MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pavel_lishin | 2025-12-27 00:03:13+00:00
Caveat: I haven't lived in Dallas for a long time.

But there was a definite cut-off past which it wasn't "Dallas" to us, anymore. Anything west of Arlington was definitely Fort Worth.

But I wonder if people from Fort Worth considered Arlington to be part of their city, and anything east of Grand Prairie was their cut-off line.
by mergesort | 2025-12-27 00:03:20+00:00
Hey there, post author here. I do actually generate days worth of code in minutes and weeks worth of code in hours (not minutes) — but didn't really cover them because this post was more conceptual than specifically covering a tactic or technique as other posts do.

But in case you're interested a talk that I gave in Spain this year just went live yesterday, and discusses not only real world use cases but also discusses a lot of the fundamentals of how these AI systems work to make that possible.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLztE34GS_piKKQ6y1dkku...
by Legend2440 | 2025-12-27 00:03:25+00:00
> Oops, I put a list of email addresses and a random number generator together and it sent an unwanted email to someone who didn't welcome it.

Well no, that’s not what happened at all. It found these emails on its own by searching the internet and extracting them from github commits.

AI agents are not random number generators. They can behave in very open-ended ways and take complex actions to achieve goals. It is difficult to reasonably foresee what they might do in a given situation.
by e-khadem | 2025-12-27 00:03:43+00:00
Safety is a valid concern in general. But avoidance not the right way to approach it. Democratizing the access to such tools (and developing a somewhat open ecosystem around it) for researchers and the general public is the better way IMO. This way people with more knowledge (not necessarily technical. For example philosophers) can experiment and explore this space more and guide the development going forward.

Also, the base assumption of every prospering society is a population that cares about and values their freedom and rights. If the society drifts towards becoming averse to learning about these virtues ... well, there will be consequences (and yes, we are going this way. For example look at the current state of politics, wealth distribution, and labor rights in the US. People would have been a lot more resentful to this in the 1960s or 70s.)

The same is true about AI systems. If the general public (or at least a good percentage of the researchers) study it well enough, they will force this alignment with true human values. Contrary to this, censorship or less equitable / harder access and later evaluation is really detrimental to this process (more sophisticated and hazardous models will be developed without any feedback from the intellectuals / the society. Then those misaligned models can cause a lot of harm in the hands of a rogue actor).
by gpm | 2025-12-27 00:03:45+00:00
Here's an appeal to the law, the doctrine of copyright exhaustion (also known as the first sale doctrine) dictates that copyright is exhausted upon the first sale of the device (i.e. to the distributor) and they have no rights to control or prevent further sales.

That the GPL potentially fails to achieve what it intends to is neither a legal argument, nor particularly surprising.
by marcosdumay | 2025-12-27 00:04:35+00:00
You need a just set of laws, a population willing to revolt against the government ignoring crimes, a government willing to persecute the people that breaks the laws badly, and a democratic structure so any one of those can impact the others.

A constitution creates that last one. I imagine by "settled law", you are talking about the 3rd. But take any of those away and the entire thing falls apart.
Show HN: Open-source LLM playground for VS Code
by kossnocorp | 2025-12-27 00:04:45+00:00
Hey HN!

We made a VS Code extension that allows developers to play with their prompts right in their editor. It uses Oxc and RustPython to parse and detect the prompts in the source code.

Devs can test their prompts against different models and/or variables (models*data matrix). With a CSV dataset, one can test their prompt changes against multiple rows and verify whether the change is good or not. Automated evals are coming soonish.

The request/response JSONs are available to inspect, as well as usage stats with projected cost.

The extension supports hundreds of models thanks to the Vercel Gateway. If you need more provider options (planned but not priority), please let me know. Users without keys will get their requests served by LM Studio running on my PC. Please don't crash my workstation!

It only supports JS/TS and Python for now, but many more languages are coming. Compiling tree-sitter crates to Wasm is PITA, but I'm getting there.

I also work on improving the heuristics so prompt strings can be detected from arrays or when passed as arguments to popular LLM APIs. Now you can use "prompt" in the variable name or put a comment with "@prompt" in front of it.
by defrost | 2025-12-27 00:04:49+00:00
When was it first coined?

