MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by slowmovintarget | 2025-12-10 00:46:25+00:00
While I'd certainly prefer raw human authorship on a forum like this, I can't help but think this is the wrong question. The labeling up front appears to be merely a disclosure style. That is, commenters say that as a way of notifying the reader that they used an LLM to arrive at the answer (at least here on HN) rather than citing the LLM as an authority.

"Banning" the comment syntax would merely ban the form of notification. People are going to look stuff up with an LLM. It's 2025; that's what we do instead of search these days. Just like we used to comment "Well Google says..." or "According to Alta Vista..."

Proscribing quoting an LLM is a losing proposition. Commenters will just omit disclosure.

I'd lean toward officially ignoring it, or alternatively ask that disclosure take on less conversational form. For example, use quote syntax and cite the LLM. e.g.:

> Blah blah slop slop slop

-- ChatGippity
by hinkley | 2025-12-10 00:46:30+00:00
The plane suffered an engine mount failure, which tore a hole in the wing, sprayed shrapnel into engine 2, which caused a compressor stall reducing thrust past the survivable level. Then it crashed into a fuel recycling plant with a full load of jet fuel.

The scary part of the mount failure is that the mounts cracked in an unexposed part where visual inspection did not reveal the damage. It wasn't due for a teardown and inspection until it had traveled 25% (80% of the maintenance window) farther. That's why they grounded the entire fleet.

Takeoffs are dangerous because they run the engines hard, and parts are operating in the supersonic range.
by DrewADesign | 2025-12-10 00:46:54+00:00
It’s always tempting to start writing code before you really know what you’re going to build because it’s so satisfying and exciting to see an idea take shape. I know I’ve had more than one or two projects where I started writing before I understood the shape of the problem I was solving and ended up a few hours into the project with a useless pile of stupid. It seems like LLMs can lead you much further down that road because it just seems so magically productive.
by progmetaldev | 2025-12-10 00:47:16+00:00
Dun and Bradstreet (?). I believe I'm remembering this correctly. I still deal with a few financial institutions that insist on using an EV SSL certificate on their websites. I may be wrong, but I believe that having an EV SSL gives a larger insurance dollar amount should the security be compromised from the EV certificate (although I imagine it would be nearly impossible to prove).

When I last reissued an EV SSL (recently), I had to create a CNAME record to prove domain ownership, as well as provide the financial institution's CEO's information which they matched up with Dun & Bradstreet and called to confirm. The entire process took about three days to complete.
by gmllama | 2025-12-10 00:47:43+00:00
One of the biggest features of this game for me as a youngin' wasn't that I could play dial-up co-op multiplayer with the neighbors down the way, but that the soundtrack audio was Redbook format on the cd-rom and I could pop the game disk itself into my CD player to listen to the what I still consider to be an amazing soundtrack. That Orc'ish harpsichord still lives rent free in my head.
by N_Lens | 2025-12-10 00:48:25+00:00
What's interesting here is that you can now debug WebAssembly applications with full C++ source-level debugging directly in Chrome, complete with breakpoints, variable inspection, and step-through debugging, just like a native desktop app.

What makes this particularly interesting is the technology stack: Emscripten embeds DWARF debugging symbols (the same format used for native Linux binaries) directly into WebAssembly binaries. A Chrome browser extension then reads these embedded symbols and reconstructs the original C++ source code view in the DevTools, mapping the compiled WebAssembly back to your Qt C++ source with full directory paths intact.

All of this would have seemed impossible not long ago.
by kesor | 2025-12-10 00:49:34+00:00
Probably because then it wouldn't be software anymore. That is because you will be required to do a physical process (print an integrated circuit) in order to use the functionality you created. It can definitely be done, but it takes it too far away from the idea the author expressed.

But I don't see a reason why the LLM shouldn't be writing binary CPU instructions directly. Or programming some FPGA directly. Why have the assembly language/compiler/linked in between? There is really no need.

We humans write some instructions in English. The LLM generates a working executable for us to use repeatedly in the future.

