MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dahart | 2025-12-13 21:03:26+00:00
> AI may output certain things at a vastly different rate than it appears in the training data

That’s a subjective statement, but generally speaking, not true. If it were, LLMs would produce unintelligible text & images. The way neural networks function is fundamentally to produce data that is statistically similar to the training data. Context, prompts, and training data are what drive the style. Whatever trends you believe you’re seeing in AI can be explained by context, prompts, and training data, and isn’t an inherent part of AI.

Extra fingers are known as hallucination, so if it’s a different phenomenon, then nobody knows what you’re talking about, and you are saying your analogy to fingers doesn’t work. In the case of images, the tokens are pixels, while in the case of LLMs, the tokens are approximately syllables. Finger hallucinations are lack of larger structural understanding, but they statistically mimic the inputs and are not examples of frequency differences.
by jfengel | 2025-12-13 21:03:26+00:00
Most of Trek's tech is just a way to move the story along. Transporters were introduced to avoid having to land a shuttle. Warp drive is just a way to get to the next story. Communicators relay plot points.

Stories which focus on them as technology are nearly always boring. "Oh no the transporter broke... Yay we fixed it".
by gmfawcett | 2025-12-13 21:03:40+00:00
I've had the same intuition. I've had mixed results in this area, although I'm certainly no expert. Recently I wanted to formalize a model of a runbook for a tricky system migration, to help me reason through some alternatives. I ended up writing a TLA+ spec before generating some visualizations, and also some possible prototypes in MiniZinc. All three (spec, visualizations, CP models) were vibe-coded in different sessions, in about that order, though most of my personal effort went into the spec.

While the later AIs quickly understood many aspects of the spec, they struggled with certain constraints whose intuitive meaning was concealed behind too much math. Matters which I had assumed were completely settled, because a precise constraint existed in the spec, had to be re-explained to the AI after implementation errors were found. Eventually, I added more spec comments to explain the motivation for some of the constraints, which helped somewhat. (While it's an untested idea, my next step was going to be to capture traces of the TLA+ spec being tested against some toy models, and including those traces as inputs when producing the implementations, e.g. to construct unit tests. Reasoning about traces seemed to be a fairly strong suit for the AI helper.)

In hindsight, I feel I set my sights a little too high. A human reader would have had similar comprehension problems with my spec, and they probably would have taken longer to prime themselves than the AI did. Perhaps my takeaway is that TLA+ is a great way to model certain systems mathematically, because precision in meaning is a great quality; but you still have to show sympathy to your reader.
by af78 | 2025-12-13 21:04:01+00:00
European leaders are far from blameless. I fully agree European countries should have weaned themselves from Russian gas and ramped up military spending much sooner. Meanwhile for a long time the US retained control of NATO military structures in Europe. And recently Trump granted a waiver allowing Hungary to continue importing Russian oil. And there is talk from the US about reviving Nordstream, that both Trump and Biden harshly (and fairly IMO) criticized.

Trump being thin-skinned does not explain much. The latest strategy document where the US administration explicitly says it will do its utmost to bring far-right parties to power in Europe goes far beyond that. It's clearly not just Trump. And again, it definitely does not help keep friends to face China. Neither does twisting Ukraine's arm to accept a disastrous deal in exchange for vague promises of riches for Trump and his clan. History shows appeasing an aggressor invites more aggression. Russia's partner, China, is watching, will sense weakness and draw conclusions neither Europe nor America will like.
by jojomodding | 2025-12-13 21:04:27+00:00
Consider, for example, the "Hydra" cryptid (second in the list OOP linked).

This is a BB(2,5) machine (2 states, 5 symbols). There are other BB(2,5) machines that take more than 10↑↑4 steps to terminate. And the "Hydra" is called a cryptid because it might run even longer than that. So "naively" running it is unlikely to yield results before the heat death of the universe.

