MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sigotirandolas | 2025-12-26 21:27:48+00:00
This looks like LLM slop (not only the writing, but the analysis itself).

To start, it is based on a single machine check. It has little context, but if this was a common problem, I'd expect more data points.

The MC happened 8 hours after the freeze. It's not unusual that a hardware/kernel failure cascades to multiple subsystems so I'd be sceptical that the MC has a direct relationship to the root cause of the freeze.

(Part 13) Why does it quote an Engineering Change Notice rather than a consolidated spec?

(Part 11) LaneErrStatus=0xFFFFFFFF is 32 bits. As far as I know, PCIe x32 is very rare.

(Part 8.4) How is it surprising MMIO isn't included in memory dumps?

(Part 4) How is the definition of a MCE relevant here?
by EddieB | 2025-12-26 21:28:19+00:00
I’ve been working through more Dostoyevsky- currently ending the year reading The Brothers Karamazov (Constance Garnett translation).

It’s topping The Idiot for me- and a fitting way to end the year. I have spent most of 2025 stuck in a 19th Century reading cycle which started when reading Murakamis “After the quake” short story collection, specifically Super-Frog saves Tokyo where he mentions Anna K.

Anna Karenina-> Crime and Punishment-> The Idiot and some various Kafka in the mix too.

Hoping to visit some modern stuff again next year
by drob518 | 2025-12-26 21:28:30+00:00
I was just reading a paper about compiling SQL queries (actually about a fast compilation technique that allows for full compilation to machine code that is suitable for SQL and WASM): https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3485513

Sounds like many DBs do some level of compilation for complex queries. I suspect this is because SQL has primitives that actually compute things (e.g. aggregations, sorts, etc.). But find does basically none of that. Find is completely IO-bound.
by admeza | 2025-12-26 21:28:44+00:00
Immanuel Kant believed that one should only act in such a way in which you believe what you're doing should become a universal law. He thought lying was wrong, for example, because if everyone lied all the time, nobody would believe anything anymore.

I'm not sure that Kant's categorical imperative accurately summarizes my own personal feelings, but it's a useful exercise to apply it to different scenarios. So let's apply it to this one. In this case, a nonprofit thought it was acceptable to use AI to send emails thanking various prominent people for their contributions to society. So let's imagine this becomes a universal law: Every nonprofit in the world starts doing this to prominent people, maybe prominent people in the line of work of the nonprofit. The end result is that people of the likes of Rob Pike would receive thousands of unsolicited emails like this. We could even take this a step further and say that if it's okay for nonprofits to do this, surely it should be okay for any random member of the population to do this. So now people like Rob Pike get around a billion emails. They've effectively been mailbombed and their mailbox is no longer usable.

My point is, why is it that this nonprofit thinks they have a right to do this, whereas if around 1 billion people did exactly what they were doing, it would be a disaster?
by nradov | 2025-12-26 21:29:50+00:00
We sometimes see similar localized effects when wealthy foreign governments and NGOs go into poor countries to "help" with foreign aid and investment. When done correctly this can boost the local economy in a sustainable way, kind of priming the pump. But often it just dumps a lot of cash in, causing price inflation as the supply of goods and services fails to keep pace with the supply of money.
by anthk | 2025-12-26 21:29:57+00:00
That reminds me of Mckenna/Peter Meyer and the fractal time.

https://www.fractal-timewave.com/articles.php

You can get a free-libre Unix timewave generator there:

https://github.com/kl4yfd/timewave_z3r0

It's a bit pseudo-science but some Chinese wrote an article on the I-Ching
and patterns and it can have a bit of truth on it.

https://vixra.org/abs/2409.0093 [ Chinese, use whatever tool you like
to translate it]
by abdullahkhalids | 2025-12-26 21:30:07+00:00
From section 4 [1]

> If distribution of object code is made by offering access to copy from a designated place, then offering equivalent access to copy the source code from the same place satisfies the requirement to distribute the source code, even though third parties are not compelled to copy the source along with the object code.

