MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by abainbridge | 2025-12-31 21:11:55+00:00
That wouldn't make me happy. If the sharpie on the tape said it was bad, I'd still look at it, sniff it and probably eat it. Certain foods scare me though. eg there's a common claim that boiled rice shouldn't be kept for more than a day and then re-heated. I follow this received wisdom even though it never seems bad and I don't know anyone who got ill from eating re-heated boiled rice. On the other hand, raw chicken does not scare me because I have an uncontrollable revulsion to it when it has actually gone bad. And of course, Camembert isn't worth eating until at least a fortnight after the expiry date.
by kgwxd | 2025-12-31 21:12:22+00:00
Believe it or not, you can visit more than 1 website. How about a guideline to put (AI) like we do with (video). I'm just sick of having to click to figure out if it's about humans or computers. They've hijacked every single word related to the most fascinating thing in the entire universe just to generate ad revenue and VC funding.
by Demiurge | 2025-12-31 21:14:07+00:00
My first thought was that pixels are never square. Squares are an artifact of nearest sampling to another grid. I suppose pixel art assumes knowledge of this final grid, but most media doesn’t?

Furthermore, the referencing of a raster can assume any shape or form. It makes some sense some signals are optimized for hardware restrictions.

Another interesting example are anamorphic lenses used in cinema.
by lp0_on_fire | 2025-12-31 21:15:15+00:00
Neither soda or McDonald’s are advertising themselves as healthy options suitable as general replacements for a balanced diet. Whereas the AI companies have a plainly stated goal of being able to accomplish virtually any task a human could.

And before you say it: there’s a massive difference between the legalese they put in fine print in their user agreements and mutter under their breath in sales presentations versus what is being shouted from the rooftops every single second of every single day by their collective marketing departments.
by dangus | 2025-12-31 21:15:39+00:00
If the author of this article just finished the book the publisher would have just published it without much fuss and probably without any significant changes.

The author had all the leverage regarding content. It’s not like the publisher could actually incorporate what they were asking for with AI, they still need an author to do that and it was a totally new subject at the time. Their demands were empty.

I don’t think the author would have finished the book if it was self-published. They clearly didn’t want to write a book that badly.

Not to say that finishing a whole-ass book is easy, I’m certainly not going to pretend that’s the case.

I’ve lately been trying to finish more side project type things in my life because these dead ends themselves feel empty to me. I am trying to set scope reasonably and then just finish even if it’s painful or there’s no confetti-style payout and nobody else cares.
by gus_massa | 2025-12-31 21:16:40+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Crew-9

It's not a breakthrough, because it could have been done with the Soyutz (except the part of reusing the launcher), but it's enough for "He promises 10, gives the world 4, but everybody else has 1, and he's hated for it."
by gamblor956 | 2025-12-31 21:17:02+00:00
Digital goods do have a marginal cost. It's a lot lower than with physical goods, but there is a cost: at the very minimum, a digital good takes up storage space. A streamed digital good requires bandwidth and electricity (and in most of the world, both are metered resources).

Also, most consumers don't choose on quality; they choose on price. This is why free mobile games became huge and paid mobile games are a dying breed. In the physical world, it's why shein and alibaba nearly became trillion-dollar companies.
by triceratops | 2025-12-31 21:17:05+00:00
> do you really think that if currently minors can buy tobacco and alcohol using unlawful means, then your TittyTokens will somehow be magically immune

No I fully admit some minors will still get access to FaceTok. We accept this failure for alcohol and tobacco. We don't have internet connected beer cans phoning home when you open them, asking to scan your face.

But at least where I live, most kids aren't falling over drunk or puffing away at school bus stops. So if the system is good enough for selling actual poisons, it's good enough to limit most minors' access to online vices.

Moreover social media has network effects. If most kids aren't on it, the rest will likely not bother either.
by ismailmaj | 2025-12-31 21:17:20+00:00
My next low hanging fruit is certainly to make my LLM usage local, my queries contain much more sensitive information than what is mentioned by this post.

