MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sestep | 2025-12-10 18:21:38+00:00
My hypothesis is that handles are underused because programming languages make it very easy to dereference a pointer (you just need the pointer) whereas "dereferencing" a handle requires also having the lookup table in hand at the same time, and that little bit of extra friction is too much for most people. It's not that pointers don't require extra machinery to be dereferenced, it's just that that machinery (virtual memory) is managed by the operating system, and so it's invisible in the language.

My current research is about how to make handles just as convenient to use as pointers are, via a form of context: like a souped-up version of context in Odin or Jai if one is familiar with those, or like a souped-up version of coeffects if one has a more academic background.
by edent | 2025-12-10 18:21:44+00:00
Again, you'll notice that I didn't actually ask anyone to join a campaign. I rather conspicuously didn't ask anyone to become a member of a political party, sign a petition, or donate money to a cause. I am literally not organising anything.

I am not able to ban people from the web. I don't have that power, nor would I want it.

As for percentages, I suggest you speak to people. Ask them if they think it is ok to be gay. You can probably look up the statistics for your country - but in most places, people are tolerant.

Ask your friends and family if gay people should be banned from studying at universities. Ask them if your city should only allow white residents. Ask if they think it is useful to build wheelchair accessible buildings.

In my experience, it probably is only the 0.5% that you experience. We agree!

But then ask them whether people who bully minorities should be welcomed in polite society.

I'd be fascinated to hear what they (and you) answer to that question.
by whimsicalism | 2025-12-10 18:21:44+00:00
Frankly, I would have been pissed if this were the case when I was a teen and I got a lot of healthy & useful value out of social media.

That said, some of the subcommunities I've seen created, particularly among young women, seem obviously unhealthy/toxic and regulation is probably needed there. I'm thinking of things like '#edtwt'.

But I also think we need to avoid ruining things for smart, responsible kids by focusing on the worst.
by crazygringo | 2025-12-10 18:21:53+00:00
> Does it really matter?

Yes, it absolutely does matter. Look at what you write:

> I'd assume

> it's reasonable to expect

The whole reason to do a study is to actually study as opposed to assume and expect.

And for many of the kinds of people engaging in therapy with an LLM, BetterHelp is precisely where they are most likely to go due to its marketing, convenience, and price. It's where a ton of real therapy is happening today. Most people do not have a $300/hr. high-quality therapist nearby that is available and that they can afford. LLM's need to be compared, first, to the alternatives that are readily available.

And remember that all therapists on BetterHelp are licensed, with a master's or doctorate, and meet state board requirements. So I don't understand why that wouldn't be a perfectly reasonable baseline.
by mananaysiempre | 2025-12-10 18:21:53+00:00
Is the 8087 related to the FPU of the 432 in any way? I’ve always suspected the former’s stack nature was due to the latter being entirely stack-based, but precisely no sources mention that, so is it just a coincidence that Intel did two stack-based architectures essentially at the same time (and then never repeated that mistake)?
by BobaFloutist | 2025-12-10 18:21:59+00:00
I have a(n admittedly fairly old) Boox and I like it in concept, it's great that I can install multiple e-reader apps and read a book in any format with any DRM, but the battery life and performance seem a lot weaker than the early-generation do-one-thing Kindles.

Which sucks, because the battery life and performance were the huge selling point for e-readers not just being shitty tablets.
by bflesch | 2025-12-10 18:22:12+00:00
If the companies which are officially banned from owning these products already own them, what does it say about recent initiatives to unban Nvidia sales in China?

If demand of companies like deepseek has already been served, will they buy significant volume of additional products from nvidia once it is "legal" again?

It feels like the initiative of US politics to unblock nvidia China sales might not be very fruitful.
by modeless | 2025-12-10 18:22:14+00:00
Man I played Operation Neptune a lot when I was a kid. I wonder if it was the first game to do this style of adaptive music layering. It predates the iMUSE system used in LucasArts games like X-Wing and TIE Fighter.

