MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by themafia | 2025-12-26 21:59:13+00:00
My parents beat me when I disappointed them. It takes a village to turn their back on apparent and obvious child abuse too. This is probably why I find it difficult to put on what I perceive to be the standard issue hacker news rose colored glasses.

You've completely avoided the topic of money. Presumably we have to pay these teachers somehow. The way we've decided to do this is inimical to all the things you've otherwise described.
by user34283 | 2025-12-26 21:59:32+00:00
Abolish it rather than continuing the current path, strict prohibition on any creative endeavor, and being extremely skeptical about anything other than direct language translation is an extreme opinion.

You agreeing with that does not make it less extreme. And OP's "vile machines raping the planet" is obviously vitriol whether you personally consider it hateful or not.
by bdangubic | 2025-12-26 22:00:14+00:00
instruct it to stop and ask something sometimes when it is doing its thing. it is one of my core instructions at every level of its memory. if instructed, it will stop when it feels like should stop and in my personal experience it is suprisingly good at stopping. I’ve read here a lot of people having a different experience and opting for smaller tasks instead though…
by bri3d | 2025-12-26 22:00:37+00:00
It's an interesting debate. The flip side of this coin is getting hires who are more interested in the language or approach than the problem space and tend to either burn out, actively dislike the work at hand, or create problems that don't exist in order to use the language to solve them.

With that said, Rust was a good language for this in my experience. Like any "interesting" thing, there was a moderate bit of language-nerd side quest thrown in, but overall, a good selection metric. I do think it's one of the best Rewrite it in X languages available today due to the availability of good developers with Rewrite in Rust project experience.

The Haskell commentary is curious to me. I've used Haskell professionally but never tried to hire for it. With that said, the other FP-heavy languages that were popular ~2010-2015 were absolutely horrible for this in my experience. I generally subscribe to a vague notion that "skill in a more esoteric programming language will usually indicate a combination of ability to learn/plasticity and interest in the trade," however, using this concept, I had really bad experiences hiring both Scala and Clojure engineers; there was _way_ too much academic interest in language concepts and way too little practical interest in doing work. YMMV :)
by isthatafact | 2025-12-26 22:02:39+00:00
I am no expert, and I am not sure what is meant by "nepo", but that seems like a
wild mischaracterization or exaggeration.

Is there evidence?

It seems obvious that parents can increase or decrease the odds of someone starting a career in an "elite" field requiring advanced education like "Science", but I interpret your comment as suggesting that most scientists got their job by means of daddy donating to a university or some other silly fantasy.
Show HN: Got tired of searching for AI news daily so I built my own AI news page
by lilsquid | 2025-12-26 22:03:03+00:00
Hacker News has been my homepage and my inspiration for many years. While I’m still learning the ropes of building a public website, I created DreyX.com out of a simple necessity: I wanted a better way to track AI news without all the fluff. Literally a tool built by a curious reader, for curious readers. Thoughts? Suggestions?
by iepathos | 2025-12-26 22:03:07+00:00
Thanks for the thoughtful reply.

The objections to non-profits, OSFs, education, healthcare, and small companies all boil down to: they don't pay enough or they're inconvenient. Those are valid personal reasons, but not moral justifications. You decided you wanted the money big tech delivers and are willing to exchange ethics for that. That's fine, but own it. It's not some inevitable prostitution everyone must do. Plenty of people make the other choice.

The Google/AI distinction still doesn't hold. Anthropic and OpenAI also created products with clear utility. If Google gets "mixed bag" status because of Docs and Maps (products that exist largely just to feed their ad machine), why is AI "unquestionable cancer"? You're claiming Google's useful products excuse their harms, but AI companies' useful products don't. That's not a principled line, it's just where you've personally decided to draw it.
by kryptn | 2025-12-26 22:03:19+00:00
Lots of scifi.

Annihilation, Authority, Acceptance, and Absolution of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach series. https://www.goodreads.com/series/112239-southern-reach

Reread books 1-4 of Dennis E Taylor's Bobiverse series to read #5 https://www.goodreads.com/series/192752-bobiverse

John Scalzi's Interdependency Series https://www.goodreads.com/series/202297-the-interdependency

Basically all of the Culture Series by Iain M Banks https://www.goodreads.com/series/49118-culture

Of Peter F Hamilton:

- The Salvation Sequence series https://www.goodreads.com/series/242882-salvation-sequence

- The Void Series, a sequel-trilogy to the Commonwealth Universe series https://www.goodreads.com/series/43520-void

Of Alastair Reynolds:

- Pushing Ice https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48991704-pushing-ice

- Eversion https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60097716-eversion

Of Adrian Tchaikovsky:

- Shroud https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/230237860-shroud

- Elder Race https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56815367-elder-race

- Alien Clay https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/199851460-alien-clay

- Going through The Final Architecture now https://www.goodreads.com/series/305076-the-final-architectu...

