MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by inshard | 2025-12-22 07:06:55+00:00
The UI is better - they box the specific types of actions the orchestrator agent takes with a clear categorization. The standard quality of life shortcuts like type a number to respond to an MCQ are present here as well. They use specialized sub agents such as one with big context window to find context in the codebase. The quotas appear to be much more generous vs CC. The agent memory management between compacting cycles seems to have a few tricks CC is missing. Also, with 3.0 Flash, it feels faster with the same level of agency and intelligence. It has a feature to focus into an interactive shell where bash commands are being executed by the orchestrator agent. Doesn't feel like Google is trying to push you to buy more credits or is relying on this product for its financial survival - I suspect CC has some dark patterns around this where the agents runs cycles of token in circles with minimal progress on bugs before you have to top up your wallet. Early days still.
by atoav | 2025-12-22 07:08:37+00:00
Idk. My main frustration with Linux has nothing to do with the OS itself. Linux is pretty good actually. My main frustration has to do with software that doesn't run on Linux that I have to use occasionally. So things that force me not to use Linux. But that has gotten much better over the years.

And meanwhile my Windows and MacOS experience has gotten much worse. So I feel pretty good with using Linux as my daily driver for the past 6 years.
by ehnto | 2025-12-22 07:10:07+00:00
Interesting.

One of the reasons an LSP is so useful is that it does not fabricate anything. If my LSP can't tell me something, it means it doesn't exist or I haven't defined it.

In some ways it helps against code being too magic as well, if my LSP can't understand what's happening in the code it is probably because of a magic string, hidden reference or hidden dependency. If you're in a loosely typed language, it also helps spot when you've got some type shenanigans happening.

All of this is instantaneous, and always factual, deterministic, sourced from hard truth.

I do not know how this LLM LSP functions, but instant, always factual and deterministic are not features of LLMs typically.

I'll give it a go though, like I said I don't know what it does under the hood.
by morgan814 | 2025-12-22 07:10:16+00:00
While I certainly drink coffee for the caffeine, black coffee is 100% my preference. Sugar in coffee tastes absolutely horrid to me. Milk is fine but it doesn’t do much for me.

People taste things differently and it’s at least partly genetic. See TAS2R38 for example [0]. It’s fascinating how we all perceive the world a little differently.

Years ago, long before I was of age, a science museum had a little demo on this (not sure if it was related to the aforementioned gene or not) using strips of paper with some chemical on it. Some people were pretty grossed out by the flavor. It didn’t bother other people at all, including myself.

On the flip side of things I’m highly sensitive to sweetness and find anything other than the smallest amounts to be off putting.

[0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6949464/
by godelski | 2025-12-22 07:10:46+00:00
Going to depend on your dosages. I try to stay low and will take breaks to help reduce dependency. I actually really dislike the feeling of a high dosage and it does have negative effects at that end.

Also remember that everyone reacts differently to things. SSRIs work great for some people, but not for me. So it's worth trying different classes of medicines too but also to make sure that when having more dangerous ones. I made sure close friends knew too
by jongjong | 2025-12-22 07:10:48+00:00
I switched to Linux about 10 years ago... I used to keep a partition on the side for Windows for dual-boot... But nowadays I just wipe my drive clean!

With my latest computer, I noticed that some kind of boot protection was added in the BIOS which made it harder to install Linux from USB... I had to disable the safety mechanism in the bios before it would let me boot... It's a shame because, at a glance, I actually thought the Windows UI had improved since the last version a few years ago which was appalling...

But yeah I hate Windows' coercive approach. This is why I was never an Apple fan. I hate how Apple keeps trying to hide the underlying hardware like the file system and external (non-Apple) devices.

These companies are basically PsyOps in my view. There are many better free (open source) alternatives available where you actually own the OS. I don't understand how people can stand renting inferior software for 10x the price as owning a better alternative.

It's like if I offered people to rent a Ford car for $20k per year or get a free Mercedes Benz, and 90% choose to rent the Ford because it feels familiar and their friends also rent a Ford... What is wrong with people?

