MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bikeshaving | 2025-12-27 18:40:04+00:00
I find that asking Claude to develop and Codex to review the uncommitted changes will typically result in high-value code, and eliminate all of Claude’s propensity to perpetually lie and cheat. Sometimes I also ideate with Claude and then ask Claude to get ChatGPT’s opinion on the matter. I started by copy-pasting responses but I found tmux to be a nice way to get rid of the middleman.
by antonvs | 2025-12-27 18:40:14+00:00
You’re very adamant about not doing an obvious comparison. You want to stop thinking at that point. It’s an emotional reaction, not an intellectual one. Quite an interesting one as well, that possibly suggests a threat response.

The assumption you seem to keep making is that things like “clever statistics” and “linear algebra” simply have no bearing on human intelligence. Why do you think that? Is it a religious view, that e.g. you believe humans have a soul that somehow connects to our intelligence, making it forever out of reach of machine emulation?

Because unless that’s your position, then the question of how human intelligence differs from current machine intelligence, the question that you simply refuse to contemplate, is one of the more important questions in this space.

The insult I see to intelligence here is the total lack of intellectual curiosity that wants to shoot down an entire line of thinking for reasons that apparently can’t be articulated.
by teiferer | 2025-12-27 18:41:08+00:00
I'd love to know whether that story is actually true.

Some dude hears somebody tell a story about sth 20 years ago, puts it in a blog, and here we are on HN, nobody questioning whether it's actually accurate. Of course Raymond Chen isn't just any random person, but the more important it would be to actually check? I mean, who hasn't heard people tell stories from decades ago, including colleagues reminiscing about the good old times "before y'all were born" only to realize later that it was vastly exaggerated or even outright made up.

Anybody around here with some actual first-hand info or at least another source besides this blog entry? I'd love to hear!
by syn-nine | 2025-12-27 18:41:25+00:00
Thanks! I really like how I combined the parameter stack and scratchpad from FORTH with the call stack from x86 style assembly. It makes it really easy to get multiple return values from functions. I also really like how lists and the loadat and storeat bytecodes turned out. It became a really elegant way to chain list indexes by pushing and popping addresses from the parameter stack. This was my first use of the scratchpad pattern and I felt like it was a very nice solution to returning temporarily allocated memory up the call chain / up scope without requiring memory management. I was also really pleased with how the new() keyword recursively deep copies something out of scratch to the heap.

It could use some cleanup though as the speed of the jam left little time to think about doing things in a sustainable way. I'm not sure I like the var keyword as I typically prefer to be explicit about types.

It really turned out pretty powerful though and I think it could be really useful as a library for game scripting.
by wredcoll | 2025-12-27 18:41:31+00:00
> This really is all wrong. One might think this based on pitches from different times but all Empires are evil by their definition and America has always been that, always

Again, the problem with this train of logic is you inevitable condemn everyone and everything as evil, at which point the word completely loses its meaning. Evil is only useful as a term if there are actually things that are not evil.

America has certainly done immoral, unethical and frankly evil things. It's also done moral, beautiful and even heroic things. It's a big complicated entity made up of literally millions of people and trying to summarize it as "good or evil" is pointless.

The reason this nuance matters is that we want, need to encourage doing good and the first step to doing that is to actually be able to distinguish between good and evil.
by alwillis | 2025-12-27 18:41:38+00:00
Apple essentially invented color matching on personal computers back in the classic Mac OS days; it's hard to believe after all this time, they're not dealing with color correctly.

The WebKit blog from 2016:

WebKit color-matches all images on both iOS and macOS. This means that if the image has a color profile, we will make sure the colors in the image are accurately represented on the display, whether it is normal or wide gamut. This is useful since many digital cameras don’t use sRGB in their raw format, so simply interpreting the red, green and blue values as such is unlikely to produce the correct color. Typically, you won’t have to do anything to get this color-matching. Nearly all image processing software allows you to tag an image with a color profile, and many do it by default.

[1]: https://webkit.org/blog/6682/improving-color-on-the-web/
by jqpabc123 | 2025-12-27 18:41:39+00:00
then who would be facing consequences for that?

Your analogy is bad.

"Some little on-line forum" with a few angry users is not really comparable to a mega-corp with billions of users.

Lawyers could but are unlikely to go after a few misguided individual users for slander. As they say, you can't get blood out of a rock. Mega-corp is a much more tempting target.

Legal liability for bad AI is just getting started but I expect lawyers are giddy with anticipation.
by m3047 | 2025-12-27 18:41:41+00:00
Upvoted because I think it's an important topic, but this take causes me to question the motive for the article... which ironically is my big concern with using LLMs to write stuff generally (the unconscious censoring / proctoring of voice and viewpoint):

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 – they could point to the contradictory parts of their report and say,
“the AI wrote that.”