Also Upgrade, by Blake Crouch https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59439117-upgrade

Also First, by Randy Brown https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/196399619-first
by jopsen | 2025-12-26 22:04:37+00:00
The alluring thing is storing the repository on S3 (or similar). Recall early docker registries making requests so complicated that backing image storage with S3 was unfeasible, without a proxy service.

The thing that scales is dumb HTTP that can be backed by something like S3.

You don't have to use a cloud, just go with a big single server. And if you become popular, find a sponsor and move to cloud.

If money and sponsor independence is a huge concern the alternative would be: peer-to-peer.

I haven't seen many package managers do it, but it feels like a huge missed opportunity.
You don't need that many volunteers to peer inorder to have a lot of bandwidth available.

Granted, the real problem that'll drive up hosting cost is CI. Or rather careless CI without caching.
Unless you require a user login, or limit downloads for IPs without a login, caching is hard to enforce.

For popular package repositories you'll likely see extremely degenerate CI systems eating bandwidth as if it was free.

Disclaimer: opinions are my own.
by webdevver | 2025-12-26 22:04:41+00:00
i get the notion that "human things should not pretend to be human", but there is funny circularity (?) here in that the "thing" that is accused of being "human" is not in fact human, and its alleged attempt to mimick human-ness is infact a projection of the human in question - which actually vindicates the non-human thing in using human language, since after all, if the squishy humans will accuse you of pretending to be human anyway (despite clearly not being one), you might aswell do so!
by legitcoders | 2025-12-26 22:05:32+00:00
I built SCORG (https://scorg.org) - a fleet management platform for Star Citizen organizations.

Star Citizen has 100K+ player orgs but no good management tools. SCORG provides real-time fleet coordination, event planning, member management, and a 3D star map for navigation.

Stack: React + Firebase + Three.js, with Discord bot integration for event sync. Just added a blog system with dynamic sitemap generation via Vercel serverless functions.

Interesting technical challenges: real-time updates at scale, complex RBAC, 3D rendering performance, and bidirectional Discord sync.

Would love feedback on architecture and scaling!
by hecanjog | 2025-12-26 22:05:38+00:00
How is this the top comment on a hacker news article... we all can't be bothered to use any critical thinking skills? Explain it to me like I'm 5 is seriously the most up-voted sentiment? This place has been proclaiming it's on a downtrend for years, but I think I finally believe it.

Edit: I believe in plain-speaking. "ELI5" being code for this is weird to me but if that's really what it is, cool. If it's really a code for "I want to understand this more deeply without jargon" I get it.

If it's code for "I don't want to understand this, just tell me the answer" then I don't really understand the appeal on a site like hacker news... that's the perspective that made me post initially. What is curious about this?
by elric | 2025-12-26 22:06:11+00:00
Fiction: some more novels in Steven Erikson & Ian C Esslemont's Malazan Empire universe. These two produce some of the best fantasy I've ever read, and I've read a fuckton.

Non-fiction: A System for Writing by Bob Doto was pretty good. Also gave Feel-Good Productivity by Ali Abdaal a chance, but found it to be uninspiring, self-aggrandising drivel.
by vlovich123 | 2025-12-26 22:06:44+00:00
You’ve got this backward. The vast majority of time due to spatial and temporal locality, in practice for any application you’re actually usually doing CPU registers first, cache second, memory third, disk fourth, network cache fifth, and network origin sixth. So this stuff does actually matter for performance.

Also, aside from memory bandwidth, there’s a latency cost inherent in traversing object graphs - 0 copy techniques ensure you traverse that graph minimally, just what’s needed to actually be accessed which is huge when you scale up. There’s a difference between one network request and fetching 1 MB vs making 100 requests to fetch 10kib and this difference also appears in memory access patterns unless they’re absorbed by your cache (not guaranteed for object graph traversal that a package manager would be doing).
by uh_uh | 2025-12-26 22:06:48+00:00
I find it hard to believe that evolution is completely blind. The search space that it can explore via mutations is astronomically large. Considering that the experiment is run at planet-scale over billions of years doesn't really save the argument as it takes some specimen years to develop and get feedback on their fitness. It's hard to believe that it's truly just random "bit-flips".

I'm not trying to suggest woo here, but there has to be some mechanisms to constrain the search space somewhat.
by LeoWattenberg | 2025-12-26 22:07:03+00:00
I mean, torrenting is decentralised and not technically takedownable. But it was entirely possible to make it legally painful for people involved in it, as seen in eg. The Pirate Bay, megaupload or an entire cease-and-desist letter industry around individual torrenting users

Intentional noncompliance with copyright law can get you quite a distance, but there's a lot of money involved, so if you ever catch the wrong kind of attention, usually by being too successful, you tend to get smacked.
by peacefulnerd | 2025-12-26 22:08:03+00:00
I RSS read all day about solid state batteries, which recently are in power banks. Hope to hear about folding MicroLED phones on www.microled-info.com But they will start out too expensive.

