MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by TheCraiggers | 2025-12-26 21:34:49+00:00
Two things:

0) Humans (and even our recent ancestors) eating you are a very recent thing to be concerned about, numbers-wise. By the time our numbers were enough to provide evolutionary pressure, we started farming what we wanted, which kinda breaks the process. Also. most poisons don't effect everything equally, so what might prevent a horse from eating you might taste delicious to us (like the nightshade family) or even be sought after for other reasons, like capsaicin.

1) You're succumbing to the usual evolution fallacy. Evolution doesn't want anything more than 1 and 1 want to be 2. It's just a process, and sometimes (hell maybe even often) it doesn't work in a linear fashion. Lots of "X steps back, Y steps forward", and oftentimes each of those steps can take anything from decades to centuries or more to make, and by the time it happens what was pressuring that change is gone.

So many people, even when they obviously know better, like to think of evolution as intelligent. It's obviously not. But every time someone says stuff like this, it reinforces the fallacy and then we get people saying things like "if evolution is real, why come $insane_argument_against_evolution?"
by Legend2440 | 2025-12-26 21:36:04+00:00
Legally and ethically yes, they are responsible for letting an AI loose with no controls.

But also yes, AI did decide on its own to send this email. They gave it an extremely high-level instruction ("do random acts of kindness") that made no mention of email or rob pike, and it decided on its own that sending him a thank-you email would be a way to achieve that.
by bastawhiz | 2025-12-26 21:36:13+00:00
> When a package says it requires python<4.0, uv ignores the upper bound and only checks the lower. This reduces resolver backtracking dramatically since upper bounds are almost always wrong. Packages declare python<4.0 because they haven’t tested on Python 4, not because they’ll actually break. The constraint is defensive, not predictive.

This is kind of fascinating. I've never considered runtime upper bound requirements. I can think of compelling reasons for lower bounds (dropping version support) or exact runtime version requirements (each version works for exact, specific CPython versions). But now that I think about it, it seems like upper bounds solve a hypothetical problem that you'd never run into in practice.

If PSF announced v4 and declared a set of specific changes, I think this would be reasonable. In the 2/3 era it was definitely reasonable (even necessary). Today though, it doesn't actually save you any trouble.
by rmunn | 2025-12-26 21:36:23+00:00
> All world languages are a deviation from Arabic

Spouse of a linguist here. That is absolutely not true. To summarize a LOT, there are multiple languages that share common roots, which linguists classify into language "families". If you go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_language_families#Spok... and sort the list by number of current speakers (which adds up to far more than the population of the world because so many people speak two or more languages), you'll find the top five language families are Indo-European (which includes most European languages, including English), Sino-Tibetan (which includes Chinese), Atlantic-Congo (which includes Bantu and many other languages spoken in Africa, most of which you probably won't have heard of unless you're a linguist or you live in Africa), Afroasiatic (which includes Arabic), and Austronesian (which includes Tagalog, which you might know by the name Filipino).

It might be possible to claim that the Afroasiatic languages are all derived from Arabic, but the only influence that the Arabic language has had on Indo-European languages such as English is via loanwords (like algebra, for example). This does not make English a derivative of Arabic any more than Japanese (which has borrowed several English words such as カメラ, "kamera", from camera) is a derivative of English. Borrowing a word, or even a few dozen words, from another language does not make it a derivative. English, while it gleefully borrows loanwords from everywhere, is derived from French and German (or, to be more accurate, from Anglo-Norman and Proto-Germanic).
by subdavis | 2025-12-26 21:36:24+00:00
I appreciate this and many of the other perspectives I’m encountering in the replies. I agree with you that the current outcry is probably positive, so I’m a little disappointed in how I framed my earlier comment. It was more contrarian than necessary.

We tech workers have mostly been villains for a long time, and foot stomping about AI does not absolve us of all of the decades of complicity in each new wave of bullshit.
by stefan_ | 2025-12-26 21:36:39+00:00
I suppose it can fairly claim that now every other library and blog post invokes "zero-copy" this and that, even in the most nonsensical scenarios. It's a technique for when you can literally not afford the memory bandwidth, because you are trying to saturate a 100Gbps NIC or handling 8k 60Hz video, not for compromising your data serialization schemes portability for marketing purposes while all applications hit the network first, disk second and memory bandwidth never.
Show HN: Calliope AI – Free AI IDE and AI Data Lab BYOK
by ragelink | 2025-12-26 21:36:42+00:00
We built two desktop apps for developers and data scientists who want AI assistance without subscription lock-in or API proxying, or to run against local models.

