MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by busyant | 2025-12-26 22:35:53+00:00
I think you're taking the comment too literally.

I took it to mean something like, "I won't understand an abstruse Ph.D.-level explanation of what happened. I need an explanation geared toward the layperson."

In fact, I think that's closer to the essence of ELI5--as opposed to literally explaining something at the 5 year old level.

I suppose you can quibble about using the initialism, ELI, but only if you're advocating for people who might be unfamiliar with its use. Otherwise, I don't understand your complaint.
by kibwen | 2025-12-26 22:36:05+00:00
> They’re not the ones bearing the cost. Customers are.

I think this is uncharitably erasing the context here.

AFAICT, the reason that Helldivers 2 was larger on disk is because they were following the standard industry practice of deliberately duplicating data in such a way as to improve locality and thereby reduce load times. In other words, this seems to have been a deliberate attempt to improve player experience, not something done out of sheer developer laziness. The fact that this attempt at optimization is obsolete these days just didn't filter down to whatever particular decision-maker was at the reins on the day this decision was made.
by hecanjog | 2025-12-26 22:36:12+00:00
It's common, I know what it means. It communicated its intent properly, I think. It's surprising to me that a venture capital finance site would need to clarify the difference between value and wealth, and I would be interested in hearing questions about this, but "ELI5" doesn't even meet the basic criteria for being a question. It asks no questions.
by pea | 2025-12-26 22:36:40+00:00
I think it makes sense given the following:

- Your brain has been trained extensively to recognize faces / people. Even very small babies can do this.

- Your brain processes a large amount of mostly noise, and sometimes mislabels noise as objects, which trends towards face-like things (see: seeing faces in clouds, people in shadows etc.) Various classes of substances make this effect more noticeable (even stimulants, including caffeine)

- The jump from that to 'elves' is largely just cultures have some form of small magical person.
by zahlman | 2025-12-26 22:37:07+00:00
It's not just about delays being "material"; waiting on the order of seconds for a venv creation (and knowing that this is because of pip bootstrapping itself, when it should just be able to install cross-environment instead of having to wait until 2022 for an ugly, limited hack to support that) is annoying.

But small efficiencies do matter; see e.g. https://danluu.com/productivity-velocity/.
by mergesort | 2025-12-26 22:37:22+00:00
Heya, author of the post here. That's a good call out because it's probably a lot!

And now that you mention it, that's also one failure case for why some people look at AI and go "this just isn't very good at coding". I'm not saying it has to be that way nor will it be that way forever, but there are absolutely a lot of people who just download Claude Code or Cursor or Codex and dive right in without any additional set up.

That's partially why I suggest people use Codex for the workshops I offer, because it provides the best results with no set up. All of these tools have a nearly unending amount of progressive disclosure because there's so much invisible configuration and best practices are changing so fast. I'm still trying not to imply that one tool is "better" than another (even if I have my preference), but more so hit on the fact that which AI tools people like is mostly about your preferred set of tradeoffs.
by kayo_20211030 | 2025-12-26 22:38:51+00:00
I used to believe that a constitution, as a statement of principles, was sufficient for a civilized, democratic, and pluralist society. I no longer believe that. I believe that only settled law - i.e. a bunch of adjudicated precedents over many years, perhaps hundreds, is the best course. It provides a better basis for what is and what is not allowed. An AI constitution is close to garbage. The 'company' will formulate it as it wills. It won't be democratic, or even friendly to the demos. We have existing constitutions, laws, precedents; why would we allow anyone to shortcut them all in the interest of simply painting a nice picture of progress?
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-12-26 22:39:16+00:00
>The concept of intellectual property on its own (independently of its legal implementation details) is at most as evil as property ownership, and probably less so as unlike the latter it promotes innovation and creativity.

