MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by MillironX | 2025-12-18 23:12:08+00:00
The first argument actually leans in favor of LaTeX or Typst as a better replacement for Docx.

A LaTeX or Typst document can contain both the content and formatting together within the same file. This isn't idiomatic for either language, and my experience is that this is more common for Typst than LaTeX, but both can do so. All of those formatting rules like small caps, table widths, margins, page numbering, etc.? Those can be rigidly defined in either LaTeX or Typst and are better guarded aginst accidental formatting rules breaches from double click, copy/paste, or table cell insertion than in Word.

I'm more sympathetic to the network effect argument. It's hard to envision a reasonable redline system compatible with both Docx and LaTeX/Typst.
by bryanhogan | 2025-12-18 23:12:16+00:00
Interesting concept! Think this would be quite cool to explore. Personally am very interested in language learning concepts / apps.

My first concerns though:

1. How can the system know which words I already know.

2. To what degree will I misunderstand the meaning of words.

3. Somewhat related to 2, how inaccurate will be description / explanation of words be.
by doctoboggan | 2025-12-18 23:12:39+00:00
I agree with you that there is one original definition, but I feel like we've lost this one and the current accepted definition of vibe coding is any code is majority or exclusively produced by an LLM.

I think I've seen people use the "vibe engineering" to differentiate whether the human has viewed/comprehended/approved the code, but I am not sure if that's taken off.
by anonymous908213 | 2025-12-18 23:12:46+00:00
The challenge with security, as you know, is it's only as strong as it's weakest link. It only takes one ignorant/incompetent person in an entire organization to jeopordize the org.

This statement could not be further from the truth. Your organization itself is completely incompetent if one ignorant employee can compromise it. The "swiss cheese" safety memetic is widely understood and basically common sense; in an actually competent organization, no single person has sole responsibility for success or failure of a process, and it takes individual failures at multiple levels to result in process failure.
by delaminator | 2025-12-18 23:12:48+00:00
> Working with some of these huge models, I can see how AI has some use, especially if it's under my own local control. But it'll be a long time before I put much trust in what I get out of it—I treat it like I do Wikipedia. Maybe good for a jumping-off point, but don't ever let AI replace your ability to think critically!

It is a little sad that they gave someone an uber machine and this was the best he could come up with.

Question answering is interesting but not the most interesting thing one can do, especially with a home rig.

The realm of the possible

Video generation: CogVideoX at full resolution, longer clips

Mochi or Hunyuan Video with extended duration

Image generation at scale:

FLUX batch generation — 50 images simultaneously

Fine-tuning:

Actually train something — show LoRA on a 400B model, or full fine-tuning on a 70B

but I suppose "You have it for the weekend" means chatbot go brrrrr and snark
by cpursley | 2025-12-18 23:12:58+00:00
And that's more of the "propaganda narrative" (google that term) getting pounded at us from all channels over the past several years. It's so 1984 - remember when we were told they were growing too much and getting overpopulated and the planet was going extent any moment? So which one is it? Anyways, their population decrease will be offset by AI and automation all while they still pump out more honor students than the entire West combined. They'll be fine is what I'm saying.
by trevor-e | 2025-12-18 23:13:03+00:00
No, what I meant is sometimes the solution is not delivering any code at all.

Many times in my career, after understanding the problem at hand and who initiated it, I realized the solution is actually one of:

1) a people/organizational problem, not technical 2) doesn't make sense to code a complicated system when it could be a simple Google Sheet 3) the person actually has a completely different problem 4) we already have a solution they didn't know about

My issue with the OP is that it highly emphasizes delivering code. We are not meant to be code monkeys, we are solving problems at the end of the day. Many people I've met throughout my career forget that and immediately jump into writing code because they think that's their job.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-12-18 23:13:11+00:00
Came to say that it badly needs better state communication.

What I’d do is to add a drop shadow and increase scale by 1-3%, with a clean, snappy animation between placed and picked up. I might also add a “gripping hand” graphic with a cursor-like appearance to picked up items and show a “scroll to move” instruction next to the hand graphic if the user hasn’t done anything for a couple of seconds.
by brokencode | 2025-12-18 23:13:22+00:00
I totally agree. It’s just going to become an expectation that AI is in the browser.

It’s so nice just to be able to ask the browser to summarize the page, or ask questions about a long article.

I know a lot of people on Hacker News are hostile to AI and like to imagine everybody hates it, but I personally find it very helpful.
by bsder | 2025-12-18 23:14:07+00:00
> so much better than ketchup

Careful. What we refer to as "tomato ketchup" has been bowdlerized and degraded by being made shelf stable.

"When Every Ketchup But One Went Extinct" https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/history-of-heinz-ketch...
by fjfaase | 2025-12-18 23:14:43+00:00
I twice worked in a teams where we did not use branches (or PRs). Both were working like that when I joined them.

