MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by MontyCarloHall | 2025-12-30 16:16:14+00:00
>The fact of resource extraction from society and externalities like pollution not being counted by capitalist because they "can’t count them" and just bundle them as externalities demonstrably destroy any concept of non-zero sum game

The article explicitly addresses this:

The fact that Capitalism is non-zero-sum doesn't mean it is necessarily positive-sum. An economy that gets out of balance can produce very negative results (which are still non-zero). Cons of capitalism: — Can not be relied on to provide adequate social services, including healthcare and education. — Can be expected to run at a cost to externalities like the environment. — Can produce products that are detrimental to well-being.

Based on your other comment [0], it seems you have a bad-faith axe to grind against this site.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46434065
by ryandrake | 2025-12-30 16:16:38+00:00
This seems to be one of the huge weaknesses of current LLMs: Despite the words "intelligence" and "machine learning" we throw around, they aren't really able to learn and improve their skills without someone changing the model. So, they repeat the same mistakes and invent new mistakes by random chance.

If I was tutoring a junior developer, and he accidentally deleted the whole source tree or something egregious, that would be a milestone learning point in his career, and he would never ever do it again. But if the LLM does it accidentally, it will be apologetic, but after the next context window clear, it has the same chances of doing it again.
by OutOfHere | 2025-12-30 16:16:47+00:00
If you compare with the free versions of Jetbrains software, to the extent they even exist at all, there is a lot more than one can do in VSCode that one cannot do in free Jetbrains. Granted, the paid annual licensed version of Jetbrains may have more features. Extensions in VSCode make up for the rest. VSCode costs nothing and I can have ten instances of it without even having to think about licensing.
by danvayn | 2025-12-30 16:16:52+00:00
I don’t think it’s that straightforward to answer that. They’re both body fonts. Public Sans is a bit wider (as it isn’t geometric) and roboto seems a bit thicker. Besides these bits which can be worked around, they’re functionally too similar. Maybe you’d prefer to use Public Sans because it’s less condensed which works well for readability of smaller fonts that would be in a body of text. But you can just adjust a number of things to get what you’re looking for here.

A more vague answer I can think of is that it’s preferential and doesn’t matter to most — with designers just being highly particular about preferences, in a way that isn’t really open to objective choice. One font may display slightly better but the other font pairs better with the title font. Or we’ll look for specific issues that I don’t really see in either fonts.
by mothballed | 2025-12-30 16:17:02+00:00
Is there evidence parents are spending less time with their kids now than before screens?

When I was a kid from a young age I'd go explore the creek, spend all day hiking in the forest with a shotgun hunting squirrels/rabbits, or my parents would hand me some legos or something and leave me for an hour to build stuff. These stories weren't terribly uncommon. It was pretty normal for kids to be let out the house during the day and not come home until dinner. Parents weren't spending a lot of time with us.

Now it feels like if you don't spend time with your kid 24/7 some Karen will call CPS on your ass lickity split and some goon from the state will happily trump it up as neglect or some such. People even get cited for leaving their kid in the car for 5 minutes while they buy a pack of cigarettes.
by echelon | 2025-12-30 16:17:56+00:00
This will at some point in the future invert.

The cost to generate a future kind of film from some template (script, characters, art choices, etc in some kind of source file) won't be much more than the cost to store it.

When this happens, perhaps we will cache the results but later dump them. Assuming storage costs don't drop faster and more significantly.

Maybe 30 years?

Edit: Lots of downvotes. I'm a filmmaker, I've made lots of photons-on-glass films. Most of us are experimenting with this tech and aren't thumbing our noses at it like people outside our industry. We don't really have a choice but to adapt, and I find it funny that casual observers on the outside are so morally opposed. It's actually an incredible tool for pitching and has utility for some SFX, compositing, and B-roll shots today. It's really going to help mid market and below, for films that don't have Disney budgets.
by robrtsql | 2025-12-30 16:18:01+00:00
I don't think you're _wrong_ for wanting these things, but I think the largest game developers avoid them and provide more "on-rails" experiences for good reasons.