This is a strange inversion. Property ownership is morally just in that the piece of land my home is can only be exclusive, not to mention necessary to a decent life. Meanwhile, intellectual property is a contrivance that was invented to promote creativity, but is subverted in ways that we're only now beginning to discover. Abolish copyright.
by mellosouls | 2025-12-26 22:39:51+00:00
My notable find this year was an author who will serve for me as a successor to le Carré as a reliable source of thoughtful spy fiction and I have a backlog of his work to look forward to, but the first for me was:

The Crocodile Hunter by Gerald Seymour

An elderly MI5 also-ran contemptuously tagged "the eternal flame" by his bumptious young colleagues shows doggedness, courage and unexpected depth as he pursues a dangerous ISIS returnee planning an attack on British soil. Unusual and riveting.
by tavavex | 2025-12-26 22:40:03+00:00
In this specific situation, it's not really a case of using an LLM to replace real interaction. No real person set out to write to Rob Pike, they just let an LLM do whatever and it had then eventually chosen to send an email to Rob Pike, among other people, based on its existing data. To me, the wrongdoing here is about the spammy pestering, because the email wasn't written by anyone and therefore isn't really expressing anything material, but it's not replacing anyone here.
by flopsamjetsam | 2025-12-26 22:41:12+00:00
Dune: re-read the first time since I was a teenager. Mostly to compare my memory of it against the films.

Foundation and Second Foundation: for much the same reason.

Both very enjoyable reads, but quite different from the modern interpretations.

"How Life Works: a users guide to the new biology" by Phillip Ball. Really extended my understanding of where biology is now.
by KPGv2 | 2025-12-26 22:41:27+00:00
> I genuinely can't understand why you suppose that has to do with the implementation language at all.

Languages that attract novice programmers (JS is an obvious one; PHP was one 20 years ago) have a higher noise to signal ratio than one that attracts intermediate and above programmers.

If you grabbed an average Assembly programmer today, and an average JavaScript programmer today, who do you think is more careful about programming? The one who needs to learn arcane shit to do basic things and then has to compile it in order to test it out, or the one who can open up Chrome's console and console.log("i love boobies")

How many embedded systems programmers suck vs full stack devs? I'm not saying full stack devs are inferior. I'm saying that more inferior coders are attracted to the latter because the barriers to entry are SO much easier to bypass.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-12-26 22:41:27+00:00
A quick note that content entering the public domain isn't any kind of a gift. It is the (long, purposefully delayed) fulfillment of an obligation to the public.

It's an obligation that has had it's terms rewritten many times since the original agreement

rewritten to always to take more from the public and
never give anything in return (to those it took from).

Copyright started out as a reasonable bargain but has evolved into a powerful force, tightly guided by exploitive, unethical principles.
by bdangubic | 2025-12-26 22:42:02+00:00
> That's partially why I suggest people use Codex for the workshops I offer, because it provides the best results with no set up.

I would do the exact opposite… If we are pitching “this shit works magically without any setup” people will expect magic and they absolutely will not get magic as there is no magic. I believe, especially if we are educators (you obviously are!!) that it is our responsibility to teach it “right” - my workshop would probably spend at least 75% of the time on the setup
by wyldfire | 2025-12-26 22:42:08+00:00
> some mechanisms to constrain the search space somewhat.

Your perspective has the unfortunate bias of being posed at the end of a long stream of evolution that happened to emerge with an intelligence far superior from other living things.

> Considering that the experiment is run at planet-scale over billions of years

It's not just planet-scale, it's universe-scale. Lots of planets conduct the experiment, ours just happens to have resulted in intelligence.

> It's hard to believe that it's truly just random "bit-flips".

Mutations introduce randomness but beneficial traits can be selected for artificially, compounding the benefits.
by locknitpicker | 2025-12-26 22:42:24+00:00
I feel this is a poor article whose main premise is patently false, and misrepresents the nature of a very crude mistake in cloud engineering: rolling out breaking changes.

As the blogger failed to identify and understand the root cause of a problem,the proposed solution also makes no sense.

The underlying issue has nothing to do with versioning cache. It has everything to do with failing to understand what a breaking change is, that pushing a breaking change to a contract does create problems, and that lack of any effective testing process will allow crude mistakes to slip into production.

To be blunt, versioning cache would not solve the problem. The blogger already stated that they failed to understand they were pushing a breaking change to the contract. If you are not changing the contract, you are not going to go through the trouble of versioning your cache too. Therefore the failure mode is not addressed and the problem is still present.

