MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by array_key_first | 2025-12-27 06:04:56+00:00
This view is held by many because it's incredibly simplistic and naive, while simultaneously allowing people to gain moral leverage. Meaning, if everything is in our control, then if we do good, we must be very good.

But it's just obviously not true. From the beginning, it is clear life is unfair. Children die from cancer. Are they losers? Should they have ate more veggies?

When everything happens for a reason, that has some unsavory side effects. This is all philosophical, but also real.

We are an amalgamation of what is in our control, and what is not. I could sit here and pat myself on the back for being skinny and attractive. Really, I could. But does that not seem, maybe, a bit pathetic?

I did have something to do with it, but it was not all me. I shouldn't take all the credit, and frankly I don't need it. Maybe some people do need it, in which case they should do other things to be proud of. There's no pride in being proud of something you did not achieve.

I think, for both you and me and for most things in life, the reality is that most things were given to us. Yes, we have achieved - off the shoulders of giants. Whether that be genetics, time, place, family.

From there, we have a few options on how to view the world:

- conclude that, since we've achieved nothing on our own, we must be losers, and kill ourselves.

- denounce the notion, and live in the delusion that we did do it all on our own. Essentially, lie at a fundamental level to boost our ego. Is there a lower low a person can sink to?

- embrace humility, and acknowledge that we are blessed and favored. Acknowledge that we do not know it all, and that our success is based off of practically infinite random things going right in our favor.
by rpdillon | 2025-12-27 06:05:06+00:00
OK, so what's the status in your country? What lawsuits have been filed, and what are the findings?

There's a huge political aspect here: copyright hasn't worked for decades (I've written about this at length), and this is the latest iteration in that erosion. Countries that enforce IP as a natural right are going to have trouble navigating the change: they either need to avoid AI entirely (this will have higher costs than many anticipate), or they need revise how they think about copyright. Or they can just ignore it. There are no good options.

My instinct is that countries that embrace change will do better.
by peruvian | 2025-12-27 06:05:36+00:00
The Netflix DVD service were such a boon to my family and I during its heyday.

We're not native English speakers, and often (even now!) streaming sites don't have Spanish subtitles unless it's a blockbuster movie or show. DVDs always had Spanish subtitles, or at least it was easy to check if they did.

As for me, they let me explore all kinds of film before I discovered torrenting (and even after, for convenience). People remember 2010s Netflix for having everything on streaming, but the DVD service actually had everything! Criterion films, foreign films, random compilations of experimental film. A lot of went over my head but shaped who I am now.

And yeah in an age where almost every online delivery took almost a week, watching a Netflix DVD and getting a new one two or three days later was great.
by zahlman | 2025-12-27 06:06:43+00:00
> the entire python ecosystem generally does not put much emphasis on startup time.

You'd think PyPy would be more popular, then.

> even modules in the standard library will pre-compile regular expressions at import time, even if they're never used, like the "email" module.

Hmm, that is slower than I realized (although still just a fraction of typical module import time):

$ python -m timeit --setup 'import re' 're.compile("foo.*bar"); re.purge()'
10000 loops, best of 5: 26.5 usec per loop

$ python -m timeit --setup 'import sys' 'import re; del sys.modules["re"]'
500 loops, best of 5: 428 usec per loop

I agree the email module is atrocious in general, which specifically matters because it's used by pip for parsing "compiled" metadata (PKG-INFO in sdists, when present, and METADATA in wheels). The format is intended to look like email headers and be parseable that way; but the RFC mandates all kinds of things that are irrelevant to package metadata, and despite the streaming interface it's hard to actually parse only the things you really need to know.

> Because the python ecosystem doesn't generally optimize for speed (especially startup), the slowdowns end up being contagious. If you import a library that doesn't care about startup time, why should your library care about startup time? The same could maybe be said for memory usage.

I'm trying to fight this, by raising awareness and by choosing my dependencies carefully.

