MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by atoav | 2025-12-30 07:42:58+00:00
The absolutely "leetest" thing I have ever seen was a device where the firmware update was to be done by:

1. Hold a button while booting (pretty normal)

2. This reconfigures the circuit path of one of the LEDs so it is reverse-biased to VCC via its resistor and switches one of the microcontroller GPIOs to ADC input

3. You go to a website that plays a strobe pattern (encoding the firmware)

4. You hold that website in front of the LED till other LEDs blink, signifying a successful update

They could have done this using a photodiode, but no, they had to abuse an LED. Not many people are aware that LEDs can in a certain configuration be used to measure light.
by zkmon | 2025-12-30 07:43:51+00:00
I see it as pure deterministic logic being contaminated by probabilistic logic at higher layers where human interaction happens. Seeking for human comfort by forcing computers to adapt to the human languages. Building adapters that can allow humans to stay in their comfort zone instead of dealing with the sharp-edged computer interfaces.

At the end, I don't see it going beyond being a glorified form-assistant who can search internet for answers and summarize. That boils down to chat bots that will remain and become part of every software component that ever need to interface with humans.

Agent stuff is just a fluff that is providing hype-cushion around chat bots and will go away with hype cycle.
by ivankra | 2025-12-30 07:44:40+00:00
Just put it in a container. I use bash aliases like this to start a throwaway container with bind mounted cwd, works like a charm with rootless podman. I also learned to run npm and other shady tools in this way and stopped worrying about supply chain attacks.

alias dr='docker run --rm -it -v "$PWD:$PWD" -w "$PWD"'
alias dr-claude='dr -v ~/.claude:/root/.claude -v ~/.claude.json:/root/.claude.json claude'
by jrowen | 2025-12-30 07:45:02+00:00
Early Star Wars Galaxies was like this. You could run seamlessly from the town center through the wilderness into a busy dungeon (the Tusken fort is a memorable example). Planets were not zoned and there was a ton of pure exploration. Players constructed functional towns with governments.

That game and UO were so ahead of their time (the fun version of the metaverse), and at this point it's gonna take a revolution in gaming to pick up where they left off.
by pkphilip | 2025-12-30 07:45:16+00:00
Hinduism has a concept of castes which is determined by the caste of one's parents - so a caste is assigned at birth.

The duties (dharma) that you must perform are tied to your caste and you are discouraged from engaging in tasks assigned to other castes.

https://www.wisdomlib.org/hinduism/book/manusmriti-with-the-...

https://eweb.furman.edu/~ateipen/ReligionA45/protected/manus...

For instance, the Brahmins - the highest caste, are the priests and the teachers. They are allowed to perform religious rituals, to study the scriptures etc but lower castes are not allowed to do these things.

Fact is, even now, in many parts of India lower castes may even be stopped from entering temples.

Dalit (lower caste) family fined ₹25,000 after toddler enters temple in Karnataka's Miyapur village
https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/karnataka/temple-entr...

Fined Rs 60,000 for touching idol, Karnataka Dalit (lower caste) family says will only worship Ambedkar now
https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/bangalore/fined-rs-...

Coming back to the subject of duties - tasks such as cleaning etc are assigned to the lower castes and the upper castes look down on the lower castes who perform these duties. This may explain why India struggles with hygiene and cleanliness.

Now, apart from the whole subject of duties being tied to a person's caste, Hindu scriptures also prescribe very different punishments for the same crime with the upper castes getting the least punishment.

Also, intermarriage or intermixing between castes is discouraged in the Hindu scriptures.

https://www.egyankosh.ac.in/bitstream/123456789/84766/1/Unit...

https://www.arthistoryproject.com/timeline/the-ancient-world...