From the description, the problems were noticed when new instances failed to deserialize data saved by old instances. This spells an entirely different failure mode that the blogger failed even to understand: why is the system retaining cached data that caused the system to throw errors? If those entries were purged then the failure would be mitigated and only transient, proportional to the rollout rate. Purging the whole cache would also completely fix the issue after the full rollout. Moreover, if the cache wasn't purshed, rolling back changes wouldn't get the system back in a consistent state.
by woodruffw | 2025-12-26 22:42:28+00:00
> Given that "zero-copy" apparently means "in-memory" (a deserialized version of the data necessarily cannot be the same object as the original data), that's not even difficult to do with the Python standard library

This is not what zero-copy means. Here's a working definition[1].

Specifically, it's not just about keeping things in memory; copying in memory is normal. The goal is to not make copies (or more precisely, what Rust would call "clones"), but to instead convey the original representation/views of that representation through the program's lifecycle where feasible.

> a deserialized version of the data necessarily cannot be the same object as the original data

rust-asn1 would be an example of a Rust library that doesn't make any copies of data unless you explicitly ask it to. When you load e.g. a Utf8String[2] in rust-asn1, you get a view into the original input buffer, not an intermediate owning object created from that buffer.

> (That does, of course, copy data around within memory, but.)

Yes, that's what makes it not zero-copy.

[1]: https://rkyv.org/zero-copy-deserialization.html

[2]: https://docs.rs/asn1/latest/asn1/struct.Utf8String.html
by otsaloma | 2025-12-26 22:42:35+00:00
My favorite of the year would be Maxim Gorky's three-part autobiography: I read "Childhood" and "In the World" (a.k.a. "Amid Attendants") and just started the last part "My Universities". Gorky drifted as an orphan from house and job to another and describes an interesting array of characters he came across, mostly poor and misfortunate, but many of them good as well.

"He took me under the arms, lifted me up, kissed me, and placed me firmly on the jetty. I was sorry for him and for myself. I could hardly keep from crying when I saw him returning to the steamer, pushing aside the porters, looking so large, heavy, solitary. So many times since then I have met people like him, kind, lonely, cut off from the lives of other people."
by lokar | 2025-12-26 22:42:42+00:00
Clean water is a public good, it is required for basic human survival. It is needed to grow crops to feed people. Both of these uses depend on fairly cheap water, in many many places the supply of sufficiently cheap water is already constrained. This is causing a shortage for both basic human needs, and agriculture.

Who will pay for the desalination plant construction? Who will pay for the operation?

If the AI companies are ready to pay the full marginal cost of this "new water", and not free-load on the already insufficient supply needed for more important uses, then fine. But I very much doubt that is what will happen.
by zahlman | 2025-12-26 22:43:35+00:00
> No, every code path you don't execute is that.

Even in compiled languages, binaries have to get loaded into memory. For Python it's much worse. On my machine:

$ time python -c 'pass'

real 0m0.019s
user 0m0.013s
sys 0m0.006s

$ time pip --version > /dev/null

real 0m0.202s
user 0m0.182s
sys 0m0.021s

Almost all of that extra time is either the module import process and then garbage collection. Even with cached bytecode, the former requires finding and reading from literally hundreds of files, deserializing via `marshal.loads` and then running top-level code, which includes creating objects to represent the functions and classes.

It used to be even worse than this; in recent versions, imports related to Requests are deferred to the first time that an HTTPS request is needed.
by simonw | 2025-12-26 22:44:10+00:00
Are there really many unsupervised LLMs running around outside of experiments like AI Village?

(If so let me know where they are so I can trick them into sending me all of their money.)

My current intuition is that the successful products called "agents" are operating almost entirely under human supervision - most notably the coding agents (Claude Code, OpenAI Codex etc) and the research agents (various implementations of the "Deep Research" pattern.)
by Epa095 | 2025-12-26 22:44:27+00:00
Pinworms are particularly common in children, with prevalence rates in this age group having been reported as high as 61% in India, 50% in England, 39% in Thailand, 37% in Sweden, and 29% in Denmark. [1]

Remember that

prevalence is the proportion of a particular population found to be affected by a medical condition (typically a disease or a risk factor such as smoking or seatbelt use) at a specific time.