Of course, you can run it more cleverly by looking at what the machine is doing and essentially re-implementing this in a faster language. People have in fact done this, and simulated 4 million "fast" steps (corresponding to much more "naive" steps), and not found it to halt. If you want to run the simulation yourself, the code is on the website OOP linked, in the article about the Hydra.
by dustywusty | 2025-12-13 21:04:30+00:00
Can really spot someone who has never had to deal with OFAC with a comment like this. Even if I don't necessarily agree with the concept, or who is actually being blocked, my business is dead in the water if I'm a) sent to prison or b) fined out of existence.

Geographic IP information is one of our best tools to defend against those outcomes, and if anything it should be better.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-12-13 21:05:09+00:00
Appreciate the kind words. I respect the disagreement, I simply feel we are out of better options at this point in the timeline and cycle. It is not the best option, it is the least worst option when there are few options.

> The solution is not to restrict foreign workers, but to protect wages and working conditions by strictly enforcing labor standards and preventing exploitative hiring (across both the foreign and native labor forces), and to use targeted immigration that addresses genuine bottlenecks. Using a single unemployment threshold is not logical because labor markets are segmented and dynamic.

I strongly agree. But that is not on offer at the moment, only restricting immigration. It is a suboptimal mechanism, but still a mechanism available. If what you propose becomes possible, certainly, I would have a different policy opinion based on system inputs and probable outcomes. Systems thinking. I am an aggressive supporter of worker rights and labor protections, having seen first hand what corporations will do to workers (with workers having zero recourse), and I am willing to support substantial economic impairment to the US economy or individual corporations if that is required.

We do not need an underclass or immigrant labor to do the work you enumerate (healthcare, construction, agriculture, childcare); we need living wages and strong worker protections for domestic workers first. There is no shortage of labor, only companies and a nation unwilling to pay living wages and provide reasonable working conditions, and that should be forced to change by any means necessary. If, in the short term, a component of that is constraining the immigration pipeline (to reduce labor supply), I support that if it is the only mechanism available.

Can I be pro worker and pro immigrant? I can be, under the assumption of prioritizing domestic workers first (as a nation state should, that is its job, to protect its citizens), then immigrant workers with the same wage and working condition protections, up to the jobs available in the economy (+- to account for dynamics). Economic growth gains go primarily to the top 10% of the US by wealth, who hold 93% of US equities, so I do not value economic growth as a KPI to optimize for.
by apparent | 2025-12-13 21:05:36+00:00
I planned to propose to my girlfriend at sunset on the coast. We walked along a path and I got out my camera, ostensibly so we could take photos of ourselves using a small tripod I brought. I was going to take a few photos using the camera remote, then propose and keep taking shots to capture the moment.

As I was setting up the tripod on a bench, and man who was walking by offered to take a photo for us. I didn't want to explain what was going to happen, so I declined. But he insisted that he had the exact same camera, and would be happy to take some photos.

I lowered my voice so my girlfriend wouldn't hear, and said "Ok don't react at all, but I am about to propose to my girlfriend." He nodded in understanding and calmly took the camera. He took a few posed shots and then gave me the signal. I got down on a knee and proposed (completely forgetting what the speech I had prepared, of course), with him taking photos all the while. I'm certain that the photos he took (in manual mode!) turned out much better than what I would have captured at sunset/dusk, via remote.

A year or two later I mentioned to my then-wife that it would have been nice had we invited the man to our wedding. She laughed and said that she always assumed he was a photographer whom I had paid to be at the location at that time. It took quite some convincing before she understood that he was just a Nikon photog who was in the right place at the right time.
by lawn | 2025-12-13 21:05:53+00:00
This is also what really annoyed me when I tried out Gleam.

I'm waiting for something similar to serde in Rust, where you simply tag your type and it'll generate type-safe serialization and deserialization for you.

Gleam has some feature to generate the code for you via the LSP, but it's just not good enough IMHO.
by blauditore | 2025-12-13 21:06:17+00:00
I could never make myself like Pharo (or Smalltalk). Yes, it's interesting and exotic, but it never seemed really practical. Maybe what I was missing the most was static/explicit typing, which replaces the need for many of Smalltalk's features. I also never liked working with Python or JS for that reason.