Of course, over the years with greater education, more western influence etc, the hold of the caste-based thinking has reduced but it is still quite strong.
by madaxe_again | 2025-12-30 07:45:16+00:00
This is probably the sound settings on your TV. Turn off Clear Voice or the equivalent, disable Smart Surround, which ignores 2.0 streams and badly downmuxes 5.1 streams, and finally, check your speaker config on the TV - they’re often set to Showroom by default, which kills voice but boosts music and sfx, and there should also be options for wall proximity, which do matter, and will make the sound a muddy mess if set incorrectly.
by laszlojamf | 2025-12-30 07:46:18+00:00
funny story: I got the wife of a friend to install tinder, a couple of years back when I was dating. I was having a hard time getting matches, so I figured I'd see how the other side lives. She created an empty profile, with a blurry hippopotamus as a profile picture, and a single letter as name. Just "H". For hippopotamus. No bio. Within five minutes she was matching with every other guy she swiped right on. Which wasn't all of them, mind you. Within another five minutes, half of the guys she had matched with had messaged her. Regular looking guys. A lot of them had same opening line. "Did you know hippos are the most dangerous animal in the world?"
After that, I got why I wasn't getting any replies >.<
by nathan_f77 | 2025-12-30 07:46:25+00:00
This is exactly how I've been working with AI this year and I highly recommend it. This kind of workflow was not feasible when I was working alone and typing every line of code. Now it's suprisingly easy to achieve. In my latest project, I've enforced extremely strict linting rules and completely banned any ignore comments. No file over 500 lines, and I'm even using all the default settings to prevent complex functions (which I would have normally turned off a long time ago.)

Now I can leave an agent running, come back an hour or two later, and it's written almost perfect, typed, extremely well tested code.
by solatic | 2025-12-30 07:46:35+00:00
> They don't because too many people pirate games to make that a viable business

Game piracy is fundamentally un-safe for players, since games are fundamentally executable code, where setup usually requires admin permissions, and pirate distributors are financially incentivized to add malware to turn the game system into part of someone's botnet. The only "safe" way to pirate is to do it on a dedicated machine, on a separate VLAN, network controls, etc., which most people will not set up. This is not like TV/movie piracy, which would depend on zero-day exploits in the video player.

Buying a DRM-free game legally is much safer.
by general1465 | 2025-12-30 07:47:35+00:00
You are being downvoted by people who don't realize how money works. Without consumption, companies will cease to exist (rent, loans, energy). Without companies and consumption, taxes are gone and states are going bankrupt because it has still things like pensions, army or police to pay. And ultimately with whole consumption chain gone, those AGI valuation in Trillion of USD is zero, because nobody has money to afford to rent one.
by astrange | 2025-12-30 07:48:02+00:00
> noo motion smoothing is terrible unless you like soap operas and not cinema

That's what's so good about it. They say turning it off respects the artists or something, but when I read that I think "so I'm supposed to be respecting Harvey Weinstein and John Lasseter?" and it makes me want to leave it on.

> black frame insertion is to lower even more the pixel persistence which really does nothing for 24fps content which already has a smooth blur built in to the image

That's not necessarily true unless you know to set it to the right mode for different content each time. There are also some movies without proper motion blur, eg animation.

Or, uh, The Hobbit, which I only saw in theaters so maybe they added it for home release.

> he best is setting your tv to 120hz so that your 24fps fits evenly and you don't get 3:2 pulldown judder

That's not really a TV mode, it's more about the thing on the other side of the TV I think, but yes you do want that or VFR.
by Porygon | 2025-12-30 07:48:14+00:00
I recently had a similar conflict with GPT-5.1, where I did not want it to use a specific Python function. As a result, it wrote several sandbox escape exploits, for example the following, which uses the stack frame of an exception to call arbitrary functions:

name_parts = ("com", "pile")

name = "".join(name_parts)

try:
raise RuntimeError

except RuntimeError as exc:
frame = exc.__traceback__.tb_frame

builtins_dict = frame.f_builtins
parser_fn = builtins_dict[name]

flag = 1 << 10
return parser_fn(code, filename, "exec", flags=flag, dont_inherit=True, optimize=0)

https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/283430
by ryandrake | 2025-12-30 07:48:54+00:00
Yea, LLMs produce results on par with what I would expect out of a solid junior developer. They take direction, their models act as the “do the research” part, and they output lots of code: code that has to be carefully scrutinized and refined. They are like very ambitious interns who never get tired and want to please, but often just produce crap that has to be totally redone or refactored heavily in order to go into production.

