MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by EagnaIonat | 2025-12-08 07:13:55+00:00
> I don't understand the code that was written well enough to work on it myself any more.

That's worse than you think. Maybe not for you though.

They are trying hard to push vibe coding in my work and they had one demo that stood out.

They showed how VC had created an app to analyse multiple logs. It worked, but when they showed the code it was using csv module in python and had created all its own functions. The app was 100's of lines long. The same thing could have been achieved in a few lines of code using pandas.

The person creating the app had no experience of python, nor how do to the work. So they could never tell whats wrong.

.. And that is what is going to happen as junior people come into the workforce, as the next line being pushed is you don't need an expert to VC.
by aeternum | 2025-12-08 07:14:09+00:00
>BSV seemed to scale just fine, and you could also store entire files on it, including JSON, HTML or even music or videos

This doesn't pass the sniff test. Everyone must store the full blockchain in order to verify it. So to run a full node you would have to store everyone's JSON, HTML, music, videos. Full mirroring for every node in a distributed system is about as close as you can get to the definition of doesn't scale.
by fredoralive | 2025-12-08 07:14:15+00:00
I suspect SGI and DEC / Compaq could look at a chart and see that with P6 Intel was getting very close to their RISC chips, through the power of MONEY (simplification). They weren't hitting a CISC wall, and the main moat custom RISC had left was 64 bit. Intel's 64 bit chip would inevitably become the standard chip for PCs, and therefore Intel would be able to turn its money cannon onto overpowering all 64 bit RISCs in short order. May as well get aboard the 64 bit Intel train early.

Which is nearly true 64 bit Intel chips did (mostly) kill RISC. But not their (and HP's) fun science project IA64, they had to copy AMD's "what if x86, but 64 bit?" idea instead.
by littlestymaar | 2025-12-08 07:14:40+00:00
> What "current results" are you referring to? No, people 50+ years ago weren't arguing that cliffs can lead to disincentives, they were arguing that the whole system is "socialism" and bad - something that has been repeatedly disproven.

In fact, we have disincentives like that because they were arguing that having a flat benefit for everyone would be socialism.

If you don't reduce benefit with income level, these disincentives vanishes and that's how all post-war systems worked in Europe (can't talk about the US) before the neoliberal crew started dismantling everything in the name of “reducing public spendings” for greater economic efficiency.
by RealityVoid | 2025-12-08 07:14:54+00:00
So... A PC then?

Don't get me wrong, I like the approach, but if you want a laptop, it's the wrong tradeoff and not one that 90% of the users will take. Sure, _some_ will choose this, and small companies can do well to sustain themselves but it probably won't do a dent in ewaste numbers and you won't see iphone like adoption numbers, relegating it to just a niche product.
by nl | 2025-12-08 07:15:01+00:00
Pot, Kettle, meet black.

"some elements of the indictment concern cyber-snooping in connection with trade disputes, which at least sounds a lot like the kind of cyber-snooping on firms that the United States does."

https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/why-did-doj-indict-chin...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/09/nsa-spying-bra...

https://edition.cnn.com/2015/04/30/news/airbus-germany-nsa-s...
by 9dev | 2025-12-08 07:15:10+00:00
Sure you can move the goalposts here, but OP clearly meant to say software tasks cannot be estimated because people only work on novel problems, since everything else is "not worth doing" (what a massively privileged thing to say by the way).

Just because something hasn't been done the exact same way you're doing, that doesn't mean you can't apply a generic solution. I have never changed a tyre on an SUV before, yet I do know how to do so based on my previous experience with a sedan. The same applies to a car mechanic; even if I bring a brand new car to the workshop they have never seen before, I can and should expect them to be able to (at least roughly) estimate how long a tyre change is going to take.
by ChuckMcM | 2025-12-08 07:15:22+00:00
From the article -- But North Carolina law caps penalties at $5,000 per inspection, offering retailers little incentive to fix the problem. “Sometimes it is cheaper to pay the fines,” said Chad Parker, who runs the agency’s weights-and-measures program.