In the past I dropped off privacy when it was too inconvenient. For example I dropped protonmail because of bad search, left Linux desktop for Windows due to missing software, etc, I still haven't found the sweet spot for LLMs yet.

For the rest, I'm currently running the full macOS, iOS, safari, Apple passwords and I'm decently happy with this middle ground.
by boznz | 2025-12-31 21:17:32+00:00
AI is just another tool that allows me to go deeper into the accuracy of the story I am writing. In my last book I used AI notably to tell me how long a current state of the art (2024) computer would take to decode a cypher encrypted in a one time pad, if the cypher used the text in one of the ten most popular books available in world war 2; My guestimate was a bit off as it seems! Another time I gave it my draft blog and asked for it to fact check it. I also use it when writing to check my plot is not too similar to another that has already been written.

I usually give two different AI's the same prompt for nuance. My problem is still that they tend to drivel on, as if a one word answer is not good enough. Still I would rather have them than not.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-12-31 21:18:09+00:00
> The customers time is not flexible like that.

A lot of the super expensive queries are flexible. Especially the agentic coding ones. And higher use naturally follows the sun anyway.

> And every second GPU is not working, it's not making money

Some companies already have more chips than they can feed, so if that continues then sure why not let it idle part of the night.
by zikduruqe | 2025-12-31 21:18:14+00:00
I usually ask if they poop with the door closed. We all know what you are doing in there, and we do the same thing. No need to hide.

Or, why do you get your mail in an envelope? I can see that it is your financial statements.

Why do you have curtains on your home? I can go to Zillow and see the interior of your house from years ago.
by iamnothere | 2025-12-31 21:19:24+00:00
> In my country, the state is enforcing a lot of essential workflows to be digital-first (and in extreme cases digital-exclusive) and I dread to think needing these services at a crticial moment and the choice of my OS making it impossible for me. This is more of a commentary on my government's choices but it's a reality for me.

If my country did this I would get a cheap used device for this purpose and keep it powered off. I refuse to carry a pocket spy for the sake of convenience. I find that it’s rarely an issue.
by immibis | 2025-12-31 21:19:34+00:00
It's ISP←A→Telco←D→Telco←A→You

Traditionally both the ISP and you pay for analog phone lines from the telco. The telco uses digital internally (remember you and your ISP probably aren't at the same exchange), which puts a hard limit on data rate - there is no trick you can do to get more bits through than the bits used in the digital part of the call.

If you (as the ISP) buy enough lines you can get them delivered in digital format. A T1 is designed to carry 24 simultaneous phone calls, acting virtually as a bundle of 24 analog phone cables. So the obvious next stage was to have a modem that can handle 24 simultaneous connections on one cable.

Now you have ISP\_modem←Ax24→ISP\_muxer←Dx24→Telco←→Telco←A→User

The ISP's modem generates analog signals for up to 24 simultaneous incoming calls, and they pass into a multiplexer that connects 24 analog lines to a T1 line and they go through the telco digitally to users. The maximum bandwidth is still as before - the modem has to generate an analog signal that will still be receivable at the other end after A2D and D2A conversion. Even though the digital bandwidth for the digital part is 56kbps, the maximum achievable bandwidth through this digital-bottlenecked analog call was found to be 33.6kbps.

But the industry had an idea: by convincing the telco to install the modems into the user's exchange, the analog portion would only be between the telco and the user, without a digital segment in the middle of it, and therefore wouldn't be bottlenecked the same way. The same digital backhaul from the ISP through the telco was used, but instead of transmitting a digitised analog modem signal and therefore causing degradation of quality, it transmitted your actual internet traffic bits, up to 56kbps. The analog signal was made at the user's side of the telco and didn't have to fit within 56kbps when digitised.