I also think it wouldn't be so hard to train such a model. We have plenty of executables with their source code in some other language available to us. We can annotate the original source code with a model that understands that language, get its descriptions in English, and train another model to use these descriptions for understanding the executable directly. With enough such samples we will be able to write executables by prompting.
by Projectiboga | 2025-12-10 00:50:11+00:00
Depreciation is mandatory, your cost basis declines while inflation slowly pushes up the value, which leads to a type of phantom gain. There are abilities for individuals to lower their tax bill as there are breaks. But for a Mom & Pop small landlord the tax situation can be tough. 1031 exchanges are tricky for small investors as you have to exchange into a situation with the same mortgage. A big real estate corp can borrow against their total equity, rather than taking a mortgage on the new property. So they can roll their equity into the new deal tax free. This is especially lucurative to buying cheap, rennovating and then selling to another corp. And what isn't discussed is there is a huge amount of "carried interest" deferred profits. That tax break was intended for high risk venture capital investments but in the 80s and 90s it became used for speculative and even day trading. https://www.pgpf.org/article/what-is-the-carried-interest-lo...
by cal_dent | 2025-12-10 00:50:33+00:00
Good luck trying to mass build in this financial and fiscal environment. Governments could cut as much red tape as they'd like now to stimulate housebuilding and the market will still continue to build higher priced homes because that's the only game in town now to deliver an attractive ROI.

A fundamental issue no one is truly engaging with his the concentration of where people want to live which has been a combination of where jobs are and the development consumer activities in those locations have fostered to keep them attractive places to live. They're too many people trying to live in too few places and thats subtly due to necessity related to where employment is.

Remote working should have eased that more sustainably over the medium term but society decided it was better to throw the baby out with the bathwater when it came to that & productivity issues etc.
by Barbing | 2025-12-10 00:51:20+00:00
Surprised to see snark re: what I thought was a standard practice (linking FAQs, essentially).

I hadn’t seen the post. It was relevant. I just read it. Lucky Ten Thousand can read it next time even though I won’t.

Simon has never seemed annoying so unlike other comments that might worry me (even “Opus made this” even though it’s cool but I’m concerned someone astroturfed), that comment would’ve never raised my eyebrows. He’s also dedicated and I love he devotes his time to a new field like this where it’s great to have attempts at benchmarks, folks cutting through chaff, etc.
by OJFord | 2025-12-10 00:53:12+00:00
It perhaps starts to make more sense now with better AI transcribing though. For the last few decades, the idea of dictating notes has been nice; but not the reality of typing them up/processing them however yourself if you don't have a secretary.

I could sort of see myself doing this coupled with good speech to text, but I don't know if I'd do it enough that it's worth having special hardware for vs. just recording on my phone or with earphones - or getting a smart watch for this plus other functionality.
by N_Lens | 2025-12-10 00:53:13+00:00
Interesting article noting how ULIDs solve database index fragmentation caused when using UUIDv4. However, for extremely high-volume writes, ULIDs create "hot spots" at the current timestamp index location, potentially causing contention. The article notes that UUID v7 (newly standardized) adopts the same time-ordered approach, validating ULID's design.
by DetroitThrow | 2025-12-10 00:53:31+00:00
In the real world, I'd say the 90% of the C code written is somewhere between "worthwhile to spend extra effort to detect and avoid memory errors" and "worth formally verifying".

Sure, for prototype sized codebases it might be able to handle finding mistakes a fresh grad might easily make, or even that memory bugs aren't a big problem - but in my experience it happily adds memory bugs to large codebases and multithreaded code (that I think an experienced human could easily spot tbh).
by JoshTriplett | 2025-12-10 00:53:44+00:00
> I couldn't care less that the term is "diluted" and that makes it harder

It also makes life harder for individuals and small companies, because this is not Open Source. It's incompatible with Open Source, it can't be reused in other Open Source projects.

Terms have meanings. This is not Open Source, and it will never be Open Source.
by jameslk | 2025-12-10 00:53:51+00:00
I agree with you general point, however in the long term, I don’t think this will financially end well for those betting on housing as an investment. At some point, if a loan essentially spans the course of a borrower’s lifetime, it’s no longer a loan, it’s a rental.