The thing you described about events occurring out-of-view reminds me of the "Radiant AI" system which Bethesda promised, and greatly underdelivered, for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Allegedly the game was going to be full of NPCs with their own wants and needs, and they would take actions to fulfill those wants and needs regardless of whether or not the player was even watching. It sounds like it would lead to a very interesting world, but in practice it led to criminal NPCs being dead before the player can meet them. (The truth to this story is debated: https://blog.paavo.me/radiant-ai/)

Likewise, the concept of an MMO where you aren't necessarily safe from other players in a town sounds interesting, especially in a game with a relatively small community. Applied at scale to something like World of Warcraft, I think that it would either be penalized so heavily that no one would do it, or not heavily enough so that new players have difficulty getting anywhere in the game because they are murdered by high-level trolls as soon as they log in.
by jwr | 2025-12-30 16:18:09+00:00
I think I described (though perhaps too briefly or not clearly enough) the very specific realistic problems?

I'm somewhat amused that every time this kind of discussion comes up, the answer is "you are holding it wrong". I have a feeling the world of knowledgeable crypto folks is somewhat detached from user reality.

If a single tool isn't possible, give me three tools. But if those three tools each require separate sets of keys with their own key management systems, I'm not sure if the user's problem is being addressed.
AI coding fails because architecture isn't persistent – I built a fix
by danamakes | 2025-12-30 16:18:20+00:00
AI tools generate code fast — but codebases drift, patterns break, and the larger the repo gets, the worse the AI behaves.

I think the root problem isn’t the model.
It’s that architecture is implicit, disposable, and not machine-readable.

The bigger the codebase, more entropy. I tried to fix this.

So I built Archeon:
- a local architecture layer
- a CLI that enforces constraints before code is generated
- and a GUI that visualizes intent, relationships, and outcomes

This reduces context size, prevents invalid generations,
and lets smaller or local models compete with larger ones.

Everything runs locally. No SaaS. No training data.
It works alongside existing editors and AI tools.

Repo + demo video:

https://github.com/danaia/archeonGUI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtNKRKn5FEs

I’m curious whether others see architecture — not prompting —
as the missing layer in AI-assisted development.
Ask HN: Any example of successful vibe-coded product?
by sirnicolaz | 2025-12-30 16:18:23+00:00
Many people talk about vibe-coding and about the different ways to use this development "methodology" successfully. I wonder though if anyone really managed to push to production anything that has been fully or almost fully created through LLM assisted coding. Do you have anything to share, whether you or someone else created it? Possibly something more complex than a static webpage.
by tolerance | 2025-12-30 16:18:40+00:00
Why not? One quality is inherent, the other inherited. The typeface was developed with banality in mind and presumably become popular because of its utility in this respect. The ensuing popularity in word processors and on the Web likely lead to the idea that it’s more professional than others.

Again, the author:

> Indeed, the stronger explanation for Times New Roman’s long reign isn’t aesthetic excellence, but practicality and inertia.
by WillAdams | 2025-12-30 16:18:54+00:00
Yes, but the principle here is that a library (system) should function as a repository for physical embodiments of knowledge, and should not be discarding books.

We're going through this at my workplace as well, converting from cubicles to an open floor plan, so workspaces which had decades of accumulated books are being cleared out --- I've rescued as many as I can justify from the recycling bin, but that's a tiny portion, so I'm feeling this sort of decision quite viscerally.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-12-30 16:19:04+00:00
It's like Excel: It's really powerful to enable someone who actually knows what needs done to build a little tool that does that thing. It often doesn't have to be professional-quality, let alone perfect. It just has to be better than doing the same thing manually. There are massive productivity gains to be had there... for people with that kind of problem.

This is completely orthogonal to productivity gains for full time professional developers.
by solaire_oa | 2025-12-30 16:19:18+00:00
Most people in this thread are quibbling about the exact degree of utility LLMs provide, which a tedious argument.

