MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by imron | 2025-12-26 22:59:19+00:00
Thanks for the info. I try a mix of things I know well and things I want to play around with.

Swift and iOS was something that didn’t work so well for me. I wanted to play around with face capture and spent a day with Claude putting together a small app that showed realtime video of a face and put dots on/around various facial features and printed log messages if the person changed the direction they were looking (up down left right) and played a sound when they opened their mouth.

I’ve done app development before, but it’s been a few years so was a little bit rusty and it felt like Claude was really helping me out.

Then I got to a point I was happy with and I thought I’d go deeper in the code to understand what it was doing and how it was working (not a delegation issue as per another comment, this was a play/learning exercise for me so wanted to understand how it all worked) - and right there in the apple developer documentation was a sample so that did basically the same thing as my app, only the code was far simpler and after reading through the accompanying docs I realized the Claude version had a threading issue waiting to happen that was explicitly warned against in the docs of the api calls it was using.

If I’d gone to the developer docs in the beginning I would have had a better app, and better understanding in maybe a quarter of the time.

Appreciate the info on spend. The above session was on the $30/month version of Claude.

I guess I need to just keep flapping my wings until I can draw the owl.
by scottlamb | 2025-12-26 22:59:33+00:00
Mine either. Choosing Rust by no means guarantees your tool will be fast—you can of course still screw it up with poor algorithms. But I think most people who choose Rust do so in part because they aspire for their tool to be "blazing fast". Memory safety is a big factor of course, but if you didn't care about performance, you might have gotten that via a GCed language.
by JohannesGlaser | 2025-12-26 23:00:04+00:00
At the lowest level, you’re right: everything the model ever sees is context. I’m not claiming a channel beyond tokens. The distinction I’m trying to draw isn’t where state ends up, but how it is governed.

AGENTS.md (and similar conventions) are a good step toward making agent context explicit. But they are still instructional artifacts: static guidance that gets loaded into the prompt. They don’t define a state lifecycle. They don’t encode history, correction, or invalidation over time. And they don’t change unless a human edits them. In most agent setups I’ve worked with, “state” is assembled per turn. An agent or orchestration layer decides what to include, summarize, drop, or rewrite. That makes continuity an emergent property of context engineering. It works locally, but over time you see drift, silent overwrites, and loss of accountability.

What I’m experimenting with is treating state as a process artifact, not an input artifact. The assistant doesn’t curate its own context. On startup, it reconstructs orientation from a fixed, inspectable set of external files — logs, rules, inventories — with explicit lifecycle rules. State changes happen deliberately (append, correct, invalidate), not implicitly via prompt evolution.

So yes, the model ultimately reads tokens. But forgetting, correction, and continuity are handled outside the prompt logic. The prompt becomes closer to a bootloader than a workspace.

If you always load a root AGENTS.md plus a stable artifact set, the surface can look similar. In practice, the difference shows up in failure modes: how systems degrade over weeks instead of minutes.

I’m not arguing current frameworks can’t approximate this — just that persistent state is usually framed as a context problem, rather than as first-class state with explicit lifecycle semantics. That shift changes what “agentic” failure even looks like.
by nathansherburn | 2025-12-26 23:01:21+00:00
I've actually been following this project for a long time and it's none of the above. They're simply testing what a set of frontier models can do when given a goal and left to their own devices.

I agree this outcome is very painful to see and I really feel for Rob. It's clear people (myself included) are completely at breaking point with AI slop.

In this specific case though it's worth spending 30sec to read the website of AI model village to understand the experiment before claiming this was sent by Anthropic or assigning malicious intent.
by cryptica | 2025-12-26 23:01:34+00:00
You can see it everywhere. In this case, the fact that it took 2 years. And of course now that FFmpeg is getting more exposure in the media due to their association with AI hype, now they finally get 'fair' legal treatment... I don't call that winning. I see this over and over. Same thing all over the west.

