MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by maxrmk | 2025-12-29 16:46:35+00:00
Yeah fair, I was being a bit lazy here when writing my comment. I've used nosql professionally quite a bit, but always set up by others. When working on personal projects I reach for SQL first because I can throw something together and don't need ideal performance. You're absolutely right that they both have their place.

That being said the question was genuine - because I don't keep up with the ecosystem, I don't know it's ever valid practice to have a nosql db exposed to the internet.
by fny | 2025-12-29 16:47:04+00:00
I have worked on out of sample problems, and AI absolutely struggles, but it dramatically accelerates the research process. Testing ideas is cheap, support tools are quick to write, and the LLM itself is a tremendous research tool itself.

More generally, I do think LLMs grant 10x+ performance for most
common work: most of what people do manually is in the training data (which is why there's so much of it in the first place.) 10x+ in those domains can in theory free up more brain space to solve the problems you're talking about.

My advice to you is to tone down the cynicism, and see how it could help you. I'll admit, AI makes me incredibly anxious about my future, but it's still fun to use.
by Kwantuum | 2025-12-29 16:48:13+00:00
Both of the things you quoted are basically gone in practice, you just always use const/let and always use triple-equals for equality comparisons and that's that. Most people that write JavaScript regularly will lint these out in the first place.

OTOH I think JS has great ergonomics especially wrt closures which a number of popular languages get wrong. Arrow functions provide a syntactically pleasant way to write lambdas, let/const having per iteration binding in loops to avoid nasty surprises when capturing variables, and a good number of standard methods that exploit them (eg map/filter on arrays). I also think, though a lot of people would disagree because of function coloring, that built-in async is a great boon for a scripting languages, you can do long operations like IO without having to worry about threading or locking up a thread, so you get to work with a single threaded mental model with a good few sharp edges removed.
by Pet_Ant | 2025-12-29 16:48:39+00:00
> I don't believe that there is near enough room for creativity to shine through in the prompt-generation pipeline

I mean you are building a prompt and tweaking it. I mean even if you didn't do that you could still argue that finding it is in itself a creative akin to found art [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Found_object
by TacticalCoder | 2025-12-29 16:48:56+00:00
> I've been hearing lots of crazy things about people getting arrested in the UK for posting "memes" or things like that.

Several (christians) people in the UK have been arrested for "praying in their heads" outside of an abortion facility.

I don't find it classy to go pray for unborn babies that are getting "killed" but that's being arrested for a thought crime and it's not OK.

But then hundreds of muslims regularly openly praying in the streets even though the country is covered with mosques: not an issue. Nothing to see here. All perfectly normal.

The pro-muslim / anti-christian two-tier policy in the UK is just wild.
by rubymamis | 2025-12-29 16:49:08+00:00
> Saying “they’re both c++” is seems kind of misleading and meaningless right?

Not really, if you avoid writing Javascript code in your QML components, than most of your executable will end up being compiled C++ code. If you do write Javascript code in your QML components, than it *could also* be compiled to C++ code using the QML script compiler[1[2].

> QML apps that heavily implement core logic in javascript would be slow as balls.

The entire point is to separate logic and view where logic is written in C++ and QML simply represents the view (which almost end up being built upon simple primitives that *are* C++ objects). So if you keep this separation you get amazing performance with great simplicity and velocity.

[1] https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/qtqml-qtquick-compiler-tech.html

[2] https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/qtqml-qml-script-compiler.html
by WorldMaker | 2025-12-29 16:49:29+00:00
> Reading your article again, I wonder whether your compiler is just not doing the right things to take advantage of the performance boosts available via CoreCLR?

> E.x. can you do things like stackalloc temp buffers to avoid allocation, and does the stdlib do those things where it is advantageous?

The C# standard lib (often called the base class library or BCL) has seen a ton of Span<T>/Memory<T>/stackalloc internal usage adoption in .NET 6+, with each release adding more of them. Things like File IO and serialization/deserialization particularly see a lot of notable performance improvements just from upgrading each .NET version. .NET10 is faster than .NET9 with a lot of the same code, and so forth.