Similar clauses in Sec 6.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/lgpl-2.1.html
by climb_stealth | 2025-12-26 21:30:14+00:00
The future is now. I personally know someone who does that. It's a fancy watch that only gets worn sometimes. And it's an automatic so it needs to be moved for it to keep running. So when they wear it every few days it is completely out of sync and they can't be bothered to adjust the time.

It is purely an accessory and completely useless for telling the time.

No judgment, but it just seems silly.

Apparently the correct way to solve it is to store the watch in a cradle that keeps it moving perpetually.
by SatvikBeri | 2025-12-26 21:30:17+00:00
> do wonder how hard it'd be to mask the default "marketing copywriter" tone of the LLM by asking it to assume some other tone in your prompt.

Fairly easy, in my wife's experience. She repeatedly got accused of using chatgpt in her original writing (she's not a native english speaker, and was taught to use many of the same idioms that LLMs use) until she started actually using chatgpt with about two pages of instructions for tone to "humanize" her writing. The irony is staggering.
by ribosometronome | 2025-12-26 21:30:21+00:00
I feel like most of these comments have ignored the article. They were taught how to read clocks, in first and second grade. Then they had no need of the skill for most of a decade and it atrophied. I suspect many would struggle to remember some of the things we had down well in elementary school, like writing fully in cursive, knowing the difference between types of rocks and clouds, or giving some full speech you had to memorize at the time (it was Patrick Henry's "Give Me Liberty" speech for me). And if you're someone who does know the difference between your cumulonimbus, cirrocumulus and such, rad! But do you suspect most of your peers remember?

I think the better question is, and the article poses this, why are students not bothering to refresh the skill now that it's necessary again?
by martin_bech | 2025-12-26 21:30:24+00:00
Security… The PDM is walled off completely, it cant install apps, its not on wifi, you cant change any settings. The issue is that a PDM technically could easily kill you, by giving you a lethal dose of insulin.

Funny thing is that the newer Omnipod 5 from the same company works with regular phones now, but only in th US.
by pxc | 2025-12-26 21:30:37+00:00
In Python's case, as the article describes quite clearly, the issue is that the design of "working software" (particularly setup.py) was bad to the point of insane (in much the same way as the NPM characteristics that enabled the recent Shai Hulud supply chain attacks, but even worse). At some point, compatibility with insanity has got to go.

Helpfully, though, uv retains compatibility with newer (but still well-established) standards in the Python community that don't share this insanity!
by firefax | 2025-12-26 21:30:54+00:00
Or maybe it's the other way around?

I was an undergrad, not in high school, but I basically designed and ran a project that led to a major publication that a useless postdoc who was foisted onto the lab leader for political reasons took credit for an "kindly" gave me last author on.

Later, when I was in my own PhD, my adviser wouldn't let me continue MY OWN RESEARCH because it might "look like" I was stealing his work, so I had to invent a different thesis topic.

The above was in CS, this is more STEM BTW -- it's perfectly possible to develop a new computational technique to "discover" 1.5m new interesting things in an existing data set -- it's impressive, but it's not on par with say, a botanist cataloging 1.5 million new flowers.
by gizmo686 | 2025-12-26 21:30:55+00:00
Having discrete jumps on a mechanical analog clock is not a particularly hard problem. Certainly easier that shrinking an accurate mechanical time keeping device down to wrist watch size.

For that matter getting a purely digital display out of a mechanical clock is not diffucult either either.

If there was a strong demand for such a product, they would have caught on before the 7 segment display made them the cheapest option. Possibly as a luxury or status symbol depending on how the cost worked out.
by tomhow | 2025-12-26 21:31:02+00:00
Please don't sermonize to distract from your own record of disrespect towards HN and its guidelines.

The people you claim have “allowed” this have maintained HN for many years – 13 in dang's case, the majority of its history. The primary reason this is a place where people want to participate is because of the guidelines that have been developed and refined since HN's inception, and that we spend hours each day upholding. People have been decrying the decline of HN since it was barely more than a few months old [1], yet it continues to grow as a place where people want to showcase interesting work, which is what we most care about.

