MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by yawaramin | 2025-12-19 01:32:39+00:00
> it's actually specifically for server-rendered content and using it for front-end development doesn't actually add much

It's for server-rendered content that can be used to build a frontend app. I know because I've done it several times.

> I would also have to write custom JS for the functions I would try to invoke with htmx

The difference is with invokers you would have to re-implement everything from scratch and with htmx you typically only need to implement some parts that it doesn't handle, like eg listening to a DOM event and doing some action in response.
by bad_haircut72 | 2025-12-19 01:33:10+00:00
I also cant understand people being in denial about, or claiming other imagined moats or whatever. They're whipping the pants of us right now industrially, if the west has any advantages left its that we speak the truth about stuff even when it hurts, why live in denial.

Also this stuff was figured out and built once before, other than the effort and resources involved (which China has lots of), why wouldn't someone else be able to figure it out again?
by sporkland | 2025-12-19 01:34:39+00:00
As told in Innovator's Dilemma mainframe companies would have told the exact same story right up until the cheaper alternative met all of their core needs. But in this case I don't think you get disrupted by copycats but instead by savvy business users building their own disposable alternatives which get just enough done.

Though I think one thing that is being overlooked is that Platforms are the hidden hero under all of this. A lot of AI products are benefiting from various cloud platforms that have been created that make it easy to deploy and opperate these apps. So as long as you are providing a sufficiently general, high productivity platform that can't be emulated by one of the major vendors you'll likely become the new runtime.
by heliumtera | 2025-12-19 01:34:48+00:00
Technology has absolute qualities. Not a fantasy. Are you being paid to browse hacker news? Probl not, but here you are. Maybe you never considered this, but programming for other reasons other than a salary is a possibility. If those pesky programmers gave it all away, for free, what would be left for you to sell? In this case, would you leave technology? Would you go somewhere else and practice your selling there? Can't we defend building for the sake of building? Doing for the sake of having fun? Maybe you would be left with nothing to sell, I understand, but that's fine for me. Sorry.
by mistercheph | 2025-12-19 01:35:15+00:00
It doesn't require reciprocation because it is a generalized version of the rebasing problem in software.

Over a big round table with cigar smoke in the air it's natural to come to the conclusion that the closed party can always outpace any set of open parties since it can take the public work and extend it with an advance that it keeps a secret.

In reality, we observe that open parties tend to win, or at minimum, if they lose, the closed party tends to have an entirely disconnected line of research that rarely incorporates ideas from the open party. In the rebasing metaphor, the reason for this is the free coordination an open party gets with other open parties. The closed party never gets to insert its advance into the shared state-of-the-art, so it loses all of the free maintenance of coordination, and it has to choose between paying the maintenance cost of integrating its secret advance with the public SOTA, dropping the secret advance and going back to parity with the public SOTA, or disconnecting from the public SOTA and going all hands in on its own ideas. The maintenance burden of integrating your ideas with the constantly moving SOTA may sound trivial but in practice it is usually prohibitively expensive if there are a lot of parties collaborating on the public SOTA and doesn't leave you with much time/budget to find new secret advances.

Right now in the US, we have all of the disadvantages of the open model: the closed parties of the world can cheaply take ideas they like from Meta, Google, OpenAI and mix them with private advances, and all of the disadvantages of the closed model: our domestic tech industry keeps all of its technology a secret from other domestic competitors, and gets none of the coordination benefits of open research / technology, independents and startups are not only unable to access information about the SOTA, but they are actively attacked by the existing monopoly players with any means available when they approach it independently, including using their access to massive capital to drain the talent pool, or being bought outright. And, as we are all too familiar with, the entrenched players don't even care that much about whether or not they can even use the talent efficiently, denying it to competitors is worth more.
by eek2121 | 2025-12-19 01:35:58+00:00
Disclosure, I've not run a website since my health issues began, however, Cloudflare has an AI firewall, Cloudflare is super cheap (also: unsure if the AI firewall is on the free tier, however I would be surprised if it is not). Ignoring the recent drama about a couple incidents they've had (because this would not matter for a personal blog), why not use this instead?

Just curious. Hoping to be able to work on a website again someday, if I ever regain my health/stamina/etc back.
by marcus_holmes | 2025-12-19 01:35:59+00:00
This is all true. But then, if you ran HN and needed to hire new devs, you could find them extremely easily just by posting on your own site. HN is a well-known project that people would want to work on because it looks great on their resume and gives kudos when talking to other devs.

In other words, HN does not have the problem that you are going to have if you use an unpopular language for your project.

If you choose LISP for your not-HN project, then you have a problem. The chances are very slim of finding any experienced LISP devs who are also in your salary range, within commute distance, want to work on your project, are a good fit for the team, etc.