What's more interesting to me is, per the article, the concern regarding everyone who is leaning into LLMs without realizing (or downplaying) the exorbitant, externalized cost. Our current LLM usage is being subsidized to the point of being free by outside investment. One day when the well runs dry, you must be able to either pay the actual cost (barring grand technology breakthroughs), or switch back to non-LLM workflows. I run local LLMs infrequently, and every single prompt makes my beefy PC sounds like a jet engine taking off. It's a great reminder to not become codependent.
by mothballed | 2025-12-30 16:19:26+00:00
Lol they will not 'entertain themselves' at that point. They will see you working on the computer, start smashing and mashing the buttons and annoying the ever living shit out of you because you have something they do not and it looks to be interesting. Yes you can deal with that in various ways, but they will have an idea what it is, even if you manage to suppress that curiosity through some form of discipline.

I'm not sure about your kid but if my kid sees something new, they will stop at absolutely nothing until they find out what it is. This is why it's good, for example, if a child is curious about something like guns to show them what it is in a supervised way rather than have them get a crowbar and break into your safe and find out the hard way and hurt themselves.
by jerf | 2025-12-30 16:19:47+00:00
I'm actually not a big fan of people who recite "concurrency is not the same as parallelism" like a mantra because I don't think it's anywhere near as orthogonal as those people think. But then, that's also largely because multicore is the norm now, rather than some bizarre exception. In a single core case, it is still true. Goroutines are just a different way of achieving async functionality, in a way probably a lot more convenient than the actual code of the time had, albeit at a bit of a performance penalty.

There was a period of time towards the beginning of Go when you could get some small performance advantages for certain tasks by locking the runtime to one goroutine at a time. They've long since addressed that, but there was a time when there were people writing Go code and deliberately limiting it to one execution context at a time.
by estearum | 2025-12-30 16:20:10+00:00
Research what? The claim that Palantir "just does what it wants to do and hopes there's no blowback?"

I literally can't even parse what that means. Palantir works in very close coordination with their customers' leadership and while the company and product "have opinions" about how to do things, it doesn't at all wash out to Palantir "just doing what it wants to do."

Such a claim doesn't even make sense in the context of a business that works the way Palantir does.

Do you mean sometimes customers pay Palantir to do things that other people or the public disagree with?

And who do you think "their biggest customer" is that they're modeling their own approach after?
by nicbou | 2025-12-30 16:20:17+00:00
I thought it was a joke, then I checked.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/10/trump-times-...

The quote is milder and the "woke" bit was added by others, but the context is essentially correct.

In an interview, the font's creator took it as a compliment and was a good sport about it.
by rafaelgoncalves | 2025-12-30 16:20:20+00:00
on postgres I can update a field easily and atomically with transactions (or there is something I don't know about?), like (postgresql 14)[0]:

UPDATE users SET profile = profile || '{"lastname":"Washington"}' WHERE profile->>'name' = 'George Washington';

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/a/38045827
by kortilla | 2025-12-30 16:20:24+00:00
> Spacex is a private company; this means "we" know nothing about actual costs. Fundraising documents dont show this either, as they are a washed-down version for, well, fundraising purposes. As an investor, it is common practice to sign an NDA just to get access to actual somewhat relevant numbers, so any actual relevant info isnt public.

None of this is correct. You don’t get fidelity as an investor repeatedly publishing fraudulent documents.

Also, it’s not like spacex can hide costs. There is no other supply of money to cover operations.

> You also seem to not be aware that there are multiple internet satellite providers with south pole coverage, as well as other regions in the globe.

They are a joke. Completely different leagues of access. Coverage of the South Pole (not McMurdo) got effective continuous bandwidth around the throughput of dialup and periodic passes from a polar sat to upload scientific data.

GEO is absolutely terrible in terms of latency and cost. Starlink is currently the only good option for the entire ocean and any remote place on earth not reachable by fiber infra.

The only up and coming potential competitor is Amazon’s Kuiper/Leo. China is also experimenting here but it’s not clear that will be available to the world.

