MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by api | 2025-12-26 16:12:50+00:00
Oh it’s Bluesky.

Both Xhitter and Bluesky are outrage lasers, with the user base as a “lasing medium.” Xhitter is the right wing racist xenophobic one, and Bluesky is the lefty curmudgeon anti-everything one.

They are this way because it’s intrinsic to the medium. “Micro blogging” or whatever Twitter called itself is a terrible way to do discourse. It buries any kind of nuanced thinking and elevates outrage and other attention bait, and the short form format encourages fragmented incoherent thought processes. The more you immerse yourself in it the more your thinking becomes like this. The medium and format is irredeemable.

AI is, if anything, a breath of fresh air by comparison.
by rpdillon | 2025-12-26 16:13:18+00:00
The license only has force because of copyright. For better or for worse, the courts decide what is transformative fair use.

Characterizing the discussion behind this as "sophistry" is a fundamentally unserious take.

For a serious take, I recommend reading the copyright office's 100 plus page document that they released in May. It makes it clear that there are a bunch of cases that are non-transformative, particularly when they affect the market for the original work and compete with it. But there's also clearly cases that are transformative when no such competition exists, and the training material was obtained legally.

https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell...

I'm not particularly sympathetic to voices on HN that attempt to remove all nuance from this discussion. It's challenging enough topic as is.
by CompuHacker | 2025-12-26 16:13:45+00:00
After whatever quota of free GPT-5 messages is exhausted, `mini` should answer most replies, unless they're policy sensitive, which get full-fat `GPT-5 large` with the Efficient personality applied, regardless of user settings, and not indicated. I'm fairly confident that this routing choice, the text of Efficient [1], and the training of the June 2024 base model to the model spec [2] is the source of all the sophistic behavior you observe.

[1] <https://github.com/asgeirtj/system_prompts_leaks/blob/main/O...>

[2] <https://model-spec.openai.com/2025-02-12.html>
Why does software still take years to ship when months should be enough?
by saichler | 2025-12-26 16:14:09+00:00
Across startups and large enterprises alike, we keep solving the same problems:
security, scalability, networking, observability, deployment.

Over the years we added tools, layers, frameworks, and now AI.
Yet idea-to-production still takes years in environments where months should be achievable.

This did not happen by accident, but it did become normalized.
I am trying to understand how this happened and what would actually reverse it.
by codegeek | 2025-12-26 16:15:03+00:00
I am sorry for the OP but this is a perfect example of "You don't need cloud at your stage". Get a $10 VPS and call it a day. Unless you have 1000s of daily active users, a $10 VPS with a solid backup strategy will work. Heck, you can even do more than that with a decent VPS. You could setup a docker compose on 1 single decent server and call it a day when you have 0 users.
by lukan | 2025-12-26 16:16:08+00:00
"and eventually you end up with countries and counties and vovoidships and cities and districts and villages, in hierarchies that gain a level per ~100x population increase."

You say it like this is a law set in stone, because this is what happened im history, but I would argue it happened under different conditions.

Mainly, the main advantage of an empire over small villages/tribes is not at all that they have more power than the villages combined, but that they can concentrate their power where it is needed. One village did not stand a chance against the empire - and the villages were not coordinated enough.

But today we would have the internet for better communication and coordination, enabling the small entieties to coordinate a defense.

Well, in theory of course. Because we do not really have autonomous small states, but are dominated by the big players. And the small states have mowtly the choice which block to align with, or get crushed. But the trend might go towards small again.

(See also cheap drones destroying expensive tanks, battleships etc.)
by Aurornis | 2025-12-26 16:16:14+00:00
> The post you were replying to is about privilege

The comment explicitly made a claim of $10K to $20K in GPU costs, which was unfounded and false.

I’m tired of the hand-wringing over privilege any time someone young does something impressive. Access to a strong GPU wasn’t the deciding factor that made this kid able to do this work. It could have been done on an average GPU at slower throughput.
by tempsaasexample | 2025-12-26 16:16:42+00:00
True technically, but there's many people that almost enjoy working on their cars IF they are pleasant to work on. And some are. At that point the car is just an avenue for your hobby of working on cars.

My parents have a Lexus RX400H (hybrid), that even for me as a car guy is a nightmare to work on. It's technically never had a fault since 2007 with 215k miles. But changing the spark plugs was probably the third hardest thing I've done with cars, only behind dropping a transmission and doing a head gasket job on other cars.
by Isamu | 2025-12-26 16:17:33+00:00
The criticism is of the spin in these articles. The experience these kids get is great, it should happen more. The articles always spin to get your attention, and the subject matter is fascinating, but it can be presented with less spin.

And frankly any kid deserves praise for doing the unglamorous work that this takes. Very few can be arsed to put up with the extra work that it takes to do anything worthwhile, we are a nation getting lazier every day.
by mergesort | 2025-12-26 16:17:52+00:00
Heya, author here!