Therefore the lender will not be made whole when their debt serf dies. That seems to place an upper ceiling on the (inflation adjusted) growth of the investment side.
by bravetraveler | 2025-12-10 00:54:15+00:00
The specific 'question' is a promise to catch training on more publicly available data, and to expect more blog links copied 'into dozens of different conversations'... Jump for joy. Stop the presses. Oops, snarky again :)

Yes, the LLM people will train on this. They will train on absolutely everything [as they have]. The comments/links prioritize engagement over awareness. My point, I suppose, if I had one is that this blogosphere can add to the chaff. I'm glad to see Simon here often/interested.

Aside: all this concern about over-fitting just reinforces my belief these things won't take the profession any time soon. Maybe the job.
by mierz00 | 2025-12-10 00:54:30+00:00
Funnily, I do a lot of those things. I have a bunch of hobbies that are very social.

But for me it’s not really that. It’s about walking in a place and knowing everyone, having small talk and feeling comfortable chatting.

Work takes up a lot of time, so I prefer to have that along side it. Rather than only in my spare time. I
by oersted | 2025-12-10 00:55:27+00:00
> robotic baristas

Coffee vending machines? That’s what’s inside the box, it’s nothing new really… There are very high quality ones too. It’s not a particularly skilled job for a human to do, besides the customer service aspect of course, perhaps I am ignorant in that regard.

Indeed, coming from Spain, I don’t really see the lady as a barista, she is the classic bartender that listens to you and knows everybody. Except the bar is open throughout the day, is family friendly, sells all kinds besides alcohol (breakfast, coffee, tobacco, lunch, dinner, newspapers, lottery tickets, snacks and sweets…), and generally acts as the social nexus of the neighborhood. These old school small bars are everywhere in southern EU. Within that context it is less surprising that she would stay working there as long as she physically could.
by wkat4242 | 2025-12-10 00:55:35+00:00
Yes I know but I doubt it will capture much at all when there's significant wind noise, even enough to understand by ear without STT.

A friend of mine has her phone on her handlebars in a gps mount and she sends me voice messages through her bluetooth headset and those are hardly intelligible. A hand on the handlebar would be even further from the mouth.

And those are pretty good ones with multiple microphones.
by jszymborski | 2025-12-10 00:55:55+00:00
There are some technical barriers to approaching fediverse platforms, but I personally see the main barriers being cultural.

I'm a big proponent of Mastodon and still love using it, but the culture (especially early on) was exceptionally protectionist and lots of people got bullied off for very silly reasons. I think the attitude is less like a children's secret club and more chill generally.

All this to say, I think this is will get better, but the best way to help the fediverse is to join it, be active, and be chill.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-12-10 00:56:10+00:00
> If two machines are generating ids independently and happen to choose initial random positions near each other, the probability of collision is much higher than the basic birthday bound.

But the chance of the initial random positions being near each other is very very low.

If you pick a billion random numbers in an 80 bit space, the chance you have a collision is one in a million. (2^80 / (2^30)^2)

If you pick a thousand random starting points and generate a million sequential numbers each, the chance your starting points are sufficiently close to each other to cause an overlap is one in a trillion. ((2^80 / 2^20) / (2^10)^2)

In that one in a trillion case, you'll likely end up with half a million collisions, which might matter to you. But if you care about 0 collisions versus 1+ collisions, pick the monotonic version.
by AuthAuth | 2025-12-10 00:56:15+00:00
No because they are highlighting a single year where solar was exceptionally high and when you look at a 5 year period it tells a completely different story. If you look at future investment there is still 60 trillion being spent on new coal and while thats smaller than the future investment in solar you need to account for the fact that there current power is already 60% coal.