It's amusing that in the mid-2010 with the raise of Node, web (turned "full stack") devs advocated for JS and how static typing was really not that relevant. Then TS came and suddenly the same folks considered it an absolut game changer.
by jdelsman | 2025-12-13 21:06:25+00:00
My favorite set of tools to use with Claude Code right now: https://github.com/obra/superpowers

1. Start with the ‘brainstorm’ session where you explain your feature or the task that you're trying to complete. 2. Allow it to write up a design doc, then an implementation plan - both saved to disk - by asking you multiple clarifying questions. Feel free to use voice transcription for this because it is probably as good as typing, if not better. 3. Open up a new Claude window and then use a git worktree with the Execute Plan command. This will essentially build out in multiple steps, committing after about three tasks. What I like to do is to have it review its work after three tasks as well so that you get easier code review and have a little bit more confidence that it's doing what you want it to do.

Overall, this hasn't really failed me yet and I've been using it now for two weeks and I've used about, I don't know, somewhere in the range of 10 million tokens this week alone.
by sprash | 2025-12-13 21:06:43+00:00
Unpopular take: Windows 95 was the peak of Desktop UX.

GUI elements were easily distinguishable from content and there was 100% consistency down to the last little detail (e.g. right click always gave you a meaningful context menu). The innovations after that are tiny in comparison and more opinionated (things like macos making the taskbar obsolete with the introduction of Exposé).
by fdsfdsfdsafdas | 2025-12-13 21:06:46+00:00
>It doesn’t take a lot of effort

Sorry, but that's where you're wrong (at least, if you mean enforcing effective limits). What you're asking is for parents to spend their scarce time and energy on fighting a technical battle, against a system that is designed to capture attention, and kids with nothing but energy and time.

>But it’s pretty well controlled and they adjust to it

Or they did 10 seconds of googling and have all the access they want.
by nkrisc | 2025-12-13 21:07:16+00:00
> Purely NLP with no screen

Cumbersome and slow with horrible failure recovery. Great if it works, huge pain in the ass if it doesn't. Useless for any visual task.

> head worn augmented reality

Completely useless if what you're doing doesn't involve "augmenting reality" (editing a text document), which probably describes most tasks that the average person is using a computer for.

> contact lenses

Effectively impossible to use for some portion of the population.

> head worn virtual reality

Completely isolates you from your surroundings (most people don't like that) and difficult to use for people who wear glasses. Nevermind that currently they're heavy, expensive, and not particularly portable.

> implanted sensors

That's going to be a very hard sell for the vast majority of people. Also pretty useless for what most people want to do with computers.

The reason these different form factors haven't caught on is because they're pretty shit right now and not even useful to most people.

The standard desktop environment isn't perfect, but it's good and versatile enough for what most people need to do with a computer.
by mattkevan | 2025-12-13 21:08:03+00:00
Really interesting. Going to have to watch in detail.

I’m in the process of designing an os interface that tries to move beyond the current desktop metaphor or the mobile grid of apps.

Instead it’s going to use ‘frames’ of content that are acted on by capabilities that provide functionality. Very much inspired by Newton OS, HyperCard and the early, pre-Web thinking around hypermedia.

A newton-like content soup combined with a persistent LLM intelligence layer, RAG and knowledge graphs could provide a powerful way to create, connect and manage content that breaks out of the standard document model.
by lpil | 2025-12-13 21:08:10+00:00
You can generate those conversions, most people do.