For anyone curious, you can actually play it here: https://archive.org/details/msdos_Super_Solvers_Operation_Ne...
by yardstick | 2025-12-10 18:22:24+00:00
While this is likely what the op was suggesting,

I would like to point out that in Australia and NZ, it can be a massive pain to find someone who will ship internationally.

Normally this is for things like Amazon US, and other US-based companies. There are services[1][2] that advertise virtual postal addresses in your purchase-country where they’ll box and ship it to you.

So yes, a Chinese name based in Australia with a shipping address in the US isn’t immediately a red flag. Lots of Chinese in Australia and NZ, and lots of people here like to use shipping services like this.

1. https://www.nzpost.co.nz/tools/you-shop

2. https://www.choice.com.au/shopping/online-shopping/buying-on... (Scroll to bottom)
by jasonthorsness | 2025-12-10 18:22:26+00:00
It's fun to read some of these historic comments! A while back I wrote a replay system to better capture how discussions evolved at the time of these historic threads. Here's Karpathy's list from his graded articles, in the replay visualizer:

Swift is Open Source https://hn.unlurker.com/replay?item=10669891

Launch of Figma, a collaborative interface design tool https://hn.unlurker.com/replay?item=10685407

Introducing OpenAI https://hn.unlurker.com/replay?item=10720176

The first person to hack the iPhone is building a self-driving car https://hn.unlurker.com/replay?item=10744206

SpaceX launch webcast: Orbcomm-2 Mission [video] https://hn.unlurker.com/replay?item=10774865

At Theranos, Many Strategies and Snags https://hn.unlurker.com/replay?item=10799261
by tptacek | 2025-12-10 18:22:27+00:00
There was never a proposal to automate arenas in Go code, and that wouldn't even make sense: the point of arenas is that you bump-allocate until some program-specific point where you free all at once (that's why they're so great for compiler code, where you do passes over translation units and can just do the memory accounting at each major step).

(Yes: I used arenas a lot when I was shipping C code; they're a very easy way to get big speed boosts out of code that does a lot of malloc).
by Xylakant | 2025-12-10 18:22:30+00:00
1 memory safety vulnerability, that's a pretty important distinction.

Yes, I believe that at least the order of magnitude is correct because 4 800 000 of those lines are guaranteed to not have any by virtue of the compiler enforcing memory safety.

So it's 1 per 200 000, which is 1-2 orders of magnitude worse, but still pretty darn good. Given that not all unsafe code actually has potential for memory safety issues and that the compiler still will enforce a pretty wide set of rules, I consider this to be achievable.

This is clearly a competent team that's writing important and challenging low-level software. They published the numbers voluntarily and are staking their reputation on these reports. From personal observation of the Rust projects we work on, the results track with the trend.

There's no reason for me to disbelieve the numbers put forward in the report.
by natch | 2025-12-10 18:22:51+00:00
Anyone interested in the topic of whether the US can stay ahead of China should ask AI to explain to them the Chinese concepts of 空降美国人 and 美宝.

These concepts are the reason why during some periods flights to the US have had an uncanny number of pregnant women and flights back to China have had an uncanny number of newborn babies.

Now these babies are adults with US citizenship, with some who returned to the US after primary school and became fully fluent native English speakers, and some of whom may be thoroughly culturally loyal to the Chinese communist party. And 100% hireable by top US AI firms and working there as we speak.

It’s staring everyone right in the face, but it’s taboo to talk about, because people conflate concerns about cultural loyalty with racism.

I don’t dislike these people. I welcome them. I also hope they will learn the value of freedom and (representative) democracy. btw Taiwan is a litmus test. (If you are one of the people I’m speaking about, and you think it would be great if the CCP could take over Taiwan, your values are not aligned with freedom and democracy.)

The point is it’s just silly to think we can stay ahead of China. Some of their best researchers are embedded in some of our best teams.

Keeping the technology from our best researchers is not going to work imho. The only avenue I see is to try to culture hack the AI efforts, and maybe most of the researchers, to be well aligned as we go.
by jrowen | 2025-12-10 18:22:52+00:00
Well certainly there is some reasonable middle ground between everything and nothing, which is presumably what licenses like this one are trying to explore? People are afforded rights beyond just looking at it, they can run it, modify it, learn from it, there's just some specific things that are carved out (to my understanding as a layperson).