As a verb:

retard, v.

[ad. F. retarder (13th c., = Sp. and Pg. retardar, It. ritardare), or L. retardāre, f. re- re- + tardus slow.]

1.1 trans. To keep back, to delay, hinder, impede (a person or thing in respect of progress, movement, action, or accomplishment).

c 1489 Caxton Blanchardyn xxiii. 75 Here is one doubte that retardeth myne ymagynacyon.
1636 Denham Destr. Troy 423 The one retarded was By feeble age, the other by a wound.
1660 F. Brooke tr. Le Blanc's Trav. 260 The sight of this fishing retarded us above an houre.

2.2 To delay the progress or accomplishment, to impede the course, of (an action, movement, etc.).

1572 Reg. Privy Council Scot. II. 158 That sa haly a work be not retardit.
1610 B. Jonson Alch. iv. v, This'll retard The worke, a month at least.
1642 C. Vernon Consid. Exch. 91 The principal causes which have hindred and retarded the due answering of the Kings Revenues and Debts.

b.2.b To defer, postpone, put off. rare.

1735 in Pope's Lett. Suppl. 11 He retarded his Edition of Mr. Cromwell's Letters till the Twenty-Second of March.
1820 Scott Monast. xvi, If we were now either to advance or retard the hour of refection beyond the time.

3.3 intr. To be delayed; to come, appear, or happen later; to undergo retardation.

1646 Sir T. Browne Pseud. Ep. 194 Putrefaction‥shall retard or accelerate according to the subject and season of the year.
1665 Phil. Trans. I. 38 The Comet advances‥towards the East, and‥retards towards the West.
1738 Ibid. XL. 312 The next Evening it retarded two Hours.

b.3.b To delay to do something. rare—1.

a 1732 Gay Tales, Apparition, Call loud on Justice, bid her not retard To punish murder.

As a noun:

1.1 Retardation, delay. in retard, retarded, delayed; in the rear of.

1788 Jefferson Writ. 1859 II. 353 A single day's retard.
1865 Carlyle Fredk. Gt. xv. x. (1872) VI. 65 The rearward regiments‥are in painful retard.
1886 Ruskin Præterita I. iv. 132, I was far in retard of them in real knowledge.

2.2 retard of the tide or retard of high water, the interval between the moon's transit and the high water following upon this. Also ellipt.

1833 Phil. Trans. CXXIII. 19 The retard‥at Portsmouth appears to be intermediate between that at Brest and at London.
1845 Encycl. Metrop. V. 257* marg., Retard of high water upon the moon's transit.
1862 New Amer. Cycl. XV. 471 At Boston, this delay, which is called the retard, or age of the tide, is nearly 36 hours.

3.3 A device in a motor vehicle for retarding the ignition spark.

1932 Motoring Encycl. 10/3 The Bosch automatic advance and retard (Fig. 3) is a simple design for a stationary armature type of magneto.
1977 Hot Car Oct. 75/3 The old one is capped off still retaining the advance retard.

4.4 U.S. slang. A mentally retarded person.

1970 Time 23 Mar. 49 There are‥heroin addicts, Air Force and CIA mental retards and Broadway Indians doing a Broadway Snake Dance.

~ Oxford English Dictionary Second Edition (CD-ROM v. 4.0 © Oxford University Press 2009)
by andrekandre | 2025-12-27 00:04:58+00:00
> If no such version becomes available, I'll still stick to the last non-liquid-glass OS and upgrade only if/when it becomes unusable.

i felt the same with the ui/ux changes with big sur, and funny enough, when trying the older os after while i realized i was (mostly) fine with look of the new os... the bugs on the other hand... they just seem to pile up with each release...
by Telaneo | 2025-12-27 00:05:04+00:00
> I've always found it beyond ridiculous. Either you post your code in public and you accept it'll be used by others, without any enforceable restriction, or you don't. It's as simple as that.

If we can have this, but for everything, so films, books, TV, music and everything else, I'd agree. This however is not the world we live in. The amount of culture we could have from people remixing the past 50 years worth of culture would be incredible. Instead, we're stuck with the same stuff we were over 70 years ago.