Generated comments and posts are banned, and we state this frequently. I spend hours each day evaluating submissions and Show HNs to determine whether they're human-authored or AI-generated. We welcome people to flag generated content and email us so we can ban accounts with a pattern of posting it.

There is a cohort of community members who have demonstrated a commitment to making HN better over several years through: (a) submitting good articles, (b) posting thoughtful comments, (c) observing the guidelines, (d) flagging bad submissions and comments, and (e) emailing us to point out guidelines breaches and to discuss the healthy functioning of the site. These are the people we listen to when they express concerns about HN's health, because they've established a track record of genuine contribution and care over several years.

From you, we see two comments prior to 2023, and little or none of the above kinds of actions. Instead: ragey fulmination, hyperbole, and ascribing views to us without basis. All this while holding yourself up as HN's defender, having never undertaken the earnest, unglamorous, unseen work that other community members do to make this the place you now hold yourself up as seeking to heroically defend.

Please. If you really want HN to be better, you are most welcome to start doing the things that other community members quietly do every day to help make it better.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=373801
by bgbntty2 | 2025-12-26 21:31:07+00:00
Years ago I once wasted 2 hours arriving at 07:00 instead of 19:00. The AM/PM stuff is ridiculous, especially when people don't specify it. It was the time we were going to leave for a trip, so 07:00 or 19:00 were all acceptable times. So 24-hour time is obviously better. Most people don't even bother saying "AM" or "PM" if it even exists in their language or culture.

I think analog clocks are mostly for old people who don't like change, for people nostalgic for the past, for people who think like it makes them better, smarter, fancier of classier somehow - especially with expensive mechanical analog watches.
by wombat-man | 2025-12-26 21:31:19+00:00
Yeah. I really feel for this guy. I'm at a bigco too and at my yoe, I would really like to be officially "senior".

But if I'm being honest with myself I have a bit of growing to do before I am there. The limiting factor is definitely me. I am improving every year but my peers are excellent.

I'm not "senior", but I'm enjoying my work, I'm making more than I ever have, and I'm improving as an IC.

I can't quite tell from OPs account if he really is the one being wronged in this situation. But I also think places like Google are not for everyone. At least from this post, I think they'll be happy with the new opportunity.
by Forgeties79 | 2025-12-26 21:31:39+00:00
I definitely try to work on my listening every day, though I would say at best it’s been a mixed bag ha. Just something I’m always having to work on.

I like the “does it need to be said by me right now?” test a lot when I can actually remember to apply it in the moment. I forgot where I learned it but somebody basically put it like this: Before you say anything, ask yourself 3 questions

1. Does it need to be said?

2. Does it need to be said by me?

3. Does it need to be said by me right now?

You work your way down the list one at a time and if the answer is still yes by the time you hit 3, then go ahead.
by rkagerer | 2025-12-26 21:31:39+00:00
I hope you're not blaming the users.

If software developers designed hammers, you'd have to twist the handle before each swing to switch from tack to nail mode. And the two heads would be indistinguishable from each other.

If business MBA's designed them, you'd wind up with the SaaSy Claw 9000, free for the first month then $9.95 in recurring subscription fees, and compatible only with on-brand nails that each have a different little ad imprinted on the head.

But it doesn't matter, because by the end of the year all construction will be vibe-built from a single prompt to Clawde.ai, which will pound non-stop, burning through $1T of investor funds, and confidently hallucinate 70% of the nails until the roof collapses on the datacenter destroying the machine and civilization along with it, and a post-singularity survivor picks up a rock and looks calculatingly at a pointy shard of metal...
by davorak | 2025-12-26 21:31:50+00:00
> "thank you for all the hard work you've done"

Who is decided to say "thank you" to Rob Pike in this case? I am not sure there is anyone, so in my mind there is not real "thank you" here. As far as I can tell it is spam. Maybe spam that tries to deceive the receiver into think there is a "thank you" to lure them into interacting the the AI? "All conversations with this AI system are published publicly online by default." after all and Rob Pike's interactions would be good PR for the company.
by locknitpicker | 2025-12-26 21:32:40+00:00
> Are you saying that you can write tests at the same speed as AI can?