I remember Rowan Atkinson (the UK actor) made a speech about this effect a couple of years ago and never heard about it since but definitely feeling it more and more... No exposure, no money, no legal representation. And at the same time we are being gaslit about our privilege.
by tim333 | 2025-12-26 23:01:45+00:00
There was an interesting take on it on youtube today, Bill Gurley (VC) talking to Tim Ferris (interviewer) on if it's a bubble, based on some research:

> ...every time there's been a technology wave that leads to wealth
creation, especially fast wealth creation, that will inherently invite
speculators, carpetbaggers, interlopers
that want to come take advantage of it.
Think of the gold rush, you know, and so
people want to make it a debate. Do you
believe in AI or is it a bubble? And if
you say you think it's a bubble, they
say, "Oh, you don't believe in AI." Like
this gotcha kind of thing. And if you
study Perez, and I I think this is
absolutely correct. If the wave is real,
then you're going to have bubble-like
behavior. like they come together as a
pair precisely because anytime there's
very quick wealth creation, you're going
to get a lot of people that want to come
try and take advantage of that.

Seems about right to me. https://youtu.be/D0230eZsRFw
by CerryuDu | 2025-12-26 23:02:14+00:00
> you need some insane mental gymnastics

Perhaps. I dislike google (have disliked it for many years with varying intensity), but they have done stuff where I've been compelled to say "neat". Hence "mixed bag".

This "new breed of purely AI companies" -- if this term is acceptable -- has only ever elicited burning hatred from me. They easily surpass the "usual evils" of surveillance capitalism etc. They deceive humanity at a much deeper level.

I don't necessarily blame LLMs as a technology. But how they are trained and made available is not only irresponsible -- it's the pinnacle of calculated evil. I do think their evil exceeds the traditional evils of Google, Facebook, etc.
by zahlman | 2025-12-26 23:02:31+00:00
I guess you mean doing the things in Python that are supposedly doable from Python.

Yeah, to a zeroth approximation that's my current main project (https://github.com/zahlman/paper). Of course, I'm just some rando with apparently serious issues convincing myself to put in regular unpaid work on it, but I can see in broad strokes how everything is going to work. (I'm not sure I would have thought about, for example, hard-linking files when installing them from cache, without uv existing.)
by BobbyTables2 | 2025-12-26 23:02:37+00:00
Look at software fuzzing, particularly the coverage guided mutators (basically a simple “genetic algorithm”.

It’s amazing what a few random bit flips combined with a crude measurement can do.

To me, evolution at first seem implausible. Monkeys banging on a typewriter aren’t going to write Shakespeare. But add a crude feedback loop to them, and soon they’ll be dishing out Charles Dickens too!
by admiralrohan | 2025-12-26 23:03:54+00:00
I mostly read historical books this year, multiple analysis of WW1 and WW2. George Bruce's book on British expedition in Afghanistan in 1939. The peacemaker, on Reagan's presidential tenure. Stalin's 2-part biography. Deng Xiaoping biography. The book Collapse of Soviet Union. Sharlock Holmes collection. And many more.
by meindnoch | 2025-12-26 23:04:01+00:00
There's a pattern here that's bigger than FFmpeg or Rockchip, and HN keeps missing it because it's too busy litigating footnotes.

Declining civilizations obsess over rules. Rising ones obsess over outcomes.

The West has turned software into theology. Licenses are no longer pragmatic tools; they're moral texts. You didn't just copy code incorrectly, you sinned. You violated the sacred distinction between "dynamic linking" and "static linking" like a heretic confusing transubstantiation. So of course the response is excommunication via DMCA, administered by a US platform acting as the high court of global legitimacy.

China, meanwhile, treats code the way early America treated British industrial designs: as something you learn from, adapt, and improve until it disappears into the background of actual progress. This isn't because Chinese engineers are "confused" about copyright. It's because they don't share the Western belief that ideas become ethically radioactive if they cross an invisible legal membrane without the right ceremony.

What HN calls "license violations" are, in a broader historical sense, the sound of a rising system refusing to internalize the anxieties of a declining one. The LGPL is a product of a very specific moment: European legalism meeting American corporate compromise. Pretending it's a universal moral truth is like insisting everyone must use QWERTY because it worked for typewriters in 1890.