I'll try to answer these one by one, but I will just note that a lot of my prompts are domain specific so it's hard to share those.

- I don't use any plans — my writing is the plan. The Plan Mode in Claude Code is excellent, but as I've switched to Codex (which doesn't have one) I will simply write up a nice long prompt and then add "Please ask any clarifying questions you may have, or for any additional details that you need" — and it works great! I may go back and forth for anywhere from 5-30 minutes depending on what else is needed, but that's basically the experience of using Plan Mode in Claude Code too.

- I've built quite a few recent features for my app Plinky [^1]. I've made a few meaningful contributions to my open source project Boutique [^2] (and have been having AI asynchronously sketch out a large new database relationships feature). I built my new blog and my workshops pages [^3] with Codex as well. Truth is I do practically everything in Codex and Claude Code these days, so I'd have more trouble listing what I haven't built lately.

- Plinky's upcoming Reader Mode is a good example of a prompt that took me two hours, but the feature isn't yet in the app so I'd prefer not to share the prompt. But I can share the first draft of the prompt for Boutique's relationships feature sine that's open source. [^4] I've been experimenting with using ChatGPT Pulse to make progress on it every day (simply by asking it to!), and much to my surprise it's been designing a new API day by day in a way that's far from perfect but certaintly has been very interesting.

The honest truth is that this one did not take two hours and I wrote it on the bus so it's probably not perfect, but the descriptive process is effectively the same. For a feature like Reader Mode you would have to capture more details to scale up to the additional complexity of a domain-specific feature with client and server components, a new download queueing pipeline, amongst other abstractions.

Hope that answers your questions!

[^1]: https://plinky.app
[^2]: https://github.com/mergesort/Boutique
[^3]: https://build.ms
[^4]: https://gist.github.com/mergesort/04a77c47ea4cb6433aa9ade4e1...
by YC39487493287 | 2025-12-26 16:18:08+00:00
You are correct that the AI industry has produced no value for the economy, but the speculation on AI is the only thing keeping the U.S. economy from dropping into an economic cataclysm. The US economy has been dependent on the idea of infinite growth through innovation since 2008, and the tech industry is all out of innovation. So the only thing they can do is keep building datacenters and pray that an AGI somehow wakes up when they hit the magic number of GPUs. Then the elites can finally kill off all the proles like they've been itching to since the Communist Manifesto was first written.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-12-26 16:18:44+00:00
Sadly, I thought the same… Pasadena? Hmmm…

Regardless of whether there is something rotten here, I think they should in fact focus on the science and not the person behind the science. And that gives the young person some cover too.

The article says that The Astronomical Journal did just that: talked about the discovery without focusing on the age of the author. I think I prefer that.
by fennecbutt | 2025-12-26 16:20:49+00:00
Pretty sure Steve Jobs was known for yelling at, belittling and bullying people, throwing tantrums and making threats/ultimatums.

Dude had anger/I'm the hero issues...his biography notably leaves this stuff out and Woz' only covers a few incidents (because he still considers friend) though I'm sure there were more. Like when Woz invented universal remote and sent a prototype to Jobs and Jobs smashed it against the wall in a fit of anger.
by parpfish | 2025-12-26 16:20:56+00:00
yeah, the hard part about this issue is that the kids that do the project are generally super smart. this situation ends up hurting three groups:

- postdocs that are in a precarious career position are being forced to give up a bunch of work "for free" that they cant put on their CV

- the bright kid is often given a skewed perception about what working in science is like and they will be disillusioned when the handholding stops and they have super-high expectations placed on them

- depending on the how the press frames it, the public either gets a story that's anti-intellectual "never trust the experts" OR some feel-good fluff about some savior-savant on the horizon. neither is useful science reporting but good for clicks.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-12-26 16:21:28+00:00
I used to type out long posts explaining how LLMs have been enormously beneficial (for their price) for myself and my company. Ironically it's the very MIT report that "found AI to be a flop" (remember the "MIT study finds almost every AI initiative fails"), that also found that virtually every single worker is using AI (just not company AI, hence the flop part).

At this point, it's only people with an ideological opposition still holding this view. It's like trying to convince gear head grandpa that manual transmissions aren't relevant anymore.
by azakai | 2025-12-26 16:21:43+00:00
The first chart in your link doesn't show "flat" usage until 2022? It is clearly rising at an increasing rate, and it more than doubles over 2014-2022.

It might help to look at global power usage, not just the US, see the first figure here:

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/06/is-generative-ai-really-g...

There isn't an inflection point around 2022: it has been rising quickly since 2010 or so.
by GaryBluto | 2025-12-26 16:22:06+00:00
I don't see why this is important for any reason other than who he is. It's just a vulgar, illogical rant triggered by an E-Mail any sane person would just either mark as spam or delete.

