MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Insanity | 2025-12-29 19:40:56+00:00
I strongly agree with the author to be honest. I can see the various perspectives in the comments here. In my view, some people care about shipping products (i.e, seeing their idea come to life). Some people enjoy solving the problems more than the shipping.

I'm in the second camp, and I think the author is as well. For those of us, LLMs are kind of boring.
by bluecalm | 2025-12-29 19:41:24+00:00
I often read about all those RSI problems and then how pinky fingers have a lot of duties. I find it strange. I type at decent speed and I barely use my pinky fingers at all. I press Caps-Lock, Tab, Shift and Enter with them as well as | and }. Pinkies are small and weak, why use them so much? That's surely neither ergonomic nor the fastest way to type.
It also means I don't like the idea of a split keyboard. I reach across quite often. I've never recorded myself to be 100% sure about all the keys but I am regularly reaching for b and y with both hands depending on the word. This way "typo" is just two quick "progressing" taps - "ty" with the left hand and "po" with the right. Of course "po" is way more comfortable with a ring-middle finger instead of a pinky/ring finger.

The whole idea of assigning keys to fingers doesn't sound too smart to me. Why would you type "ce" with the same finger? It's neither fast nor ergonomic.
Why do it to yourself?

>Home row mods live in the base layer. In my opinion, home row mods are nearly essential to make a layout this small work well. The idea is simple: your home row keys act as normal keys when tapped, but double as modifiers when held.

I feel this is underexplored idea. After remapping my CapsLock to tap=Esc, hold=ctrl it went from the least used key on my keyboard to the most used one. I really like the idea of also doing it with home row keys, that must be very convenient after getting used to. That also seems completely free as you never (I think) hold those keys during normal computer use.
by observationist | 2025-12-29 19:41:31+00:00
Radical change in the available technology is going to require radical shifts in perspective. People don't like change, especially if it involves degrading their craft. If they pivot and find the joy in the new process, they'll be happy, but people far more often prefer to be "right" and miserable.

I have some sympathy for them, but AI is here to stay, and it's getting better, faster, and there's no stopping it. Adapt and embrace change and find joy in the process where you can, or you're just going to be "right" and miserable.

The sad truth is that nobody is entitled to a perpetual advantage in the skills they've developed and sacrificed for. Expertise and craft and specialized knowledge can become irrelevant in a heartbeat, so your meaning and joy and purpose should be in higher principles.

AI is going to eat everything - there will be no domain in which it is better for humans to perform work than it will be to have AI do it. I'd even argue that for any given task, we're pretty much already there. Pick any single task that humans do and train a multibillion dollar state of the art AI on that task, and the AI is going to be better than any human for that specific task. Most tasks aren't worth the billions of dollars, but when the cost drops down to a few hundred dollars, or pennies? When the labs figure out the generalization of problem categories such that the entire frontier of model capabilities exceeds that of all humans, no matter how competent or intelligent?

AI will be better, cheaper, and faster in any and every metric of any task any human is capable of performing. We need to figure out a better measure of human worth than the work they perform, and it has to happen fast, or things will get really grim. For individuals, that means figuring out your principles and perspective, decoupling from "job" as meaning and purpose in life, and doing your best to surf the wave.
by maybewhenthesun | 2025-12-29 19:41:42+00:00
I wholeheartedly agree. I'm not saying LLMs are 'bad'. I'm not saying they are not useful. But to me personally they take out the fun parts from my profession.

My role changes from coming up with solutions to babysitting a robotic intern. Not 100% of course. And of course an agent can be useful like 'intellisense on steroids'. Or an assistant who 'ripgreps' for me. There are advantages for sure. But for me the advantages don't match the disadvantages. LLMs take the heart out of what made me like programming: building stuff yourself with your near infinite lego box of parts and coming up with ideas yourself.

I'm only half convinced the LLMs will become as important to coding as they seem . And I'm hoping a sane balance will emerge at the other end of the hype. But if it goes where OpenAI etc. want it to go I think I'll have to re-school to become an electrician or something...
by simonw | 2025-12-29 19:41:53+00:00
Thanks for the correction, and sorry for getting that wrong. I genuinely didn't know that.