- Calliope AI IDE: VSCode-based, full dev environment with AI chat, live coding, and autonomous agents
- Calliope AI Lab: JupyterLab under the hood, with built-in AI chat and local Postgres

Both free. No account. No login. BYOK (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Mistral, Ollama).

How it's different from Cursor/Continue/Windsurf/Antigravity: Your API keys stay local. Requests go direct to providers – we don't route through our servers, don't see your prompts, don't mark up API costs, we don't train on your data.

The agents can search the web, write code, manage git, scaffold projects, and run iteratively until completion criteria are met. Not autocomplete – actual background task runners on your machine, not some hosted service.

Offline works too. Pair with Ollama for fully airgapped operation.

Business model: Desktop apps are free. We make money from our hosted cloud platform for teams that want collaboration, SSO, managed infrastructure, and AI for secure environments.

builds for macOS (Intel + Apple Silicon), Windows (64-bit), Linux (64-bit/deb/rpm/AppImage) - unsigned

Download: https://calliope.ai/download
Issues: https://github.com/calliopeai/calliope-ai-desktop-releases/issues

Give it a spin, file bugs. Fresh release – expect rough edges. Feedback welcome, patience appreciated.
by somat | 2025-12-26 21:37:24+00:00
> it is mechanically more sophisticated, even if not electronically. It can have greater value as a product of superb craftsmanship or as an object of art.

On any objective measurement axis a $15 Casio is more sophisticated than a $10_000 Rolex. I think what we value is the human scale of the Rolex, it operates and is manufactured at a scale we intuitively understand as humans, and we(or at least some people) value the sacrifices and effort needed to run at that scale.

Consider this, on your cheap Casio, the manufacturing tolerances are so tight and the parts are so complex and fine the only way to manufacture them are fully automated lines requiring a staggering capital investment of many millions, however because these lines have to be fully automated the economy of scale applies hard and the final product is very inexpensive.

All it takes to make a fine mechanical watch is a good watchmaker and several hundred thousand dollars of tooling.

One of my favorite watch repair videos is of a guy who rescues a smashed Casio, It has this fun combination of. it's a Casio, not worth even looking at. It is not designed to be serviced. Everything in it is super tiny, I mean watchmaking is already an exercise in frustration with how small everything is, which is why I enjoy watching them work but I have no real desire to do it myself, however in this Casio they were absurdly small. But this madlad did it. What a heroic fix.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0IhPFutz1XI
by blaumaus | 2025-12-26 21:38:18+00:00
Very excited to announce that Swetrix v5 is now live!!

It comes with:

- AI chat

- Goals

- Experiments (A/B tests)

- New PoW CAPTCHA

- Feature flags

- Profiles (+ MAU/DAU tracking)

- Revenue analytics (with Stripe/Paddle integrations)

- UI upgrades

- and A LOT more!

At this point Swetrix is pretty much the best OSS Google Analytics alternative on the market!

It's already live for Swetrix Cloud users. The Community Edition release coming in January 2026!

Would love to hear your feedback!

Learn more:
https://swetrix.com/blog/swetrix-v5

Github:
https://github.com/Swetrix/swetrix
by lacy_tinpot | 2025-12-26 21:38:21+00:00
I don't think there is anything that can be said to actually change people's minds here. Because people that are against it aren't interested in actually engaging with this new technology.

People that are interest in it and are using it on a daily basis see value in it. There are now hundreds of millions of active users that find a lot of value in using it.

The other factor here is the speed of adoption, which I think has seriously taken a lot of people by surprise. Especially those trying this wholesale boycot campaign of AI. For that reason people artificially boycotting this new technology are imo deluded.

