MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by roncesvalles | 2025-12-28 19:23:26+00:00
There is nothing intrinsically wrong about using AI to help convey your ideas, as long as the ideas being conveyed are 100% genuinely yours. Because then it just becomes a choice of style, and a non-native speaker may not have a better choice of style than "LLMese".

It's like writing something with a commodity Bic ballpoint vs a fancy fountain pen with expensive ink. The style of the prose itself is not the valuable artifact, at least not here (it may be in certain places e.g. poems and novels), unless you think well-written/well-spoken people are automatically more veritable or intelligent, which is just as shallow as lookism.

The witch-hunt style comments where people accuse an author of using LLMs as if it's some big gotcha that discredits everything they said need to stop. It only derails the discussion.
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-12-28 19:23:29+00:00
> The core algorithm behind modern generative AI was developed specifically for translation

Indeed! And yet, generative AI systems wire it up as a lossy compression / predictive text model, which discreetly confabulates what it doesn't understand. Why not use a transformer-based model architecture actually designed for translation? I'd much rather the model take a best-guess (which might be useful, or might be nonsense, but will at least be conspicuous nonsense) than substitute a different (less-obviously nonsense) meaning entirely.

Bonus: purpose-built translation models are much smaller, can tractably be run on a CPU, and (since they require less data) can be built from corpora whose authors consented to this use. There's no compelling reason to throw an LLM at the problem, introducing multiple ethical issues and generally pissing off your audience, for a worse result.
by scottlamb | 2025-12-28 19:24:43+00:00
> I know it’s thermal throttling because I can see in iStat Menus that my CPU usage is 100% while the power usage in watts goes down.

There's another possibility. If your battery is low and you've mistakenly plugged it into a low-power USB-C charger source (phone charger), you will also see 100% CPU usage, low power usage, and terrible performance. Probably not the author's problem, but it's been mine more than once! It might be worth adding something to detect this case, too. You can see your charger power under "System Information"; I assume there's an API for it also.
by ArcHound | 2025-12-28 19:26:11+00:00
I can agree with you. And in a discussion with adults working together to address our issues I will.

The issue is that we don't have exact proof that AI is suitable for tasks and the people doing those are already laid off.

The economy now is propped up only by the belief that AI will be so successful that it will eliminate most of the workforce. I just don't see how this ends well.

Remember, regulations are written in blood. And I think we're about to write many brand new regulations.
by rekireki | 2025-12-28 19:26:20+00:00
Let's discuss the benefits of writing fullstack Rust, as well as crossplatform development for Desktop and web targets. What are pros and cons of this approach? I've been using Rust in the browser since early days and noticed a number of interesting points.

Shared code and data structures: one of the key benefits for me personally is that you don't need to document you api with tools like swagger. Define the shared data structures in a module, import it on the client and server sides, and you are good to go. In addition, thanks to serde it's easy to switch between different serialization formats. Want to switch from JSON to MessagePack? Define encode/decode function in the shared module and use them from both client and server. Now changing the format takes a few lines of code.

One language: you can switch between writing client and server without a lot of effort. Of course, WebAssembly adds technical overhead. But I would argue that it's less than using two different languages. Still, there's a need to write platform dependent code at times, and it requires the familiarity with the target platform.

One package manager: when you use a language it's not only about the syntax, but also the ecosystem. And crates.io provides solutions for many common problems already. It saves a lot of time if you have only one package ecosystem to explore. As far as it has the packages you need, of course.

A bit more about WebAssembly: it was created when people wanted to build desktop applications for the browser. And now it's just a nice and convenient benefit when you make a desktop app, but you have an option to build it for the web too.

Binary size: the example application has .wasm file of 4.4Mb when compiled in release mode and optimized with wasm-opt from binaryen.

Font loading: when you use canvas to render your app in the browser, there's a need to load the fonts and it can easily add another 10Mb to the downloading data depeding on the fonts used.