Pedantically, the digital circuits are 64kbps but one bit in some bytes is used for call status signaling, which is okay for voice, but the ISP equipment can't predict which bytes have a bit overwritten (and it could be multiple if there are several hops) so it just used 7 bits in each byte.
by bryanrasmussen | 2025-12-31 21:19:36+00:00
high quality carpentry has a market of people who buy one off projects for lots of money.

There is not really a similar market in software.

I'm not saying there won't be fine programmers etc. but with woodworking I can see how a market exists that will support you developing your skills and I don't see it with software and thus the path seems much less clear to me.
by pdmccormick | 2025-12-31 21:19:52+00:00
Conceptually, can you break your processing up into a more or less "pure" functional core, surrounded by some gooey, imperative, state-dependent input loading and output effecting stages? For each processing stage, implement functions of well-defined inputs and outputs, with any global side effects clearly stated (i.e. updating a customer record, sending an email) Then factor all the imperative-ish querying (that is to say, anything dependent on external state such as is stored in a database) to the earlier phases, recognizing that some of the querying is going to be data-dependent ("if customer type X, fetch the limits for type X accounts"). The output of these phases should be a sequence of intermediate records that contain all the necessary data to drive the subsequent ones.

Whenever there is an action decision point ("we will be sending an email to this customer"), instead of actually performing that step right then and there, emit a kind of deferred-intent action data object, e.g. "OverageEmailData(customerID, email, name, usage, limits)". Finally, the later phases are also highly imperative, and actually perform the intended actions that have global visibility and mutate state in durable data stores.

You will need to consider some transactional semantics, such as, what if the customer records change during the course of running this process? Or, what if my process fails half-way through sending customer emails? It is helpful if your queries can be point-in-time based, as in "query customer usage as-of the start time for this overall process". That way you can update your process, re-run it with the same inputs as of the last time you ran it, and see what your updates changed in terms of the output.

If those initial querying phases take a long time to run because they are computationally or database query heavy, then during your development, run those once and dump the intermediate output records. Then you can reload them to use as inputs into an isolated later phase of the processing. Or you can manually filter those intermediates down to a more useful representative set (i.e. a small number of customers of each type).

Also, its really helpful to track the stateful processing of the action steps (i.e. for an email, track state as Queued, Sending, Success, Fail). If you have a bug that only bites during a later step in the processing, you can fix it and resume from where you left off (or only re-run for the affected failed actions). Also, by tracking the globally affecting actions you can actually take the results of previous runs into account during subsequent ones ("if we sent an overage email to this customer within the past 7 days, skip sending another one for now"). You now have a log of the stateful effects of your processing, which you can also query ("how many overage emails have been sent, and what numbers did they include?")

Good luck! Don't go overboard with functional purity, but just remember, state mutations now can usually be turned into data that can be applied later.
by leptons | 2025-12-31 21:19:55+00:00
I moved my server and 6 VMs running on it to Linux Mint this year, in response to Microsoft enshitifying Windows 11. It was a pretty easy move, and practically all software I needed has a Linux version. Plex, Agent DVR (security cams), and the LSI-Megaraid admin software for my RAIDs all runs on Linux. Moving the RAID was the easiest part, I just moved the LSI card from the Windows system to the Linux system and drives just showed up instantly. Of course they are formatted as NTFS, and it would be better for Linux if they were formatted as something else, but I'm working on moving ~35TB of stuff off to a backup server so I can reformat those RAID drives, then move all the data back.

The last VM I need to move to Linux is a somewhat complex Windows 10 IIS webserver setup that is still running on a Windows VM. I have to figure out a bunch of stuff to make that move to Linux happen, but I will do that soon enough.

Microsoft can fuck off, I'm done with them after 30 years. They have made it clear I am not their target audience anymore, and I won't recommend their products to anyone anymore.
by gregors | 2025-12-31 21:20:06+00:00
I slapped 96GB of ram into my 13 framework laptop last year, when prices were cheap. I'm probably going to upgrade next cycle for fun and give my current laptop away (I'll keep the ram). I'm sure that laptop will last a very long time with linux.