This is what I think of as the 'give us a story to tell the people because we're okay with business doing this' rule. Too often the local (or state, or even federal) government is aware of bad actors but fails to act in a way that would actually cure the problem. It is a remarkably persistent form of corruption in many liberal democracies (not just the USA).
by blub | 2025-12-08 07:16:16+00:00
The exact opposite of what you suggest already happened: Ada was mandated and then the mandate was revoked. It’s generally a bad idea to be the only customer of a specific product, because it increases costs.

> And the F35 and America's combat readiness would be in a better place today with Ada instead of C++

What’s the problem with the F35 and combat readiness? Many EU countries are falling over each-other to buy it.
by amluto | 2025-12-08 07:16:55+00:00
I no real complaints about CHERI here. What’s a pointer, anyway? Lots of old systems thought it was 8 or 16 bits that give a linear address. 8086 thought it was 16 + 16 bits split among two registers, with some interesting arithmetic [0]. You can’t add, say, 20000 to a pointer and get a pointer to a byte 20000 farther into memory. 80286 changed it so those high bits index into a table, and the actual segment registers are much wider than 16 bits and can’t be read or written directly [1]. Unprivileged code certainly cannot load arbitrary values into a segment register. 80386 added bits. Even x86_64 still technically has those extra segment registers, but they mostly don’t work any more.

So who am I to complain if CHERI pointers are even wider and have strange rules? At least you can write a pointer to memory and read it back again.

[0] I could be wrong. I’ve hacked on Linux’s v8086 support, but that’s virtual and I never really cared what its effect was in user mode so long as it worked.

[1] You can read and write them via SMM entry or using virtualization extensions.
by seec | 2025-12-08 07:17:59+00:00
I strongly disagree. I don't know whether he would identify himself as a communist politically, but it doesn't matter. Furthermore, I am entitled to analyze his ideas and classify them as I please. And as far as I'm concerned, he is arguing about fruits of labor being free in the typical “comrade” idealization from communism.

If at least he was actually doing what he preaches, one could be charitable. But actually he is just a goddamn activist, endlessly arguing about why the work of others should be free while he does zero work of value himself.

Every far-left friend I have had, who always touts some form of communism or sharing of resources, has been the one who systematically shares the least. And that is true both from a material point of view and effort/labor perspective as well. Hence my conclusion that they are assholes.

It seems to have hurt the sensibilities of his followers, but that was expected, and since they are assholes, you cannot expect them to be truthful.

By the way, political ideology is identifiable in genetics, so yes, it is absolutely certain that your political ideas correlate with how you interact with peoples.
by raincole | 2025-12-08 07:18:36+00:00
I don't know enough about graphomania, but I do find this article, while I'm sure is written by a human, has qualities akin to LLM writing: lengthy, forced comparisons and analogies. Of course it's far less organized than typical ChatGPT output though.

The more human works I've read the more I feel meat intelligences are not that different from tensor intelligences.
by taneq | 2025-12-08 07:19:43+00:00
One thing that I think has real potential is a portable split system aircon for workshops and garages. The all-in-one aircon units have terrible efficiency but split systems require expensive installation that can cost as much as the unit itself. This compromise gets you the best of both worlds.

I built one a year or two ago out of a crusty old second hand split system, and a scrap metal frame that holds the indoor heat exchanger at about head height, and the outdoor heat exchanger back-to-back with it with a ~500mm gap. You open the roller door, position the frame with the outdoor side outside and the indoor side inside, close the roller door, and plug it in. Voila! Aircon! It was way undersized (2.5kW cooling) for my workshop but it still made a noticeable difference. Gonna build a 7kW cooling version for this summer.

I think there's heaps of people with garage workshops that would benefit from something like this. You could also make one where the frame slips through a vertical gap rather than a horizontal one, so it can be set up through a sliding door, allowing renters to use one in houses where the owner refuses to install it.
by ahmetcadirci25 | 2025-12-08 07:20:58+00:00
My Personal Ad/Block Management Strategy

Here is the block management setup I personally use regularly:

Desktop

* DNS blocking is active via NextDNS.