Mono still benefits from some of these BCL improvements (as more of the BCL is shared than not these days, and Blazor WASM for the moment is still more Mono than CoreCLR so some investment has continued), but not all of them and not always in the same ways.
by threethirtytwo | 2025-12-29 16:49:36+00:00
I think the terminology objection here is mostly semantic and misses what the author is actually claiming.

No one experiences their own beliefs as “cynical” or “optimistic.” Everyone believes they are being realistic. A cynic does not think “I am distorting reality negatively.” He thinks “this is how things really are.” The labels cynic and optimist are almost always imposed by observers, not chosen by the believer. When someone calls himself a cynic, what he usually means is that others perceive his conclusions, which he believes are factual, as negative.

So the core claim is not that cynicism is a mood or an attitude to aspire to. The claim is that reality itself is often negative, and that people who arrive at pessimistic conclusions are sometimes closer to the truth than people who default to hopeful narratives. Calling that “realism” instead of “cynicism” does not change the substance of the argument.

There is also actual empirical work here, not just vibes. In psychology this shows up under what is sometimes called depressive realism. Multiple studies starting with Alloy and Abramson in the late 1970s found that mildly depressed subjects were more accurate than non depressed subjects at judging contingency, control, and likelihood in certain experimental settings. Non depressed subjects systematically overestimated their influence and future outcomes, while depressed subjects were closer to objective probabilities. Later work refined this and showed the effect is bounded and context dependent, but the core point survived: positive mental health is often associated with optimistic bias, not neutral accuracy.

More broadly, a large literature on optimism bias and self serving bias shows that psychologically healthy people tend to overestimate success, underestimate risk, and interpret ambiguous evidence in their favor. That bias is adaptive and motivating, but it is still a bias. People who lack it tend to have more internally consistent and stable world models, even if those models are less emotionally pleasant.

So saying “realism is neutral” is true in the abstract, but psychologically misleading. Humans do not converge on realism by default. They converge on motivated belief. When someone repeatedly reaches pessimistic conclusions across domains, it is at least plausible that they are sampling reality with fewer affective filters, not merely indulging in a negative personality trait.

That does not mean cynicism is virtuous, or that it should guide social behavior. Tact and parrhesia are social strategies. They are orthogonal to whether your internal model of the world is accurate. You can be accurate and tactful, accurate and abrasive, inaccurate and pleasant, or inaccurate and hostile. Mixing those axes together is what creates confusion here.

The real disagreement is not about tone or attitude. It is about whether optimistic distortions are a feature or a bug. Psychology suggests they are a feature for well being, but a bug for accuracy.
by warmedcookie | 2025-12-29 16:49:38+00:00
I think it depends on the student, but I think you are probably overall correct. As someone who hated reading most of my textbooks, there is absolutely no way I am going to effectively extract relevant flash card material out of them better than an LLM can. I'm going to get bored and my mind will probably wonder and start thinking about other things while I am "reading".
by delta_p_delta_x | 2025-12-29 16:49:51+00:00
Worse quality, latency, potential to lose one (or both) earbuds, having to faff with batteries and charging and cases (and charging the charging case) when I can just... plug it in, bam, music in my ears. The knotting is a small price to pay for the improved quality and convenience in every other way.

What's wrong with analogue audio?
by diogenes_atx | 2025-12-29 16:50:22+00:00
A Google search using the terms "did the CIA claim there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in 2003?" yields the following information:

The CIA and the Bush administration claimed Iraq possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) in 2003, building the case for invasion on assertions that Saddam Hussein had active WMD programs and failed to comply with UN resolutions, though these claims proved to be incorrect after the invasion found no stockpiles, leading to later acknowledgments of intelligence failures...

CIA's Role: The CIA provided assessments, including classified estimates, stating high confidence in Iraq's possession of biological and chemical weapons, which formed the basis for public statements by officials...