But also, you shouldn’t think of it as writing the same type twice! If you couple your external API and your internal data model you are greatly restricting your domain modelling cability. Even in languages where JSON serialisation works with reflection I would recommend having a distinct definition for the internal and external structure so you can have the optimal structure for each context, dodging the “lowest common decimator” problem.
by smj-edison | 2025-12-13 21:08:40+00:00
Every time I've tried visual programming for anything other than data flow I find it way more painful than just typing code. It's particularly hard to follow control flow, and organization is a pain. So I'm not convinced that visual programming (as conventionally envisioned) is the future. That said, I'm a big fan of making use of visual intuition, at least how dynamic land and folk computer envision it (they also have the datalog-like reactive database that is the glue that connects different programs together in a nicer way than data flow).
by uberman | 2025-12-13 21:09:20+00:00
Just checking prices and labor rates. Those guys gave like an hour of their work to lost strangers. I guess it's not the biggest kindness but it still made a lasting impression on me.

I would have loved to retire to Tahiti based on how wonderful the people there were to us but I gather lots of people have the same kind of experience with the hospitality and now it is too expensive to retire there :p
by miki123211 | 2025-12-13 21:10:12+00:00
There's a flywheel where programmers choose languages that LLMs already understand, but LLMs can only learn languages that programmers write a sufficient amount of code in.

Because LLMs make it that much faster to develop software, any potential advantage you may get from adopting a very niche language is overshadowed by the fact that you can't use it with an LLM. This makes it that much harder for your new language to gain traction. If your new language doesn't gain enough traction, it'll never end up in LLM datasets, so programmers are never going to pick it up.
by peterburkimsher | 2025-12-13 21:11:09+00:00
After a concert in London, I missed the last train back to Lancaster. So I made a sign saying that I was on CouchSurfing, and some strangers invited me over!

After CouchSurfing started charging a monthly fee, I’ve defected to BeWelcome.org which is a European, open-source alternative to CS.
by linguae | 2025-12-13 21:11:17+00:00
I enjoyed this talk, and I want to learn more about the concept of “learning loops” for interface design.

Personally, I wish there were a champion of desktop usability like how Apple was in the 1980s and 1990s. I feel that Microsoft, Apple, and Google lost the plot in the 2010s due to two factors: (1) the rise of mobile and Web computing, and (2) the realization that software platforms are excellent platforms for milking users for cash via pushing ads and services upon a captive audience. To elaborate on the first point, UI elements from mobile and Web computing have been applied to desktops even when they are not effective, probably to save development costs, and probably since mobile and Web UI elements are seen as “modern” compared to an “old-fashioned” desktop. The result is a degraded desktop experience in 2025 compared to 2009 when Windows 7 and Snow Leopard were released. It’s hamburger windows, title bars becoming toolbars (making it harder to identify areas to drag windows), hidden scroll bars, and memory-hungry Electron apps galore, plus pushy notifications, nag screens, and ads for services.

I don’t foresee any innovation from Microsoft, Apple, or Google in desktop computing that doesn’t have strings attached for monetization purposes.

The open-source world is better positioned to make productive desktops, but without coordinated efforts, it seems like herding cats, and it seems that one must cobble together a system instead of having a system that works as coherently as the Mac or Windows.

With that said, I won’t be too negative. KDE and GNOME are consistent when sticking to Qt/GTK applications, respectively, and there are good desktop Linux distributions out there.
by Grosvenor | 2025-12-13 21:11:35+00:00
What he's getting at is single level storage. Ram isn't used for loading data & working on it. Ram is cache. The size of your disk defines the "size" of your system.

This existed in Lisp and Smalltalk systems. Since there's no disk/running program split you don't have to serialize your data. You just pass around Lisp sexprs or Smalltalk code/ASTs. No more sucking your data from Postgres over a straw, or between microservices, or ...

These systems are magnitudes smaller and simpler than what we've built today. I'd love to see them exist again.
by AndrewKemendo | 2025-12-13 21:11:39+00:00
> Yes, whittling down a stick is pretty much the same experience as using an electric toothbrush

Correct? I agree with this precisely but assume you’re writing it sarcastically

From the point of view of the starting state of the mouth to the end state of the mouth the USER EXPERIENCE is the same: clean teeth

The FORM FACTOR is different: Electric version means ONLY that I don’t move my arm

“Most people” can’t do multiplication in their head so I’m not looking to them to understand
by rgmerk | 2025-12-13 21:11:43+00:00
From a global perspective, people living in temperate areas are actually the exception, not the rule (if a disproportionately economically successful exception).