IANAL but if they signed off on it then presumably they own it. Same as if it was Microsoft Dog, an intern, whatever. If they said "the AI shat it" then I'd ask "what parts did you find unacceptable and edit?" and then expect we'd get the juicy stuff hallucinations or "I don't recall". Did they write this, or are they testifying to the veracity of hearsay?

From what I've seen reports written by / for lawyers / jurists / judges already "pull" to a voice and viewpoint; I'll leave it there.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-12-27 18:41:52+00:00
> get the bloody USD printing machine under control

The amount the US government spends on debt service is already unreasonable. If the US dollar lost reserve status, the first thing that would happen is that the Fed would have to buy the debt with newly created money to prevent bond rates from causing interest payments to explode. Meanwhile the act of other countries unloading US dollar reserves would cause significant inflation in itself.

Basically, loss of reserve status = hyperinflation. At least at the outset.

On the plus side, that would pretty much wipe out the excessive amount of US consumer debt as long as wages stay consistent with the value of the dollar.
Ask HN: Best Email AI Assistant?
by watson | 2025-12-27 18:42:21+00:00
I’m looking for an AI assistant that works with Gmail. My main requirements are that it should remind me of important mails requiring my attention and draft replies. Pricing is almost irrelevant if it can remove the stress, mental load and missed emails that is my current reality. But there’s a lot of options out there. Which do you recommend and why?
by smeeagain2 | 2025-12-27 18:42:45+00:00
The subject of the conversation is that the U.S. government and various other parasitic entities (but I repeat myself) are engaging in a wide scale weather modifications without your permission, right over your head, while gaslighting you into believing any number of various lies as to whether this or happening or not and for what purpose. This is a fact. This is a much more important subject than your "Muh Feelings", which in this context, simply aren't worthy of respect or discussion, as you in fact seem to be totally clueless.

Which is exactly what OP meant by "being embarassed for you." It's really sad how ignorant the average person is about everything. The real problem however and what is so contemptible is your arrogance, which prevents you from ever learning anything.
by jMyles | 2025-12-27 18:43:09+00:00
> for texts like police reports

If what you mean is, "texts upon which the singular violence of the state is legitimately imposed", then a simple solution (and I believe, on sufficiently long time scales, the happily inevitable one) is to abolish police.

I can't fathom, in an age where we have ubiquitous cameras as eyewitnesses, instant communications capability to declare emergencies and request aid from nearby humans, that we need an exclusivity entity whose job it is to advance safety in our communities. It's so, so, so much more trouble that it's worth.
by swat535 | 2025-12-27 18:43:26+00:00
This is because, actually practicing the Christian faith vs simply performing theatrics are different things.

From my own experience of someone who practices regularly, there is a minority of people who really follow it. They show up to the daily Mass, perform Works of Mercy, do charitable work, etc. The truth is that Christianity demands _a lot_ from you, including saying no to greed, lust and gluttony.

How many people are willing to say no to an extra 200k so that someone less fortunate might benefit? Or open their homes to strangers, so that they may not freeze in the cold?

I think that one of the worst thing that has happened to our faith is its hijacking by the government for political gain (some lower Churches like Evangelicals are currently _heavily_ suffering due to this).

I'm a Catholic but when I speak to my Protestant friends, they feel the same about their communities. Luckily, we still have each other and Christ to help guide us.
by MisterMower | 2025-12-27 18:43:39+00:00
It’s probably all of these factors, but price is going up due to supply inelasticity.

It’s similar to oil: demand is what it is, and even if it doesn’t fluctuate much, a refinery exploding or political instability in a producer nation can cause prices to rise by large amounts, even if supply only drops by a few hundred thousand barrels per year.

In the 1980’s when the Hunt brothers tried to corner the market, households responded by liquidating their Sterling silver and other silver items. That’s ultimately why their strategy failed. Today that domestic source of supply is much smaller, contributing even more to supply inelasticity.

This is more of a supply story than a demand story.
by perching_aix | 2025-12-27 18:43:46+00:00
Something is off about this.

> Plot twist; here was never a gAMA chunk to begin with!

But I do see a gAMA chunk in the file?

> 00 00 00 04 67 41 4d 41 00 03 5b 5e 5c ff 26 78

Which decodes to a gamma of 2.19998. Conversely, I don't see any bundled ICC profiles (iCCP chunks).

Mind you, I am able to reproduce the different colors, so something is indeed wrong. Chrome (Windows) and the Photos app (MS Store) both present it as a washed out, ghostly image (I wouldn't describe it as foggy, as that to me suggests a blur as well, but alas). In contrast, when I open it in MS Paint (the modern, MS Store app version), I do get saturated colors.
by yndoendo | 2025-12-27 18:43:52+00:00
There is a high chance the extra nuts and bolts added to Windows, which slow it down, are IT required softwoods, settings, and security enhancements.