I feel this is a gross mischaracterization of any user flow involving using LLMs to generate code.

The hard part of generating code with LLMs is not how fast the code is generated. The hard part is verifying it actually does what it is expected to do. Unit tests too.

LLMs excel at spewing test cases, but you need to review each and every single test case to verify it does anything meaningful or valid and you need to iterate over tests to provide feedback on whether they are even green or what is the code coverage. That is the part that consumes time.

Claiming that LLMs are faster at generating code than you is like claiming that copy-and-pasting code out of Stack Overflow is faster than you writing it. Perhaps, but how can you tell if the code actually works?
by zephen | 2025-12-26 21:32:47+00:00
The problem is that popularity is governed by power laws.

Literally anybody could forsee that, _if_ something scales to millions of users, there will be issues. Some of the people who forsee that could even fix it. But they might spend their time optimizing for something that will never hit 1000 users.

Also, the problems discussed here are not that things don't work, it's that they get slow and consume too many resources.

So there is certainly an optimal time to fix such problems, which is, yes, OK, _before_ things get _too_ slow and consume _too_ many resources, but is most assuredly _after_ you have a couple of thousand users.
by kibwen | 2025-12-26 21:32:49+00:00
Learning to read Roman numerals is secretly an exercise in mental arithmetic. You're summing numbers in your head as you go, and occasionally you'll need to keep that sum off to the side while you subtract a second number from a third. So rather than viewing it as time wasted on learning an obsolete numeral system, instead consider it as a different way to frame a math exercise.
by imzadi | 2025-12-26 21:32:51+00:00
I'm on my about 10th re-read of Dungeon Crawler Carl. I also reread the Murderbot Diaries.

Some new listens that I liked:

* Blood Over Brighthaven

* Fleabag: A Monster Evolution LitRPG

* Flybot

* The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

* Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil
by zahlman | 2025-12-26 21:32:52+00:00
> Isn't assigning out what all made things fast presumptive without benchmarks?

We also have the benchmark of "pip now vs. pip years ago". That has to be controlled for pip version and Python version, but the former hasn't seen a lot of changes that are relevant for most cases, as far as I can tell.

> This also doesn't cover subtle things. Unsure if rkyv is being used to reduce the number of times that TOML is parsed but TOML parse times do show up in benchmarks in Cargo and Cargo/uv's TOML parser is much faster than Python's (note: Cargo team member, `toml` maintainer). I wish the TOML comparison page was still up and showed actual numbers to be able to point to.

This is interesting in that I wouldn't expect that the typical resolution involves a particularly large quantity of TOML. A package installer really only needs to look at it at all when building from source, and part of what these standards have done for us is improve wheel coverage. (Other relevant PEPs here include 600 and its predecessors.) Although that has also largely been driven by education within the community, things like e.g. https://blog.ganssle.io/articles/2021/10/setup-py-deprecated... and https://pradyunsg.me/blog/2022/12/31/wheels-are-faster-pure-... .
by observationist | 2025-12-26 21:32:53+00:00
They want the same thing as every other organism wants - maximal exploitation of a niche by a lineage. Each adaptation that survives overwhelmingly tends toward advantage in the exploitation of a niche - fending off predation, establishing control over resources, symbiotic support, parasitic drain, and a myriad other capabilities that are highly environment dependent.

Just look at antelope in north america - they evolved incredible speed and agility in order to outrun and evade megafauna predators, but there's nothing left nearly fast enough to be a threat to them. Environments can change, and leave an organism with features that are no longer necessary or even beneficial in terms of overall quality of life and energy efficiency. The slightest noise can disturb a herd of antelope into bolting as if there were prairie lions or sabertooth tigers on the prowl. They don't need to be hypervigilant in the same way, and it burns a lot of calories to move the way they do, so whitetail deer and other slower species that aren't quite as reactive or fast are better at exploiting the ecosystem as it is.