The likely implication of this is that, long term, unless wind power starts going back down the cost curve, or you're fortunate enough to have lots of hydro power, Northern Europe, Canada, northern China and so on are going to have much more expensive energy than more equatorial places.
by girvo | 2025-12-13 21:12:06+00:00
> Presumably much of that learning boost is because I'm a hobbyist tier programmer, guessing professionals wouldn't experience the same since they learned this via manual coding trial & error over years.

I can only speak for myself and my not-quite two decades of professional experience, but yes pretty much!

It’s neat to see that sped up for others though with lower stakes, though it’s not quite the same unless you prompt your agent to question you back a lot (Claude is much better at this in my experience)
by rokoss21 | 2025-12-13 21:12:22+00:00
The key insight most people miss: AI isn't a code generator, it's a thinking partner. Start by defining the problem precisely in plain English before asking it to code. Use it for refactoring and explaining existing code rather than generating from scratch. That's where you get the 10x gains.

Also, treat bad AI suggestions as learning opportunities - understand why the code is wrong and what it misunderstood about your requirements.
by krapp | 2025-12-13 21:12:29+00:00
>In the Trek universe, LCARS wasn't getting continuous UI updates because they would have advanced, culturally, to a point where they recognized that continuous UI updates are frustrating for users.

Not to be "that guy" but LCARS wasn't getting continuous UI updates because that would have cost the production team money and for TNG at least would have often required rebuilding physical sets. It does get updated between series because as part of setting the design language for that series.

And Geordi was shown constantly making improvements to the ship's systems because he had to be shown "doing engineer stuff."
by Fargren | 2025-12-13 21:12:44+00:00
That explains why it happens, but doesn't really help with the problem. The expectation I have as a pretty naive user, is that what is in the .md file should be permanently in the context. It's good to understand why this is not the case, but it's unintuitive and can lead to frustration. It's bad UX, if you ask me.

I'm sure there are workarounds such as resetting the context, but the point is that god UX would mean such tricks are not needed.
by rokoss21 | 2025-12-13 21:12:44+00:00
Lobsters is the natural choice - thoughtful tech discussion with strong moderation against hype. Also worth checking: comp.lang.* Usenet groups (surprisingly active), Reddit's niche programming subreddits (r/rust, r/golang), and specialty forums like electro-tech-online.com for hardware folks.

The key difference: smaller communities attract people who are there for the craft, not engagement metrics.
by Hammershaft | 2025-12-13 21:13:04+00:00
All of the other examples you gave are products constrained by physical reality with a small set of countable use-cases. I don't think computer operating systems are simply mature appliance-like products that have been optimized down their current design. I think there is a lot of potential that hasn't been realized because the very few players in the operating system space have been been hill-climbing towards a local maxima set by path dependence 40 years ago.
by rokoss21 | 2025-12-13 21:13:09+00:00
The issue isn't whether people cite AI—it's whether they're adding actual insight. A thoughtful comment like "I tried this approach and X happened because Y" is valuable regardless of source.

The real problem is lazy low-effort comments. "ChatGPT says do X" without reasoning is no different from "just trust me bro."

Better solution: encourage original thinking, reward substantive contributions, flag low-effort content regardless of origin. Guidelines shouldn't be about the tool, but about discourse quality.
by fsflover | 2025-12-13 21:13:25+00:00
> T-Mobile would have to white list the phone for it to work. This is a real pain, especially since I have been needing to field some really important calls lately.

I guess, there is nothing you can do if your provider bans your hardware.

> it seems like it drops to 2g for the call

This means, the poster is using an outdated modem firmware, which should be upgraded by contacting Purism (AFAIK Purism isn't allowed to freely distribute it).

Calls seem to work fine for me.