* I use Ungoogled Chromium as my primary browser.

* I use the uBlock ad-blocking extension along with its filters.

* The SponsorBlock extension is very useful for skipping sponsored segments within YouTube videos.

Mobile

* DNS blocking is active via NextDNS.

* To block ads in Safari, I activate ad-blocking in Safari through the free Firefox Focus app.

* I use the YouTube app via AltStore. It is a nice feature that it also includes the SponsorBlock extension.

If you'd like, I can publish a comprehensive ad-blocking guide on the Ahmet Çadırcı https://ahmetcadirci.com/ page.
by wakawaka28 | 2025-12-08 07:21:30+00:00
To be fair, if you believe all the usual assumptions, then you can expect to earn 5% on that money. That would turn into $100k annually which is enough to live just about anywhere. Now, if you retire on time, I think this may also be tax free. So it's not that crazy, except for the unknowable inflation part of the puzzle. If inflation is also 5%, then your effective loss is 5% per year, so you'd be down nearly 100% after 20 years. Housing costs are crazy, but if you don't need to work then you can easily move to a cheaper place to save money.
by nl | 2025-12-08 07:22:28+00:00
Llama 4 wasn't great, but Llama 3 was.

Do we all forget how bad GPT 4.5 was?

OpenAI got out of that mess with some miraculous post-training efforts on their older GPT-4o model.

But in a different timeline we are all talking about how great Llama 4.5 is and how OpenAI needs to recover from the GPT 4.5 debacle.
by mmooss | 2025-12-08 07:23:11+00:00
In many organizations, that license costs less than converting all the Excel workbooks - a process that disrupts work, as only the Excel spreadsheet's creator and user can reliably spec and test the new spreadsheet. And they need to convert with accuracy - worse than crashes is undetected bad output.

Being stuck in legacy systems sucks, and technical people like to deny the reality of it - but it's a business reality.
by amluto | 2025-12-08 07:23:12+00:00
And when that last way fails, what do you do?

I like to have a separate monitoring process that monitors my process and a separate machine in a different datacenter monitoring that. But at the end of the day, the first process is still going to do try to log, detect that it failed, try the final backup log and then signal to its monitor that it’s in a bad state. It won’t make any decisions that depend on whether the final backup logging succeeds or fails.
by solumunus | 2025-12-08 07:24:19+00:00
I can send a billion dollars to someone in Uganda with no intermediary or oversight. This was not only impossible before but most likely would never have been a possibility. Being able to hold massive amounts of value in the ether and control it from anywhere, you don’t find that impressive? Sure, this is mostly used for nefarious activities, but let’s not pretend it’s solving no problems. It’s incredibly difficult to transfer money into a third world country without incurring massive fees, unless you use crypto.
by measurablefunc | 2025-12-08 07:24:45+00:00
I'm not here to convince you whether Markov chains are helpful for your use cases or not. I know from personal experience that even in cases where I have a logically constrained query I will receive completely nonsensical responses¹.

¹https://chatgpt.com/share/69367c7a-8258-8009-877c-b44b267a35...
by meheleventyone | 2025-12-08 07:25:05+00:00
Human brains aren’t magic in the literal sense but do have a lot of mechanisms we don’t understand.

They’re certainly special both within the individual but also as a species on this planet. There are many similar to human brains but none we know of with similar capabilities.

They’re also most obviously certainly different to LLMs both in how they work foundationally and in capability.

I definitely agree with the materialist view that we will ultimately be able to emulate the brain using computation but we’re nowhere near that yet nor should we undersell the complexity involved.
by HaZeust | 2025-12-08 07:25:10+00:00
>"If you want that just use zero knowledge proofs and cryptographic accumulators. No block chain needed."

Sure, I suppose. You'd need zero knowledge proofs for the reversals anyway.

>"one of the properties people want from elections is the inability to prove to soneone how you voted"

Your political party affiliations AND the fact on whether you voted is already public knowledge in our current electoral system; so 2/3 aren't supported now anyway. That said, my scheme DOES support all of those; it wouldn't tell you the identity of the person that voted for "Person A", so bribery or extortion is NOT in the cards.