You're probably going to have to hire a dev who is a good match on all those other things and train them up on LISP. Unless they've had experience with other functional languages (not that unusual, but not common either) then they're going to have to learn an entire new paradigm. All of which means that they'll spend the first six months going slow while they learn, and needing support from the rest of the team.

And you'll need to convince them to join you (probably by paying them more money) because if they spend a few years on your project learning LISP, they probably won't be able to use those skills for their next gig, and their current skills in a popular language will go out of date.

LISP is a great language, and if used well it will probably give you an advantage over the competition using other, more mundane, languages. But is that going to be enough of an advantage to counteract your slower onboarding, higher salaries, and greater recruitment workload?
by afaxwebgirl | 2025-12-19 01:36:01+00:00
I think that food instability will be a serious problem. I don't think that the store shelves will be empty per se, but rather I believe it will be priced so high that people will be starving because they simply can't afford it.

Its already happening but I believe it will accelerate in 2026 especially with the Fed turning the money-printers back on. Inflation is sure to increase :-/

Grow a garden everyone. Just do it.
by username223 | 2025-12-19 01:36:05+00:00
> Imagine you have an AI button.

That pretty much sums up the problem: an "AI" button is about as useful to me as a "do stuff" button, or one of those red "that was easy" buttons they sell at Home Depot. Google translate has offered machine translation for 20+ years that is more or less adequate to understand text written in a language I don't read. Fine, add a button to do that. Mediocre page summaries? That can live in some submenu. "Agentic" things like booking flights for an upcoming trip? I would never trust an "AI" button to do that.

Machine learning can be useful for well-defined, low-consequence tasks. If you think an LLM is a robot butler, you're fundamentally misunderstanding what you're dealing with.
by reincarnate0x14 | 2025-12-19 01:36:18+00:00
Without getting overly political, it is nihilistic because one of the major US parties got so high on its own supply of lies that the people currently running it FORGOT they were lying. You're looking at a similar situation to many authoritarian or fascist political systems in which they way to get ahead in no way involves doing your job, but making sure Stalin or Mussolini is happy with you. This started in the US in the mid 1990s when GOP leadership bought in on power being its own end and is now on full display.

People have all sorts of mythologized reasons for why the USSR failed, because while it often produced immense amounts of goods and services and well educated people in certain areas (sometimes beating "the west" by a good margin for one or two years at a go), it also made long term advancement contingent on the party and not the real world and became incapable of handling major changes.

We're witnessing that now in the US with perhaps one of the most incompetent governments in history that is also burning down the non-political institutions of expertise that for all their faults and mistakes, at least had educated and motivated people that cared about their purpose.
by gucci-on-fleek | 2025-12-19 01:36:30+00:00
I help out with the production of a periodical that is journal-ish [0], and the biggest expense is printing and mailing. But it's ran by a non-profit, our editors are all volunteers, we don't do peer review, and our authors typeset the articles themselves, so this is definitely an atypical example.

[0]: https://tug.org/TUGboat/
by ryan_lane | 2025-12-19 01:36:31+00:00
The rest of the market was allowed to maximally increase rent to the point this person can't afford rent anywhere except for where they live, and the problem is rent control (which NYC has relatively little of)?

Why not complain about the high-rises full of empty apartments bought by oligarchs for money laundering? Why not complain about the tens of thousands of airbnb units?

NYC is actually quite good in terms of building supply, but the demand is also extremely high. Some of that demand is completely artificial due to money laundering and short-term rentals, and without fixing those issues, how can we expect people to live without limiting maximally increasing rents?
by crazygringo | 2025-12-19 01:36:51+00:00
I mean obviously that's what things like environmental and safety regulations are for, as well as things like antitrust. You have to set the "rules of the game."

I just mean that otherwise, usually competition ensures good outcomes for consumers, because the corporations that produce bad outcomes go out of business once consumers catch on.

But there are definitely exceptions, especially around rare events that are difficult to foresee or that can't reasonably be expected to be part of product comparison. The likelihood of your account being shut down without recourse and losing things you've paid for falls into that category perfectly. Predatory surprise fees with things like credit cards and bank accounts, and that change without warning, also fall into that. Also minimum warranties, since consumers can't easily inspect quality on the inside of a product.
by wrs | 2025-12-19 01:37:25+00:00
People definitely are doing that. Anyone who is not a programmer and asks the LLM to write a program is doing exactly that. The LLM will do that itself behind the scenes nowadays (yesterday Claude wrote a Python program when I simply asked it to give me the document it wrote in Word format!).

