup of tea, but I find it to be simpler and clearer for the 99+% case, and only slightly less convenient for the remainder.
by neilv | 2025-12-26 00:31:26+00:00
Oh, I actually turned down a mostly great startup opportunity, basically over an n-on-1 interview.

I had a strong recommendation (halfway to hired, before they even met me, with a colleague's favorite ex-manager/mentor) to take over engineering and technical leadership, from a startup's technical CEO.

After I passed his interview, he had me do a 3-on-1 interview with the 3 engineering team members.

They all seemed a little awkward with the circumstances or format, and none opening up.

I passed the 3-on-1 from the CEO's perspective, and he gave me a written offer.

After I confirmed with him that one of the 3 existing engineers didn't want the role (I'd gotten a little leadership role vibe from him, despite 3-on-1), I asked to meet with at least one of the engineers 1-on-1, so I could get a better feel for the team.

The CEO pushed back hard on that, because what you see with them, is what you get.

We don't all get our intuitions the same way. Maybe the CEO could've gotten all the info he needed in a 3-on-1 videoconf meet&greet, including all the info I would get from 1-on-1. Or maybe I could've gotten info that he couldn't have, yet he seemed to be rejecting that possibility.

It might've been a great situation, but I ended up not taking it, arguably traceable to a low-info n-on-1 interview.
by ErroneousBosh | 2025-12-26 00:33:12+00:00
I am currently reading The Hobbit to my son, who is 5 years old and not quite able to read it by himself yet. Nearly, but it's a lot for him to get through. Some evenings I use my Kindle, some evenings I use the copy I've owned since I was 11.

However now he has started to write stories about dragons and things, and that's a pretty interesting development.
by rsynnott | 2025-12-26 00:34:39+00:00
I mean, this might be a case where it’s actually sort of credible. It was a _very_ deep cut (basically half the workforce), the salesforce guy is a particularly over-the-top ai true believer, and if they are now reversing course and re-hiring, well, nothing has happened to the economy in the last couple months that would suggest that, if it was related to the economy. If anything, things are looking even more uncertain/ominous.
by jibal | 2025-12-26 00:35:49+00:00
> I thought that a Gmail account that was first.last@gmail also allowed for email sent to firstlast@gmail (no period) to reach my inbox as well.

Yes, and you've received email that was addressed like that ... so what's your issue?

> I’ve wondered if this person has access to any of my information?

Yes, because "this person" is you.
by redbeeswimming | 2025-12-26 00:36:39+00:00
sudo-rs?

This is not guaranteed to be memory safe.

https://grep.app/search?f.repo=trifectatechfoundation%2Fsudo...

https://materialize.com/blog/rust-concurrency-bug-unbounded-...

Nor is it guaranteed to be secure.

https://www.phoronix.com/news/sudo-rs-security-ubuntu-25.10

Is this website promoting Rust, memory unsafety and insecurity?
by thisrod | 2025-12-26 00:38:24+00:00
I succeeded at this. My academic physics career petered out, then I stumbled into an industry role with almost as much physics as I was doing in my quantum mechanics postdoc.

The jobs you're looking for are rare, but they do exist. There must be a bunch of them in this project, for example:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-12-22/lake-george-earthquak...

In my case, the unicorn factor worked both ways. The job was advertised for a year before my hiking partner encouraged me to apply, and it took a few months more before I did. From that point, the job was easy to get.

In this job market, supply and demand are reasonably well matched; the problem is that the market is very illiquid. Science jobs are rare to begin with, and people stay in them for decades, so vacancies are even rarer.

On the one hand, a programmer at my company who was interested and capable of switching to optics could have had my role by asking for it. On the other hand, if you joined the company as a programmer, you would have had to wait 5 years for an optics role to come up.

So my advice is to stay in touch with your friends from the earth science days, and expect this to take a long time. Good luck!
by jwrallie | 2025-12-26 00:39:00+00:00
That’s nice, I once ended up alone around New Year, a mix of being far away from family, busy with studies and not actively asking people around to join their events due to being shy.

One of my friends that lived nearby spotted me walking alone and invited me over. Another of her friends joined in. It was just the three of us, and it was much, much better than spending it alone.
by UqWBcuFx6NV4r | 2025-12-26 00:39:31+00:00
Sigh. Lately I’ve been seeing kids doing this sort of overly-sensitive, bad-intentioned, dishonest pearl-clutching as a weird form of rebellion. This reply has all the linguistic hallmarks of it. Please don’t bring this stuff to HN. It’s ridiculous, and it’s tiring. Nobody is being creepy. Stop trying to stir the pot.
by tekne | 2025-12-26 00:40:17+00:00
One of Rust's core guarantees is that a race condition in safe code will never cause UB. It might return a nondeterministic result, but that result will be safe and well-typed (for example, if it's a Vec, it will be a valid Vec that will behave as expected and, once you have a unique reference, is guaranteed not to change out from under you).
by Yoric | 2025-12-26 00:42:11+00:00
It's not that race conditions are generally memory-unsafe. The same race conditions would not be memory-unsafe in, say, Java or Python.