So when GitHub issues a DMCA takedown, it's not defending openness; it's defending relevance. It's the West saying: the rules still matter, please keep caring about them. But history suggests that once you're relying on process to assert superiority over results, you're already late.

You can cheer this if you want. Just don't confuse enforcement with inevitability. The future usually belongs to the people who ship, not the ones who litigate why shipping was noncompliant.
by aucisson_masque | 2025-12-26 23:04:40+00:00
> The Gulag Archipelago

I did read it a few years ago, that's very though and it describes in a very technical way how gulags worked. In hindsight I'm not sure it was the best way to do it.

If you liked it tho, id suggest the two kravchenko books on the trials, Rudolph Hess book (very interesting), Simon Sebag Montefiore book on Stalin.

I can provide many more about this kind of subject, I found that fascinating for a few months and did read a lot of books on it.

Although I'd argue that the most fascinating is watching the usa, from outside, turn into a totalitarian state. That is truly incredible to be able to witness how much Trump achieved in a few months.
by bavell | 2025-12-26 23:04:50+00:00
Maybe won't be viewed favorably by the HN crowd, but I enjoyed the most recent Bret Weinstein interview on Joe Rogan [0] where Bret talks about his pet theory on natural selection / evolution (maybe 2/3 way through the interview).

Basically, the "junk" DNA we have may be "variables" that influence form and morphology, thus giving natural selection a vastly reduced design space to search for viable mutations. E.g. not much chemical difference between a bat wing and another mammals hands - mostly a difference of morphology. Allowing for more efficient search of evolutionary parameters instead of pure random walk.

[0] https://youtu.be/WX_te6X-0aQ
by kortilla | 2025-12-26 23:06:20+00:00
No, it’s not a well-founded assumption. Many categories like these were created in the first place because there is a very obvious discontinuous step change in behavior.

You’re fundamentally misunderstanding what tragedy of the commons is. It’s not that it’s “zero-cost” for the participants. All it requires a positive return that has a negative externality that eventually leads to the collapse of the system.

Overfishing and CO2 emissions are very clearly a tragedy of the commons.

GitHub right now is not. People putting all sorts of crap on there is not hurting github. GitHub is not going to collapse if people keep using it unbounded.

Not surprisingly, this is because it’s not a commons and Microsoft oversees it, placing appropriate rate limits and whatnot to make sure it keeps making sense as a business.
by simonw | 2025-12-26 23:06:28+00:00
This post is excellent. I really like reading deep dives like this that take a complex system like uv and highlight the unique design decisions that make it work so well.

I also appreciate how much credit this gives the many previous years of Python standards processes that enabled it.

Update: I blogged more about it here, including Python recreations of the HTTP range header trick it uses and the version comparison via u64 integers: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/26/how-uv-got-so-fast/
by johnnyanmac | 2025-12-26 23:06:47+00:00
Rob pike "set llms in motion" about as much as 90% of anyone who contributed to Google.

I understand the guilt he feels, but this is really more like making a meme in 2005 (before we even called it "memes") and suddenly it's soke sort of naxi dogwhistle in 2025. You didn't even create the original picture, you just remixed it in a way people would catch onto later. And you sure didn't turn it into a dogwhistle.
by AngryData | 2025-12-26 23:06:47+00:00
But where is that demand coming from? Silver prices didn't go up when we switched to silver solder. The only reason for silver to have been rising in the last few years is speculative demand because there are no new large scale applications or scaled uses that line up with price changes. Yes demand is up, but not from using that much more silver in things, but to hold onto silver as an investment or to hedge against inflation. Just like how golds industrial value is not nearly as high as its speculative value, but industrial users still have to pay the price that speculators are paying to get it.
by azuanrb | 2025-12-26 23:06:51+00:00
The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort To Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self by Michael Easter.

Never Finished: Unshackle Your Mind and Win the War Within by David Goggins.