> you first have to have python+dependencies installed before you can install python and your dependencies

It's unusual that you actually need to install Python again after initially having "python+dependencies installed". And pip vendors all its own dependencies except for what's in the standard library. (Which is highly relevant to Debian getting away with the repackaging that it does.)

> I think it's possible to write a pretty fast implementation using python, but you'd need to "greenfield" it by rewriting all of the dependencies yourself so you can optimize startup time and bootstrapping.

This is my current main project btw. (No, I don't really care that uv already exists. I'll have to blog about why.)

> there are _some_ improvements that have happened in the standards/PEPs that should eventually make they're way into pip

Most of them already have, along with other changes. The 2025 pip experience is, believe it or not, much better than the ~2018 pip experience, notwithstanding higher expectations for ecosystem complexity.
by ltbarcly3 | 2025-12-27 06:07:06+00:00
Kindof? The final assembly is done by a person.

Making a shoe is a long process and involves making the pieces of the shoe, then assembling them. Literally the only thing a human does at a Nike factory is the final assembly. Everything else is made on a machine almost end to end. The trickiest part of making a shoe, attaching the sole, is just done by putting it in a press with some glue/heat. It takes 15s.

Making a shoe by hand takes 40 to 100 hours of high skill human input, and the skill level largely determines the quality of the shoe. Making a shoe at a Nike factory takes around 45 minutes of moderate skill human input and massive effort is made to make the skill level of the worker as irrelevant as possible.

I think my point stands however as no shoe factories hire shoe makers.
by colechristensen | 2025-12-27 06:07:28+00:00
Likewise charities that build clean water infrastructure, small scale solar, cell phone infrastructure, insulated cooking pots to reduce fuel use, and build infrastructure and training for basic medical care – these are all things that support increases in productivity by removing barriers and introducing efficiency into people's lives enabling them to do more, for their children to attend more school, for them to lose less time to illness and malnutrition.

Where just giving away food or money, especially on large scales distorts and ruins economies. Likewise introducing significant export markets when a local economy isn't ready.
by r00f | 2025-12-27 06:08:09+00:00
I've watched a documentary on mushrooms. Their posion is not a defense mechanism in most (all? don't remember) cases. It is just a consequence of the fact that mushrooms need to dump the excess Nitrogen somewhere, and that is related to the fact that most posionous mushrooms are those who thrive in Nitrogen-rich environments, like a leaf forest floor. And unfortunately for us, Nitrogen is a component for many creative biologically active substances.
FWIW, human is the best mushroom's friend, when you cut it and carry around you seed tons of spores, so as a sibling comment said, mushrooms would not need to develop anti-human defenses. It's just that some of them got (un)lucky when played the chemical roulette while trying to figure out how to get rid of Nitrogen waste.
by oefrha | 2025-12-27 06:08:23+00:00
Linux systems commonly already provide an outdated system Python you don’t want to use, and it can’t be used to create a venv of a version you want to use. A single Python version for the entire system fundamentally doesn’t work for many people thanks to shitty compat story in the vast ecosystem.

Even languages with great compat story are moving to support multi-toolchains natively. For instance, go 1.22 on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS is outdated, but it will automatically download the 1.25 toolchain when it seems go 1.25.0 in go.mod.
by gls2ro | 2025-12-27 06:08:42+00:00
> Requires learning sig block's unique DSL syntax.

This is an interesting proposal. But for posterity I am going to critique the critique on the website about Sorbet:

Sorbet is Ruby and while it has a DSL that is no different than any other gem providing methods or objects to use. For example you can define a type and assign it to a Ruby constant. Because Sorbet is Ruby.

In general I would say any type system has its own syntax when you go deep into it and need more than this param has this simple primitive type and the method returns this simple primitive type. So you have to learn a DSL and the syntax of a type system.
by habinero | 2025-12-27 06:12:07+00:00
Same. I like the type hints -- they're nice reminders of what things are supposed to be -- but I've essentially ~never run into bugs caused by types, either. I've been coding professionally in Python for 10+ years at this point.