Even if we give China the most charity and take their 2025 results at face vault(even though they NEED to be independently verified) China is at best average when it comes % of gridpower that is renewable. Off the top of my head I think they are like 27-30% renewable. But its actually worse because they are the biggest polluter by a mile. Bigger the next 6 biggest polluters combined.
by kulahan | 2025-12-10 00:56:31+00:00
There are a couple stores around me run by small families, and honestly sometimes I feel like I'm halfway to being part of their family when I visit. They recognize me, greet me by name, and start firing up my order right away. Or they ask me how I'm doing and I do the same, but it goes deeper than "good, you?" - I'm learning currently about how one dude is trying a year living together with his ex again. I'm praying for 'em every day pretty much. We share recipes, stores, etc.

We will rue every decision we make to remove humans from interactions imo.
by Joker_vD | 2025-12-10 00:56:52+00:00
> If the Zba extension is present, sh3add.uw is a single instruction for zero-extending idx from 32 bits to 64, multiplying it by sizeof(uint64_t), and adding it to slots.

Yay, we've got an equivalent of SIB byte but as three (six?) separate opcodes. Well, sub-opcodes.

It's a shame though that Zcmp extension didn't get into RVA23 even as an optional extension.
by jcranmer | 2025-12-10 00:56:54+00:00
To expand on this a little bit more:

x86 has a general pattern of encoding operands, the ModR/M byte(s), which gives you either two register operands, or a register and a memory operand. Intel also did this trick that uses one of the register operand for extra opcode bits, at the cost of sacrificing one of the operands.

There are 8 escape opcodes, and all of them have a ModR/M byte trailing it. If you use two-address instructions, that gives you just 8 instructions you can implement... not enough to do anything useful! But if you're happy with one-address instructions, you get 64 instructions with a register operand and 64 instructions with a memory operand.

A stack itself is pretty easy to compile for, until you have to spill a register because there's too many live variables on the stack. Then the spill logic becomes a nightmare. My guess is that the designers were thinking along these lines--organizing the registers in the stack is an efficient way to use the encoding space, and a fairly natural way to write expressions--and didn't have the expertise or the communication to realize that the design came with some edge cases that were painfully sharp to deal with.
by mvdtnz | 2025-12-10 00:57:08+00:00
The author calls this out and tries to brush it off with FPS figures,

> The current version of the base engine renders extremely fast, faster than most would think a garbage collected language could go. In my testing a release mode build of a game in Unity with nothing but a black background and a cube runs at about 1,600 FPS.

But straight-up FPS is generally not the main concern with GC in a game engine, it's GC pausing which can make an otherwise smooth game feel almost unplayable. I don't know anything about Go so maybe this is less of a concern in that language?
by deathnail298 | 2025-12-10 00:57:19+00:00
This is a complete organizational operating model built from first principles. It covers worker, manager, and executive workflows; AI-assistant boundaries; governance; scorecards; SOP hardening; alignment cycles; and scaling rules. The goal is to give companies a simple, deterministic structure that avoids complexity and reduces failure points. All material is open and published on GitHub.
by N_Lens | 2025-12-10 00:57:22+00:00
Some cool optimisations here: MAP elites, island models to prevent premature convergence & fast rejection of bad candidates.

What's particularly interesting is the meta level insight: The system discovered scipy.optimize.SLSQP for circle packing - a completely different algorithmic paradigm than it started with. It's genuinely discovering new approaches, not just parameter-tuning.
by WhyOhWhyQ | 2025-12-10 00:57:53+00:00
Everyone on this website has thoughts on LLM's, not just you.

LLM's are heavily biased by leading questions, which is not a good property in a doctor. They also tend to respond in a way to please the prompter, which might be a frustrated parent, not in a way which is impartial and based on good medical practices. They frequently speak with high confidence and low accuracy.
by malachi_dev | 2025-12-10 00:58:14+00:00
Hey HN! I built this because every time I shipped a side project, I'd either skip OG images entirely or waste hours in Figma making one.

Existing solutions (Bannerbear, Placid) charge $49-149/mo which felt crazy for indie projects making $0.

Technical details: - Node.js + @napi-rs/canvas (not Puppeteer — way faster) - ~50-100ms generation time - Vercel serverless - 10 templates

Free tier is 25 images/mo, then $9-299 based on volume.