Funny how he only seems to care about "raping the planet" and "blowing up society" when it's about LLMs and not any other technology, much like most people with a raging hate-boner[1] for them.

[1] Do not misconstrue this as an outright dismissal of LLM criticism, as there are many reasons to dislike them, but I often find that those who are quite outspoken about disliking them often tend to be quite hypocritical.
by bwb | 2025-12-26 16:22:50+00:00
My 3 favorites were:

Dungeon Crawler Carl - I laughed, I cried, perfect match for my sense of humor.

The Comfort Crisis by Michael Easter - Great read, changed some of my training because of it.

Fall of Giants by Ken Follett (#1 of The Century Trilogy series) - An amazing overview of the 20th century through the eyes of several families accross the globe (fiction).
by simonw | 2025-12-26 16:22:58+00:00
Urgh, I know that it's a solid explanation but I hate the "it may not be true but it captures a truth that people feel" argument so much!

See also "instagram is spying on you through your microphone". It's not, but I've seen people argue that it's OK for people to believe that because it supports their general (accurate) sentiment that targeted ads are creepy.
by pier25 | 2025-12-26 16:23:34+00:00
So Rob Pike received one of those weird emails from Claude and he posted this on Bluesky:

> Fuck you people. Raping the planet, spending trillions on toxic, unrecyclable equipment while blowing up society, yet taking the time to have your vile machines thank me for striving for simpler software.

> Just fuck you. Fuck you all.

> I can't remember the last time I was this angry.
by TazeTSchnitzel | 2025-12-26 16:24:06+00:00
I think it's really cool that they're using bare-metal Rust for this. It's a lot more accessible than C because the standard distribution (rustup) can work as a cross-compiler to a no-OS target out of the box. Deliberately avoiding dependencies makes me happy too, people really underestimate what you can do with Rust without relying on the whole dependency ecosystem, and this is better pedagogically because you can understand the whole system.

I'm rather amused at how https://www.learnix-os.com/ch01-02-booting-our-binary.html has you creating a 16-bit target that ostensibly uses 32-bit pointers in its data layout… presumably that doesn't actually work to compile normal code to (edit: …or does it?! What on earth does LLVM do with that then…) but I guess it works so long as it's just acting as a scaffold for inline assembly. It's cool they don't need to bring in a secondary toolchain for the 16-bit part of bootstrapping, even if I worry this might break in some future rustc/LLVM revision.
by dahart | 2025-12-26 16:24:16+00:00
> so I say take as much as you can. Commons would be if it’s owned by nobody

This isn’t what “commons” means in the term ‘tragedy of the commons’, and the obvious end result of your suggestion to take as much as you can is to cause the loss of access.

Anything that is free to use is a commons, regardless of ownership, and when some people use too much, everyone loses access.

Finite digital resources like bandwidth and database sizes within companies are even listed as examples in the Wikipedia article on Tragedy of the Commons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
by nntwozz | 2025-12-26 16:24:32+00:00
In the same vein many years later:

--

After the original iPad was released, Steve Jobs held a meeting with the MacBook engineering team and demonstrated the difference in wake speed.

He woke up a current MacBook (with an Intel chip), which took a few seconds.

He then instantly woke up the iPad (with an Apple A-series chip) by pressing the home/power button on and off rapidly.

Jobs told the team, "I want you to make this" (pointing to the MacBook) "like this" (pointing to the iPad), and then walked out of the room.

---

This no longer exists at Apple.
by echelon | 2025-12-26 16:24:34+00:00
I think video-based world models like Genie 2 will happen and that they'll be shrunken down for consumer hardware (the only place they're practical).

They'll have player input controls, obviously, but they'll also be fed ControlNets for things like level layout, enemy placement, and game loop events.

When that happens, and when it gets good, it'll take over as the dominant type of game "engine".
by eterm | 2025-12-26 16:24:35+00:00
It does matter, because the phyiscal keys themselves are literally in different places.

Comparison:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wt1DL1fO6Zs

Note that weird abomination of a backslash key around the enter key on the US keyboard.

There's no way to just map the US keyboard to the UK one.
by mikojan | 2025-12-26 16:24:51+00:00
You do not seem to be familiar with Rob Pike. He is known for major contributions to Unix, Plan 9, UTF-8, and modern systems programming, and he has this to say about his dream setup[0]:

> I want no local storage anywhere near me other than maybe caches. No disks, no state, my world entirely in the network. Storage needs to be backed up and maintained, which should be someone else's problem, one I'm happy to pay to have them solve. Also, storage on one machine means that machine is different from another machine. At Bell Labs we worked in the Unix Room, which had a bunch of machines we called "terminals". Latterly these were mostly PCs, but the key point is that we didn't use their disks for anything except caching. The terminal was a computer but we didn't compute on it; computing was done in the computer center. The terminal, even though it had a nice color screen and mouse and network and all that, was just a portal to the real computers in the back. When I left work and went home, I could pick up where I left off, pretty much. My dream setup would drop the "pretty much" qualification from that.