These two books stuck with me. We are often too comfortable with being comfortable. There is nothing wrong with that, but real growth happens when we step outside our comfort zone. We are far more capable than we think.
by zahlman | 2025-12-26 23:07:11+00:00
It has been realized in the Python community for a very long time. But there have been years of debate over the contents and formatting, and years of trying to figure out how to convince authors and maintainers to do the necessary work on their end, and years of trying to make sure the ecosystem doesn't explode from trying to remove legacy support.

There are still separate forms of metadata for source packages and pre-compiled distributions. This is necessary because of all the weird idiosyncratic conditional logic that might be necessary in the metadata for platform-specific dependencies. Some projects are reduced to figuring out the final metadata at build time, while building on the user's machine, because that's the only way to find out enough about the user's machine to make everything work.

It really isn't as straightforward as you'd expect, largely because Python code commonly interfaces to compiled code in several different languages, and end users expect this to "just work", including on Windows where they don't have a compiler and might not know what that is.

See https://pypackaging-native.github.io/ for the general flavour of it.
by Humorist2290 | 2025-12-26 23:08:17+00:00
So the AI Village folks put together a bunch of LLMs and a basically unrestricted computer environment, told it "raise money" and "do random acts of kindness" and let it cook. It's a technological marvel, it's a moral dilemma, and it's an example of the "altruistic" applications for this technology. Many of us can imagine the far less noble applications.

But Rob Pike's reaction is personal, and many readers here get why. The AI Village folks burned who knows how much cash to essentially generate well wishing spam. For much less, and with higher efficacy, they could've just written the emails themselves.
by mergesort | 2025-12-26 23:08:28+00:00
Hey Jose, author here! That's a great call out. I write predominantly in Swift and for a long time Claude was the only usable option. But sometime around GPT-5 OpenAI's models got much better at Swift, so the choice started becoming more about aesthetics (as a descriptor of preferences). So you're right — if the model can't write coherent code then it doesn't matter what kind of flow you feel as you're working with the tools — but I do imagine this will continue to improve for all languages including Elixir.
by peacefulnerd | 2025-12-26 23:08:33+00:00
The beginning is a list of ## chapters because there's many. A woman was in the psych ward for more than a decade. Luckily a doctor tested for autoimmune, which cured her.

For example you can search the page for ## False Claims Act. It will show the FBI jailing psychiatrists who illegally over billed Medicaid for fake or unnecessary services.
by schmuckonwheels | 2025-12-26 23:08:47+00:00
It's a medical device that requires a prescription. You can't buy it off the shelf. They're not distributing software to you either. You must go through a medical equipment supplier who transfers the device to you after insurance has paid for some or all of it.

For the same reason you can't find an airplane entertainment system in the trash and call up the company and demand source code.
by rijavecb | 2025-12-26 23:08:52+00:00
I'm planning to read more, mostly technical books recommended by the fine folks on the Book Overflow podcast and a few books on writing. As someone who's mostly self-taught, I know I have many gaps in my knowledge, so I'd like to fill some of those. And learning new things just feels great.

I'm also hoping to improve my Romanian. While I can get by (my wife is Romanian and we live there), I make waay too many mistakes, and considering I've been living there for a few years now, I feel I should do better.

This year has been pretty busy with personal things and working on my own apps, so I hope next year I can get back to learning things I find interesting and useful.
by jacquesm | 2025-12-26 23:09:04+00:00
I had C++, python and ruby in mind, but yes, GP also mentioned Rust in the list of 'sprawling' languages, and they are probably right about that: Rust started as a 'better C replacement' but now it is trying to dominate every space for every programming language (and - in my opinion - not being very successful because niche languages exist for a reason, it is much easier to specialize than to generalize).