References: This is the original definition ("forget that the code even exists"). [0] Simon Willison wrote a much longer version of my comment. [1] He also suggested the term "vibe engineering" for the case where you are reviewing the LLM output. [2]

[0] https://x.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383

[1] https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/19/vibe-coding/

[2] https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/7/vibe-engineering/
by Neywiny | 2025-12-19 01:37:52+00:00
This is computer science. My uni's course number wasn't too different and I remember 3 things worth sharing here: 1. Somebody asked the lecturer what practical application something had. He pondered for a bit, and said "I don't really care." And then gave an explanation of how it's a science/theory class. 2. A classmate threw fits in the group chat about how he'd never have to do this kind of work after graduating because he could hire people like our lecturer to do it for him. 3. The rush when I figured out how to prove something during the last problem of an exam. As the time ticked away and I'm just staring at the words over and over, before I can sink an ice pick in and finally start grabbing a foothold.

Other things not really worth mentioning were that we had some useless digital logic section at the start where we made a full adder and called it a computer. As a CompE, it was weird. The CS students thought they knew all there was to how a computer worked from that. Also, he was only a lecturer because our processor got sick right before the class and they found a grad student to do it. He was ok but took shortcuts and our TA would be like "oh, he did this fast and loose, so now I have to teach you the real way it's done".

It was a great class in retrospect and certainly pushed my boundary on theoretical computing but you could feel the code monkeys regretting their decisions each homework and exam. It's what radicalized me to believing we needed programming and computer science to be different majors.
by jazzyjackson | 2025-12-19 01:38:01+00:00
Sounds like a weird way to run the "LLM small business owner" running a shop environment. I mean maybe you'd want the bot to be able to call and talk to suppliers if you go all the way, but why wouldn't the bot be left isolated with a closed loop of interactions, vend this, order more when your done, change prices to meet demand... Instead they just let everyone mess with the CEO at will? What were they testing instead, working in an adversarial environment?
by Timwi | 2025-12-19 01:38:03+00:00
I actually saw the “summarize this page” feature in the right-click menu today and clicked on it out of curiosity. The box that appeared had a “remove AI features” button which I accidentally clicked. Now the feature is completely gone and I don't know how to get it back. (Don't really care much, wasn't planning on using that feature anyway, just giving feedback on my first impression)
by johnnyanmac | 2025-12-19 01:38:17+00:00
> I don't use bookmarks. Should those be opt-in?

You can choose not to use bookmarks, remove the bar reserved for it, and it’s taking up kilobytes in the background. Can’t say the same about shoving an LLM in a browser.

But sure, I’m much closer to the extreme of “make bookmarks a plug-in” than “make everything a default”.
by solid_fuel | 2025-12-19 01:39:01+00:00
> If that happens, hardware trust becomes non-verifiable.

Unfortunately I already have to run a binary blob just to play fps games from 10 years ago. I can't even load a new OS onto my phone anymore.

Ultimately I'm not sure hardware sourced from China changes the trust equation very much, at least for me individually. I have much more concern about the FBI, which has recently decided to ramp up investigations into queer people [0][1][2], than I do about foreign powers - at least as long as it's not actively destructive malware or something.

> We will also see talent pipeline erosion.

We absolutely will, and to some degree I wonder if we aren't already with how popular tablets and phones are. I've noticed many young people these days don't really know how to interact with anything on a computer that isn't an app. GPUs and RAM becoming more significantly more expensive will take a huge chunk out of the hobby market and in doing so they will intensify the pipeline erosion.

[0] https://www.advocate.com/politics/pam-bondi-trans-equality-b... [1] https://ncac.org/news/advocacy-isnt-terrorism [2] https://www.hrw.org/news/2025/09/26/us-trump-targets-opponen...
by Terretta | 2025-12-19 01:40:04+00:00
> I'm disappointed Apple has a persistent blindspot preventing them from succeeding in ... things that would eventually find their way into my home lab after 5-7 years.

I can see the dollar signs in their eyes right now.

Aftermarkets are a nice reflection of durable value, and there's a massive one for iPhones and a smaller one for quick flameout startup servers, but not much money in 5 - 7 year old servers.
by zephen | 2025-12-19 01:40:08+00:00
> It is not just a way of writing ring buffers. It's a way of implementing concurrent non-blocking single-reader single-writer atomic ring buffers with only atomic load and store (and memory barriers).

That may or may not be part of the actual definition of a ring buffer, but every ring buffer I have written had those goals in mind.

And the first method mentioned in the article fully satisfies this, except for the one missing element mentioned by the author. Which in practice, often is not only not a problem, but simplifies the logic so much that you make up for it in code space.

Or, for example, say you have a 256 character buffer. You really, really want to make sure you don't waste that one character. So you increase the size of your indices. Now they are 16 bits each instead of 8 bits, so you've gained the ability to store 256 bytes by having 260 bytes of data, rather than 255 bytes by having 258 bytes of data.