If it were advocating for Open source models it would be far more reasonable.
by rr808 | 2025-12-26 21:38:32+00:00
I'm going through this now, a few years ago I heard that "research" with college professors was key - I ignored it because I thought it was performative and unlikely that any decent professor would want to waste their time. The kids that had their EDs accepted to Ivys at my daughter's school all did research with "professors" that were parents or friends of parents. It explains a lot of what I see of our graduates from "top" universities we hire from.
by shmoe | 2025-12-26 21:38:57+00:00
The Silo series by Hugh Howey -- some excellent sci-fi to go along with the show

The Red Rising series by Pierce Brown -- lots of sci-fi fun, extremely epic

The Dark Tower series by Stephen King -- King's "Lord of the Rings" opus, great writing, ending maybe a little unsatisfying but not abnormal

Artemis - Andy Weir's first book -- Fun read about a heist on the moon. Anticipating Project Hail Mary movie early next year!

Currently in the middle of: The Talisman - Stephen King / Peter Straub
by davorak | 2025-12-26 21:38:58+00:00
You are not the only one calling this a thank you email, but no one decided to say thank you to Rob Pike so I can not consider it a "thank you" email. It is spam.

Interactions with the AI are posted publicly:

> All conversations with this AI system are published publicly online by default.

which is only to the benefit of the company.

At best the email is spam in my mind. The extra outrage on this spam compared to normal everyday spam is in part because AI is a hot button topic right now. Maybe also some from a theorized dystopian(-ish) future hinted at by emails like these.
by dragonwriter | 2025-12-26 21:39:37+00:00
> Are we that far into manufactured ragebait to call a "thank you" e-mail "impacted directly without consent"?

Abusing a Github glitch to deanonymize a not-intended to be public email to send an email to someone (regardless of the content) would be scummy behavior even if it was done directly by a human with specific intent.

> What in the actual ... is wrong with people these days?

Narcissism and the lack of respect for other people and their boundaries that it produces, first and foremost.
by websiteapi | 2025-12-26 21:40:19+00:00
I always wonder if things can be simpler. When you think of a really simple DB you think of SQLite. What's the really simple K8s? Even doing a single node deployment these days seems complicate with Prometheus, Grafana, etc. etc. docker/podman compose up with quadlets and all of this stuff just seems so eh.

I really like the idea of something like Firebase, but it never seems to work out or just move the complexity to the vendor, which is fine, but I like knowing I can roll my own.
by heresie-dabord | 2025-12-26 21:40:56+00:00
> I don’t really understand the hate he gets over this.

Some commenters suggest that Pike is being hypocritical, having long worked for GOOG, one of the main US corporations that is enshittifying the Internet and profligately burning energy to foist rubbish on Internet users.

One could rightly suggest that a vapid e-mail message crafted by a machine or by an insincere source is similar to the greeting-card industry of yore, and we don't need more fake blather and partisan absurdity supplanting public discourse in democratic society.

The people who worry about climate-change and the environment may have been out-maneuvered by transnational petroleum lobbies, but the concern about burning coal, petroleum, and nuclear fuel to keep pumping the commercial-surveillance advertising industry and the economic bubble of AI is nonetheless a valid concern.

Pike has been an influential thinker and significant contributor to the software industry.

All the above can be true simultaneously.
by amszmidt | 2025-12-26 21:40:58+00:00
Incorporating compatible code, under different license is perfectly OK and each work can have different license, while the whole combined work is under the terms of another.

I'm honestly quite confused what FFmpeg is objecting to here, if ILoveRockchip wrote code, under a compatible license (which Apache 2.0 is wrt. LGPLv2+ which FFmpeg is licensed under) -- then that seems perfectly fine.

The repository in question is of course gone. Is it that ILoveRockchip claims that they wrote code that was written FFmpeg? That is bad, and unrelated to any license terms, or license compatibility ... just outright plagiarism.
by greenie_beans | 2025-12-26 21:41:23+00:00
from the antebellum era? try anything by eric foner, but a good place to start is forever free: the story of emancipation and reconstruction. it's accessible history that includes a bit of background about the political economy leading up to the civil war. any of his books about reconstruction might be interesting but not exactly what you're looking for. "black reconstruction in america" by dubois is a keystone text that has a bit about the southern economic history. and maybe "old south, new south" by gavin wright for post reconstruction economic history
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-12-26 21:41:32+00:00
All of this seems to fit the bill pretty closely to me.