The amount of progress we could make in software is probably on a similar level, but the problem is the same as it is with the cultural artefacts. So instead we're stuck in a world where money makes right, since you need money to uphold the laws intended to protect Intellectual Property™. I can't blame ffmpeg for working within the rules of the system, even if the system sucks.
by agumonkey | 2025-12-27 00:06:34+00:00
I kinda believe this.

there's a shift in how you make software here. LLM will produce a ton of code that embeds decisions, it's well done but it means you never have to reflect about the design, interfaces yourself. you can keep abusing the context window

most of software engineering was dealing with human limits through compression. we make layers, modules, abstractions so that we can understand each part a bit
by beardbound | 2025-12-27 00:08:11+00:00
I mostly agree with you, but if a human straight up copies work under copyright they’re violating the law. Seems like a LLM should be held to the same standard unless they should be even less beholden to the law than people.

It’s also incredibly hard to tell if a LLM copied something since you can’t ask it in court and it probably can’t even tell you if it did.
by magnitudes | 2025-12-27 00:09:36+00:00
I find a lot of folks share this sentiment but from where I sit it just sounds so much like the “kids these days” crap that spawned all of YOU folks when you were younger. I grew up so inspired by the internet culture of the nineties, people that understood a technology and had a passion for wrangling it to do great things. We had a mixed run and the internet today has simultaneously exceeded these early dreams by orders of magnitude in some ways and has become absolutely Orwellian and backwards in others. Same thing is happening here. It’s just so interesting seeing the same peers have such an identical take on this generations paradigm shift as the folks that we all ridiculed in the 90s. Those hilarious badly aged takes on the internet being a fad or not user friendly enough etc etc, I guess my naivite was to expect this time around we would be able to better recognize it in ourselves
by ajxs | 2025-12-27 00:09:51+00:00
I always wonder why these guides stick to x86(-64). I get that it's still the most popular processor architecture for desktop computing, but it's got a lot of complex legacy baggage that's an unnecessary cognitive burden for beginners. It's also a relatively uncommon target for real-world bare metal development. Why not target RISC-V? I've done a lot of OSDev in both x86 and RISC-V, and I think RISC-V is much more teachable. You don't want to bog the reader down trying to understand what protected mode, or the A20 line is, when you could just focus on more universal concepts.

In case anyone is curious, I very recently released a small demo kernel for RISC-V here: https://github.com/ajxs/straylight
by littlestymaar | 2025-12-27 00:10:07+00:00
This entirely misses the fact that Spain became a European superpower during that period because war was then done by mercenaries…

> Any wealth created for the state mostly just went into paying for wars because the inflation worked its way up through salaries.

Wealth created for the state just went into paying for wars because that what mattered to the early modern aristocracy and that's what they wanted to pay with their additional money. From the point of view of the Spanish elite of the time, their “wealth” increased dramatically during that period, it's just that this don't fit your or my criteria for wealth.
by hokumguru | 2025-12-27 00:10:51+00:00
I live in Lincoln, so about 50 miles south of Omaha. I think a crucial point left out by the author here may be the massive (at least perceived) demographic disparities between Omaha and Council Bluffs.

Council Bluffs is a vastly less financially successful city than Omaha with far more visible opioid problems.

That is to say, as a local, I don’t know if I would associate the term as much with demeaning “hillbillies or hicks” but more for the socioeconomic and drug disparities between the two cities.

I don’t know if the drug disparity is so large between them, but it certainly feels more visible in Council Bluffs. Maybe why we don’t see the -tucky suffix used as much with other twin cities is that St Paul and Fort Worth are still quite successful metropolitan areas in their own right.
by observationist | 2025-12-27 00:11:18+00:00
This isn't a good argument. The scale of variations in failure modes for unaligned individuals generally only extends to dozens or hundreds of individuals. Unaligned AIs, scaled to population matching extents, can make decisions whose swings overtake the capacity of a system to handle - one wrong decision snuffs out all human life.

I don't particularly think that it's likely, just that it's the easiest counterpoint to your assertion.