In the end, I'd like to thank all the people who are working on the tools and ecosystem. It's possible only because of your hard work!

What do you think about fullstack and crossplatform development in Rust?
by mschuster91 | 2025-12-28 19:26:48+00:00
> GameDevs don't actually like paying a shit load of money for anti-cheat (that also breaks their debugging systems and causes bugs: a wonderful combination)... so if you've got a better way: join the industry and fix it. You'll be a moderately wealthy person.

I got a better way... just look at the past. Back in ye goode olde UT2004 times, there was no random matchmaking / ranking bullshit that removed the social element, game licenses cost money, people ran their own servers, and if you pissed off server mods enough, no matter if you were a cheater, a suspected cheater, or just an asshole, your serial got banned - sometimes, across a fleet of servers that shared ban lists. Cheating had costs associated.

But of course, that means you can't lure in whales with free to play games and loot them via microtransactions any more...
by drnick1 | 2025-12-28 19:27:07+00:00
> My Google account, my laptop, my phone, my interface language, and preferences are all set to English; only my physical location and payment methods are local.

Your problem start here. Don't give Google your phone number, location, or payment information. Google is a monstrous surveillance machine. If you can't do without Google search for some reason, at least use a VPN or Tor.
by jppope | 2025-12-28 19:27:08+00:00
This article is akin to something I wrote a while ago - https://jonpauluritis.com/articles/on-giving-better-advice/

I would often do general consulting while mainly helping with tech, marketing or sales... and I noticed that all of my most important advice no one would follow. It got so extreme that I would often joke that "I know my advice is good because no one ever takes it". David Maister acknowledged a similar thing in his book "Strategy and the Fat Smoker: Doing What's Obvious But Not Easy"

This article strikes a chord of course because its right in line with that thought. Deathbed regrets in that sense are kind of cheap - they knew what they were doing and did it anyway. I think the author is however missing a key feature of this genre though - those regrets are almost always things that are there, that have no deadline and are easily delayed. Spending time with family, working on hobbies or creative pursuits, and so on. What the regretters are failing to attribute is their lack of discipline... and that there is a valuable take away. The genre could really be just a derivative of: "I wish I had been more disciplined in my life"
Book recommendations based on reading history
by easywood | 2025-12-28 19:27:18+00:00
I have rated hundreds of books in Goodreads and it still gives me crummy recommendations. For example, other books by the same author, or just books in the same genre with high ratings.
Always the same collection of classics or things I can easily find myself.
I would much rather have a service which sees a pattern in books I have rated highly in the past and surprises me with books it thinks I will like. Does anyone know of an actually good recommendation service? Surely this must be possible with today's AI capabilities.
by Obscurity4340 | 2025-12-28 19:28:15+00:00
Right, but the statement extends to the present state of mind of the writer. They're saying that they currently find the notion that nuclear energy can be clean or the cleanest as absurd based on their childhood in the infancy of the program.

Isnt it currently the consensus that nuclear energy can be one of the more clean energy sources? Because they seem to hold their childhood view that thats crazy
by eviks | 2025-12-28 19:28:26+00:00
> with their exceptional quality and functionality.

This was never true, for example, taking this simple criterion of readability:

> would be really helpful if I could read clearly what’s on my display

Look at the device's names at the left-most screenshot - you can't clearly read them even though there is plenty of space wasted on the margins and the "…"