There is something seriously wrong with people. It's like someone (or something) hypnotized them. Are we sure we don't have ASI controlling people? This is not normal.

This is like; what kinds of people are trying to accumulate fiat money nowadays? There's nothing behind it. It's just digits inside a bunch of different databases without any consensus between them and where the government can create unlimited digits for free. Something wrong with people.
by b112 | 2025-12-22 07:12:35+00:00
Obviously things will continue to improve, so this is a point in time criticism.

One of the biggest issues with current state of tech I see is, where these cars usually are. They're in cities, and most often in very dense ones, and ones in the south. These are effectively perfect conditions.

From my perspective, I wonder how these cars will behave with ice on the road, with snow, or a typical Montreal Wednesday of "It's a blizzard, you can't see 10 feet, there is snow on the road and ice, it's slippery, all the lines and street markings are obscured completely, oh and the power is out and there are no traffic lights."

Some of this can be resolved by snow tires, or even studded tires which are legal in Quebec. It should be noted that Quebec plows the roads less, and uses less dirt and salt on the road, and also enforces a law that snow tires are on cars in the winter. Of course studded tires give insane grip on ice, but have reduced grip on rain.

And it can 10C and rain, then freeze, then be a blizzard, then move to -40C, all in a few days.

But anyhow, my point is if a Waymo is slow with a missing traffic light, how will it act with a missing traffic light, and 10ft visual range of reflective snow in the air, no ability to see lines on the street, and so on. Humans are great at peering and seeing mostly obscured indications of an intersection, but this is still challenging for a car with a top priority of safety.

Here's another example. The cameras in my car are constantly obscured by slush, dirt, and such on the windshield and all over the car. All the roads are coated with dirt to help with slipping on ice. I often have my car absurdly complaining that cameras are covered, and there's no assist this and that, just because the entire car is coated in dirt.

How will a Waymo operate with all sensors covered in dirt?

There are probably solutions. But it feels like it will be a long while before such cars treat a normal day in winter, as usual.

It should be noted that I've simply discussed downtown Montreal. What of a rural area? And by rural, I mean houses 1 km apart, also with a blizzard, all lines obscured on the road, and meanwhile Canadians just intuitively know where and how to drive it. We just slow down a bit (from 120km/hr to maybe 70km/hr) and just drive on our merry way. If we try to stop, distances are greatly extended, and of course in some places without care you'll just slide into the ditch.

Of course that's just a Wednesday, and you can read the 'signs of the road', and sort of tell where to slow down more. Where to take more care.

Sometimes, you'll see a bunch of cars in the ditch, and think 'Ah, must be particularly slippery here', and slow down a bit more.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-12-22 07:13:16+00:00
> AI writing tends to suck more verbosely

So, it's the style you oppose, the way a grammar nazi complains about "improper" English

> and in exciting new ways (e.g. by introducing factual errors).

Because factually incorrect comments didn't exist before AI?

Your concern is that you read something you don't like, so you pick the lowest-effort criteria to complain about. Speaks more about you than the original commenter.
by Jean-Papoulos | 2025-12-22 07:13:51+00:00
>The company uses pure, purpose-made CO2 instead of sourcing it from emissions or the air, because those sources come with impurities and moisture that degrade the steel in the machinery.

So no environmental advantages. It's supposedly 30% cheaper than lithium-ion, but BYD cars have sodium-based based batteries on the road right now which CATL says will end up being 10-20$/kwh (10x cheaper than current batteries).

So what's the actual advantage of this ? I think it's just lucky to land just at the right time where batteries aren't cheaper enough yet.
by josegonzalez | 2025-12-22 07:14:21+00:00
Dokku maintainer here.

This is pretty neat. I think using the compose yaml file to document what should be running is pretty powerful at smaller scales (though I'm hesitant to place data in docker volumes as people tend to delete things at will and then are shocked that their data is gone).

I once spoke with the manager of the Compose project and it was news to them that folks used it in production for deploys. The lack of tooling around zero-downtime restarts makes that frustrating, so it's exciting to see projects that introduce that in some fashion.