With mushrooms that have mysterious chemistry, there will be a lot of those sorts of vestigial features. Extinct species of insects and animals and plants will have been the target of specific features, or they might end up in novel environments where other features are particularly suitable, but some become completely counterproductive in practice.

As far as psilocybe mushrooms go, in lower quantities, they actually provide a cognitive advantage sufficient to make a symbiotic relationship plausible between mammals and the mushrooms, albeit indirect. Animals under low levels of psilocybin influence have better spatial perception, can better spot movement in low light conditions, and there's a slight reduction in the neural influence of trauma inspired networks. Large quantities can be beneficial in a number of abstract ways. Any animal that sought those mushrooms out could thereby gain adaptive advantage over competitors that didn't partake.

Having an extremely toxic substance might be useful for killing large organisms and their decomposition either feeding the fungi directly, or feeding the organisms beneficial to the fungi. This can be plants, other fungi, or the feces of scavengers. Horizontal transfer might occur if there's an initial beneficial relationship, animals like the smell and taste of a thing, and then the fungi picks up the killing poison, and the consequences are sufficiently beneficial to outbreed the safe ones.

If too many become deadly, animals get killed off, and the non-deadly ones tend to gain the upper ground, since they aren't spending any resources on producing any poisons. Where there's a balance of intermittent similar but poisonous mushrooms, they take down enough animals to optimize their niche.

There are dozens of such indirect webs of influences and consequences that spread from seemingly simple adaptations, and it's amazing that things seem so balanced and stable as they do. It's a constant arms race of attacks and temptations and strategies.
by eszed | 2025-12-26 21:33:03+00:00
Yeah, I loved my university-level grammar class, which I took as a requirement for a TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) certification. But I was able to speak and read and write at an extremely advanced level long before that. In fact - though I got a private kick out of breaking down sentences, and it certainly was a help teaching second-language speakers - I don't think it helped my own ability to express myself in English in any way. Grammar's fun for nerds, and useful for adult language acquisition, but not worth the time it takes to teach to the general population.
by haensi | 2025-12-26 21:33:10+00:00
I’m a Christian as well and spent a day in Oxford earlier this year. After spending some time at Magdalen College, I bought every book I could by C.S. Lewis and just finished Letters to Malcolm (on prayer) today.

His refreshingly honest take is very relatable, humorous and encouraging.

I can highly recommend it if you’re interested in prayer life (and how to use powerful formulations in letters)
by systemtest | 2025-12-26 21:33:43+00:00
Wow. A device in 2025 with a non-detachable USB-A cable? That sounds like a horrible design decision from both a repairability and future-proofing standpoint. My keyboard has a USB-C port on the side so you can plug in whatever cable you want, A or C, long, short, curled, braided. It even connects to my phone without dongles.
by steve_adams_86 | 2025-12-26 21:34:05+00:00
I'm my experience this is definitely where rust shined. The language wasn't really what made the project succeed so much as having relatively curious, meticulous, detail-oriented people on hand who were interested in solving hard problems.

Sometimes I thought our teams would be a terrible fit for more cookie-cutter applications where rapid development and deployment was the primary objective. We got into the weeds all the time (sometimes because of rust itself), but it happened to be important to do so.

Had we built those projects with JavaScript or Python I suspect the outcomes would have been worse for reasons apart from the language choice.
by lacoolj | 2025-12-26 21:34:29+00:00
So essentially, it's like this?

"we plan on users having a phone to connect to it and use primarily. FDA requires a primary/backup. well it's already phone-controlled, go find a phone that works with it. needs to be cheap, cuz no one will really use it anyway"

That makes a little more sense. I was imagining the development process involving both devices, rather than one device first, then determining what the second would be later.

Thanks for the insight!
by reissbaker | 2025-12-26 21:34:33+00:00
According to Wikipedia, the Yunnan mushrooms indeed have their hallucinogens broken down after cooking: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucinogenic_bolete_mushroom

Good guess!

Although, the local hospital records imply that hallucinations can last for days or even months, so uh, probably not a great idea to go looking for them...