The first was because we were svn (and maybe even csv before that, but I cannot remember) and that did not support branching easily. That team did switch to git, which did not go with its some struggles, and misconceptions, such as: "Never use rebase."

The second team was already working without branches and releasing a new version of the tool (the Bond3D Slicer for 3D printing) every night. It worked very well. Often we were able to implement and release new features within two or three days allowing the users to continue with their experiments.

When after some years the organization implemented more 'quality assurance' they demanded that we would make monthly releases that were formally tested by the users, we created branches for each release. The idea was that some of the users would test the releases before they were official released, but that testing would often take more than a month, one time even three months, because they were 'too busy' to do the formal review. But at the same time some users were using the daily builds because these builds had the features implemented that they needed. As a result of this, the quality did not improve and a lot of time was wasted, although the formal quality assurance, dictated by some ISO standard, was assured.

I have no experience with moving away from using branches. It might be a good idea to point your manager/team lead/scrum master to dora.dev or the YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@ModernSoftwareEngineeringYT
by adastra22 | 2025-12-18 23:15:03+00:00
My search of 2024 numbers stated. $10bn from App Store out of approx $400bn revenue. Which seem to be what is stated in the first tables in that link.

I’m not sure who is right, Apple or these analysts, but either way: 2.5% or 7%, that revenue source isn’t large enough to be a corrupting incentive on Apple’s behavior.

Maximizing digital service revenue at the cost of user trust which drives their high margin hardware sales would be killing the golden goose.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-12-18 23:15:16+00:00
If you didn't care about exposure time, you could build 2nm chips with brute-force electron beam lithography. But the limited throughput confines EBL to research and very low-volume applications. ASML's EUV-based processes are what permit industrial-level scaling, ultimately because parallel beams of electrons repel each other while parallel beams of photons don't.

I don't personally understand why suitable EUV light sources are so hard to build, but evidently, they are. It sounds like a big deal if China is catching up in that area.
by ScottBurson | 2025-12-18 23:15:30+00:00
Actually, formal verification could help massively with four of those problems — all but the first (UI/UX) and fifth (requirements will always be hard).

A change in the API of a dependency should be detected immediately and handled silently.

Reliance on unspecified behavior shouldn't happen in the first place; the client's verification would fail.

Detecting breakage caused by library changes should be where verification really shines; when you get the update, you try to re-run your verification, and if that fails, it tells you what the problem is.

As for interconnected systems, again, that's pretty much the whole point. Obviously, achieving this dream will require formalizing pretty much everything, which is well beyond our capabilities now. But eventually, with advances in AI, I think it will be possible. It will take something fundamentally better than today's LLMs, though.
by dwoldrich | 2025-12-18 23:15:34+00:00
That's great to hear, but perhaps I will ask too much even of the M-series chips.

Occasionally, I will show 3 things at once: an MP4 that the Mac Mini plays from its storage transitioning into captured hdmi signal from a canon camera as picture-in-picture with the main body of the stream containing captured hdmi output from my development laptop.

I'm not sure what my capture solution will be, but it seems there are a wide variety of USB-C capture adapters that I could use that are compatible with OBS on Mac and are even bus powered.

Other comments seem to indicate there are bugs in that specific picture-in-picture setup, but I'm sure those will get ironed out.
by saaaaaam | 2025-12-18 23:16:16+00:00
“Time-locked models don't roleplay; they embody their training data. Ranke-4B-1913 doesn't know about WWI because WWI hasn't happened in its textual universe. It can be surprised by your questions in ways modern LLMs cannot.”

“Modern LLMs suffer from hindsight contamination. GPT-5 knows how the story ends—WWI, the League's failure, the Spanish flu.”

This is really fascinating. As someone who reads a lot of history and historical fiction I think this is really intriguing. Imagine having a conversation with someone genuinely from the period, where they don’t know the “end of the story”.
by crazygringo | 2025-12-18 23:18:32+00:00
...it doesn't.

Like, Apple knows what you're watching within the Apple TV app obviously.

But it's certainly not taking screenshots every second of what it displaying when you use other apps -- which shows and ads you're seeing. Nor does Apple sell personal data.

Other video apps do register what shows you're in the middle of, so they can appear on the top row of your home screen. But again, Apple's not selling that info.
by bitexploder | 2025-12-18 23:18:43+00:00
A lot of skills in say, running a business, really do transfer. It is possible to gain expertise on how to run a small business and translate that to other realms of running a business. But it is also important, perhaps critical, to recognize limitations. The less similar the situation and environment the less that will transfer. Some times enough transfers that the insights are useful. Some times it is actively harmful to apply previous approaches. Recognizing the differences and what transfers is much harder but also a skill. Becoming skilled enough to help up until your limitations is how you can continuously be successful in domains you have no right to be. The irony is even then you may still not really be able to offer helpful insight.
by munificent | 2025-12-18 23:19:21+00:00
I agree that externalities and complex, and situational, and that the value proposition of a piece of technology is most certainly not uniformly distributed.