Cool stuff!
by that_was_good | 2025-12-22 07:14:24+00:00
39,345 People were killed in traffic accidents last year in the US alone [1]. Not including permanent injury. If humans were replaced by self driving cars at their current accident rate, 34,000 less people a year would die [2].

Even if every US city had Waymos blocking the street for every single disaster, as they did here. I find it extremely unlikely that even the indirect deaths would come close to that number. And that's assuming Waymo learn from this lesson. Which they will.

[1] https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/nhtsa-estimates-39345-t... [2] https://storage.googleapis.com/waymo-uploads/files/documents...
ScrapeForge build log. Day 3
by Vishwas-Batra | 2025-12-22 07:17:26+00:00
Started implementing a SERP scraper using Playwright. Initial success was followed by captchas, IP blacklisting, device fingerprinting, and other anti-bot protections.

Spent the day improving script behavior to better mimic real users. Scraper is not finished yet, but learned a lot about practical scraping challenges.

Feedback welcome.
by catlikesshrimp | 2025-12-22 07:18:31+00:00
"litres-of-fuel per km-driven" (Volume/Distance) is still fully reductible to an area: litres is still a volume (1 cubic decimeter) and km is still a distance (1x10⁴ dm) Maybe you meant that the other way around? Distance/Volume (as in Miles/gallon) is an Area⁻¹ (Distance⁻²), which is more difficult to imagine in space.

Now, Kg is a measure of mass (or weight, depending on who you are asking), which throws density into the equation, which is proportional to the temperature, which will vary according to where and when the driving takes place. But since the time and place, and hence the temperature is (allegedly) defined when the fuel consumption was tested, the density is a constant, and as such you can leave it out from the relation.

Mass = V*ρ

(I know, I am being pedantic² :)
by Jean-Papoulos | 2025-12-22 07:19:37+00:00
I switched from a 1h30 of commute by bus to 15 minutes by car a while back ; then I switched jobs and now have 1h total commute. It's kind of annoying that I can't do anything of substance during this time because I'm driving. I used to read on the bus and while I don't miss the bus, I certainly miss the reading.
by sheepscreek | 2025-12-22 07:19:58+00:00
Maybe - they’ve certainly fooled me if that’s the case. I took them at face value and so far they haven’t done anything out of character that would make me weary of them.

Their models are good. They did not use prompts for training from day one (Google is the worst offender here amongst the three). Have been shockingly effective with “Claude Skills”. Contributed MCP to the world and encouraged its adoption. Now did the same for skills, turning it into a standard.

They are happy to be just the tool that helps people get the job done.
by pjmlp | 2025-12-22 07:21:09+00:00
Turbo Vision as introduced in Turbo Pascal 6 (C++ version came later), was a great way to learn OOP on MS-DOS, the other being Clipper 5.

Besides a nice OOP architecture, collections, iteration with callbacks, serialization, in a nice AOT compiled language with blazing compile times.

Kind of tragic what we could get in 1992, in 640 KB, in a single tasking operating systems, and how bad so many "modern" frameworks happen to be by comparison, regarding the whole development experience.
by delaminator | 2025-12-22 07:21:58+00:00
Because making it work is burdensome and writing programs that interact with it even more so.

I'm guessing you've never tried to write a terminal rendering program.

The hoops you hav to jump through to get vi to switch into a blank screen and then drop back and re-render your previous terminal.

Behaviour differences on some terminals when you run man and the previous output is simply cleared or the man page is printed and scrolled.

There are piles of hacks.
by 8bitsrule | 2025-12-22 07:22:46+00:00
According to Gigazine (Osaka, est. 2000), "In 2024, there were 296 internet shutdowns in 54 countries around the world, with Myanmar, India, Pakistan and Russia accounting for about 70% of the total."

https://gigazine.net/gsc_news/en/20250228-internet-shutdowns...
by maplethorpe | 2025-12-22 07:24:53+00:00
> i really, sincerely, believe that art is one of the most important uses for a computer.