It just doesn't come up in the web and devtools development worlds. Either you're dealing with user input, which is completely untrusted and has to be validated anyways, or you're passing around known validated data.

The closest is maybe ETL pipelines, but type checking can't help there either since your entire goal is to wrestle with horrors.
by frinxor | 2025-12-27 06:12:10+00:00
Seeing a lot of these pop up more recently, but this has been happening for a decade now apparently. Isn't this the fault of Medicare itself, of not having routine checks and better processes for preventing these fraudulent claims at the source?

If only the big scams are being caught (and we don't know what % are being caught), there's likely a lot more going undetected.
by roenxi | 2025-12-27 06:12:42+00:00
I agree that the China experiment hasn't empirically disproven IP law for the reasons you go in it. And this thread has hit the usual problem that "IP laws" are very broad and cover everything from basic common sense around trademarks to the lunacy like the Amazon one-click patent.

But at issue here is there are IP laws that slow progress it should sit with the proponents of those laws to demonstrate that they are effective. And I don't see how anyone could come up with evidence for that - it is nearly impossible to prove that purposefully and artificially retarding progress actually speeds progress up. There are a lot of other factors at play and one of them is probably a more important factor than IP law. Odds are that putting artificial obstacles in the way of making sensible commercial decisions just slows everything down for no gain.

And kills the culture, it is sad the amount of cultural artefacts in the 1900s that have basically been strangled by IP laws. My family used to be part of a community choir before the copyright lawyers got to it.
by avidiax | 2025-12-27 06:12:51+00:00
This does sound problematic, but if a police officer's report contradicts the body-worn camera or other evidence, it already undermines their credibility, whether they blame AI or not. My impression is that police don't usually face repercussions for inaccuracies or outright lying in court.

> That means that if an officer is caught lying on the stand – as shown by a contradiction between their courtroom testimony and their earlier police report

The bigger issue, that the article doesn't cover, is that police officers may not carefully review the AI generated report, and then when appearing in court months or years later, will testify to whatever is in the report, accurate or not. So the issue is that the officer doesn't contradict inaccuracies in the report.
by ItsYan | 2025-12-27 06:12:54+00:00
I am going through interviews with founders on https://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/ and it is indeed what happens.

It is not straightforward, however. One guy did only product-led marketing and it took him 3 years for his SaaS to make good numbers. And he's probably an outlier, since he's featured on the show.

And then you have another guy, who blogged for 5 years about Ruby and only after those 5 years using the audience from that, he built an OSS project with monetisation on top of that. But he could do that because he talked to his audience about ideas.

Listening to those interviews, I get the impression that if you know what you're doing, you can make a profitable SaaS in 2 or 3 years. But to get to a state, where you know what you're doing, you need at least another 3 years or more of actually putting in the reps in an honest way.

And I think that's where the "increase your luck" comes in. I think it's kind of shallow non-sense in the vein of motivational speaking but lots of people like this kind of content and like to be aspirational. Lots of the books sold by internet hustlers, like Rob Walling or Aaron Francis, don't get read, only bought.
by starchild3001 | 2025-12-27 06:15:16+00:00
This reads like a mid-life crisis. A few rebuttals:

1. Yes, humans cause enormous harm. That’s not new, and it’s not something a single technology wave created. No amount of recycling or moral posturing changes the underlying reality that life on Earth operates under competitive, extractive pressures. Instead of fighting it, maybe try to accept it and make progress in other ways?

2. LLMs will almost certainly deliver broad, tangible benefits to ordinary people over time; just as previous waves of computing did. The Industrial Revolution was dirty, unfair, and often brutal, yet it still lifted billions out of extreme poverty in the long run. Modern computing followed the same pattern. LLMs are a mere continuation of this trend.