Took me almost a year to get a separate laptop laptop for office and development. Their Enhanced Security prevented me from testing administrative code features and broke Visual Studios bug submission system, which Microsoft requires you to use for posting software bugs.

By the way, I can brake Windows simply by running their PowerShell utilities to configure NICs. Windows is not the stable product people think it is.
by tripletao | 2025-12-27 18:44:08+00:00
I spent some time looking for sources for the various "railroad investment as % of GDP" numbers floating around, and I don't think they're very good. The modern concept of GDP didn't even exist back then, so the denominator is calculated in retrospect from the limited contemporary data. The numerator is more confident, but the papers I found mostly showed closer to 3%. A pretty wide range is at least defensible though, and I guess VCs are comparing against the high end for obvious reasons.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44805979

This AI investment is interesting because it's mostly not in durable goods, unlike the railroad's rails and (most importantly) land. The buildings and power infrastructure for the datacenters could retain value for decades, but the servers won't unless something goes badly wrong. I believe this is the largest investment in human history justified primarily by the anticipated value of intellectual property.
by jacquesm | 2025-12-27 18:45:18+00:00
Well, in this case the proof is there for your perusal: it works. They have ironed out most if not all of the kinks and manufacturers are pissed that they got shown up by a bunch of people who they consider to be subjects, not having agency. Because after all, if a bunch of ordinary but skilled people can do this their justification for obscene pricing all but evaporates.

I look at these companies for a living. Every two weeks on average another one. I see their codebases. I interview their engineers. There is no magic sauce. It is rare that you come across a company that really gets engineering and that doesn't see the product as a minor obstacle on the way to profits. Medical device companies in general are not exceptional in this sense (though I am aware of one that is).

But fine, you think that the people that work for these companies are somehow better than that ones whose lives are at stake. I beg to differ.
by skydhash | 2025-12-27 18:45:23+00:00
Rebasing is basically working at the meta layer, when you are editing patches instead of the code that is being versionned. And due to that, it requires good understanding of the VCS.

Too often, merges is only understood as bring the changes from there to here, it may be useful especially if you have release candidates branches and hotfixes. And you want to keep a trave of that process. But I much prefer rebasing and/or squashing PR onto the main branch.
by usernamed7 | 2025-12-27 18:45:28+00:00
hey this is pretty cool! very interesting concept to transpile to rbs.

in most of my coding career (rails) i have not needed types. But when i was working on a large codebase with many teams, the lack of types was a recurring issue. now i work in a SOA and face different coupling challenges.

But i much prefer this syntax to what RBS required.
by oefrha | 2025-12-27 18:45:31+00:00
Okay, since there’s so much stuff to digest here and apparently there are issues designated as wontfix by GnuPG maintainers, can someone more in the loop tell us whether using gpg signatures on git commits/tags is vulnerable? And is there any better alternative going forward? Like is signing with SSH keys considered more secure now? I certainly want to get rid of gpg from my life if I can, but I also need to make sure commits/tags bearing my name actually come from me.
by SecretDreams | 2025-12-27 18:45:31+00:00
I actually feel like this for social media and other big tech things too.

These mega corps should be forced to have to offer stripped down free versions w/ no strings attached and privacy if they're also offering commercial versions that benefit directly from internet infrastructure they haven't paid for and targeted ads/data theft that nobody can decline.

A bit like fedora and redhat.
by jMyles | 2025-12-27 18:45:34+00:00
> But that's another issue.

...is it?

It seems to me that the growth of professional police as an institution which bears increased responsibility for public safety, along with an ever-growing set of tools that can be used to defer responsibility (see: it's not murder if it's done with a stun gun, regardless of how predictable these deaths are), are actually precisely the same issue.

Let's stop allowing the state to hide behind tooling, and all be approximately equally responsible for public safety.
by indubioprorubik | 2025-12-27 18:46:00+00:00
No, each pushed alternative is just worser. The euro could take over, but europe just revealed itself as a "lawful" player with no plan and no pants (security-wise) - so the euro is just defacto tied to the dollar value wise. For without the us guarding europe, the euro is just loaded with invisible gigantic security and pension debts.

BRICs is dealing in store credits and raw-materials. Every other empire and kingdom is not to be trusted or only to be trusted as long as the town power-drunk world-police-man does his job. He may be the towns drunk, mumbling "Screw you guys, im going home!" but he is also the only one so far doing a decent job as sheriff.

You can grasp how unreliable the other actors are, by how one of the hostile actors (russia) recently complained about the (world-police) doing what its proxies in yemen and ukraine are constantly doing (piracy) to venezuella. They complained about the break-down of maritime safety- to the us. Yep, its that bad.
by andrewaylett | 2025-12-27 18:46:03+00:00
I keep a couple of jj aliases that apply the `pre-commit` tool to a commit or a tree of commits:

https://github.com/andrewaylett/dotfiles/blob/7a79cf166d1e7b...