Every major voice that I've seen comment on this thus far seems to acknowledge the value and the rationale behind the license, they're just saying you can't call it open source.

Would you say that the "free software" and "open source" movements are largely synonymous? I guess I thought free software was a more strict subset that has the "all or nothing" philosophy centered around truly "free" software. Which is honorable and commendable. But is there really no room for stuff that's a little more gray area? I get the rug pull, I get that it's not truly owned by the community, but it still seems like a useful ally and a step in the right direction from fully closed source. With support there could be norms and culture developed to safeguard from bad behavior.

The context of what the software does should also be taken into account. The best arguments I've seen in this thread revolve around the idea that you can trust that you can pull an "open source" library into your project without hesitation. That is a beautiful "free as in libre" building blocks vision. But the software in question here is a completed end-user product. It's not ever intended to be used in another project. But they want to make some kind of good-faith effort to share and be more "open" than normal proprietary SaaS. Instead of this being a good thing it's a huge drama because it's not enough. At least that's my read.
by LeifCarrotson | 2025-12-10 18:22:53+00:00
Because you clearly haven't spent enough time closely looking at pond and river water!

Our local parks department has several annual events where they ask for volunteers to help perform benthic macroinvertebrate surveys. It basically amounts to meeting up at a local park with a couple people in waders dragging special nets along the bottom, dumping scoops of material into buckets and large, shallow, white trays, and others sitting at picnic tables with spoons, magnifying glasses, and muffin tins sorting out the critters that get caught in the nets.

The cool part is that at the end, you can score the creek based on the quantity and types of larvae that you find: Caddisfly, mayfly, and stonefly larvae are very sensitive to factors like runoff from agriculture and road salt, sediment, water oxygenation, and other factors, beetles, crayfish, dragonflies, and scuds are moderately tolerant, while leeches, worms, midges, and flies will grow in anything. Thousands of these surveys happen every year, so you can compare the relative frequency and quantity of various species and determine the relative health of the stream.

I don't know how many tardigrades you'll find just scooping 4-8mm nymphs and larvae by eye, but I've brought my microscope to a couple and put random droplets of water under a cover and slide: there are an astonishing number of tiny critters swimming around at any zoom level.
by erohead | 2025-12-10 18:23:36+00:00
This isn't a question I understand, but I appreciate you writing it. At the end of the day it's up to you - if you think this is useful, please use it. If you don't want to use it because of the 4.7 grams of e-waste, I do get it.

All consumer tech is intentionally disposable. That's life. Especially for tiny smart rings that are water resistant. It's a ring, it's going to get banged up, you'll lose it or smash it. It's new tech - there will always be a new version, etc.

Better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all.
by tavavex | 2025-12-10 18:23:41+00:00
Some people have to travel for work. For Canadians, lots of international flights connect through the US (especially if you're flying on the cheapest routes), and there's no way to transit through without "properly" entering the country. While the thing in the post doesn't yet apply to Canada (due to us not requiring an ESTA), it very well could become a thing soon. That would be pretty awful for everyone.
by threethirtytwo | 2025-12-10 18:23:54+00:00
Ai is currently a bubble. But that is just a short term phenomenon. Ultimately what AI currently is and what the trend-line indicates what AI will become will change the economy in ways that will dwarf the current bubble.

But this is only if the trend-line keeps going, which is a likely possibility given the last couple of years.

I think people are making the mistake that AI is a bubble and therefore AI is completely bullshit. Remember: The internet was a bubble. It ended up changing world.
by hedora | 2025-12-10 18:23:57+00:00
That’s not a ban of nvidia chips though. It’s for a few of the biggest companies, and is specifically telling them not to buy a made-for-china SKU:

> The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) told companies, including ByteDance and Alibaba, this week to end their testing and orders of the RTX Pro 6000D, Nvidia’s tailor-made product for the country, according to three people with knowledge of the matter
by krautburglar | 2025-12-10 18:23:57+00:00
Dude, your flag function is abused to no end, and you don't really do anything about it. One of the earliest comments I've made was one on semi-recent X11 history, and got flagged for it, because apparently everything is political now.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45796728
by LegionMammal978 | 2025-12-10 18:24:01+00:00
Every public API change is a cost on the user: for an extreme example, if every library I ever used renamed half its APIs every year to align with the latest ontology, then there would hardly be any point in saving my scripts, since I'd have to be constantly rewriting them all.