Would love feedback on the API design or template suggestions!
by jaimie | 2025-12-10 00:58:52+00:00
The world of the Digital Humanities is a lot of fun (and one I've been a part of, teaching programming to Historians and Philosophers of Science!) It uses computation to provide new types of evidence for historical or rhetorical arguments and data-driven critiques. There's an art to it as well, showing evidence for things like multiple interpretations of a text through the stochasticity of various text extraction models.

From the author's about page:

> I discovered digital humanities (“humanities computing,” as it was then called) while I was a graduate student at the University of Virginia in the mid-nineties. I found the whole thing very exciting, but felt that before I could get on to things like computational text analysis and other kinds of humanistic geekery, I needed to work through a set of thorny philosophical problems. Is there such a thing as “algorithmic” literary criticism? Is there a distinct, humanistic form of visualization that differs from its scientific counterpart? What does it mean to “read” a text with a machine? Computational analysis of the human record seems to imply a different conception of hermeneutics, but what is that new conception?

https://stephenramsay.net/about/
by talkingtab | 2025-12-10 00:59:17+00:00
The course is great. I am a fan. This, not so much.

One of the unsung problems of any technology is understanding what you can do with it that you could not do before. Lets say you are a prehistoric person and somehow you find a modern steel axe. What do you do with it? Ultimately, it is not the axe that is important, it is the metallurgy.

Lets say you are a modern person and you found bitcoin. What do you do with it? Again, my thought is not the bitcoin, it is the cryptographic technology.

Lets say you are a modern person and you find threejs. What do you do with it? My personal reaction is that there is so much more that can be done with threejs, react-three-fiber, react-three drei, shaders, shadertoys, than this.

For me the definition of "cool" is things that change how you see the world. Where you never look at things the same way. A little example for me was this:

https://codepen.io/prisoner849/full/wBGQYvy
by bpt3 | 2025-12-10 00:59:31+00:00
People talk about the market for assets: cars, precious metals, collectibles, and houses are examples. They are not normal expenses because you have something after the expense, unlike fuel or groceries.

Assets often function as stores of value, and housing is unique in that it performs an essential function, is comprised of material that generally rises in cost, has sentimental value, and is fixed to a specific location that may or may not rise in value but does in general (you see very little written about the non-housing shortage in Baltimore or many rust belt cities where land is very close to free, or even less than that in some cases).

Residential real estate is one of the most fragmented investment classes in existence. We're so far from feudalism that it's not even worth talking about. If you want housing to be less expensive in your area, you need to be like Baltimore and reduce demand or remove the disincentives from building and allow an increase in supply. Most people prefer the latter.
by mojomark | 2025-12-10 00:59:43+00:00
"Take a chilly window sheeting over with ice: even one oddly shaped snowflake can exert an influence on the final frosty pattern."

I wish writers would do a better job of conveying chaos. Yes, the butterfly flapping it's wings in Brazil (or whatever) can drastically influence the weather a continent away. But I think the true wonder of chaos needs to consider that if that butterfly were turned a few degrees in another direction, the resultant weather can be completely different. It's these infinitesmally small changes in parameters resulting in widely different outcomes that really brings the idea of chaos to life I think.
by kazinator | 2025-12-10 00:59:43+00:00
That's not a constraint as much as the worst case size.

If you actually only have a handful of entries in the table, it is measurable in bytes.

A linear array of all 4 billion possible values will occupy 16 GiB (of virtual memory) upfront. We have then essentially replaced the hash table with a radix tree --- that made up of the page directories and tables of the VM system. If only the highest and lowest value are present in the table, then we only need the highest and lowest page (4 kB or whatever) to be mapped. It's not very compact for small sets; storing N numbers in random locations could require as many as N virtual memory pages to be committed.
by syntaxing | 2025-12-10 00:59:58+00:00
The original Devstral was a collaboration between All Hands AI (OpenHands) and Mistral [1]. You can use it with other agents but had to transfer over the prompt. Even then, the agents still didn't work that well. I tried it in RooCline and it worked extremely poorly with the tool calls.

[1] https://openhands.dev/blog/devstral-a-new-state-of-the-art-o...