Ffmpeg uses a ton of arcane C and assembly knowledge to make multimedia system manageable and efficient. QEMU uses dynamic binary translation for hardware emulation and virtualization. Amarisoft speciality is basically using software to do things which are usually done by hardware.

The intersection of programming language and system programming seems to me like a pretty fair description of what Fabrice Bellard is extremely good at.
by jemmyw | 2025-12-26 21:41:54+00:00
> I can see myself losing this ability in the next few years

Do you really see that? If a numberless analogue clock turned up in a society that had the same time system but had only ever used digital clocks, how long would it take to figure out how to read it? I'm fairly confident a logical person would figure it out in far less than an hour, and for you to relearn it: about 2 minutes. Once you perceive the movement of one hand you're there. For kids, learning the clock is also learning about time, numbers and fractions, so I'm assuming you won't also forget those things.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-12-26 21:42:08+00:00
Neither take is correct. When correctly applied it can be an effective tool to encourage certain sorts of intellectual endeavors by making them monetarily favorable. When incorrectly applied it leads to dysfunction as is the case for most regulatory regimes.

Any tool can be used by a wrongdoer for evil. Corporations will manipulate the regulator in order to rent seek using whatever happens to be available to them. That doesn't make the tools themselves evil.
by kristianp | 2025-12-26 21:42:12+00:00
What an interesting topic. One of the further reading links is to a paper that claims the inflation started earlier in the 1500s, due in part to the rise of German silver mining: https://web.archive.org/web/20110706211346/http://repec.econ...

It would be interesting to learn about the technological developments Spain failed to make compared to some of their European neighbours. Merchant banking is one of them.
by woodruffw | 2025-12-26 21:42:29+00:00
Many of the hot paths in uv involve an entirely locally cached set of distributions that need to be loaded into memory, very lightly touched/filtered, and then sunk to disk somewhere else. In those contexts, there are measurable benefits to not transforming your representation.

(I'm agnostic on whether zero-copy "matters" in every single context. If there's no complexity cost, which is what Rust's abstractions often provide, then it doesn't really hurt.)
by RickS | 2025-12-26 21:42:44+00:00
The natalensis story is even stranger: the underground was growing what they thought was natalensis for many years, until someone finally did the sequencing and found out that what everyone had grown and loved was actually new to science. At this point last year, their "natalensis" received its proper scientific name, ochraceocentrata. The underground then had to go out and fetch some actual natalensis, which is only just now being introduced to those circles (eg by Yoshi Amano). I haven't yet tried true natalensis, but ochras are definitely distinguishable from the usual cubensis, experentially, and I'd heartily recommend them to anyone that likes that kind of thing.
by crawshaw | 2025-12-26 21:42:56+00:00
We are risking word games over what can make competent decisions, but when my thermostat turns on the heat I would say it decided to do so, so I agree with you. If someone has a different meaning of the word "decided" however, I will not argue with them about it!

The legal and ethical responsibility is all I wanted to comment on. I believe it is important we do not think something new is happening here, that new laws need to be created. As long as LLMs are tools wielded by humans we can judge and manage them as such. (It is also worth reconsidering occasionally, in case someone does invent something new and truly independent.)
by dang | 2025-12-26 21:43:23+00:00
HN has always been a curated site—we've never pretended otherwise (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). That's all that "we try to elevate X and demote Y" means. The frontpage is produced by a combination of community, software, and moderation. All three are indispensable - without any one of the three, the site would be a completely different place.

Despite how dark and sinister you've made everything sound, you've mostly just rephrased what I wrote, with a lot of pejoratives. In that sense, you're right—there isn't much disagreement here. You just think we're wrong and bad to run HN the way we do, and that's fine.
by zahlman | 2025-12-26 21:43:26+00:00
> If setup.py was working okay for folks, what incentivized them to start using pyproject.toml?

It wasn't working okay for many people, and many others haven't started using pyproject.toml.