Because abusive parents false arrested/committed me without a trial as manic for buying a Linux (they can barely use apple) computer and RockBox music player. I spent much time gathering these quotes https://antipsychiatry.yay.boo/
by RajT88 | 2025-12-26 22:08:12+00:00
> And the poisonous ones apparently don't use color as a warning signal, and don't smell all that bad, and some of the poisons have really mild effects, like "gives only some people diarrhea" or "makes a hangover worse".

Some of the poisonous ones even taste really good, and don't start making you sick for a day or two (and then you die horribly). You hear about it from time to time, where people have the best dinner of their life and then are dead.
by wging | 2025-12-26 22:08:21+00:00
I think the article is being careful not to say uv ignores _all_ upper bound checks, but specifically 4.0 upper bound checks. If a package says it requires python < 3.0, that's still super relevant, and I'd hope for uv to still notice and prevent you from trying to import code that won't work on python 3. Not sure what it actually does.
by perching_aix | 2025-12-26 22:08:33+00:00
The part where they specifically address Pike's "argument" [0] is where they express that in their view, the energy use issue is a data center problem, not a generative AI one:

> nothing he complains about is specific to GenAI

(see also all their other scattered gesturings towards Google and their already existing data centers)

A lot can be said about this take, but claiming that it doesn't directly and specifically address Pike's "argument", I simply don't think is true.

I generally find that when (hyper?)focusing on fallacies and tropes, it's easy to lose sight of what the other person is actually trying to say. Just because people aren't debating in a quality manner, doesn't mean they don't have any points in there, even if those points are ultimately unsound or disagreeable.

Let's not mistake form for function. People aren't wrong because they get their debating wrong. They're wrong because they're wrong.

[0] in quotes, because I read a rant up there, not an argument - though I'm sure if we zoom way in, the lines blur
by astrange | 2025-12-26 22:10:20+00:00
Ah, so what you're doing here is confusing "caring" with "borderline personality disorder".

This is also why men like dating crazy girls. It's not actually a good relationship or management style.

(To balance this out, one thing I noticed reading those bios of Jobs where he shouts at everybody, is that the people being shouted at were all director/distinguished engineer level or higher, so they were all earning millions per year. It's not like he did that with everyone.)
by abigail95 | 2025-12-26 22:11:00+00:00
FSF has opinions but not case law - anyone else's opinion is as valid, there's no citation because no court has ruled that dynamic linking is or isn't a derivative work.

You have to construct your own view based on existing statute and vaguely related cases.

Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc., 593 U.S. 1 (2021) is not a pro-FSF opinion.

Whether linking (dynamic or not) is a derivative work is defined by things like incorporation, similarity, and creative expression.

I think the FSF view is unreasonably confident in its public opinions where the current law is that each potential infraction is going to be decided on a case by case basis. Read 17 USC 101 for yourself and square that with FSF/Stallman opinions.

There's too much nuance to have a stance about what happens when you link a program. "It depends" is the only thing you can say.
by anymouse123456 | 2025-12-26 22:11:14+00:00
The allure of declarative approaches to complex problem solving has finally been worn down to nothing for me and Kubernetes was the last straw, nearly 10 years ago.

The mental gymnastics required to express oneself in yaml, rather than, say, literally anything else, invariably generates a horror show of extremely verbose boilerplate, duplication, bloat, delays and pain.

If you're not Google, please for the love of god, please consider just launching a monolith and database on a Linux box (or two) in the corner and see how beautifully simple life can be.

They'll hum along quietly serving many thousands of actual customers and likely cost less to purchase than a single month (or at worst, quarter) of today's cloud-based muggings.

When you pay, you'll pay for bandwidth and that's real value that also happens to make your work environment more efficient.
by IshKebab | 2025-12-26 22:11:56+00:00
Yes, uv basically solves the terrible Python tooling situation.

In my view that was by far the biggest issue with Python - a complete deal-breaker really. But uv solves it pretty well.

The remaining big issues are a) performance, and b) the import system. uv doesn't do anything about those.

Performance may not be an issue in some cases, and the import system is ... tolerable if you're writing "a python project". If you're writing some other project and considering using Python for its scripting system, e.g. to wrangle multiple build systems or whatever than the import mess is a bigger issue and I would thing long and hard before picking it over Deno.
by jraph | 2025-12-26 22:12:10+00:00
> I totally understand his rage.

Do you really? What follows makes me doubt it a bit.

> Thank you notes from AI systems can’t possibly feel meaningful,

Indeed, but that's quite minor.

> So I had Claude Code do the rest of the investigation:

Can't you see it? That would likely be a huge facepalm from rob pike here!