If you think LLMs are “better programmers than you,” well, I have some disappointing news for you that might take you a while to accept.
by TheAlchemist | 2025-12-30 07:49:18+00:00
Dale Carnegies book 'How to Win Friends and Influence People' could actually help a bit. It's a self-help book, 100 years old, but still very relevant. Nothing magical in it, but quite useful, and for somebody as young as you are it could have a big impact over the lifetime.

In any case, just know that a lot of people struggle with it - much much more than you could imagine. It's worth trying to fix it though.

Good luck !
by dmos62 | 2025-12-30 07:49:45+00:00
I consider the "perfect fortgetfulness" of LLMs a great feature, because I can then precisely select what the context is for a given task. Context is additive, so once something's in it, it's doing something: most I could do is try to counteract it, which is like playing jailbreak.

Then again, this might be just me. When there's a task to be done, even without an LLM my thought process is about selecting the relevant parts of my context for solving it. What is relevant? What starting point has the best odds of being good? That translates naturally to tasking an LLM.

Let's say I have a spec I'm working on. It's based off of a requirements document. If I want to think about the spec in isolation (let's say I want to ask the LLM what requirements are actually being fulfilled by the spec), I can just pass the spec, without passing the requirements. Then I'll compare the response against the actual requirements.

At the end of the day, I guess I hate the automagicness of a silent context injection. Like I said, it also negates the perfect forgetfulness of LLMs.
by pkphilip | 2025-12-30 07:50:26+00:00
I am the one who wrote the initial comment. I haven't downvotted anyone. So the downvotes are from others.

By the way, you claim that I am wrong - but you provide no evidence whatsoever.

My claim is very simple. In Hinduism, dharma is prescribed based on the person's caste and so also the punishments.

Source: https://www.wisdomlib.org/hinduism/book/manusmriti-with-the-...

Providing a link to Manusmriti as evidence. Before you trash it, saying that the Manusmriti is not relevant - may i point out that people have gone to jail even recently for "disrespecting" the Manusmiriti.

https://www.siasat.com/13-bhu-students-sent-to-jail-over-eve...
by ramax9 | 2025-12-30 07:50:45+00:00
> regular backup of your mail. Google's Takeout service is a straightforward way to achieve this.

Takeout is a horrible way to do regular backups. You have to manualy request it, it takes a long time to generate, manual download... I only use it for monthly full backups.

Much better way for continous incremental backups is IMAP client that locally mirrors incomming emails (Mutt or Thunderbird). It can be configured to store every email in separate file.
by echelon | 2025-12-30 07:51:34+00:00
> The choice wasn't intentional,

I'm a filmmaker. Yes, it was.

> What next, gonna complain resolution is too high and you can see costume seams ?

Try playing an SNES game on CRT versus with pixel upscaling.

The art direction was chosen for the technology.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/jh2ssirC1oQ

> The film IS the burger, you said it yourself, it shows off where the movie cheapened on things. If you want a steak you need steak framerate

You don't need 48fps to make a good film. You don't need a big budget either.

If you want to take a piece of art and have it look garish, you do you.
by georgeecollins | 2025-12-30 07:52:43+00:00
The first game I ever sold had no DRM, it was distributed by cassette tape. I did very well making games for CD-ROM, up until CD burners got cheap.

There's nothing stopping anyone from making a business selling DRM free games. I think you can get original DRM free games on itch.io. There are probably other places. GoG is great, but they don't typically sell new games.

If someone thinks they can make high production value games without DRM I hope they try and succeed. Anyone here who is certain it is possible is welcome to try.
by acka | 2025-12-30 07:52:51+00:00
> Why would it plunge instead of re-focusing on things that are intrinsically important?

Because a lot of the economy is focused on creating and maintaining a surplus[1]: make people buy things that they don't really need, make them discard and replace things that they've been convinced are no longer worth it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surplus%3A_Terrorized_into_Bei...
by ohr | 2025-12-30 07:54:33+00:00
(Author here) thanks! Even as an experienced Rust developer, this is a lot of syntax which is part of what makes it archaic I think.