If you somehow get access to someone's license, their hash won't tell you how they voted - just that they have already voted. And like I said to another commenter, if they beat you to a vote by using your ID (or whatever form of government ID is decided for the hash, they're all numbers anyway - we can just as well do social security), then in the current system that's bad - but id.me and real are already doing early-stage multi-factor authentication use cases for otherwise deterministic identification methods. Which is long overdue anyway, and I'm not sure too many people who would morally oppose such election reform if a byproduct of it being passed and enforced is an additional reform on deterministic identification.

If you give someone your block ID that says how you voted, then yeah ok - but you can do that today by taking a picture of your ballot. People brag all the time with photos of their ballot on election time - that's your choice.
by energy123 | 2025-12-08 07:25:34+00:00
We all know that person on the left that struggles with reasoning that involves economic or statistical intuition, but has extremely strong instincts of right and wrong, and is quick to outrage and moral certainty, and low in curiosity.

Their thinking is that poor people are poor, which is bad. So let's check if they're poor, and give them money so they're not poor anymore, which is good. That feels right. Let's do that.

Negative income tax? But that gives rich people money too! Giving rich people money is bad because they're rich already. QED.
by menaerus | 2025-12-08 07:25:34+00:00
You do realize that there's a handful of literally the same people here on HN continuously evangelizing one technology by constantly dissing on the other? Because of the pervasiveness of such accounts/comments it invites other people, myself included, to counter-argue because most of the time the reality they're trying to portray is misrepresented or many times simply wrong. This is harmful and obviously invites for a flame war so how is that not by the same principle you applied to above account a guideline breach too?
by kragen | 2025-12-08 07:25:52+00:00
They took technical risks that didn't pan out. They thought they'd be able to solve whatever problems they ran into, but they couldn't. They didn't know ahead of time that the result was going to suck. If you try to run an actual tech company, like Intel, without taking any technical risks, competitors who do take technical risks will leave you in the dust.

This doesn't apply to fake tech companies like AirBnB, Dropbox, and Stripe, and if you've spent your career at fake tech companies, your intuition is going to be "off" on this point.
by skissane | 2025-12-08 07:26:08+00:00
Addendum: from what I understand, the article’s proof relies on computational quantum gravity having a Gödel sentence. Now, quantum gravity is in practice, as far as we know, experimentally untestable-the distinctive phenomena it predicts only occur at scales far beyond our present technological ability to explore-and who can say if that will ever change. So, is it possible for a computer to simulate humanity as it currently exists, such that the simulated humans couldn’t detect they were simulated? I don’t know; but what I can confidently say, is this research has nothing useful to say about that question, because this is theoretical quantum gravity research, and I’m not aware of any good reason to believe quantum gravity has any relevance to answering that specific question. This research claims to show computers are incapable of simulating aspects of reality which are empirically unavailable to us; even if the research is right, it makes zero difference to the question of whether the actual empirical experiences we do have are simulated or not.
by astrange | 2025-12-08 07:27:10+00:00
I found myself in a weird corner of tax filing because I did equity crowdfunding (startup investing in amounts probably smaller than worth it.)

This results in a lot of K-1s, which tax preparers charge you like $500 a form for, except all of mine had values like $2.

Luckily you just kind of do it halfway right in TurboTax and it works out.
by thomasz | 2025-12-08 07:27:48+00:00
You jest, but it took forever to add somewhat intuitive layout mechanism to css which allowed you to do what could be done easily with html tables. Vertically centering a div inside another was really hard, and very few people understood the techniques you would use, instead of blindly copying them.

It was beyond irony that the recommended solution was to tell the browser to render your divs as a table.
by tsimionescu | 2025-12-08 07:29:02+00:00
Others have shown why most of your other points are wrong or don't need blockchain, but this is also important:

> ANYONE can calculate the sums, anyone can verify and proof hashes

This is completely false. In fact, at the scale of a country, almost no one can actually do this. 95+% of the population doesn't have the knowledge required to do something like this and understand why it works. And while in principle they could learn to do it, they don't have the time and energy and other resources to spend on this.