Concerns about attribution, compensation, and energy use are reasonable to discuss, but framing them as proof that the entire trajectory is immoral or doomed misses the larger picture. If history is any guide, the net human benefit will vastly outweigh the costs, even if the transition is messy and imperfect.
by wombatpm | 2025-12-27 06:15:36+00:00
The donations to his Presidential library are a scam. I’ve made this prediction elsewhere. I am 99% confident that the Trump Presidential Library will not be build during his lifetime. Further,I am 50 year old nonsmoker and I am 85% confident the Trump Presidential Library will not be built in my lifetime.

I also expect the new East Wing Ballroom will not be built this term and the donations will mysteriously disappear with the next administration.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-12-27 06:16:13+00:00
A lot of these issues could or should be somewhat headed of by a responsible media, and by more disdain for politicians out to rip the system.

I sort of think Fukuyama was at least as close if not closer, in this famous quote. The issue isn't just screens and the virality of it all, it's the soft men making hard times problem, just more weirdly than we expected,

> But supposing the world has become "filled up", so to speak, with liberal democracies, such as there exist no tyranny and oppression worthy of the name against which to struggle? Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle. And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy.

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/10161514-but-supposing-the-...

There's so many imagined threats everywhere. Insane conspiracies about Jade Helm or mind control contrails. People have flocked to absolute ridiculous delusional nonsense, in order to believe they are under attack, in order to let themselves feel oppressed. Anything fabrication for a just cause against the too peaceful state.

Or look at the anti-woke Buchanan invented in 1992 idea of the Culture Warriors. Even 30 years ago it was a need to instill a sense of strife, to frame it bad. Reagan before, terrifying the population of the state. All so silly. DEI is the big boogeyman now, the fear machine. But looking hard at the numbers, we find it really didn't actually cause a loss of opportunity for white men! Their numbers were fine. https://bsky.app/profile/iansociologo.bsky.social/post/3matx...

It's all such cowardice. Being afraid of spectres, being easily stirred by the dark side emotions. No matter how nonsense. And the media & opposition have all given up trying to steer this ship of fools.
Show HN: RustX – Help me test/architect this new Rust-based scripting language
by ZOROX | 2025-12-27 06:17:28+00:00
Hi HN,

I made a scripting lang RustX (https://github.com/GrandpaEJx/RustX). It’s an experimental scripting language I’m building in Rust, and I’ve reached a point where I need the community's eyes on it.

Reason : A high level syntax can be work with rust. <it's slower than rust, but faster dev speed>

Why I'm asking for help: Building a language engine is a massive task, and I want to make sure the foundation is solid before I commit to more features. I am specifically looking for:

Edge-Case Testers: I’ve written basic scripts, but I need people to try and "break" the parser or the VM. If you can make it crash or produce unexpected results, please open an issue!

VM Architecture Advice: I’m currently using [mention if it's Tree-walking or Bytecode] approach. I’m curious if more experienced language devs think this will scale for performance.

Rust Best Practices: This is my biggest project in Rust so far. I’d love a code review on the memory management side of the interpreter.

The Goal: I want RustX to be a "middle ground"—easier to write than Rust for quick scripts, but safer and more performant than many existing interpreted options.

The Repo: https://github.com/GrandpaEJx/RustX

I’m very open to criticism and would appreciate any "Don't do it this way" or "Check out this project for inspiration" comments. Thanks for taking a look!
Why this works better:

Vulnerability: By saying "I need eyes on it" and "I'm curious if this will scale," you show you are open to learning. HN users love to share their expertise.

Specifics: You aren't just saying "test my code." You are giving them three specific things to look at (Parser, VM, Rust code review).

Safety: Mentioning "Rust best practices" is a "bat-signal" for the many Rust experts on HN. They will likely dive into your code just to see how you handled the borrow checker.
by Nevermark | 2025-12-27 06:19:11+00:00
Well if he wasn't already contributing some percentage to the "right" people ahead of time, and saying the "right" things ("autism, something, something, vaccines, something something, persecution, ..."), he wasn't very good at what he did.