Found that paperwork here: https://www.sqlite.org/copyright-release.html

I will make sure not to spread that misinformation further in the future!

Update: I had a look in fossil and counted 38 contributors:

brew install fossil
fossil clone https://www.sqlite.org/src sqlite.fossil
fossil sql -R sqlite.fossil "
SELECT user, COUNT(*) as commits
FROM event WHERE type='ci'
GROUP BY user ORDER BY commits DESC
"

Blogged about this (since it feels important to help spread the correction about this): https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/29/copyright-release/
by bugglebeetle | 2025-12-29 19:42:03+00:00
As a former artist, I can tell you that you will never have good or sufficient ideas for your art or writing if you don’t do your laundry and dishes.

A good proxy for understanding this reality is that wealthy people who pay people to do all of these things for them have almost uniformly terrible ideas. This is even true for artists themselves. Have you ever noticed how that the albums all tend to get worse the more successful the musicians become?

It’s mundanity and tedium that forces your mind to reach out for more creative things and when you subtract that completely from your life, you’re generally left with self-indulgence instead of hunger.
by the_af | 2025-12-29 19:42:14+00:00
> The lessons of the Cold War [...] should not include "actually the American system and the Soviet system were equally bad"

I was arguing that the Cold War, a substantial duration of which I also lived through, introduced a mistrustful "us vs them" kind of thinking that is harmful. The Soviet system is no longer relevant, and unfortunately "the end of history" didn't happen as Fukuyama predicted. What matters today are the successes but also the failings, lies, and fabrications of the systems that endured, and it's not all China.

Cold War mentality is what makes you (specifically you, in this context) mistrustful of any narratives not dictated by your country. So when someone else, as in this thread, praised an article for showing points of views other than the dominant narrative [1], you instantly questioned what the user meant, out of suspicion. You cannot deny it was suspicion, because in other comments you clarified what kind of "criticism of the West" you meant (and tellingly, you equated listening to other narratives to criticism of the West!): that "as often as not" it's "absurd" whining about Churchill or about the term "Iranian regime", or (in another comment) claiming that "China is freer than the US".

> The term "useful idiot" has no expiration date

As long as you acknowledge it's a term of propaganda. It has no value today other than as a relic of the Cold War past.

I hope you're not trying to use it as a thought-terminating cliché to criticize anyone who wants to say something about China that doesn't belong with the usual tropes.

> The world's major powers still attempt to propagandize their rivals.

Yes, though we would likely disagree about which is the major world power more likely to engage in this tactic today.

---

[1] what's even more puzzling is that I think TFA actually shows the same point of view as the Western narrative: China doing China things, secrecy, military projects, enclosed towns, executions. This wouldn't feel surprising or novel to an English-speaking reader, it would just confirm what they already thought of China!
by delta_p_delta_x | 2025-12-29 19:42:18+00:00
I own an Xperia 5iii (so about four-and-a-half years old now), and I also own a Pixel 10.

The Pixel 10's camera is unequivocally better. Note that this is not representative of newer Xperias' camera quality; I've heard they have improved considerably. I'm not too concerned because I hardly use my phone to take photos; I have a Nikon mirrorless for that.
by oarsinsync | 2025-12-29 19:42:30+00:00
> I can assure you that offline installer you got today from GOG will not work on Windows 20

Given the lengths the Windows development team has gone to, to preserve backward compatibility, to the point that there was individual-game-specific workarounds codified in Windows, makes this claim the same as the GP’s, that Steam will change 30-60 years from now.