> The impact of AI is likely to be much more negative than it could be because of the tech bro oligopoly emerging in the US.

There is circularity here because the tech bro oligarchy will certainly be empowered and enriched by AI as well.
by jcgl | 2025-12-18 23:20:01+00:00
> The hang up here is SWEs belief those abstractions must be stored as some syntax they know

What does it matter how it's "stored"? I think (hope?) that most SWEs know that that syntax and its semantic aren't how things work on the metal. Storage format of the syntax seems pretty irrelevant. And surely you're not suggesting that SWEs should be using a syntax and semantics that they...don't know.

So what's the better, non-traditional-software notation? Your conceptualization does sound genuinely intriguing.

However, it seems like it would by necessity be non-portable across architectures (or even architecture revisions). And I take it as given that portable software is a desirable thing.
by zxu | 2025-12-18 23:20:01+00:00
Hi folks, I’ve spent the past few months building a small open source project that helps students learn Python, algebra, and machine learning using a Blockly-based platform.

It’s designed to be extremely easy to use—there’s no need to install anything else (like Python). Just download and run the DMG file.

Please feel free to give it a try! Any feedback is very welcome and greatly appreciated.

https://github.com/pycanvas/pycanvas-desktop/releases/tag/v0...
by theshrike79 | 2025-12-18 23:20:04+00:00
Yea, I don't understand why people use LLMs for "facts". You can get them from Wikipedia or a book.

Use them for something creative, write a short story on spec, generate images.

Or the best option: give it tools and let it actually DO something like "read my message history with my wife, find top 5 gift ideas she might have hinted at and search for options to purchase them" - perfect for a local model, there's no way in hell I'd feed my messages to a public LLM, but the one sitting next to me that I can turn off the second it twitches the wrong way? - sure.
by Heliodex | 2025-12-18 23:20:07+00:00
The sample responses given are fascinating. It seems more difficult than normal to even tell that they were generated by an LLM, since most of us (terminally online) people have been training our brains' AI-generated text detection on output from models trained with a recent cutoff date. Some of the sample responses seem so unlike anything an LLM would say, obviously due to its apparent beliefs on certain concepts, though also perhaps less obviously due to its word choice and sentence structure making the responses feel slightly 'old-fashioned'.
by Sabinus | 2025-12-18 23:20:16+00:00
I've used Firefox for decades, and use Nightly as a daily driver to contribute to development testing.

I like and regularly use the AI sidebar, and I'm interested to see that Firefox does in the AI space.

While I agree that Firefox has wasted time on non-core browser features, AI is not one of those. Browsers are information retrieval and display programs, and AI as a revolutionary information transformation technology is a natural part of that.
by roadside_picnic | 2025-12-18 23:21:09+00:00
> I don't think the current US administration has any strategy

I 100% believe the strategy is to enlarge the Trump family's wealth, and it's been a wildly successful strategy (in the past year he's been able to create billions in wealth for his family [0]). At least this vaguely ties Trump's success to the success of the United States in a limited capacity. Completely destroying the US is not ideal for him, but it's clear all policy decisions being made are being done so based on their capacity to improve Trump's situation.

We've been headed this direction long before Trump, from both parties, increasingly American policy is about what's good for American companies and in particular the people who own them. Now that pool has just shrunk a bit.

0. https://www.wsj.com/politics/trump-family-business-visualize...
by mywittyname | 2025-12-18 23:21:26+00:00
This sounds good in theory, but in practice, a person capable of doing a good job at this role would also be a good developer whose impact would be greater if they were churning out code. This is a combination of a lead engineer and SDET.

In reality, this ends up being the job given to the weakest person on the team to keep them occupied. And it gives the rest of the team a mechanism to get away with shoddy work and not face repercussions.

Maybe I'm just jaded, but I think this approach would have horrible results.

AI code review tools are already good. That makes for a good first pass. On my team, fixing Code Rabbit's issues, or having a good reason not to is always step 1 to a PR. It catches a lot of really subtle bugs.
by trevor-e | 2025-12-18 23:21:27+00:00
Sorry I wrote that hastily and my wording seems to have caused much confusion. Here's a rewrite:

> The job is to help the business solve a problem, not just to ship code. In cases where delivering code actually makes sense, then yeah you should absolutely be able to prove it works and meets the requirements like the OP says. But there are plenty of cases where writing code at all is the wrong solution, and that’s an important distinction I didn’t really understand until later in my career.