Intelligence Failures: Investigations later confirmed that the intelligence community was "simply wrong" in its assessments, highlighting failures in analysis and sourcing, despite intelligence professionals believing their information at the time...

In summary, the CIA and U.S. government did assert the presence of WMDs, but these claims were later disproven, revealing significant flaws in the intelligence used to justify the war.
by vunderba | 2025-12-29 16:50:32+00:00
I was in India for a wedding a few years back and spent a couple days in New Delhi. I remember stepping out into the 6AM brisk morning air and feeling like I was going to cough up a lung.

It tasted like what I imagine a finely aged glass of acid rain would taste like.

You know how when you open the weather app on your phone, in normal places it says things like: sunny, cloudy, rainy? The weather app just showed SMOKE (this was an actual weather report).

This is partially a result of agricultural burning in the surrounding states which is one of the fastest (and cheapest) ways to clear out the fields for the next crop.
by soldthat | 2025-12-29 16:50:37+00:00
I was actually trying to be precise.

The 27 UN member countries (within 1,000 miles):

Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Chad, Cyprus, Egypt, Eritrea, Georgia, Greece, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Moldova, North Macedonia, Romania, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Sudan, Syria, Turkey, Ukraine, Yemen.

Additional non-UN / partially-recognized entities also within 1,000 miles

Kosovo, Palestine, Northern Cyprus.

Although my source occasionally hallucinates, I think this is approximately accurate, especially if you consider the distance Israeli jets actually travelled.
by throwaway743 | 2025-12-29 16:50:56+00:00
This might be a little conspiracy thinking, but I think it's possible that the recent drive from NVIDIA to move toward defense contracting and shift to B2B is part of a larger strategy. When you combine that with the rapid increases in hardware pricing and the push toward renting cloud compute, it looks like a form of collusion between the private sector and the government in the name of "national security".

The goal seems to be to squash the proliferation of open source LLMs and prevent individuals from running private, uncensored models at home. It is an effective way to kill any possible underdog or startup competition by making the "barrier to entry" (the compute) a rented privilege rather than a private resource. The partnership with Palantir seems to point directly to this, especially considering the ideologies of Thiel and Karp.

They are building a world where intelligence is centralized and monitored, and local sovereignty over AI is treated as a liability to be phased out
by skulk | 2025-12-29 16:51:01+00:00
> Sauron is also appearing on the scene as concerns rise about crime among the most wealthy. Recent high-profile incidents include a November armed robbery at the home of tech investors Lachy Groom and Joshua Buckley in San Francisco’s Mission District, where $11 million in cryptocurrency was stolen during a 90-minute ordeal involving torture and threats.

I'll never get tired the irony in one of crypto's most lauded design features (private key = money) leading to it being almost impossible to secure from an XKCD 538 style attack. In the crypto-libertarian's mind, the only solution here is to arm yourself and your house to the teeth and constantly look over your shoulder. Never mind the fact that the social contract is being ripped up and cynical actors are concentrating resources and preparing to shut the other half out for good.
by nradov | 2025-12-29 16:51:13+00:00
That's a common misconception. The days of taking anyone who walked into the recruiting office are long over. US Navy recruits are, on average, regular middle class youths with a high school diploma or some college. Most of them could do fine in the civilian labor market if they wanted to.

The truly desperate people don't even meet recruiting standards due to criminal records, health conditions, drug use, low fitness, bad test scores, lack of a high school diploma, etc.
by HotGarbage | 2025-12-29 16:51:20+00:00
Verizon (and their MVNOs) eSIMs are the worst. Registration is tied to IMEI and enforced via the eSIM's EID. You can't use one if those "physical" eSIMs because if you give Verizon a donor IMEI during registration, the EID of the eSIM doesn't match and activation is rejected.
by tomesch1982 | 2025-12-29 16:52:16+00:00
Clickbait.

The opening paragraph contains some factual errors (you can only get kicked off a train when you do something illegal) and the whole story lives by exaggeration and missing facts.