The cynic in me thinks you’re both right, mind.
by kwar13 | 2025-12-29 19:43:26+00:00
I don't quite agree. LLMs have been fun for me in the sense that they have enabled me explore topics I wouldn't quite be familiar with and it would take too much for me to actually explore. For instance, putting a "restore last session" (restoring tabs) in my daily tabbed file explorer, Nemo. I wouldn't have cared enough to fork the repo and add this for myself if I didn't have an LLM to guide me through the parts that I would need to edit. It's too large of a code base for me to go digging through.
by qudat | 2025-12-29 19:43:30+00:00
You can be as specific as you want with an LLM, you can literally tell it to do “clean code” or use a DI framework or whatever and it’ll do it. Is it still work? Yes. But once you start using them you’ll realize how much code you actually write is safely in the realm of boilerplate and the core aspect of software dev is architecture which you don’t have to lose when instructing an agent. Most of the time I already know how I want the code to look, I just farm out the actual work to an agent and then spend a bunch of time reviewing and asking follow up questions.

Here’s a bunch of examples: moving code around, abstracting common functionality into a function and then updating all call sites, moving files around, pattern matching off an already existing pattern in your code. Sometimes it can be fun and zen or you’ll notice another optimization along the way … but most of the time it’s boring work an agent can is 10x faster than you.
by sho_hn | 2025-12-29 19:43:54+00:00
> German supports using the monopoly on violence given to the state to make raids on people who make undesirable social media posts.

Yes. As a sibling poster mentioned, this has historical roots. German law recognizes something called "Volksverhetzung", similar to concepts in other national criminal codes in other countries:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volksverhetzung

You can probably guess which hot button issue it comes up with in context the most often (if not: Holocaust denial).

Essentially, there was a landmark judgement that certain forms of calling for violence against women publicly can qualify as this, and so may potentially be criminal (this would be decided case by case in an actual trial, of course).

I can completely understand coming from the perspective of the First Amendment US system and having a different opinion on this. As a crude analogy, it's a bit like Americans love their free market while Europeans usually think a bit more regulation of capitalism is a sane thing to do. It's going to be difficult to agree across the pond.

These things exist on a gradient. Note that plenty of other intact democracies are much stricter than Germany, e.g. South Korea where legal action against online hate speech occurs at a far larger volume, and comes together with far more tracking infrastructure and lack of anonymity on the internet (e.g. since everyone has a client cert for online commerce). And you know what? Many South Koreans want internet hate speech and trolling and bullying policed even much harder.

In Germany there is constant, sometimes quite heated debate on the reach of the application of the Volksverhetzung idea. I think that's very good and have had different opinions across various cases.

> Will you think its still a good use of your tax money when the opposition is putting you in a police car for this exact HN comment?

I know the legislative and political processes of my country well enough to know the long process it would take to get there. If I see things slide in the wrong direction, you bet I'll vote or take to the streets on that issue, too.

A country is a process that takes active participation. It's not a black or white thing you settle one time.
by EA-3167 | 2025-12-29 19:43:58+00:00
Piracy is widespread, that's undeniable. The question that industry groups and lawmakers love to avoid or lie about however is how much of that piracy represents lost sales, and how much represents people in the third world finding a way to participate with all of the people who can afford it. I pirated a lot as a kid because I had no money, there were no lost sales there. As an adult I don't pirate at all, because I have money, because it's inconvenient now compared to legitimate access.

So I'm perfectly prepared to believe that Steam is a good option (I personally love it), and frankly if the worst happens and the games I pay for go away on Steam... there are options. Once I pay for something I no longer feel any guilt about seeking a backup for example, and neither should you, even if the industry groups count that as a full-sale price theft.
by heresie-dabord | 2025-12-29 19:43:59+00:00
> there is something wrong with a group of people completely unable to see when someone is lying to them.

They mistakenly believe, like temporarily embarrassed millionaires/capitalists [1], that they are actually in the winning group.

[1] _ https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Steinbeck#Disputed
The "4-Hour Barrier": Forensic Audit of Sm_90 Logic Decay on Nvidia H100
by Stan_Byriukov | 2025-12-29 19:44:02+00:00
I’ve been auditing autonomous reasoning models on NVIDIA Hopper (sm_90) hardware, and I’ve identified a systemic decay in deterministic stability that seems to be ignored by the industry.