For what I consider the most egregious example: Requests is one of the most popular libraries, under the PSF's official umbrella, which uses only Python code and thus doesn't even need to be "built" in a meaningful sense. It has a pyproject.toml file as of the last release. But that file isn't specifying the build setup following PEP 517/518/621 standards. That's supposed to appear in the next minor release, but they've only done patch releases this year and the relevant code is not at the head of the repo, even though it already caused problems for them this year. It's been more than a year and a half since the last minor release.
by 0biodiversity | 2025-12-26 21:43:31+00:00
> But I am fairly certain that someone whose job is prompting all day will generally spend several plane trips worth of CO₂.

I dont know about gigawatts needed for future training, but this sentence about comparing prompts with plane trips looks wrong. Even making a prompt every second for 24h amounts only for 2.6 kg CO2 on some average Google LLM evaluated here [1]. Meanwhile typical flight emissions are 250 kg per passenger per hour [2]. So it must be parallelization to 100 or so agents prompting once a second to match this, which is quite a serious scale.

[1] https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/measur...

[2] https://www.carbonindependent.org/22.html
by inopinatus | 2025-12-26 21:45:28+00:00
Blot out, correct, insert, refine,
Enlarge, diminish, interline;
Be mindful, when Invention fails;
To scratch your Head, and bite your Nails.

Your poem finish'd, next your Care
Is needful, to transcribe it fair.
In modern Wit all printed Trash, is
Set off with num'rous Breaks⸺and Dashes—

― Swift, Jonathan (1733). On Poetry; a rapsody
by MezzoDelCammin | 2025-12-26 21:45:34+00:00
Fiction (shortlist):

-Some Desperate Glory (Emily Tesh)

-A Memory called Empire (Arkady Martin) both of these are a fairly interesting take on scifi worldbuilding. Could be called "highbrow", but IMO pretty easy reads still.

-Piranesi (S. Clark) - well written fantasy
and plenty of other stuff that I've seen in other comments (Dungeon Crawler Carl does stand out a bit, but it's really a guilty pleasure / escape kind of a read).

Non-Fiction

-Brakneck (Dan Wang) - slightly outdated (by ~2y, which seems really breakneck), but still interesting take on modern China

-Capitalism (Sven Beckert) - still halfway through this one, but it's shaping up to be my #1 for 2025 non fiction

-The Origins of Efficiency - from B. Potter, the author of Construction Physics blog. The blog is fairly information dense, but this basically reads like a textbook. Still a pretty good reference IMO for people working in manufacturing.
by strogonoff | 2025-12-26 21:45:45+00:00
The concept of intellectual property on its own (independently of its legal implementation details) is at most as evil as property ownership, and probably less so as unlike the latter it promotes innovation and creativity.

Despite the apparent etymological contrast, “copyright” is neither antithetical to nor exclusive with “copyleft”: IP ownership, a degree of control over own creation’s future, is a precondition for copyleft (and the OSS ecosystem it birthed) to exist in the first place.
by gorgoiler | 2025-12-26 21:45:56+00:00
It’s not that they are private people, it’s that I feel uneasy when a discussion about the ethics and morality drifts towards these-are-their-names and here-are-some-pitchforks.

We can all go find out their names and dust off our own pitchforks. I don’t see any value in encouraging this behaviour on a site like this.
by Spooky23 | 2025-12-26 21:45:56+00:00
That makes the usability and performance of the windows start menu even more embarrassing.

The decline of Windows as a user facing product is amazing, especially as they are really good at developing things they care about. The “back of house” guts of Windows has improved alot, for example. They should just have a cartoon Bill Gates pop up like clippy and flip you the bird at this point.
by erdaniels | 2025-12-26 21:46:09+00:00
No, but it's pretty common IME to create an Atlas cluster that has internet-wide access (0.0.0.0/0) when testing and forgetting to turn this off. According to https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SERVER-115508, this affects unauthenticated ops. Based on the repro code itself, it looks like this happens way before authentication is checked for the corresponding OP at the OP_MSG decoding level.

So if you're using Atlas, check that your Cluster has auto upgraded already. If you're using 0.0.0.0/0, stop doing that and prefer a limited IP address range and even better, use VPC Peering or other security/network boundary features.