I mean, sure, liquid glass made everything worse, but it doesn't mean all the other decades-old UI sins disappear in the exceptionally fuzzy rearview window
by DTutorin | 2025-12-28 19:29:10+00:00
That’s a fair point, and I think it’s related.
Fiction has a structural advantage: it’s coherent, emotionally satisfying, and low-effort to consume. Evidence-based reasoning is fragmented, probabilistic, and often unsatisfying - especially when you don’t get a clean narrative or conclusion.
One thing this experiment tries to test is whether forcing arguments to be atomic (individual facts instead of stories) helps or hurts. My suspicion is that it actually removes the narrative glue that makes ideas compelling - which may explain why such systems struggle to attract sustained engagement.
In other words, it may not just be about truth vs fiction, but about narrative vs non-narrative cognition.
If that’s correct, the failure mode is structural, not just social or political.
by pmontra | 2025-12-28 19:29:11+00:00
In my case Android Auto got rid of my car. I bought a second hand car in 2020 and Android Auto had upgraded to a new version a few months before. However my car did not upgrade its software and it probably has no way to do it. So the sw in my car and the software on my phone are not compatible. Even the original Android Auto on my phone is too new for my car.

Is it a big deal? Not at all because I hang my phone close to my wheel and it's much better than the screen of my car.

A friend of mine connected his iPhone to my car and it worked but the result is underwhelming: the screen of the phone is still much better. There is no reason for me to go through my car to do stuff on my phone.

By the way, phone calls and media work on the Bluetooth of the car and that's all I need from it.
by Vincent_Yan404 | 2025-12-28 19:29:15+00:00
I think it's well known, cause that generation are still alive.In the Northern China, the situation was often more dire because the land is unforgiving. In the South, people at least had the chance to supplement their rations by fishing in the rivers.While the official term often points to 'natural disasters,'it is widely recognized as a man-made catastrophe.

I remember when I was 4 or 5 years old, my mother told me stories about those years. As a child, I didn't understand the historical context; I thought mass starvation was something that happened cyclically, like the seasons. I vividly remember asking her: 'Does this happen every few years? Should we start stockpiling food now just in case?'

Even today, you will see older Chinese people who cannot bear to see a single grain of rice left on a plate. It’s not just frugality; it’s a ghost from 1959.

A common criticism of Chinese people is that they 'eat everything,' but a major reason for this is that China has endured more famines than almost any other nation in human history.
by LucidLynx | 2025-12-28 19:29:18+00:00
> you can find all of those things for any major software release

Maybe it is because you were using Windows all the time and you can't judge outside (no judging), but the quality and the (legendary) reliability of macOS was true. Everything was well engineered, well designed, and had a purpose.

This is not the case anymore, and this is why people are so upset too. People are also upset because all those annoying things have been reported since betas and Apple did not really listened to them (except most absolute valid points).
by tptacek | 2025-12-28 19:31:12+00:00
These are words, but I don't understand how they respond to the preceding comment, which observes that binary legibility is an operational requirement for real security given that almost nobody uses reproducible builds. In reality, people meaningfully depend on work done at the binary level to ensure lack of backdoors, not on work done at the source level.

The preceding comment is saying that source security is insufficient, not that transparency is irrelevant.
by hinkley | 2025-12-28 19:32:16+00:00
While I have definitely done this a few times, one of my MacBooks could draw more power than the power supply could deliver and there was a particular computer game that I discovered I could “only” play for about five hours before the laptop shut itself off. Because it was having to draw supplemental power from the batteries to keep up.

IIRC the next generation of MacBook was the one that came with the larger power brick, which didn’t at all surprise me after that experience. Then they switched to GaN to bring the brick size back down.
by alexcloudstar | 2025-12-28 19:32:46+00:00
I noticed a pattern in my own projects and in many indie startups.

Late-night idea. Immediate domain purchase. Instant feeling of momentum.
But no users, no validation, no real risk taken.

Buying a domain feels productive because it keeps the dream alive without exposing it to rejection. The downside is cognitive lock-in. Once you own the “perfect” name, you resist pivots and start building for the brand instead of the problem.

I wrote a short piece arguing that domains, logos, and other “business-looking” steps often delay real validation. The first real milestone is not a launch or a domain, but a stranger giving you their email because they actually want the solution.