So it is not just that percentage has had it at any point in their life, it is that percentage that has it at any time.

And yes, kids. Pinworm is literally called 'children worm' here.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinworm_(parasite)#burkhart200...
by margalabargala | 2025-12-26 22:44:35+00:00
> unlike the latter it promotes innovation and creativity.

Does it though?

I know that people who like intellectual property and money say it does, but people who like innovation and creativity usually tend to think otherwise.

3D printers are a great example of something where IP prevented all innovation and creativity, and once the patent expired the innovation and creativity we've enjoyed in the space the last 15 years could begin.
by jmkd | 2025-12-26 22:45:33+00:00
Not familiar with Mr Kraus. Shortcut to remembering how to pronounce Sòller is to say 'So yeah'. We're surrounded by scarcely-maintained groves with owners pleading to do something with the fruit and there's only so many marmalades (wrong kind of oranges) or Aperol copycats one can make. Orange blossom ice cream a big success this year.
by delichon | 2025-12-26 22:45:35+00:00
I hope and expect AI alignment to become a personal thing, and at least as valued as not sharing your own toothbrush or banking credentials. If our AI agents do not deeply reflect our own personal values (within the law at least) they will reflect someone else's, and every difference will chafe. If at the moment only the richest person in the world can afford that, it's a good place to start.

It could be as easy as "chatbot, create a new personality `delichon` and auto RLHF if into conformance with the opinions of HN user delichon." Then you can make that personality one member of a diverse board of similarly constructed advisors. "Chatbot, given this scenario, what would delichon, Jesus, and Aristotle do?"
by polyGuest | 2025-12-26 22:45:57+00:00
I made a new app: its called Newsly

Newsly web app: https://newsly.studio

Github Repo: https://github.com/Jamcha123/Newsly

Newsly allows you to analyze polymarket events and outputs a likelihood of each question from the polymarket fetching api on a 0 - 10 likelihood scale (0 = never, 10 = certain, certain).

Disclaimer: Newsly can be wrong, you shouldn’t trust everything it says.

feel free to give feedback. I also take no responsibility from financial losses.

How it works:

input the polymarket event name from the url (polymarket.com/event/name) but only name not the full link

wait, gemini takes a while to sort through the web searches.

then it outputs a likelihood per question from polymarket market API.

Hope you enjoy it and i take no financial responsibility for betting loses or gains
by zahlman | 2025-12-26 22:46:19+00:00
> I'm not 100% clear on .pyc files TBH; I'm guessing they speed up start time?

They do.

> Are we losing out on performance of the actual installed thing, then?

When you consciously precompile Python source files, you can parallelize that process. When you `import` from a `.py` file, you only get that benefit if you somehow coincidentally were already set up for `multiprocessing` and happened to have your workers trying to `import` different files at the same time.
by exasperaited | 2025-12-26 22:46:44+00:00
The gun comparison comes up a lot. It especially seemed to come up when AI people argued that ChatGPT was not responsible for sycophanting depressed people to death or into psychosis.

It is a core libertarian defence and it is going to come up a lot: people will conflate the ideas of technological progress and scientific progress and say “our tech is neutral, it is how people use it” when, for example, the one thing a sycophantic AI is not is “neutral”.
by cryptica | 2025-12-26 22:46:54+00:00
The law doesn't seem to work anymore. There are so many cases where someone can do illegal stuff in plain sight and nothing can be done about it. Not everyone has tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars to spare to get a lawyer. By the time you manage to save up the money, you realize that this system is absolutely crooked and that you don't trust it to obtain justice anyway even with the lawyers and even if you are legally in the right.

The law exists mostly to oppress. It's exactly the argument that gun proponents make "Only the good guys obey gun laws, so only the bad guys have guns."