Claiming there are alternatives to Starlink is extremely ignorant. It only takes a brief glimpse of what it’s doing to both maritime and aviation to understand that it’s unique.
by jesuslop | 2025-12-30 16:20:31+00:00
Heisembugs aren't just technical debt but project killer time bombs so one must better have a perfect thread design in head that works first attempt, else is hell on earth. I can be safe in a bubble world with whole process scope individual threads or from a thread pool (so strong guarantees of joining every created thread) and having share-nothing threads communicating only by prosumer sync-queues that bring a clear information-flow picture. One can have a message pump in one thread, as GUI apps do. That is just a particular case of the prosumer channel idea before. Avoid busy waits, wait on complex event conditions by blocking calls to select() on handler-sets or WaitForMultipleObjects(). Exceptions are per thread, but is good to have a polite mechanism to make desired ones to be potentially process-fatal, and fail earliest. This won't cover all needs but is a field-tested start.
by AndrewKemendo | 2025-12-30 16:20:35+00:00
The entire premise is not philosophically rigorous

Read any serious philosophical work and the first thing it does it tells you what it’s assumptions are about the world and basis for reality.

At no point does this website do that at all it just assumes a lot of background and then jumps into this concept that there exist these “win-win games” with a bare grounding in game theory, and that all we need to do is pull the concepts out of existing structures without acknowledging any of the foundational structures or any of the epistemological Foundations of the claims.

My primary problem with it is that it sneaks in a bunch of factually incorrect and problematic concepts like the idea of capitalism as win-win which has been thoroughly debunked by Proudhon in “What is Property” and expanded on by Graeber in his book Debt
by ragnese | 2025-12-30 16:21:09+00:00
Talk about trivializing complexity...

The idea that making things immutable somehow fixes concurrency issues always made me chuckle.

I remember reading and watching Rich Hickey talking about Clojure's persistent objects and thinking: Okay, that's great- another thread can't change the data that my thread has because I'll just be using the old copy and they'll have a new, different copy. But now my two threads are working with different versions of reality... that's STILL a logic bug in many cases.

That's not to say it doesn't help at all, but it's EXTREMELY far from "share xor mutate" solving all concurrency issues/complexity. Sometimes data needs to be synchronized between different actors. There's no avoiding that. Sometimes devs don't notice it because they use a SQL database as the centralized synchronizer, but the complexity is still there once you start seeing the effect of your DB's transaction level (e.g., repeatable_read vs read_committed, etc).
by _willhf | 2025-12-30 16:21:25+00:00
Thanks for the reply. That looks like a great resource, and I’ll check it out.

What I was missing is the verification aspect. Someone can work through old quals on their own, but there’s no standard way to demonstrate to a third party that they actually met a particular bar, short of enrolling in a program. I’m curious whether people see that gap as something that matters, or whether it’s simply not something most people care about.
by LanceH | 2025-12-30 16:21:27+00:00
The first four episodes this season weren't good. The whole D&D metaphor already felt played out but is instead leaned on heavily again. The pop references are plentiful, but 5 seasons of the same references also gets old. The military is straight up a bad guy now and one way to handle them is straight up killing them in gunfights.

Then the release of the next three were just so much worse. More of the same bad stuff, but now they're rewriting the bad guys, good guys, and world setting. Major characters have fallen to the wayside, other side characters are now main. Tons of stupid, "I'm angry at you" followed by splitting up while being hunted by monsters, or hashing out some grievance while being chased by monsters in an end of the world scenario.

The cast is not awkwardly cute anymore. They are full grown adults playing children. I can forgive this as I know the difficulties in getting a production together. But it does make the petty squabbles -- which are constant -- more unbearable.

I'll watch the last episodes at they come out this week, but I have low hopes. It would be nice to see something actually wrapped up nicely even if the show is stumbling to the finish. So help me though, if they win through the power of friendship and love...
by array_key_first | 2025-12-30 16:21:39+00:00
It's not bogus at all. We've had access to 100,000x more information than we know what to do with for a while now. Right now, you can go online and learn disciplines you've never even heard of before.