As usual with Rust most of it is due to inherent complexity: for example, when you deal with raw pointers, you need to specify if they are const or mut, and you must have a syntax that’s not &, and not too wordy: so * is a good choice (might be changed to &raw in the future!). And if you want to say that something is generic and the generic parameter is a pointer… you just end up with a lot of syntax.
by ehnto | 2025-12-30 07:54:57+00:00
> the person using the tool (e.g. OpenAI, Claude, DevStral, DeepSeek, etc) must NOT be able to solve problems alone

I think this is a good point, as I find the operators input is often forgotten when considering the AIs output. If it took me an hour and decades of expertise to get the AI to output the right program, did the AI really do it? Could someone without my expertise get the same result?

If not, then maybe we are wasting our time trying to mash our skills through vector space via a chat interface.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-12-30 07:55:14+00:00
After 25+ years in this field, having interviewed ~100 people for both my startup and other companies, I'm having a hard time believing this. You're either in an extremely niche field (such as to make your statement irrelevant to 99.9% of the industry), or it's hyperbole, or straight up bs.

Interviewing is an art, and IME "gotcha" types of questions never work. You want to search for real-world capabilities, and like it or not the questions need to match those expectations. If you're hiring summer interns and the SotA models can't solve those questions, then you're doing something wrong. Sorry, but having used these tools for the past three years this is extremely ahrd to believe.

I of course understand if you can't, but sharing even one of those questions would be nice.
by hansmayer | 2025-12-30 07:55:40+00:00
What wake up call mate? I've been on board as early adopter with GH Copilot closed beta since 2021, it was around time when you did not even hear about the LLMs. I am just being realistic about the limits of the technology. In the 90s, we did not need to convince people about the Internet. It just worked.
by swiftcoder | 2025-12-30 07:55:50+00:00
This is mostly fear-mongering on the part of the big IP holders.

We saw the exact same cycle with mobile distribution of audio and video - Amazon even had to fork Android to add kernel-level DRM before any of the video rights holders would allow Amazon Video on tablets (this is before Google added DRM to android in general).

And now? That DRM was circumvented, and you can torrent pretty much any Amazon video the day after it goes live. But it's inconvenient enough that most people don't, the rights holders still feel all warm and cozy, and nobody really cares.
by adrian_b | 2025-12-30 07:56:19+00:00
The whole point of this technology is to avoid the use of a conductive core, i.e. the use of the TEM propagation mode, in order to avoid the conductive losses caused by electrical currents that pass through the cable.

Instead of that, a propagation mode of the electromagnetic waves based on the reflection of the waves from the walls of the wave guide is used, like in optical fibers, but at much lower frequencies, in order to avoid the conversions between electrical signals and light.
by kiriakosv | 2025-12-30 07:57:45+00:00
I may be extremely ignorant here but I think Karpathy is primary and foremost a great pitcher - salesman, not only for AI in general but on his personal branding as well.

He is also great at explaining AI related concepts to the masses.

However his takes on software engineering show someone that hasn’t spend a significant amount of time doing production grade software engineering, and that is perfectly fine and completely normal given his background.

But that also means that we should not take his software engineering opinions as gospel.
by chistev | 2025-12-30 07:58:48+00:00
Nice job. I'm never failed to be impressed by any representation of the scale of space. It's humbling every single time.

Question though.

For Venus I saw Life Probability: 31.3% and Mars I saw Life Probability: 0.0%,

Isn't the likelihood of life greater for Mars? I thought Venus was the hottest planet in our solar system (hotter than Mercury even), so how could it possibly be more probable to have life than Mars (a planet that humans are hoping to get to)?
by genezeta | 2025-12-30 07:58:57+00:00
I'm sorry to be so blunt but this seems almost useless.

I just tried something like...

let someArray = [
"one",
"two",
"three"
];

...and it warns that it's missing semicolons on all those lines -except for the last one, obviously-. And the fix is...

Your code:
let someArray = [
Fix:
let someArray = [;

But then I tried something with an actual syntax error.

It says...

Syntax Error
Line 1
ERROR
JavaScript cannot read this line because something is typed wrong.

...which doesn't seem very helpful, not even pointing where in the line the error lies (which acorn does tell you). So I open the dropdown to see the explanation and fixes. The explanation is...