It is as moronic as saying people were kidnapped when a plane had to divert because of the weather. Also he would have been entitled to get a paid cab ride to his destination when that happens. But that is just one of the facts he did not mention.

This story should be ignored and tossed into the local legends garbage.
by jerf | 2025-12-29 16:52:27+00:00
I find it a bit weird that I find it intuitive how things like the Super Nintendo did their work, and how modern games and systems work, but comparing the hardware specs of the Dreamcast/PS2/XBox/Gamecube era to the best of their output is where my intuition struggles the most. Not that the games of the era stand up to modern stuff, even when upscaled and texture-packed etc. in an emulator, but how they did it with so little oomph still amazes me.
by nickmonad | 2025-12-29 16:52:30+00:00
Author here! That's totally fair. I did learn this is a common technique in the embedded world and I had a whole section in the original draft about how it's not a super well-known technique in the typical "backend web server" world, but I wanted to keep the length of the post down so I cut that out. I think there's a lot we can learn from embedded code, especially around performance.
by testdelacc1 | 2025-12-29 16:52:42+00:00
It is known, but not widely used outside of embedded programming. The fact that they’re using it while writing a database when they didn’t need to makes people sit up and notice. So why did they make this conscious choice?

It’s tempting to cut people down to size, but I don’t think it’s warranted here. I think TigerBeetle have created something remarkable and their approach to programming is how they’ve created it.
by airhangerf15 | 2025-12-29 16:52:52+00:00
Mozilla is a hopelessly corrupt organization at this point. At any point they could block support from uBlock Origin working correctly. They still have all their Google money, so they won't be forced to make any real changes.

I have been on Librewolf for years. I use it on my personal machine and work machine. I know it's downstream and dependent on Mozilla/Gecko, but it's privacy aware and tries to strip out all their garbage.

LadyBird is our real hope now, not Servo. I hate all the slander levied against the lead LadyBird dev. He's an amazing individual who has overcome horrific drug addiction that almost destroyed his family. I try a LadyBird build every few months and it's pretty amazing how much work they've done.
by Ericson2314 | 2025-12-29 16:52:56+00:00
Morally, I think the US should be involved, but practically, we have shown ourselves to be baffoons, and Europe really needs:

1. A common enemy

2. Reason for further integration (EU-level federation is woefully incomplete)

3. Reason for heavy deficit spending, to heat up their sluggish economies

So practically, I do hope Europe does it themselves
by thewisenerd | 2025-12-29 16:52:59+00:00
inb4 "tailscale hurr durr",

if you are using tailscale already, with it setup as the DNS resolver,

you can setup NextDNS as the global resolver within tailscale[1];

i'm not sure exactly how much my latency's being affected, but am at something like 900k queries/mo and don't really notice it

[1] https://tailscale.com/kb/1218/nextdns
by JohnFen | 2025-12-29 16:53:08+00:00
> Do you trust review sites today?

No. I consider reviews and review sites to be basically worthless and pay no attention to them. If I'm making a nontrivial purchase decision, I research the product itself first (not reviews of the product). The closest I get to paying attention to "reviews" is that I do a web search looking for people asking for help resolving issues with the product. That gives me a good idea of how problematic the product is and how much difficulty people have had engaging with the manufacturer about problems.

> Would you trust an app/extension that automatically aggregates the best products across multiple reputable review sites, shows you the sources, and ranks them by how consistently they’re recommended?