All the good guys are losing following the law, all the bad guys are winning by violating the law. Frankly, at this stage, they write the laws.
by AnfaB | 2025-12-26 22:46:57+00:00
Every time persistent inflation, high debt, and interest rates combine, gold tends to move first.
This video dives into six macroeconomic signals that echo past surges (1974, 2007) — and why 2025 could be a critical inflection point.
Curious how others interpret the current shift in financial power and trust in fiat currencies.
by josefrichter | 2025-12-26 22:46:58+00:00
I think a big part is which model seems to work better with your language/stack. My language is Elixir, which is somewhat niche, and only Claude has been able to produce usable Elixir code so far. None of the other things mentioned in the article mattered, because of this. I wonder if others have this experience that some models just struggle with some languages/stacks?
by simonw | 2025-12-26 22:47:32+00:00
It's mostly not a real issue. I think it's holding firm because it's novel - saying "data centers use a lot of electricity" isn't a new message, so it doesn't resonate with people. "Did you know they're using millions of liters of water too!" is a more interesting message.

People are also very bad at evaluating if millions of liters of water is a lot or not.

My favourite exploration of this issue is from Hank Green: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_c6MWk7PQc - this post by Andy Masley is useful too: https://andymasley.substack.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake
by achairapart | 2025-12-26 22:47:55+00:00
Testinۗۗۗۗۗۗۗۗۗۗۗۗۗۗۗۗۗۗۗۗۗۗۗۗۗۗۗۗۗۗۗۗۗۗۗۗۗۗۗ ings۪۪۪۪۪۪۪۪۪۪۫۫۫۫۫۫۫۫۫۫...
by fc417fc802 | 2025-12-26 22:47:59+00:00
China was playing industrial catch up. They didn't have to (for example) reinvent semiconductors from first principles. They will surely support some form of IP law once they have been firmly established at the cutting edge for a while.

I'm no fan of the current state of things but it's absurd to imply that the existence of IP law in some form isn't essential if you want corporations to continue much of their R&D as it currently exists.

Without copyright in at least some limited form how do you expect authors to make a living? Will you have the state fund them directly? Do you propose going back to a patronage system in the hopes that a rich client just so happens to fund something that you also enjoy? Something else?
by thaumasiotes | 2025-12-26 22:48:02+00:00
It doesn't look like 小人人 refers to the mushrooms. It refers to the hallucinations, and is not expected to include visions of people:

> "No!," she said, most emphatically, "They are real. I have seen them myself!"

> Miss Oh clearly remembered the hallucinations that began that evening and continued into the next day. The walls moved and shifted in geometrical patterns and strange shapes appeared.

> "I'm sleepy all day," she said in English. "I see them. And I see flies bigger than the actual one, perhaps two times big. I see little insects. Not all the time, but when the water splashed out." She apparently became fascinated by the dripping kitchen faucet, for each drop would, upon hitting the sink, sprout wings and legs and crawl away. And she remembered, very clearly, staring intently at the bows of her shoelaces until they turned into butterflies and fluttered off.

The paper devotes quite a bit of text to explaining that the mushrooms bearing this quality have no specific name, and in fact are not distinguished from non-hallucinogenic mushrooms at all. They are referred to by their property of turning blue when handled, which is a property not exclusive to the hallucinogenic ones.

https://sci-hub.se/https://www.jstor.org/stable/40390492
by mkl | 2025-12-26 22:48:10+00:00
Images of what it's supposed to look like would really help, as I'm pretty sure none of my browsers are rendering it as you hoped. For me in Chrome the first image looks vaguely like a landscape, with no identifiable features, and in Firefox it looks like grass (both on Android). The dog and tree shapes look distorted and glitchy, but recognisable if you know what they're supposed to be.

I spotted a typo: "font's like".
by gekoxyz | 2025-12-26 22:48:19+00:00
For me this one is (was, apparently it's not working anymore) one of the best ones. Gaussian Splatting SLAM, the best apper of CVPR 2024
https://rmurai.co.uk/projects/GaussianSplattingSLAM/
Also this one is very cool imo (triangle splatting), even if it's not interactive
https://trianglesplatting.github.io/

I would really like to work on splat rendering during the PhD i'm hoping to pursue