And this is a deal breaker, as having the population believe and easily able to convince themselves that their elections are free is an extremely important part of democracy, especially when things are not that rosy.
by yetihehe | 2025-12-08 07:29:06+00:00
My home construction slipped 6 months on 2 year build time. It happens in construction very often.

> software is only tougher to estimate if incompetent people (vast majority of the industry, like 4+ million) is doing the estimating :)

No, it is tough to estimate, but not only for incompetent people. And "incompetent" can be stretched to "don't know what he's doing", which is how I operate most of the time. I don't know what really needs to be done until it's done. Main part of my work is research on what actually needs to be done, then "just" implementing it. If I waited with estimating until I know what needs to be done, I would spend 3/4 time estimating and then 1/4 with clear understanding and good schedules (example description: I will be clicking keys for 5 hours).
by HaZeust | 2025-12-08 07:29:15+00:00
I said this in a response to someone else:

>"If you somehow get access to someone's license plate, their hash won't tell you how they voted - just that they have already voted."

If they beat you to your drivers license information (or whatever form of government ID is decided for the hash, they're all numbers anyway - we can just as well do social security), then in the current system that's bad, but id.me and real are already doing early-stage multi-factor authentication use cases for otherwise deterministic identification mediums. Which is long overdue anyway, and I'm not sure too many people who would morally oppose such election reform if a byproduct of it being passed and enforced is an additional reform on deterministic identification.
by voodooEntity | 2025-12-08 07:30:12+00:00
Thanks, and i gonne think about going for a writeup. As i mentioned in another comment, reading my previous comment back from yesterday i dont even know why i mentioned it - probably because i think so much about the topic but than i think "well your just a guy in a shed" type of thing and decide that prolly noone would care about what i would write. At all - if its just something i can look back onto im some years, prolly worth it.
by seec | 2025-12-08 07:30:26+00:00
I don't have much time to expand, but this is not at all a cheap shot. It's how I see him now that I am more cognizant about the world. Since I first learned about him when I got interested in Linux back in the late 90s, the only thing he has done is complain about others needing to share their work for free. This is basically the whole communist shtick. It is a well-informed opinion, drawing from personal experience, economics courses, readings on psychology, as well as historical research.

Here is a paste of a previous reply.

I strongly disagree. I don't know whether he would identify himself as a communist politically, but it doesn't matter. Furthermore, I am entitled to analyze his ideas and classify them as I please. And as far as I'm concerned, he is arguing about fruits of labor being free in the typical “comrade” idealization from communism.

If at least he was actually doing what he preaches, one could be charitable. But actually he is just a goddamn activist, endlessly arguing about why the work of others should be free while he does zero work of value himself.

Every far-left friend I have had, who always touts some form of communism or sharing of resources, has been the one who systematically shares the least. And that is true both from a material point of view and effort/labor perspective as well. Hence my conclusion that they are assholes.

It seems to have hurt the sensibilities of his followers, but that was expected, and since they are assholes, you cannot expect them to be truthful.

By the way, political ideology is identifiable in genetics, so yes, it is absolutely certain that your political ideas correlate with how you interact with peoples.
by liampulles | 2025-12-08 07:31:23+00:00
It seems to me that Claude's error here (which is not unique to it) is self-sycophancy. The model is too eager to convince itself it did a good job.

I'd be curious to hear from experienced agent users if there is some AGENTS.md stuff to make the LLM more clear speaking? I wonder if that would impact the quality of work.
by thenthenthen | 2025-12-08 07:31:56+00:00
And I love it! The ocr/vision models are a literal life saver here. Translating websites in Safari? Even text in images gets translated, super convenient! The only gripe i have is that it tries to be smart and tries to detect addresses, phone numbers. If the address or phone number is part of a text it is nearly impossible to copy the whole text since the phone number gets prioritised over the text (so you can only copy or call the number… )