Of course, the reality is hardly ever as bad as that, but I'd say having to deal with trivial API changes is a reasonable basis for a user to dislike a given project or try to avoid using it. It's up to the maintainers how friendly they want to be toward existing user code, and whether they pursue mitigating options like bundling migrations into less-common bigger updates.
by forbiddenlake | 2025-12-10 18:24:07+00:00
This trick unfortunately falls down above a certain size, especially if you want to game at a good fps, and stay in the consumer space (price) rather than the commercial display space. That gigabyte 45 inch is too small to use above your fireplace and view across the living room.

In my case I compromised on needing 4k, and got an lg 65 inch with only HDMI.
by feb012025 | 2025-12-10 18:24:07+00:00
I feel like everyone in this thread is assuming this is a good faith move by Australia to help kids in school and with socialization.

I think phones and social media are harmful, but I get the sense there's a political motive behind this. We've been hearing politicians complain for years that they're losing the youth when it comes to long-standing foreign policy positions, etc... And suddenly they ban social media. Rahm Emanuel is campaigning for the same thing in America.

I don't believe they're overly concerned with "helping the kids" unfortunately
by joshstrange | 2025-12-10 18:24:08+00:00
It's a bad ad and the AI just makes it worse. The song doesn't rhyme well, the lyrics doesn't make much sense (they feel very forced), the things they portray are mostly unrealistic/exaggerated, and the cherry on top is that McDonalds is somehow a respite from the chaos of Christmas. I've never once in my life thought of McD as somewhere comforting to go. It's just a bad ad period.

Also, no one wants a bad (probably also AI-generated) song about how terrible Christmas is. I'm not saying it's not terrible but no one wants a song about it.
by catigula | 2025-12-10 18:24:20+00:00
>I find the resulting outlook for employment terrifying. I am enormously concerned about what will happen to the people whose jobs AI renders unnecessary, or who can’t find jobs because of it. The optimists argue that “new jobs have always materialized after past technological advances.” I hope that’ll hold true in the case of AI, but hope isn’t much to hang one’s hat on, and I have trouble figuring out where those jobs will come from. Of course, I’m not much of a futurist or a financial optimist, and that’s why it’s a good thing I shifted from equities to bonds in 1978.

It's no wonder that the "AI optimists", unless very tendentious, try to focus more on "not needing to work because you'll get free stuff" rather than "you'll be able to exchange your labor for goods".
by nrclark | 2025-12-10 18:24:32+00:00
I'd be surprised if Qualcomm replaces their application processors (the cores that typically run Android/Linux or QNX) with RISC-V any time soon. Aarch64's ecosystem is huge, and Qualcomm would cut their customers off from it by moving fully to RISC-V.

They're more likely to replace the smaller CPU cores imo.
by Hizonner | 2025-12-10 18:24:49+00:00
> Fixing deprecations is unfortunately the lowest prio of any kind of work for majority of the projects.

... and the right answer to that is to make it entirely their problem.

> Part of the problem is probably lack of pressure to do so it if the timeline is unclear. What if this is actually never removed?

In this case, the warnings said exactly what release would remove the API. Didn't help.

> Why going through the pain?

Because you're not a feckless irresponsible idiot? I don't think it's an accident that the projects they said didn't react were an overcomplicated and ill-designed management layer for an overcomplicated and ill-designed container system, a move-fast-and-break-things techbro company, and what looks to be a consolation project for the not-too-bright.

You probably get an extra measure of that if you're operating in the Python ecosystem, which is culturally all about half-assed, 80-percent-right-we-hope approaches.