I wasn't particularly commenting on Rust's backward compatibility story so if you're not sure what I was arguing about then why did you feel the need to defend Rust from accusations that weren't made in the first place?
by BiteCode_dev | 2025-12-26 23:10:08+00:00
Other design decisions that made uv fast:

- uncompressing packages while they are still being downloaded, in memory, so that you only have to write to disk once

- design of its own locking format for speed

But yes, rust is actually making it faster because:

- real threads, no need for multi-processing

- no python VM startup overhead

- the dep resolution algo is exactly the type of workload that is faster in a compiled language

Source, this interview with Charlie Marsh: https://www.bitecode.dev/p/charlie-marsh-on-astral-uv-and-th...

The guy has a lot of interesting things to say.
by nearbuy | 2025-12-26 23:10:10+00:00
No one intentionally wanted to thank Rob Pike. As an experiment, some people asked an AI agent to do "random acts of kindness". They didn't specifically know the AI would send emails as a result and have since updated its instructions to forbid it from emailing people. They probably should have been more careful about unleashing AI agents on the world, but I don't think they intended to spam anyone.
by gigatexal | 2025-12-26 23:10:23+00:00
I have no sympathy for folks who exert undue influence effort to avoid taxes. Public infrastructure made them their wealth. But… I do have sympathy for the rich person who is upset about what they might see as taxation on programs that yield questionable results. They’ll see yet another tax and immediately ask what will it be used for? Is that worthwhile? I guess if they really wanted to change the focus of the spending or the taxation itself they could just buy themselves a lawmaker or two.
by imron | 2025-12-26 23:10:27+00:00
Yeah it is but firstly this example was from before skills were a thing and secondly the rules might not be universally applicable.

In this case the two tables shared 1:1 mapping of primary key to foreign key so the join was fast and exact - but there are situations where that won’t the case.

And yeah this means slowly building out skills with enough conditions and rules and advice.
by xrrocha | 2025-12-26 23:10:29+00:00
Thanks for this, Daniel! I've been working on a related piece [1] that arrives at Naur from a different angle.

Your "knowledge debt" framing is valuable, it gives practitioners something
concrete. And your emphasis on team practices (reviews assessing understanding, pair programming around AI suggestions) addresses social dimension I neglected.

Where we diverge: I argue Naur's pessimism is narrower than supposed. His critique targets technical documentation that describes artifacts while presupposing the theory needed to understand them. But theory-focused documentation -WHY and WHEN, not just WHAT and HOW- isn't subject to the same critique. The Renaissance transmitted Aristotelian theory across a thousand-year gap via preserved texts.

The key distinction: Naur's argument is epistemological, not economic. He's not saying we lack time to document, he's saying certain knowledge cannot in principle be articulated. If the problem was labor, AI would solve it. If it's epistemological, AI can't.

But AI does change something: forced articulation. The interlocutor effect means reasoning that would have remained implicit gets spoken and preserved. Not a solution: better odds.

I posted this recently [2] without much traction, so I'm glad your piece is reaching people. These ideas deserve discussion.

[1] https://xrrocha.github.io/solo-dev-musings/001-naur-document...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46378885
by zbrozek | 2025-12-26 23:11:09+00:00
Thanks, I'll do that! I figured I've had the machine for a while and it was unlikely to be covered by warranty, so I didn't consider reaching out to support. Instead I assumed I'd buy a new keyboard if it ever annoyed me too much.

At some point I actually considered poking around the firmware and seeing about fixing up the PD behavior. But it never quite rose in priority above my many other projects.

I absolutely love that the embedded controller firmware and much of the motherboard schematics are available. It makes it possible to do these little projects should I gather the gumption. That, plus easy and reasonably priced replacement parts availability and easy OS compatibility, are why I got the Framework.
by hberg | 2025-12-26 23:11:59+00:00
Just finished Ken Kocienda's "Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs".

It was interesting to read about the various decisions made along the way to the first iPhone launch and remember the real-time launch back then. Even though the first phone had limitations, they were able to do enough things "right" that you could feel the paradigm shift within a few minutes of using it. Coming from a mobile software company at the time (and having access to all the top phones of the time, various Blackerry devices, Moto Razr, etc) it was easy to see that Apple had really made something extraordinary with its software.