He writes more or less "fuck you people with your planet killing AI horror machine", and here you are, "what happened? I asked a planet killing horror machine (the same one btw) and...". No. Really. The bigger issue is not the email, or even the initiative behind, which is terrible, but just a symptom. And this:

> Don’t unleash agents on the world like this

> I don’t like this at all.

You're not wrong, but the cynic in me reads this as: " don't do this, it makes AI, which I love, look bad". Absolutely uncharitable view, I know, but really, the meaningless email is infuriating but hardly the important part.

This makes the post feel pretty myopic to me. You are spending your time on a minor symptom, you don't touch what fundamentally annoys rob pike (the planet killing part), and worse, you engaged in exactly what rob pike has just strongly rejected. You may not have and it may be you deliberately avoided touching the substance of robe pike's complaint because you disagree with it, but it feels like you missed the point. I would be in rob pike's position, it's possible I would feel infuriated by your article because through my anti ai message, I would have hated triggering even more AI use.
by Fnoord | 2025-12-26 22:12:14+00:00
Now, I could say a lot of things Russia is known for, but not for their rich hacker culture, lest it to be mentioned in the same context as USA. Russia simply isn't known for their large hacker culture; Europe is (since I want to include a member of FVEY, specifically a country which Brexited, and am also referring to a time when EU did not yet exist). A somewhat dark past of CCC is related to Russia via Eastern Germany by CCC member Hagbard (my nickname here related to it). Back in those days, the hacker culture very much was counterculture. KMFDM has a couple of good tracks about it.

CCC is German, and started in West-Germany. It is the oldest hacker conference. The second was USA (DEF CON), and the third was The Netherlands (theirs is approx every four years, and has a different name every year). The first one in NL was HeU 1993 (Hacking at the End of the Universe). This list excludes demoscene (IMO part of hacker culture due to reversing / cracking software, plus programmming and art in limited constraints, but at the very least it is related to); the first demoscene party was called Copy Party in Finland, 1980. Nordic countries are well represented in demoscene.

I am only aware of one person who fled USA to RU, and said person wasn't known in hacker culture before he did, plus he ended up there by mistake. By contrast, various people in infosec left USA for Europe. Jacob Applebaum went to Germany, Drew DeVault went to The Netherlands.

Since 2022, brain drain started in Russia due to the full scale invasion and war with Ukraine.

There's a very free country near the USA which does not have the ridiculous entry requirements the USA has. It even has a couple of large cities near the US border, including near cities with a rich hacker culture. Entry to said country is about as easy as entry to Germany. The country is called Canada. Yes, your neighbor.

May HOPE, DEF CON, and Black Hat end up in a tolerant, hacker-friendly country. I am not aware of brain drain due to Trump II. I mean, it is happening, but it also happened during Bush era, and the proportions I don't know about.

As for CCC being held in Germany. They have been very open to foreigners (as have us Dutch been), famous USA hackers were always welcome (and came) to hacker conferences in NL and DE. Talks in NL were almost all in English, at CCC partly (German is a relatively popular language in Europe). Nowadays, almost all German talks get dubbed and subbed. So CCC is very American-friendly, cause we Europeans get that Americans speak almost exclusively English only.
by habryka | 2025-12-26 22:12:40+00:00
To be clear, this email really had basically zero human involvement in it. It's the result of an experiment of letting language models run wild and exploring the associated social dynamics. It feels very different from ML-generated marketing slop. Like, this isn't anyone using language models for their personal gain, it feels much more like a bunch of weird alien children setting up their own (kind of insane) society, and this being a side-effect of it.
by Yizahi | 2025-12-26 22:12:44+00:00
I'm honestly baffled at this either revelation or a meme, being reposted over past few years, about modern teenagers unable to recognize or use some tech predating them. I was born around 90s and never had to use for example a typewriter or punch-cards or 8" diskettes, but I could recognize all that stuff without any training since my childhood. Same with most other gadgets from before my generation.

How come kids are supposedly can't recognize a rotary phone for example? Or an analog clock?
by culi | 2025-12-26 22:12:47+00:00
I think the point GP was making was to take issue with framing like "and it turning out to be an entirely new class of chemicals."

More accurately we can say "an entirely newly described class of chemicals". Even before penicillin was isolated and described for the first time, soldiers would keep moldy pieces of bread and use them on wounds (Penicillium being the most common bread mold). Even Ötzi the iceman was found to be carrying a piece of fungi that we know was used to kill parasitic worms.

While these traditions didn't conceptualize their medicines as compounds or chemicals, they were certainly well aware of their effects. Sometimes intimately so.

All that aside though, there are bolete species documented to have tryptamine content so I would be a little surprised if the active compound(s) in question here aren't also tryptamines. Although I did read that Dennis McKenna hypothesized it could be an anticholinergic effect (i.e. Datura alkaloids)