While these systems show 100% reliability in Isaac Lab simulations, real-world deployment on H100 hardware reveals what I call "Stochastic Logic Drift."

The core issue is that in standard Euclidean-based vector search and reasoning manifolds, floating-point non-determinism and thermal noise accumulate.

After approximately 4 hours of continuous high-load inference on H100 PCIe, the decision manifold loses its deterministic lock. I’ve observed bit-level similarity (LCP) decay significantly as hardware entropy gains ground over model weights.

I’ve published a full forensic audit—including a SHA-256 hash-chain of over 28,000 queries—that demonstrates this “Logic Collapse” on baseline systems versus a p-adic invariant approach that maintains a 100% bit-perfect lock even under peak thermal stress (72°C).

The raw telemetry, H100 hardware receipts, and the CUDA kernel logic I used to anchor the substrate are available here:
https://gist.github.com/StanByriukov02/3686a8cd3da70effa5d848deb46753e7

If we continue to ignore "Inference Liability" at the hardware level, we are building autonomous systems on a foundation of sand. Simulation parity is a myth if the substrate itself isn't deterministic.

I’m interested to hear if others have seen similar jitter in long-context reasoning runs on sm_90/sm_100, or if the industry is simply accepting this drift as "expected noise."
by dc396 | 2025-12-29 19:44:02+00:00
Call me cynical, but I figure in our post-truth world, faith depends on the tribe you belong to, not "transparent investigation". To me, this is yet another episode of one side screaming "conspiracy" and the other side screaming "conspiracy to create a conspiracy" in order to drive clicks on both sides. The actual truth will likely never be publicly known or acknowledged.
by andoando | 2025-12-29 19:44:14+00:00
I mean I don't really give a shit. Im buying a game to play it now, maybe next year.

Besides you only need Steam if the publisher chooses to use Steam DRM. There's clearly an incentive for it, don't think its purely Steam's fault.

If that's the model the publisher offers, that's the model you have. Its your choice to participate in it or not.
by mrbonner | 2025-12-29 19:44:30+00:00
I wonder if LLMs and Gen AI represent a shift similar to the invention of the tractor a century ago. Initially, both technologies struggled to find their most effective applications, despite grand promises of transformative productivity. It took tractors several decades to become truly mainstream. Perhaps the same pattern will unfold with LLMs and AI. The difference this time is that companies are investing enormous amounts of capital in preparation for that inevitable moment of widespread adoption.
by 453yuh46 | 2025-12-29 19:44:54+00:00
I have been diagnosed with Aspergers not long before it became part of ASD. I don't really understand why you are disassociating yourself with Aspergers which was another word for "high-function" autism and is still used interchangeably.

Reading from what you have written - that is part of my experience, though I don't think that it has anything to do with being Aspergers or even being on a spectrum, but being alone a lot and educating myself a lot - that basically is what "smart people" in general are doing - including NT. Yes, there are a lot of people that do not actively learn, but that can apply to Aspergers as well as NT. That is not the reason for differences.

Just to save space and not to create another comment - "four phenotypes" are not new attempt to classify. To me it looks like rewording - before there was already quite clear distinction between Aspergers and Aspergers&ADHD combination - both of them are part of "high functioning autism", and they behave wildly differently(people with Aspergers&ADHD part might not be recognized as "weird" but even as NT - by other people). They were all part of spectrum anyway. And from reading the paper it seems, that they have made 2 other types for what was "low functioning" autism.
Apparently putting them all in ASD was not helping for bureaucracy - especially when it comes down to finances - it is quite important in Trumps USA and might be also for other countries.
by kjkjadksj | 2025-12-29 19:44:57+00:00
You can get in the weeds with complex decision making even when you suck. Say you hit your 3 wood 200 yards and you are 200 yards away from the hole. Course management would tell you that you hit your 9 iron well x% more often than three wood so maybe try and hit it twice laying up instead of the hero shot. Then there is the true reality unbound by theory like course management is, where if you thin the hell out of that 3 wood it is still going to skip forward at least 130 yards making it a safer shot than the 9 iron with a risk free attempt at the green coupled in.