This is unlikely to be of interest to me. How would just a site define "best product", how would it decide what review sites are "reputable", etc.? Also, review aggregators like this historically have been even worse than the review sites themselves.
by xur17 | 2025-12-29 16:54:03+00:00
I've found this to be the case as well. My typical workflow is:

1. Have the ai come up with an implementation plan based on my requirements

2. Iterate on the implementation plan / tweak as needed, and write it to a markdown file

3. Have it implement the above plan based on the markdown file.

On projects where we split up the task into well defined, smaller tickets, this works pretty well. For larger stuff that is less well defined, I do feel like it's less efficient, but to be fair, I am also less efficient when building this stuff myself. For both humans and robots, smaller, well defined tickets are better for both development and code review.
by pigpop | 2025-12-29 16:54:17+00:00
The software development market is measured in tens of billions to hundreds of billions of dollars depending on which parts you're looking at so inventing a better hammer (development tool) can be expected to drive billions of dollars of value. How many billions depends on how good of a tool it turns out to be in the end. That's only counting software, it's also directly applicable to all media (image, video, audio, text) and some scientific domains (genetics, medicine, materials, etc.)
by SV_BubbleTime | 2025-12-29 16:54:23+00:00
> It’s too easy to slip from the idea that you’re just going to use the LLM to generate study materials into thinking that you’re just going to let the LLM do this

This is exactly what people who know better are figuring out with vibe coding.

It’s extremely tempting for me to ask Claude to “do this thing that would take me three hours, but you only seconds”.

Many people are coming around to the realization that while that sometimes does work great, most of the time you ARE going to spend those three hours… you’re just going to spend it fixing, debugging, refactoring, instead of writing to begin with.

We are in a new era of ”no free lunch”.
by acheong08 | 2025-12-29 16:54:36+00:00
I do have that as well. I've noticed that sometimes all network connections out of the country gets blocked. With syncthing, there are relays within China that can be used which may be in less restrictive provinces.

Kind of a best case, worst case scenario thing such that I can switch between as necessary. WireGuard best case, Xray-core fallback, syncthing worst case
by FloorEgg | 2025-12-29 16:54:38+00:00
In person exams make sense yes, but pen and paper?

If you want high integrity, exams should be done on school computers with extra integrity monitoring software. In the current cheating paradigm, pen and paper are as easy to cheat as students using their own laptops. Note that students can take pictures of exam with their phones, glasses, even their pens. There are pens with cameras and LED screens on them that connect via Wi-Fi to chatgpt.

Oral exams make for the best integrity but they are a pain to grade.
by the_af | 2025-12-29 16:54:46+00:00
The "difficulty" with remote viewing is nonsense pseudoscience and crackpottery.

It absolutely does not work. Not "unreliably", but not work at all.

This reminds me of that one time on HN when someone tried to convince me that ritual witchcraft (I think they called it blood magic) on servers was a real thing, necessary to make them work, and my dismissal was typical of narrow minded people.
by Zambyte | 2025-12-29 16:54:58+00:00
I'm doing pretty much this exact pattern with NATS right now instead of Redis. Cool to see other people following similar strategies.

The fact that the Zig ecosystem follows the pattern set by the standard library to pass the Allocator interface around makes it super easy to write idiomatic code, and then decide on your allocation strategies at your call site. People have of course been doing this for decades in other languages, but it's not trivial to leverage existing ecosystems like libc while following this pattern, and your callees usually need to know something about the allocation strategy being used (even if only to avoid standard functions that do not follow that allocation strategy).
by oh_my_goodness | 2025-12-29 16:55:15+00:00
Normal students learn the material from normal textbooks. The Feynman Lectures on Physics are a fantastic supplement and a great reference for people who already have a solid background. They’re not a practical introduction. Feynman acknowledged in the introduction that, as an intro course, the Lectures were a failed experiment.

Another way you may hear this same point is “only Feynman could get away with doing things in this crazy unrigorous way.” That’s incomplete. Feynman checked the living shit out of everything he wrote. He just doesn’t show all the checking, so he appears to be fast and loose.
by shayway | 2025-12-29 16:55:16+00:00
While we're sharing AI generated videos, IGORRR's ADHD music video [0] is definitively art, zero question about it. I don't think typing a prompt in and taking the output as it comes is art -- good art, anyway (the point-and-shoot photography comparison is apt) -- but that doesn't mean AI can't be used to make truly new, creative and unique art too.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGIvO4eh190 (warning, lots of disturbing imagery)