Curious if others here experienced the same trap, or if you think early branding genuinely helps.
by schoen | 2025-12-28 19:33:00+00:00
There are a lot of subtleties about connotation here. I would say that "storytelling" traditionally primarily meant fiction, but some modern uses also include narrative technique generally, including nonfiction and also marketing. There may also be older traditions of nonfiction storytelling, but that has some connotation of a ritualized or formalized activity (e.g. children sitting in a circle listening to a recitation).

The term that has no connotations of fiction is probably "narrative".

I think many languages have closely related words for fictional narratives and nonfictional narratives.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-12-28 19:33:04+00:00
I 100% agree with your comment. That yes, we should test the models on our own private benchmarks and there is no denying that local has a long way to go.

I was just proposing that local feels the most sustainable way for things to go, perhaps even an API Openrouter like things but you can read my other comment on how I found their finances to be loss/zero profit so its good while it lasts (on the AI bubble) if one person needs it but long term I feel like its prices are gonna rise whereas local would still remain stable (Also worth mentioning that there is no free lunch so I think the losses would be distributed to everybody in the form of the financial crisis caused by AI, I hope that the impacts of the financial crisis lessens because I am genuinely worried about the crisis more so at this point.

Agreed, I myself understand that right now using these AI bubble fuel money sponsored might make sense (look at my other comments where I went into the rabbithole on how most companies are losing/zero profitting while investing billions)

Although these aren't sustainable, the one idea where it makes sense is that we transition to a local model based (which yes I know are inefficient) but the inevitability in my opinion if the bubble bursts but there are definitely some steal deals nowadays if one wishes.

Also You may have understood me wrong in this comment (if so my apologies) in the sense that what I was mentioning was for the secretary use-case and not a company (using AI?)/selling Ai related services which need 24x7 access

One wouldn't have to worry about Blackouts because if your secretary's house is blacked out, lets just be honest that AI won't turn the magic lights on

Also the machines in our devices are beast. I am pretty sure that for basic communication tasks as the grandfather comment suggested, we are very likely that even the "toy" models as you say would be "good enough"
by Marsymars | 2025-12-28 19:33:31+00:00
A good part of this is locale-based and not language-based - I find that Google will prefer often local (English) results over the canonical English results that I'm actually looking for.

Though I primarily use Kagi now.

e.g. If I search "world's best pizza" the top Google result is a random local pizza joint that isn't even top-5 in my medium-sized city (but who have included "worldsgreatestpizza" in their long URL), and then a bunch of Facebook results. Kagi's top couple results are sites with rankings of (ostensibly) the world's top pizza restaurants.
by kcplate | 2025-12-28 19:34:41+00:00
Seems to me you are focused on money rather than time here. However, people using these road are not in alignment with that metric. What’s important is not the cost, but the value. Why choose a toll road over a public path from A to B? It’s all about saving time—that’s the value the transaction provides those users.

If a toll road becomes public, its value goes away because traffic increases on it, eliminating any benefit of traffic reduction that provides time savings that the gate keeping of the charging a toll provides. Also this notion of “everyone now bears the cost of the road” creates damage. That cost now hits the folks who don’t want to use it currently because they do not see its value. All you have done is hurt both the drivers of the road and the drivers who do not use the road by “sharing the burden” and making it public.
by fastasucan | 2025-12-28 19:34:45+00:00
>Maybe the most obvious con: a tada list forces you to have an accomplishment each day so you can write it down, and this added stress to my day.

The problem here is that they think it forces you to have an accomplishment. Just write what you did in short form. IT can be "Was very stressed and couldn't get anything substantial done, attended the monthly developer meeting and did some work on documentation".

I do this as well to better remember what I have done at work, to quickly be able to document my value towards the company, and to have some "tabs" to show if there are any questions regarding what I did a day.
by AuthAuth | 2025-12-28 19:36:58+00:00
No we didnt lose communication to entertainment. You still have communication protocols like email and xmpp. Fediverse is a communication protocol and some of that communication is entertainment. We need to seperate social media and fediverse because the philosophy is completely different. Fediverse has you make an account and you get posts from users you follow. The reason you need multiple accounts is because the sites are not complete enough to handle all of the different styles of posts. There is still a social and communication aspect to it.