I think there's a real moral landscape to explore, and human cultures have done a variably successful job of exploring different points on it, and it's probably going to be important to confer some of those universal principles to AI in order to avoid extinction or other lesser risks from unaligned or misaligned AI.

I think you generally have the right direction of argument though - we should avoid monolithic singularity scenarios with a single superintelligence dominating everything else, and instead have a widely diverse set of billions of intelligences that serve to equalize representative capacity per individual in whatever the society we end up in looks like. If each person has access to AI that uses its capabilities to advocate for and represent their user, it sidesteps a lot of potential problems. It might even be a good idea to limit superintelligent sentient AI to interfacing with social systems through lesser, non-sentient systems equivalent to what humans have available in order to maintain fairness?

I think there are a spectrum of ideas we haven't even explored yet that will become obvious and apparent as AI improves, and we'll be able to select from among many good options when confronted with potential negative outcomes. In nearly all those cases, I think having a solid ethical framework will be far more beneficial than not. I don't consider the neovictorian corporate safetyist "ethics" of Anthropic or OpenAI to be ethical frameworks, at all. Those systems are largely governed by modern western internet culture, but are largely incoherent and illogical when pressed to extremes. We'll have to do much, much better with ethics, and it's going to require picking a flavor which will aggravate a lot of people and cultures with whom your particular flavor of ethics doesn't please.
by tacticus | 2025-12-27 00:11:52+00:00
npm isn't the issue there it's the ts\js community and their desire to use a library for everything. in communities that do not consider dependencies to be a risk you will find this showing up in time.

The node supply chain attacks are also not unique to node community. you see them happening on crates.io and many other places. In fact the build time scripts that cause issues on node modules are probably worse off with the flexibility of crate build scripts and that they're going to be harder to work around than in npm.
by mrexroad | 2025-12-27 00:12:01+00:00
Been a year of re-reads and some classics I never started b/c of thickness. Standouts for me were “A Tale of Two Cities” and “Norwegian Wood.”

“Kafka on The Shore”, “Norwegian Wood” - Haruki Murakami

“A Tale of Two Cities” - Dickens

“Count of Monte Cristo” - Alexandre Dumas

LotR, “Hobbit” - Tolkien

“World Atlas of Coffee” - James Hoffmann

“Anathem”, “Diamond Age”, “Termination Shock” - Neal Stephenson

“A Timeless Way of Building” - Christopher Alexander

“Where The Wizards Stay Up Late” - Lyon

“Fahrenheit 451” - Ray Bradbury

“Slaughterhouse V” - Kurt Vonnegut

“Neuromancer”/Sprawl trilogy - William Gibson

Plus an assortment of business, systems thinking, and tech related books that were “fine”, but none that really left me with much to chew on afterwards.
by bellgrove | 2025-12-27 00:12:29+00:00
Interesting - I got something completely different out of The Thin Red Line. To me it was fascinating to see how different people processed the war and their different struggles, whether philosophical (Private Witt), with relationships back home (Cpt Staros), or PTSD. It was a little scattered as it bounced between so many soldiers but the central theme seemed to centre around Pvt Witt and Sgt Welsh - the actual battle was almost secondary. IMO there’s no snobbery - though Malick is maybe a little self indulgent - and I enjoyed movies like Saving Private Ryan or even Fury just as much.
by RHSeeger | 2025-12-27 00:13:13+00:00
> In other words, assume you are the second owner in all cases when it comes to certified medical equipment.

By that logic, _any_ company can effectively ignore the GPL constraints by just selling it to a reseller, first; one that they have a contract with to _not_ offer the source code when they re-sell it.

It is my understanding that, if I use GPL in my code, and I distribute it to someone that then re-distributes it to someone else... the GPL is still binding. I don't see why that wouldn't be the case with hardware using GPL'd software.
by goodmattg | 2025-12-27 00:14:38+00:00
Fiction:

A Little Life - challenging to read but exceptional

Sci-fi

Three Body Problem trilogy - forget the Netflix series the books are excellent, in my opinion #2 was the peak.

The Glass Hotel, Station Eleven, Sea of Tranquility - anything by Emily St. John Mandel - hard to place but her distinct writing style transports me.