Me too. Sometimes when I tell people I spent the day on the computer, I get responses like "oh that's sad" or "you're going to burn yourself out".

Would they say the same thing if I told them I spent the day painting in my studio? Or playing the guitar? Or writing a piece of music? The computer is my paintbrush.
by MrVandemar | 2025-12-22 07:25:18+00:00
> The amount of power an individual has today is vastly more than any other moment in the past, and that will only continue to increase. This power transfer has occurred in 3 layers.

Nah, not really. None of that stuff is where the real power is.

Probably, if anything, it's reduced the ability to make positive material social change because the channels to do so are under firm control, and the people who might have been motiviated to activism are hustling, trying to make ends meet and has about enough energy to note social problems as they doomscroll.
by AndrewKemendo | 2025-12-22 07:26:46+00:00
The term Artificial Intelligence was coined in 1955 for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence. The Gods of AI all got together: John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon. They defined the entire concept of Artificial Intelligence in a single sentence:

The conjecture that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it.

The only AI explainer youll need: https://kemendo.com/Understand-AI.html
by godelski | 2025-12-22 07:28:15+00:00
I think you have a misunderstanding because a heavy tail is essentially one that is not exponentially bounded. A long tail being a subclass.

There's kinda a big difference in the characteristics of a normal distribution and power and I think explaining that will really help.

In a normal you have pressure from both ends so that's why you find it in things like height. There's evolutionary pressure to not be too small but also pressure to not be too large. Being tall is advantageous but costly. Technically the distribution never ends (and that's in either direction!). Though you're not going to see micro people nor 100' tall people because the physics gets in the way. Also mind you that normal can't be less than zero.

It is weird to talk about "long tail" with normal distributions and flags should go up when hearing this.

In a power distribution you don't have bounding pressure. A classic example of this is wealth. It's easier to understand if you ignore the negative case at first, so let's do that (it still works with negative wealth). There's no upper bound to wealth, right? So while most people will be in the main "mode" there is a long tail. We might also say something like "heavy tail" when the variance is even moderate. So this tail is both long and the median value isn't really representative of the distribution. Funny enough, power laws are incredibly common in nature. I'm really not sure why they aren't discussed more.

I think Veritasium did a video on power distributions recently? Might be worth a check.
by brailsafe | 2025-12-22 07:31:19+00:00
A personal prison can mean many things, and if low wages automatically mean precarity, then that's a type of stress that would be worthwhile to try and create a lesser draw on, imo.

For me, I'm always framing whatever I currently earn as "right now". Right now I'm doing ok, but it's fairly likely it won't last longer than 2 years, because it never has, and I have no reason to think it will this time. That means that even if a bank were to give me a long term loan, I'd be stupid to commit to anything but the most manageable terms, which means I'd have to consider what I'd be able to make in a part-time laborer position when layoffs come around or something.

If I can theoretically make myself liable for a 3.5k a month tiny condo mortgage, even if it's less than half my take home, I'd be uncomfortable doing so unless it was half that amount. Therefore, either a miracle needs to happen on the career side or the housing market needs to finally crash before my partner and I move out of this basement, no kids, used car etc.. and that's fine for now. If I lose a job, I need to have at least a year if not more of liquid or close to liquid assets available to cover living expenses, and for that to be possible, I need to have relatively minimal fixed liabilities
by jatins | 2025-12-22 07:33:44+00:00
Yeah no, that's not it. Not everyone has to chase the highest purpose. A lot of existential dread would go away if: 1/ People had hopes of buying a house in their lifetime 2/ They were not afraid of being let go at any point 3/ Social media did not create a hedonistic treadmill

The whole higher purpose narrative is bs to keep sell more books or courses or whatever author is selling. And what's with random yellow highlights and bold formatting on every second sentence?
by solatic | 2025-12-22 07:33:57+00:00
> Like in what world is payroll not as important as your DBMS - if you can't pay people you don't have a business!