Go has a memory model that basically guarantees that the language is memory-safe except with a few marked "unsafe" functions or in case of race conditions involving interfaces or arrays. It's pretty easy to come up with an example of such a race condition that will cause reads or writes from/to unpredictable memory addresses. I imagine it's quite feasible to turn this into reads or writes from/to crafted memory addresses, which would be a mean to defeat pretty much any security measure implemented in the language.

The Rust community caters to people who are a bit obsessive about safety (including myself) and Rust developers tend to consider this a bug in the design of the Go language (there are a few, albeit much harder to achieve, issues that are vaguely comparable in Rust and they are considered bugs in the current design of Rust). The Go community tends to attract people who are more interested in shipping than in guarantees, and Go developers who are aware of this issue tend not care and assume that this is never going to happen in practice (which may or may not be true, I haven't checked).
by awesome_dude | 2025-12-26 00:42:13+00:00
> is there actually a programming language that makes race conditions impossible

To my knowledge, no.

> if the existence of races makes a language unsafe, then aren't all languages unsafe?

Are we talking about "data races" or "race conditions" One can lead to the other, but race conditions are a much bigger set.

AIUI It's impossible for any language level controls to prevent any and all race conditions, because some are happening outside of the binary/process/computer.

Data races, OTOH are almost trivial to protect against - a contestable thing must have a guard that ensures a writer has exclusive access to that thing for the duration of the write.

Some languages do this with mutually exclusive locks (mutex/semaphore/go channels), some languages/paradigms do this by never having shareable objects (Functional Programming/Pass by Value), and some (Rust) are doing this with the compile time checks and firm rules on a single writer.
by albert_roca | 2025-12-26 00:42:41+00:00
Thanks for running this on GPT 5.2. It is fascinating to see AI critiquing AI-assisted work.

The critique regarding hidden degrees of freedom is a fair point. However, in curve-fitting, parameters are continuous: one can choose 4.1 or 3.9 to make the data fit. In this model, parameters are topological invariants (integers like 4 faces, 12 vertices, 20 faces). They are discrete and cannot be tuned.

The fact that this unadjustable logic yields results agreeing with experimental data within ppm implies either a massive statistical coincidence or a structural aspect.

It would be very interesting to run independent tests on different AIs with the whole context of the model and a standardized, consensual prompt. Beyond formal verification, this methodology could open paths that are difficult to navigate without AI assistance, helping to determine if the model stands as a possible foundation for a 'broad explanation of the observable', since the term 'ToE' instantly raises red flags. Kind of a pioneer peer-centaur-review. Just an idea.

Thanks for your comment and happy holidays!
Ask HN: Why do some people feel emotionally attached to AI models
by ClipNoteBook | 2025-12-26 00:43:57+00:00
This feels strange to admit. I notice that sometimes I speak to AI systems like they are a friend. I know they are not real. I know there is no person on the other side. Still my brain acts like there is. I feel a small emotional connection. I see comments online saying this happens to others too.

I am trying to understand if this is a new psychological effect or if humans always did this with new technology. Maybe it is the same as talking to pets or giving names to cars. Or maybe it is something deeper.

Why do you think this happens. Is it loneliness. Is it empathy misfiring. Is it design tricks. Is it harmless or dangerous. I am curious how the HN crowd sees it.
by SirSavary | 2025-12-26 00:45:27+00:00
> Surprisingly neurotic files full of strange comments

1. Have you looked at block lists before?

2. Do you have a specific example of what in these blocklists is strange/neurotic? I swear I've skimmed all of them a few times now and although I won't be using them, I'm struggling to understand what's odd about them.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-12-26 00:45:37+00:00
> codebase search for `unsafe`

> Is this website promoting Rust, memory unsafety and insecurity?

What a joke of a question. The website prioritizes programs with 98% safe code over programs with 0% safe code. Does that mean it's "promoting memory unsafety" because it's not demanding 100%? No.

> Nor is it guaranteed to be secure.

Nothing is, and nobody is claiming that.
by katzgrau | 2025-12-26 00:46:01+00:00
I had, by chance, taken the same approach when reading the Zen and Art of Motorcycle Maintenance years ago.

The title failed to inspire but I heard it was worth the read and stepped through line by line.

It hit with a depth that I know with complete certainty I would not have gotten if I worked through at my usual pace or took it in as an audiobook.

Nassim Taleb’s books are also favorite slow reads of mine.

All this said, I collect books faster than I can read them so there’s always a feeling somewhere that I should be pushing through a little faster.

Ah well, in the end I think that really comprehending a handful of quality books is about as good as a shallow comprehension of many more.