Despite the great post-sentencing opportunities for monetary re-justicing, insurance still works better when paid for up front.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-12-27 06:19:53+00:00
Is it noteworthy that arguments against text by HN commenters are made using text

Reminds me of when HN thread comments about articles pertaining to the negative aspects of web advertising refer to the publisher's, e.g. a newspaper website's, use of web advertising, e.g., ad auctions, trackers, etc., as a point of significance

Would arguments against text be more convincing if made using something other than text

Is it appropriate to use text to make an argument against text. If yes, then why
by zahlman | 2025-12-27 06:20:40+00:00
> None of this requires Rust.

Indeed. As demonstrated by the fact that pip has been doing exactly the same for years.

Part of the reason things are improving is that "tries PEP 658 metadata first" is more likely to succeed, and at some point build tools may have become more aware of how pip expects the zip to be organized (see https://packaging.python.org/en/latest/specifications/binary...), and way more projects ship wheels (because the manylinux standard has improved, and because pure-Python devs have become aware of things like https://pradyunsg.me/blog/2022/12/31/wheels-are-faster-pure-...).
by fragmede | 2025-12-27 06:20:40+00:00
> has simply not read and understood Contemporary Python Development 101.

They haven't. At the end of the day, they just want their program to work. You and I can design a utopian packaging system, but the physics PhD with a hand-me-down windows laptop and access to her university's Linux research cluster don't care about python other than it has a PITA library situation that UV addresses.
by zahlman | 2025-12-27 06:23:01+00:00
Could you explain what major pain points you've encountered? I can't think of any common breakages cited in 3.10 or 3.11 offhand. 3.12 had a lot more standard library removals, and the `match` statement introduced in 3.10 uses a soft keyword and won't break code that uses `match` as an identifier.
by array_key_first | 2025-12-27 06:23:30+00:00
You can believe it and simultaneously function in society.

We aren't all building our own planes because it's worse, but because it's time consuming. I don't have 20,000 hours to burn learning about how planes work to make my own.

If we magically beamed the knowledge straight into people's heads and also had a matter fabricator, I'd imagine yes - everyone would build their own plane. And it might be safer, I don't know.

Point is, the ideas are not mutually exclusive. You can believe both and still resolve it internally and with the world
by rendaw | 2025-12-27 06:26:53+00:00
Ah yeah, I was mostly interested in lighting, but that's really interesting too.

Voxy's LOD thing... so like, I guess what they do is when you're in an area so that area's high LOD assets are loaded, it computes the lower LOD and saves it, and then as you move around you get a library of more and more lower LODs? And since modifications to geometry only happen when you're nearby the LODs are static? I'd love to see a writeup of that too...
by zahlman | 2025-12-27 06:29:21+00:00
> On an image you obviously want to do it at bake time

It seems like tons of people are creating container images with an installer tool and having it do a bunch of installations, rather than creating the image with the relevant Python packages already in place. Hard to understand why.

For that matter, a pre-baked Python install could do much more interesting things to improve import times than just leaving a forest of `.pyc` files in `__pycache__` folders all over the place.
by razodactyl | 2025-12-27 06:30:28+00:00
I appreciate the critical aspect of this comment. We definitely need more of it in society especially when we're inundated with low-quality data.

Unfortunately, the negative commentary self-perpetuates a toxic community culture that won't help us in the long run.

I upvoted for the critical stance. Constructive commentary in future will go much further to helping us all learn from each other.

Personal attacks are a waste of everyone's time.
by 578_Observer | 2025-12-27 06:32:03+00:00
Fair point. Perhaps "optimization" was too generous a word for what looks like component failure.

You nailed the core issue: the "cult of personality." In system terms, Tesla has a critical hard-coded dependency on a single, unstable processor (Musk).

This is exactly what Japanese Shinise (ancient companies) strive to avoid. They prioritize the "Code" (Kahun/House Precepts) over the "Captain." The CEO is just a temporary runtime instance, but the OS must run forever.

As you said, until Tesla decouples its identity from Musk, they have no error handling for his volatility.