So why arent you a master of, I don't know, reupholstery? Because the barrier isn't information, it's you. You're the bottle neck, we all are, because we're humans.

And AI really just does not help here. It's the same problem with professor Google, I can just turn off the computer, and I will. This is how it is for the vast majority of people.

Most people who claim to be self taught aren't even self taught. They did a course or multiple courses. Sure, it's not traditional college, but thats not self taught.
by cryptica | 2025-12-30 16:21:41+00:00
I agree with the sentiment but I find this definition of 'good code' is a bit superficial for my liking.

Especially the part about TypeScript. My experience is that LLMs such as Claude Code work really well with vanilla JavaScript. Once you switch to TypeScript, you're tapping into a different language training set which is much smaller than the JS training set and which adheres to different conventions and principles.

The part about good test coverage makes sense though I don't know if 100% coverage is the specific goal to aim for. You can have 100% coverage in terms of lines of code but don't test the relevant parameters which cause issues.

My definition of good code is more about architecture; modularity, separation of concerns, minimal interfaces, choosing good abstractions and layering them appropriately, clearly separating trust boundaries with appropriate validation... Once the LLM sees certain things, it lets you tap into a "world class software engineer" training set.

A lot of the points mentioned in the article differentiate junior developer from mid-level developer... If you want the LLM to output 10x software engineer quality, the patterns are different and more nuanced... Goes beyond just having good test coverage.
by kortilla | 2025-12-30 16:22:01+00:00
> That does not happen if 98% of anything doesn't like it.

Actually it does. Electric car sales were so anemic during that time claiming the title made it trivial to be supported by 2% of the population.

> Any claim involving "road trips" is a red herring because the Nissan Leaf was designed as a city car used in daily commutes, which means a daily driver for your 1h trips. This is by far the most popular use of a car in the world.

No it’s not. “Range anxiety” was a constant refrain for anything mentioning electric cars during the first 20 years of the century.

A “city car” isn’t a concept in the US. Only when you get into upper middle class where people can afford multiple cars per household is when you could sacrifice one car like this.
by aap_ | 2025-12-30 16:22:34+00:00
That's the puzzling thing. i find it hard to believe they sent out an operating system that can't deal with multiple file systems. yet i can't get them to work correctly. The pre-v4 nsys kernel is another piece in the puzzle. it doesn't have pipes implemented yet but aside from that (i put them in) it also shows these "busy i" bugs, but even when running on a single disk. Maybe there's more i'm doing wrong there since it's running on the fs from the v4 tape. But that i'm getting such similar bugs in different situations suggests there is something wrong that i'm not seeing yet. gotta debug more.

If it turns out to be a timing-related bug it may be that the bug was much less obvious on real hardware.
by koakuma-chan | 2025-12-30 16:22:45+00:00
I'm not even arguing that you should replace the Figma person with AI. I am arguing that even without AI, having Figma persons is a bottleneck. It is much faster to just use some kind of component library, like shadcn, and let the developer figure it out. And with AI that would be even faster, as the developer wouldn't have to write any code, just check the AI output and prompt to make changes if needed. Unless of course you need one of those really fancy landing pages, but even then, you would likely need a specialized developer, and not a Figma person.
Show HN: NoCall.chat – I built a service that calls businesses for you
by mikeavdeev | 2025-12-30 16:23:53+00:00
Hi HN.

NoCall.chat — a small web tool for people who don’t want to make phone calls.

You describe what you want to book in chat (haircut, restaurant, appointment), and the system calls the business and tries to book it for you. You get the result back in text.

This is very early and free for now.

Some countries are temporarily disabled due to legal and operational constraints — I’m rolling this out cautiously.

I’m mainly looking for: honest feedback, legal/ethical concerns, similar products or past attempts, reasons why this might be a bad idea

Not selling anything — just trying to learn.

Happy to answer questions.