Big tech social media is pushing you a stream of entertainment and pushing away from social interactions.
by Loughla | 2025-12-28 19:37:13+00:00
I used that book as a background example in a presentation I did you faculty on how to integrate new open resources into their classes. One guy in the back laughed really hard at that screen and everyone looked at him like he was a lunatic.

And that's the story of how I made a work best friend.

Seriously though, if you haven't read amusing ourselves to death you need to.
by schoen | 2025-12-28 19:37:54+00:00
In the U.S. we have belatedly had declassification of various parts of military history, including lots of details about Los Alamos (where the U.S. atom bomb was invented). Sometimes this has happened on a delay of many decades and there are certainly still some things that the public might think of as part of "history" that are not officially declassified. Has there been a similar process in China where older military history is no longer officially secret?
by tombert | 2025-12-28 19:37:55+00:00
Graphics have been a blind spot for me for pretty much my entire career. I more or less failed upward into where I am now (which ended up being a lot of data and distributed stuff). I do enjoy doing what I do and I think I'm reasonably good at it so it's hardly a "bad" thing, but I (like I think a lot of people here) got into programming because I wanted to make games.

Outside of playing with OpenGL as a teenager to make a planet orbit around a sun, a bad space invaders clone in Flash where you shoot a bird pooping on you, a really crappy Breakout clone with Racket, and the occasional experiments with Vulkan and Metal, I never really have fulfilled the dream of being the next John Carmack or Tim Sweeney.

Every time I try and learn Vulkan I end up getting confused and annoyed about how much code I need to write and give up. I suspect it's because I don't really understand the fundamentals well enough, and as a result jumping into Vulkan I end up metaphorically "drinking from a firehose". I certainly hope this doesn't happen, but if I manage to become unemployed again maybe that could be a good excuse to finally buckle down and try and learn this.
by shadowgovt | 2025-12-28 19:39:33+00:00
Google has a lot of data to see how the average user uses computers. The problem is, that data tells them that the number of people who misconfigure their localization settings (or can't configure them; shared computer) is way larger than the people using those settings on purpose to try and request non-local results. So they err far, far on the side of using your location as a signal of intent over your machine and browser configuration.

ETA: https://www.google.com/advanced_search appears to give options for tuning your language and region in the search results. I haven't used it personally in ages, but it may give you what you're looking for.
Show HN: Warlocks – a real-time browser multiplayer game running at 60fps
by iCeGaming | 2025-12-28 19:39:34+00:00
I built Warlocks as a learning project around real-time multiplayer in the browser.
The server is full authoritative and handles matchmaking, game state, collisions, and cooldowns over WebSockets.

It supports up to 8-player custom lobbies (easy to try with friends) and a quick 1v1 mode with raw matchmaking.
If no opponent is found, it auto-matches you with a bot to keep wait times short.

I’d love feedback on gameplay feel, networking choices, or edge cases.
by mmooss | 2025-12-28 19:39:42+00:00
I don't understand: æ is not a ligature so it's not an example of a ligature. There are English ligatures to use.

Also, most fonts have many characters beyond ASCII, including æ. If your font lacked it then you would see an empty box, not the two letters ae. Applying a font style would not change the rendering of æ into ASCII letters; I don't think it changes the rendering of English ligatures, which are separate code points in Unicode.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-12-28 19:40:04+00:00
A quick search shows me (Disclosure: I think it is the duck.ai search thing rather than any article)

> TCP and HTTP protocols were primarily developed with funding and support from government agencies, particularly the U.S. Department of Defense and organizations like ARPA, rather than by non-profit entities. These protocols were created to facilitate communication across different computer networks

So um... yea?