Although funnily enough, the meaning you interpreted also has its own merit. Like other commenters have mentioned, there's always a cost tradeoff to evaluate. Some projects can absolutely cut corners to, say, ship faster to validate some result or gain users.
by gaigalas | 2025-12-18 23:22:02+00:00
There's something wrong with this vibe coded stuff, any kind of it.

_It limps faster than you can walk_, in simple terms.

At each model release, it limps faster, but still can't walk. That is not a good sign.

> Do we want this?

No. However, there's a deeper question: do people even recognize they don't want this?
by mpeg | 2025-12-18 23:22:07+00:00
Yes, but this is not a particularly high access level bug.

Depending on the target, it's possible that the most damage you could do with this bug is a phishing attack where the user is presented a fake sign-in form (on a sketchy url)

I think $4k is a fair amount, I've done hackerone bounties too and we got less than that years ago for a twitter reflected xss
by Teever | 2025-12-18 23:22:52+00:00
This is a neat idea. I've been wondering for a while now about using these kinds of models to compare architectures.

I'd love to see the output from different models trained on pre-1905 about special/general relativity ideas. It would be interesting to see what kind of evidence would persuade them of new kinds of science, or to see if you could have them 'prove' it be devising experiments and then giving them simulated data from the experiments to lead them along the correct sequence of steps to come to a novel (to them) conclusion.
by schoen | 2025-12-18 23:23:06+00:00
My friend is working on Grammatical Framework, which has a Resource Grammar library of pre-written natural language grammars, at least for portions of them. The GF research community continues to add new ones over time, based on implementing portions of written reference grammars, or sometimes by native speakers based on their own native speaker intuitions. I'm not sure if there are larger grammar libraries elsewhere.

There could be companies that made much better rule-based MT but kept the details as trade secrets. For example, I think Google Translate was rule-based for "a long time" (I don't remember until what year, although it was pretty apparent to users and researchers when it switched, and indeed I think some Google researchers even spoke publicly about it). They had made a lot of investment (very far beyond something like a GF resource grammar) but I don't think they ever published any of that underlying work even when they discontinued that version of the product.

So basically there may be this gap where academic stuff is advancing slowly and yet now represents the majority of examples in the field because companies are so unlikely to have ongoing rule-based projects as part of projects. The available state of the art you can actually interact with may have gone backwards in recent years as a result!

nimi sina li pona tawa mi.
by globalnode | 2025-12-18 23:23:19+00:00
One solution would be for the SE's to publish their scraper IP's and allow content providers to implement bot exclusion that way. Or even implement an API with crypto credentials that SE's can use to scrape. The solution is waiting for some leadership from SE's unless they want to be blocked as well. If SE's dont want to play perhaps we can implement a reverse directory, like ad blocker but it lists only good/allowed bots instead. Thats a free business idea right there.

edit: I noticed someone mentioned google DOES publish its IP's, there ya go, problem solved.
by rnewme | 2025-12-18 23:23:52+00:00
Yup, we are all definitely lowering the bar of what's acceptable when it comes to uptime and bugs. More features more hype x10 seems to be the standard approach to market, but there are still a lot of companies and teams where greybeards and rational folks remember and understand previous hype cycles/bubbles, and who appreciate and protect the engineering approach. It's just that they mostly hire/partner by reference, so it's kinda hard to exit the toxic bubble of startups and "growth hacking" enterprises.
by crote | 2025-12-18 23:24:01+00:00
Oh, they know. The industry has been lobbying quite badly for exactly this to happen. Why spend a fortune on innovation when a few bucks of lobbying can get the government to ban your competition because "China bad"?

As the comment you responded to said: it's all about the next quarterly profits. The fact that we are getting leapfrogged by China doesn't matter to those CEOs: that's a long-term thing, and it doesn't impact their next bonus.
by energy123 | 2025-12-18 23:24:13+00:00
I have sent the same prompt to GPT-5.2 Thinking and Gemini 3.0 Pro many times because I subscribe to both.

GPT-5.2 Thinking (with extended thinking selected) is significantly better in my testing on software problems with 40k context.

I attribute this to thinking time, with GPT-5.2 Thinking I can coax 5 minutes+ of thinking time but with Gemini 3.0 Pro it only gives me about 30 seconds.

The main problem with the Plus sub in ChatGPT is you can't send more than 46k tokens in a single prompt, and attaching files doesn't help either because the VM blocks the model from accessing the attachments if there's ~46k tokens already in the context.
by _--__--__ | 2025-12-18 23:24:23+00:00
The time cutoff probably matters but maybe not as much as the lack of human finetuning from places like Nigeria with somewhat foreign styles of English. I'm not really sure if there is as much of an 'obvious LLM text style' in other languages, it hasn't seemed that way in my limited attempts to speak to LLMs in languages I'm studying.