The right answer is to remove it when you say you're going to remove it, and let them pick up the pieces.

It also helps if you design your API right to begin with, of course. But this is Python we're talking about again.
by newdee | 2025-12-10 18:25:04+00:00
Yeah, it most certainly does. Very noticeable on iOS. I don’t know if this is an Apple specific thing, or if it’s a similar story on Android.

It’s WireGuard underneath, which is designed to not be very chatty when idle, so I’d put this down to regular back and forth with Tailscale’s control plane, relays, etc.

It’s a shame really, because a huge value prop of TS is that it’s a VPN you just leave on and forget about. I hate having to toggle it when I inevitably forget to and wonder why I’m getting connection errors to private resources.
by MarkusWandel | 2025-12-10 18:25:50+00:00
On my car the automatic features - automatic headlight on/off, automatic high beam, automatic lock when you walk away etc. - work well enough to be a plus (except when you switch to the other, older car that doesn't have those features).

But the cruise control. You can not disable the adaptive part. It's either adaptive cruise control or nothing. And at night, the camera-based system sometimes gets confused in the mess of over-bright headlights coming the other way and brakes for no reason. So you end up not being able to use cruise control at all.

I guess the reason they make it that way is exactly the habit problem. You don't want people crashing into the car in front because they forgot that the cruise is not in adaptive mode.

Automatic wipers would be great (if optional to enable!) After all that same camera that makes all the other wizardry work can see rain drops on the windshield in front of it. So why don't the make that feature?
by mindcrash | 2025-12-10 18:25:52+00:00
Please, please, please go to anywhere EXCEPT the Netherlands. We beg you.

We have a gigantic and near unsolvable housing problem. We have thousands of refugees/immigrants with residence permits waiting for housing already (currently stuck in hotels and bungalow parks just to give them a roof over their heads), and we don't even have enough affordable houses for our own.

On behalf of everyone in the Netherlands waiting to start a family in their own affordable house, thank you.
by danaris | 2025-12-10 18:25:56+00:00
But one can come from privilege, and choose to use that privilege to, effectively, infiltrate the ranks of the moneyed elite, seeking to make things better for the average person.

Some people have claimed that this is what he is doing. You have provided zero evidence that it is not. You merely keep repeating the same statements about his origins and his affiliation with the WEF.

I am not saying you are wrong. I am saying you have not supported your position in any meaningful way.

What are his words? What are his actions?

Where is the harm?

Where is the evidence?
by antonvs | 2025-12-10 18:26:40+00:00
That's an unreasonably high bar.

We already have irrefutable evidence of what can reasonably be called intelligence, from a functional perspective, from these models. In fact in many, many respects, the models outperform a majority of humans on many kinds of tasks requiring intelligence. Coding-related tasks are an especially good example.

Of course, they're not equivalent to humans in all respects, but there's no reason that should be a requirement for intelligence.

If anything, the onus lies on you to clarify what you think can't be achieved by these models, in principle.
by nrclark | 2025-12-10 18:26:45+00:00
Fully agree - Ventana's cores are more like Cortex A76 kinds of things, and are on a completely different scale from typical Cortex-M cores.

But switching to RISC-V would shut Qualcomm out from QNX and would limit its Android compatibility. And on the Qualcomm chips that I've seen so far, they're really bought in on both QNX and Android. That's why I think this is probably an aquihire more than a desire to ship Ventana's CPU cores.
by subscribed | 2025-12-10 18:27:24+00:00
I'm an adult, not living in Australia, and yet my backup Roblox account has been barred from using any form of in-app chat unless I send my face and ID to some third party service.

All of my (adult) friends living in AU had to perform various forms of age checks on almost all platforms they used, which seems to be very far from invisible.

I'd much prefer anonymous, safe, reliable age checks (that can be done!) that don't require me to spray my personal data at the dozens of companies either in the weird jurisdictions or with dubious privacy commitments records (like Bluesky using Epic Games services, famously fined over half of billion dollars for violating children's privacy laws and deceptive practices). Yeah, that's doable. No, won't happen because it's a out the control.