Macbook Pro's are the best laptops I've ever used. But if you go that route you better up front that RAM or you'll be stuck. The one place the Mac destroys the framework is battery usage. It's not a deal killer for me, but it might be for many.
by ffsm8 | 2025-12-31 21:20:24+00:00
> Once validated, the code is good for 1 year (or 6 months or 3 months, adjust based on how stringent you want to make it) - then it expires and a new one must be purchased.

That sounds fantastic, were just one step away from making social media entirely controlled by one single party

Perfect to push anyone you don't like into irrelevancy, politicians will love this

Journalists too, finally they can be rid of these pesky YouTubers that show how politically captured they're! Just need to get someone with admin permission in that company and you're golden
by harmonic18374 | 2025-12-31 21:20:33+00:00
I feel RevenueCat is on shaky ground, their market position can only get worse and worse as Apple and Google improve their complimentary offerings and they are forced into more A/B testing that directly competes with others. Recent StoreKit changes this year close a lot of the remaining gap. I would have sold. I wonder why they chose not to.
by Kapendev | 2025-12-31 21:21:11+00:00
I wrote a simple benchmark comparing my custom dynamic array implementation in Dlang with dynamic arrays in other languages. The test appends and then removes 100,000,000 integers on a Ryzen 3 2200G with 16 GB RAM. This is just a rough cross-language benchmark and not something serious:

Appending and removing 100000000 items...
Testing: ./app_d
real 0.16
user 0.03
sys 0.12
Testing: ./app_zig
real 0.18
user 0.05
sys 0.13
Testing: ./app_odin
real 0.27
user 0.10
sys 0.16

Code and benchmark files are here: https://github.com/Kapendev/joka/tree/main/benchmarks/array_...
by PaulHoule | 2025-12-31 21:21:48+00:00
What he's missing is that there's always been a market for custom-built software by non-professionals. For instance, spreadsheets. Back in the 1970s engineers and accountants and people like that wrote simple programs for programmable calculators. Today it's Python.

The most radical development in software tools I think, would be more tools for non-professional programmers to program small tools that put their skills on wheels. I did a lot of biz dev around something that encompassed "low code/no code" but a revolution there involves smoothing out 5-10 obstacles with a definite Ashby character that if you fool yourself that you can get away with ignoring the last 2 required requirements you get just another Wix that people will laugh at. For now, AI coding doesn't have that much to offer the non-professional programmer because a person without insight into the structure of programs, project management and a sense of what quality means will go in circles at best.

I think the thinking in the article is completely backwards about the economics. I mean, the point of software is you can write it once and the cost to deploy a billion units is trivial in comparison. Sure, AI slop can put the "crap" in "app" but if you have any sense you don't go cruising the app store for trash but find out about best-of-breed products or products that are the thin edge of a long wedge (like the McDonald's app which is valuable because it has all the stores baacking it)
by triceratops | 2025-12-31 21:22:10+00:00
> The issue is and will always remain reselling the age verification tokens. The entire system is pretty pointless.

I forgot to mention in my original post. I'd also rate limit purchases. Maybe only allow purchasing one per visit.

> Kids will just have some hoops to jump through, and they will be very motivated to do so.

Maybe? Kids can just buy alcohol or cigs or drugs from criminals today. But most can't or don't. Some do, and we accept that as a society. And we punish the criminals who enable it.

This isn't like illegal drugs, where criminals have a massive market (adults with cash). A black market catering to only minors isn't very lucrative.

Moreover social media's network effects work in our favor. If most kids can't join, their friends are less motivated to get in.
by Dusseldorf | 2025-12-31 21:22:16+00:00
I've basically shifted to negatively weighting any advertisements I see, the thinking being that if a company needs to advertise, they're more likely to be a scam; companies who are actually great at what they do can survive off word of mouth (or at the very least, don't have it in their margins to pay someone to advertise door to door.) Basically the same logic as the old "never go to a restaurant that has someone standing outside trying to drum up business because it's a tourist trap."
by bredren | 2025-12-31 21:22:18+00:00
This is the route I went for making Claude Code and Codex conversation histories local and queryable by the CLIs themselves.