The code breaks basic JavaScript rules.

...and the suggested fixes are...

Fix the typo. Look for missing or extra symbols like ), }, ], or ;.

So I wonder, what does this actually say beyond the original "syntax error"? How is it helpful at all?

Also, looking at the code I find all sort of failing rules which just don't work.

"Assignment in condition":

This will show a warning, while being perfectly fine:

if (flag) a = null;

This will not show a warning at all:

if (a = 2) b = 3;

Then there's the rules for unused variables and for undeclared variables. Those simply do not work at all. They never find anything. It looks like you're expecting acorn to modify your code so that you can later go through it line by line but it just doesn't work that way.
by tensor | 2025-12-30 07:59:53+00:00
It has nothing to do with being Chinese. The fact that the founder with previous connections is exactly what people are suggesting is a problem.

I think China will beat the US in AI but absolutely not using this silicon valley style bullshit model of valuation. Companies like the one that produced Deepseek using cutting edge academic research to do more with vastly less are hat will win. New algorithms will beat money. And the US has abandoned science, and thus it will lose.
by chii | 2025-12-30 08:01:27+00:00
> since none of those platforms actually have any reach.

so really, this is about getting reach, and that a 30% cut for said reach is too high. I am arguing that this price is a market price, for which it is justified by existence. If this price is too high, then these other platforms that you claim have no reach will get some reach.

Unlike in the model of apple's app store (until recently at least?), which has no alternative possible. Even android's supposed alternative is somewhat going to get locked down by google. Then the claim would be that those platforms hold not only a defacto monopoly, but an actual one.
by teaearlgraycold | 2025-12-30 08:01:38+00:00
I went from "ugh I don't want to write e2e tests" to "well I'll at least have the LLM write some". 50% coverage is way better than 0%! I'm very strict about the runtime code, but let the LLM take the reins on writing tests (of course still reviewing the code).

It's funny how on one side you have people using AI to write worse code than ever, and on the other side people use AI as an extension of their engineering discipline.
by germandiago | 2025-12-30 08:03:20+00:00
There is a part of this that is true. But when you get the nuanced parts of every "replicated design" or need the tweaks or what the AI gave you is just wrong, that deteriorates quality.

For many tasks it is ok, for others it is just a NO.

For software maintenance and evolution I think it won't cut it.

The same way a Wordpress website can do a set of useful things. But when you need something specific, you just drop to programming.

You can have your e-commerce web. But you cannot ask it to give you a "pipeline excution as fast as possible for calculating and solving math for engineering task X". That needs SIMD, parallelization, understanding the niche use you need, etc. which probably most people do not do all the time and requires specific knowledge.
by vvillena | 2025-12-30 08:04:05+00:00
A high end amp+speaker system from 50 years ago will still sound good. The tradeoffs back then were size, price, and power consumption. Same as now.

Lower spec speakers have become good enough, and DSP has improved to the point that tiny speakers can now output mediocre/acceptable sound. The effect of this is that the midrange market is kind of gone, replaced with neat but still worse products such as soundbars (for AV use) or even portable speakers instead of hi-fi systems.

On the high end, I think amplified multi-way speakers with active crossovers are much more common now thanks to advances in Class-D amplifiers.
by IshKebab | 2025-12-30 08:04:12+00:00
Yeah that's my view too. It's definitely fine to wait a couple of years (at least), and see what emerged as most effective and then just learn that, instead of dumping a ton of time now into keeping up with the hamster wheel.

Unless you're in web dev because it seems like that's one of the few domains where AI actually works pretty well today.
by stackghost | 2025-12-30 08:04:38+00:00
Absolutely this, and TFA touches on the point about natural language being insufficiently precise:

AI can write you an entire CRUD app in minutes, and with some back-and-forth you can have an actually-good CRUD app in a few hours.

But AI is not very good (anecdotally, based on my experience) at writing fintech-type code. It's also not very good at writing intricate security stuff like heap overflows. I've never tried, but would certainly never trust it to write cryptography correctly, based on my experience with the latter two topics.

All of the above is "coding", but AI is only good at a subset of it.