Obviously, if you have a 64 byte buffer, there is no such tradeoff, and the third example wins (but, whether your are doing the first or third example, you still have to mask the index data off at some point, whether it's on an increment or a read).

> The author says that non-power-of-two is not possible, but I'm pretty sure it is if you use a conditional instead of integer modulus.

There's "not possible" and then "not practical."

Sure, you could have a 50 byte buffer, but now, if your indices are ever >= 50, you're subtracting 50 before accessing the array, so this will increase the code space (and execution time).

> The [index size > array size] technique is also widely known in FPGA/hardware circles

Right, but in those hardware circles, power-of-two _definitely_ matters. You allocate exactly one extra bit for your pointers, and you never bother manually masking them or taking a modulo or anything like that -- they simply roll over.

If you really, really need to construct something like a 6 entry FIFO in hardware, then you have techniques available to you that mere mortal programmers could not use efficiently at all. For example, you could construct a drop-through FIFO, where every element traverses every storage slot (with a concomitant increase in minimum latency to 6 clock cycles), or you could construct 4 bit indices that counted 0-1-2-3-4-5-8-9-10-11-12-13-0-1-2 etc.

Most ring buffers, hardware or software, are constructed as powers of two, and most ring buffers either (a) have so much storage that one more element wouldn't make any difference, or (b) have the ability to apply back pressure, so one more element wouldn't make any difference.
by aranelsurion | 2025-12-19 01:40:15+00:00
> I'd say also that you should never purchase Apple gift cards from anyone except Apple directly

This would be a good measure assuming we’ve fully discovered all the reasons Apple might ban you for, and only reason happens to be gift cards.

Since we don’t know what other seemingly trivial actions may provoke Apple to wipe an account, I think starting a developer conference is the only way to be safe.
by zelphirkalt | 2025-12-19 01:40:30+00:00
Is "Manhattan Project" supposed to be sounding threatening or something? Is anyone in on Japanese newspapers and whether they often us such rhetoric, when reporting things about China? It reads really kind of idiotic. As if chips are to be equal to atomic bombs and could be dropped on Tokyo any moment now. Maximum alarmist. That on the background of recent clumsiness of the Japanese PM ... It starts to paint a certain picture.
by woofcat | 2025-12-19 01:40:50+00:00
Because the modern system is that the parenting has been offloaded onto the school. The reason we have sex-ed is because we can't trust parents to do that.

The notion that the school board would simply ask a parent, then deal with the parents from kid A complaining that they read a book checked out by kid B is out there.

We run our schools to a lowest common denominator system.
by neom | 2025-12-19 01:41:07+00:00
This would be a super interesting research/teaching tool coupled with a vision model for historians. My wife is a history professor who works with scans of 18th century english documents and I think (maybe a small) part of why the transcription on even the best models is off in weird ways, is it seems to often smooth over things and you end up with modern words and strange mistakes, I wonder if bounding the vision to a period specific model would result in better transcription? Querying against the historical document you're working on with a period specific chatbot would be fascinating.

Also wonder if I'm responsible enough to have access to such a model...
by undershirt | 2025-12-19 01:41:38+00:00
I think debates are interesting because it’s obvious that people are temporarily imprisoning any devastating arguments within their higher sense that something about it is wrong.

The attempt to “rationalize” and discover what this higher intuition is saying might look like rejecting reason, even if temporarily. But I think it underscores what is really meant by “rejecting reason”— that understanding the true meaning of a logical argument requires a vigilant process directed by a higher moral directive, to ensure nothing “evil” is laundered through it.
by lrvick | 2025-12-19 01:41:45+00:00
You do not need a custom buildkit frontend to do reproducible builds with any modern container build system, including docker.

Vanilla docker/buildkit works just fine as we use it in Stagex with just makefiles and Containerfiles which makes it super easy for anyone to reproduce our images with identical digests, and audit the process. The only thing non default we do to docker is have it use the containerd backend that comes with docker distributions since that allows for deterministic digests without pushing to a registry. This lets us have the same digests across all registries.

Additionally our images are actually container native meaning they are "from scratch" all the way down avoiding any trust in upstream build systems like Debian or Alpine or any of their non deterministic package management schemes or their single-point-of-failure trust in individual maintainers.

We will also be moving to LLVM native builds shortly removing a lot of the complexity with multi-arch images for build systems. Easily cross compile all the things from one image.

Honestly we would not at all be mad if Docker just white labeled these as official images as our goal is just to move the internet away from risky and difficult to audit supply chains as opposed to the "last mile" supply chain integrity that is the norm in all other solutions today.

https://stagex.tools