Taking a moment to consider the green before you chip on is also a simple concept that would benefit golfers of all handicaps. Setting yourself up for easier putts or the chance to roll the ball in off the chip just takes awareness rather than skill and repetition.

Golf is one of the more interesting sport just from a standpoint of how many considerations you are making and how lies aside from the teeshot are often so unique.
by pritambarhate | 2025-12-29 19:45:03+00:00
What is good design and code quality?

If I can keep adding new features without introducing big regressions that is good design and good code quality. (Of course there will come a time when it will not be possible and it will need a rewrite. Same like software created by top paid developers from the best universities.)

As long as we can keep new bugs to the same level as hand written code with LLM written code, I think, LLMs writing code is much superior just because of the speed with which it allows us to implement features.

We write software to solve (mostly) business efficiency problems. The businesses which will solve those problems faster than their competitors will win.
by kayo_20211030 | 2025-12-29 19:45:58+00:00
It's very hard to accept criticism; very hard. But OP's view is the mature, thoughtful way to go about it. Some people are going to be mad-as-hell, and they just will be. The analysis and advice is good. The initial response from the founder wasn't great and because we all like rooting for the underdog, there was a pile-on. Bad on us.

But, just to see how accepting criticism works, it wasn't Dostoevsky who had that quote about happy families, it was Tolstoy. :-)
by troupo | 2025-12-29 19:46:37+00:00
> That proposal was withdrawn

"That proposal" was a talk by Alex Russel in 2011: https://web.archive.org/web/20121119184816/https://fronteers...

Web Components are not a single proposal. Their core originally is three specs:

- Custom Elements

- Shadow DOM

- HTML Templates

Custom Elements v0 was implemented by Google, but the API changed (especially with ES6 classes making their way into all major browsers), and now everyone's on Custom Elements v1. There are very little fundamental changes between the two beyond that.

Shadow DOM is there, is an endless source of bizarre problems that literally no one has, and in the end will need ~30 different specs and changes to the browser to fix those problems (for a sample see https://w3c.github.io/webcomponents-cg/2022.html)

HTML Templates were only implemented in Firefox, and were removed in favor of JavaScript-only HTML Modules which were eventually scrapped in favor of on-off additions to JavaScript imports (see e.g. "CSS Module scripts" https://web.dev/articles/css-module-scripts)

> was proposed based on lessons learned from (or inspired by?) React/Vue.

Lol. The world wishes it were so. There rarely was such an insular group of people developing major web standards as those developing web components. They were hostile to any outside input or influence and listened to no voices, and looked at no implementations but their own.
by lucb1e | 2025-12-29 19:46:43+00:00
Which one is that?

I would be interested in paying a bit more if the ISP is better. In the Netherlands we always had xs4all, nowadays sorta morphed into freedom internet, which was started from a hacker magazine and kept the spirit, fighting surveillance and censorship while offering regular ISP services and then some. I'm not aware that Germany has such a thing so any step in the right direction would make me switch if I can get it (should be fine if it's available via Telekom's public network, we're currently on a virtual operator as well)
by autoexec | 2025-12-29 19:47:29+00:00
Sadly all the AI is owned by companies that want to do all your art and writing so that they can keep you as a slave doing their laundry and dishes. Maybe we'll eventually see powerful LLMs running locally so that you don't have to beg some cloud service for permission to use it in the ways you want, but at this point most people will be priced out of the hardware they'd need to run it anyway.

However you feel about LLMs or AI right now, there are a lot of people with way more money and power than you have who are primarily interested in further enriching and empowering themselves and that means bad news for you. They're already looking into how to best leverage the technology against you, and the last thing they care about is what you want.
by dboreham | 2025-12-29 19:47:47+00:00
I don't do side projects, but the LLM has completely changed the calculus about whether some piece of programming is worthwhile doing at all. I've been enjoying myself automating all sorts of admin/ops stuff that hitherto got done manually because there was never a clear 1/2 day of time to sit down and write the script. Claude does it while I'm deleting email or making coffee.