Most employees, contractors, and vendors are surprisingly forgiving of one-time screw-ups. Hell, even the employees who are most likely to care the most about a safe, reliable paycheck - those who work for the US federal government - weren't paid during the recent shutdown, and not for the first time, and still there wasn't some massive wave of resignations across the civil service. If your payroll processor screws up that badly, you fire them and switch processors.

If your DBMS isn't working, your SaaS isn't working. Your SLA starts getting fucked and your largest customers are using that SLA as reason to stop payments. Your revenue is fucked.

Don't get me wrong, having working payroll is pretty important. But it's not actually critical the way the DBMS is, and if it was, then yeah you'd see more companies run it in-house.
A Global Forum Built for Real, Unfiltered Conversations
by cimaa | 2025-12-22 07:36:54+00:00
Hey HN, I’ve been heads-down building a Global social forum, a new global discussion platform designed for people who actually want to talk — not just scroll. No algorithmic chaos, no dopamine traps, no corporate varnish. Just conversations, communities, and clarity.

It’s still early days. I’m a solo builder trying to create a space that isn’t pretending to “disrupt” anything — it’s just trying to do the basics right: meaningful threads, respectful debates, and a community culture that doesn’t collapse into noise.

Why I built this

Every platform is trying to be everything. Forums became outdated, social media became polluted, and long-form conversations started disappearing. GeneralGiist is my attempt to bring back that clean, old-school discussion energy, but with a modern, global flavor.

What’s already live

A working forum with categories across lifestyle, politics, tech, entertainment, and more

User accounts, posting, profiles — the essentials

Fast, distraction-free UI

Early community structure and seeded discussions

A long-term plan to evolve this into a flagship platform under my “Space Platform” umbrella

What I’m looking for

Feedback. Brutal honesty. Tell me:

What feels off

What’s clunky

What’s confusing

What’s boring

What’s surprisingly good

I’m not pitching perfection — I’m pitching potential.

Link

https://generalgiist.com

Thanks for reading, and thanks even more if you poke around and tell me where the cracks are. I’ll be in the thread replying to everything — even the spicy takes.
by Terr_ | 2025-12-22 07:38:00+00:00
I miss when I felt that personal computers were a new wave of democratized capital, a kind of affordable factory for individual owners to use pursuing their own autonomy and power... and not just for programmers.

I underestimated the economic forces trying to turn them into devices for enforcing the interests of a large company onto the owner and turning the owner into a renter.
by edg5000 | 2025-12-22 07:38:05+00:00
To be honest I think she can handle LibreOffice. Double-click to open file (can be docx), start typing and click save when done. Open any MS Office file. I really don't get the religuous attachment to MS Office.

I do worry sometimes about fonts. The default Arial replacement should be geometrically idential and thus not lead to issues. TBH I don't know if there are significant rendering issues between LO and MS Office, as I always use PDF. I sometimes upload it to Google Docs to see if it's displayed identically. So far I've never ran into an issue. TBH I think LO is better except for the performance which is okay but not great.

At this point Office programs are commodity. Apple has good options. Google has. And any Linux distro will come with LO. Really a non-issue I think. Even for older people.
by SyzygyRhythm | 2025-12-22 07:41:05+00:00
Many people think of driving in time rather than distance. I'd say it's actually more common to say a city is 3 hours away rather than 200 miles.

What makes kW less useful is really just that most EVs don't advertise their capacity very prominently. But if you knew you had an 80 kWh battery and the car uses 20 kW at freeway speeds, then it's easy to see that it'll drive for 4 hours.
by jacquesm | 2025-12-22 07:41:28+00:00
I've worked with a startup in the medical device space. Well funded. They were indistinguishable from most other startups, except in one detail: they did everything right. They made some extremely high tech stuff, very lightweight, and technology wise they were closer to watchmakers than to software and hardware people. I loved working with them and helped them to improve their yield (their QA was so strict that of their initial couple of runs more than 2/3rds of the devices got binned for the smallest infractions).

I suspect you may have just been unlucky with where you ended up. I'm getting closer to retirement myself but I no longer have to work for 'the man' so in that sense I got really lucky. But I really sympathize with how you feel. So, count the days, and look forward to something nicer. Best!