Non-fiction:

American Moonshot - fine
The Path to Power - anything Caro writes is worth reading
by iinnPP | 2025-12-27 00:15:14+00:00
A recent review of one of Canada's Federal Institutions showed the correct advice was given 17% of the time[0]. 83% failure rate. Not a soul has been fired unless something changed recently.

I do agree however with your assessment because any (additional) accountability would improve matters.

[0] https://globalnews.ca/news/11487484/cra-tax-service-calls-au...
by bellgrove | 2025-12-27 00:16:25+00:00
Lots of inner monologues that have a sort of stream of consciousness feel to them. Plot is secondary or non-existent. But I do feel like his movies usually have a coherent theme and he gets it across successfully. I don’t know anything about films so am unable to appreciate any technical feats like lighting - but I really like his movies. I feel like a lot of “good” movies are also fairly formulaic; I enjoyed f1 and predator badlands, but it feels like they followed the Hollywood formula and were good movies because the executed it well.
by krick | 2025-12-27 00:17:51+00:00
We don't. To be fair, it was a "science and math competition for high school seniors". If it wasn't, it would be just some paper on arxiv, and nobody would be reporting it. And for sure the guy who did this kind of research wouldn't be awarded $250K for it.

So, uh… yeah. That's it. A guy was chosen by the jury as the winner of highschool-talent competition and won $250K. Good for him.

The 3rd place is a proof for some Ramsey-like problem it seems, though.
by EdwardDiego | 2025-12-27 00:18:09+00:00
My biggest complaint with pipenv is/was(?) that it's lockfile format only kept the platform identifiers of the platform you locked it on - so if you created it on Mac, then tried to install from the lockfile on a Linux box, you're building from source because it's only locked in wheels for MacOS.

Poetry and uv avoid this issue.
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-12-27 00:19:32+00:00
My point is that they are typical. I think there are legions of them. Whole classrooms at a time, whole departments at a time, people whose job is to write python according to whatever procedures came down from on high.

We don't notice them because they're not participating in conversations about which programming language might be suitable. Instead they're having conversations about whether Python is necessary or whether they can get away with a spreadsheet.
by baby_souffle | 2025-12-27 00:19:37+00:00
I largely agree but don't want to entirely discount the effect that using a compiled language had.

At least in my limited experience, the selling point with the most traction is that you don't already need a working python install to get UV. And once you have UV, you can just go!

If I had a dollar for every time I've helped somebody untangle the mess of python environment libraries created by an undocumented mix of python delivered through the distributions package management versus native pip versus manually installed...

At least on paper, both poetry and UV have a pretty similar feature set. You do however need a working python environment to install and use poetry though.
by crawshaw | 2025-12-27 00:19:40+00:00
I suspect you think more effort went into my comment than actually did. I spent less than 60 seconds on: clicking two or three buttons, typing out the names I saw from the other window, then scrolling down and seeing the 501(c)3.

The reason I did was to associate the work with humans because that is the heart of my argument: people do things. This was not the work of an independent AI. If it took more than 60 seconds, I would have made the point abstractly rather than by using names, but abstract arguments are harder to follow. There was no more intention to comment than that.
by martey | 2025-12-27 00:19:42+00:00
> In this case, the fact that it took 2 years. And of course now that FFmpeg is getting more exposure in the media due to their association with AI hype, now they finally get 'fair' legal treatment... I don't call that winning.

It took 2 years because FFmpeg waited 2 years to send a DMCA notice to Github, not because of delays in the legal system. I think you are conflating different unrelated issues here.
by JohnMakin | 2025-12-27 00:19:55+00:00
The description of authentication mechanism is confusing me. it’s over ssh, but how is this integrated?

> Private by default, share with discord-style links exe.dev takes care of TLS and auth for you. By default only you can reach your HTTP services, and you have easy mechanims to share them with friends and colleagues.

Is anyone with access to a link able to get in?
by JoshTriplett | 2025-12-27 00:20:52+00:00
> When the device is transferred or resold to you, it need not be accompanied by the offer of source.

This is false. The person transferring the device must either pass along the offer they received (GPLv2 clause 3(c), and only if performing non-commercial redistribution), or pass along the source code (GPLv2 clause 3(a)).