Create the DB and provide the tools and skill.

This blog entry explains how: https://contextify.sh/blog/total-recall-rag-search-claude-co...

It is a macOS client at the present but I have a Linux-ready engine I could use early feedback on if anyone is interested in giving it a go.
by _aavaa_ | 2025-12-31 21:23:04+00:00
> No bigger than the current black market for beer and cigs for kids.

I don't think this part is true. Kids are currently used to having access to all of these services. And there is a lot more utility to having access to the whole internet, than having a a few packs.

To say nothing of the fact that these codes can be distributed digitally once they have been purchased. So it's harder to deter.
by fragmede | 2025-12-31 21:23:32+00:00
What blows my mind that we absolutely take for granted today is insulated wires. The technology and supply chain to mine or to find into metal and also to farm cotton and wool and formed that into protective tubing before the advent of plastic insulation. The amount of technology that goes into making a "simple" USB-cable beggars belief if you stop to think about it. Even a simple #2 wooden pencil with an eraser on top is beyond the knowledge of one person to produce, nevermind a USB-c cable!
by aw1621107 | 2025-12-31 21:23:46+00:00
That paper isn't relevant here. From the paper (emphasis added):

> 7.1.3 Reserved Identifiers

> [snip]

> Macro names and identifiers with external linkage that are specified in the C standard library clauses.

> This proposal does not propose any changes to these reserved identifiers.

Furthermore, that paper doesn't make the use of reserved external identifiers not UB, so there's no change there either.
by agentifysh | 2025-12-31 21:25:45+00:00
The confusion you are displaying is because you are not cognizant of whats going on throughout the world particularly in advanced economies that have opened their doors to all forms of migration legal and illegal.

The timing of this coincides with countries in particular have seen a major rise in anti-migration sentiments which have become very fashionable and popular among young men in particular as polls show a global trend of men under 30s are shifting towards right wing with women towards leftwing.

Suddenly, they decide NOW is the time to stop despite the fact that they've allowed young people to be exposed to all sorts of "dangerous content" and algorithms for decades, in the late 90s and early 2000s as teenagers we had uncensored access to the internet, warez, anarchy, shock as they have circumventions widely shared among each other today.

In short, these countries are so concerned about a civil unrest in particular between religious groups that are perceived to have "overstayed their welcome" that they are outright trying to shutdown online discourse both legitimate and exaggerated.

Europe, in particular UK, are on the brink of a major civil war as per intelligence reports and the ban for the young won't be the last but that the net would be cast even wider. It's a last ditched effort bandaid solution to keep the dam from bursting. With the backdrop of Keir Starmer's threats to extradite Americans and jail people for posting grievances against the demographic crisis, you can see where Europe and other advanced economies even in places like Korea mirror the trends, conflicts and draconian laws to buy time for the inevitable.

If we want to keep this debate going there has to be an understanding of the political context and direction that can only be realized through inference and intuition. They will never openly announce true motives as that would hinder the objective. The comments I am seeing are awfully similar to the confusion and fierce debate I see around wrestling control of TikTok, which have largely been blamed on China, but the concern around uncensored videos of atrocities committed in the middle east reaching hundreds of millions of young people that has shifted steadfast opinions of a certain country which for decades were positive, now show significant departure among age brackets within the same political camp which shocked a lot of old people from that same side.

Perception is everything and the question "asking for a source on if these bans popular" completely misses the mark and irrelevant, rather the more interesting question is,

"will these bans that limit freedom of information and speech escalate and proliferate in the near future and whether France, Australia, Korea is just the start?"

" will the countries reviewing ban like new zealand, greece, canada invite more countries to join the trend?"

" why are these bans being accelerated in countries that have seen a large wave of migrations that are causing major frictions?"