What I really want is some way within jj to keep track of which commits have been checked and which are currently failing, so I can template it into log lines.
by littlestymaar | 2025-12-27 18:46:47+00:00
Gold is a terrible unit of international money because the supply isn't flexible enough to accommodate any growth in international trade.

Contrary to popular belief, during history gold has always had limited role in the monetary system, because it was too scarce to really be useful (in most of human history, Silver, not gold was the cornerstone of trade, and trade itself was a tiny part of economic activity in an era where most of it was subsistence farming). It's only when banking and paper money replaced silver that gold took a bigger role in the monetary system. The gold standard is in fact an invention of the late 19th century and it didn't last disappeared progressively (the first world war being the beginning of the end).

Unfortunately for us, it just happened to be the period when influential economists grew up (particularly Ludwig Von Mises), and like every human being they assumed that the system they grew up with was special and what came after was decadent, an idea that has unfortunately since then become widespread in the general population.

Most people wrongly assume that the key property for a commodity to become the basis of a monetary system is scarcity, but in reality scarcity is a drawback. Money most be abundant enough (too abundant is bad, but too scarce is even worse).
by vlovich123 | 2025-12-27 18:47:02+00:00
Obviously not the video but the accompanying audio track. Could also just be a made up apocryphal engineering story that never actually happened exactly as described. Engineering as a profession is chock full of them but they do tend to be memorable parables of things to keep in mind when working on a relevant piece of tech.

What is definitely well documented is Brendan Gregg’s related discovery of performance degradation in servers from vibration of sibling servers / clapping nearby that caused spinning disks to pause their heads.
by rd_wei | 2025-12-27 18:47:29+00:00
Saying “N/A” for battery life isn’t biased, it simply highlights that books don’t need a battery at all, unlike e-readers. As for durability and theft, books can be damaged by water, fire, or time, while a well-protected e-reader keeps hundreds of books safe... Regarding environmental impact, pointing out e-reader e-waste while ignoring the pollution caused by producing paper books clearly shows bias, making books requires cutting down trees, which are effectively killed in the process, plus transportation and processing, while one e-reader can replace hundreds of physical books over its lifetime.
by npodbielski | 2025-12-27 18:47:38+00:00
This is good. I should also blog about stuff that I found interesting. Just to myself as a reminder. I am not active blogger but it actually happen to me that I was looking for something l, used web search and did found my own blog in the results.
Also I could just go to my own blog for this 'interesting link/stuff I found few days ago'.
by creativesage | 2025-12-27 18:47:45+00:00
Photo culling app. Photographers upload 1000+ images, ML clusters similar shots so clients can pick favorites faster. Needs serious parallel compute (but infrequently). Cloud SQL is the baseline (~$40-50/month, doesn't scale to zero).

My fuckup was setting --cpu 4 --memory 16Gi during initial migration and only optimizing instance counts, not resource sizing.

Didn't help that GCP has no hard spending cap. Budgets only send alerts (in my case 1 easy to miss alert saying you spent more than $50 this month), they don't stop charges... Looking at my credit card statement there are multiple $1-2k charges.

The incentives aren't exactly aligned toward helping you spend less.
by imoverclocked | 2025-12-27 18:47:53+00:00
They exist in a strange space. They want to be a Linux host but they also want to be an embedded host. The two cultures are pretty different in terms of expectations around kernels. A Linux sysadmin will (rightly) balk at not having an upgrade path for the kernel while a lot of embedded stuff that just happens to use Linux, often has a single kernel released… ever.

I’m not saying one approach is better than the other but there is definitely a lot of art in each camp. I know the one I innately prefer but I’ve definitely had eyebrows raised at me in a professional setting when expressing that view; Some places value upgrading dependencies while others value extreme stability at the potential cost of security.
by cycomanic | 2025-12-27 18:48:24+00:00
> Not sure I've met one of those people in... a decade or so? Loving apple products has been an uphill road for a long time (and increasingly more so post-Jobs)

You either a deliberately misrepresenting the facts or been livoning under a rock. I mean read any discussion about M laptops and you see apple fanboys noncritucally declaring them a revolution in computing.
by d4rkp4ttern | 2025-12-27 18:49:29+00:00
You mean so-called headless or non-interactive mode? Yes I’ve considered that but the advantage communication via Tmux panes is that all agent work is fully visible and you can intervene as needed.

My repo has other tools that leverage such headless agents; for example there’s a resume [1] functionality that provides alternatives to compaction (which is not great since it always loses valuable context details):
The “smart-trim” feature uses a headless agent to find irrelevant long messages for truncation, and the “rollover” feature creates a new session and injects session lineage links, with a customizable extraction of context for the task to be continued.

[1] https://github.com/pchalasani/claude-code-tools?tab=readme-o...