[0]: https://usesthis.com/interviews/rob.pike/
by layer8 | 2025-12-26 16:25:39+00:00
“*nix” means a Unix-like OS just generally (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%2Anix), like for example in “Minix” and “Xenix”. Sticking “OS” to the end of an OS name is also commonplace. However, the title on the page is “The Learnix Operating System”, so the actual name seems to be just “Learnix”.

It’s arguably Nix and NixOS who have unnecessarily stepped into the “*nix” namespace without adding a distinguishing prefix.
by Marha01 | 2025-12-26 16:25:47+00:00
If humanity's energy consumption is so high that there is an actual threat of causing climate change purely with waste heat, I think our technological development would be so advanced that we will be essentially immortal post-humans and most of the solar system will be colonized. By that time any climate change on Earth would no longer be a threat to humanity, simply because we will not have all our eggs in one basket.
by elxr | 2025-12-26 16:26:07+00:00
Close to 5 years. I read docs too and love the immersion and the fully grasping of concepts when going with your route, but most days there's just not enough hours for this.

> The boring work is where you usually learn the most. It's also the time you don't recognize that's happening

That was always how I did it before mid-2025. And I do still do boring work when I truly want to master something, but doing that too much just means (for me) not finishing anything.
by echelon | 2025-12-26 16:26:36+00:00
> with the tradeoff mainly being control and artistic errors.

For now. We're not even a decade in with this tech, and look how far we've come in the last year alone with Veo 3, Sora 2, and Kling 4x, and Kling O1. Not to mention the editing models like Qwen Edit and Nano Banana!

This is going to be serious tech soon.

I think vision is easier than "intelligence". In essence, we solved it in closed form sixty years ago.

We have many formulations of algorithms and pipelines. Not just for the real physics, but also tons of different hacks to account for hardware limitations.

We understand optics in a way we don't understand intelligence.

Furthermore, evolution keeps evolving vision over and over. It's fast and highly detailed. It must be correspondingly simple.

We're going to optimize the shit out of this. In a decade we'll probably have perfectly consistent Holodecks.
by bossyTeacher | 2025-12-26 16:26:55+00:00
>You think Rob Pike was super happy about it?

He sure was happy enough to work for them (when he could work anywhere else) for nearly two decades. A one line apology doesn't delete his time at Google. The rant also seems to be directed mostly if not exclusively towards GenAI not Google. He seems happy enough to use Gmail when he doesn't have to.

You can have an opinion and other people are allowed to have one about you. Goes both ways.
by simonw | 2025-12-26 16:27:17+00:00
I don't think that a 10x estimate is credible. If it was I'd understand the ethical argument being made here, but I'm confident that excluding one person's open source code from training has an infinitesimally small impact on the abilities of the resulting model.

For your fire example, there's a difference between being Prometheus teaching humans to use fire compared to being a random villager who adds a twig to an existing campfire. I'd say the open source contributions example here is more the latter than the former.
by kbolino | 2025-12-26 16:29:00+00:00
The interesting thing about Go's loopvar change is that nobody was able to demonstrate any real-world code that it broke (*1), while several examples were found of real-world code (often tests) that it fixed (*2). Nevertheless, they gated it behind go.mod specifying a go version >= 1.22, which I personally think is overly conservative.

*1: A great many examples of synthetic code were contrived to argue against the change, but none of them ever corresponded to Go code anyone would actually write organically, and an extensive period of investigation turned up nothing

*2: As in, the original behavior of the code was actually incorrect, but this wasn't discovered until after the loopvar change caused e.g. some tests to fail, prompting manual review of the relevant code; as a tangent, this raises the question of how often tests just conform to the code rather than the other way around
by ModernMech | 2025-12-26 16:29:23+00:00
Hold up... "lazy engineers" are the problem here? What about a society that insists on shoving the work product of unfunded, volunteer engineers into critical infrastructure because they don't want to pay what it costs to do things the right way? Imagine building a nuclear power plant with an army of volunteer nuclear engineers.

It cannot be the case that software engineers are labelled lazy for not building the at-scale solution to start with, but at the same time everyone wants to use their work, and there are next to no resources for said engineer to actually build the at scale solution.

> the path of least resistance for themselves.

Yeah because they're investing their own personal time and money, so of course they're going to take the path that is of least resistance for them. If society feels that's "unethical", maybe pony up the cash because you all still want to rely on their work product they are giving out for free.
by jarofgreen | 2025-12-26 16:29:27+00:00
It's not just package manager who do this - a lot of smaller projects crowd source data in git repositories. Most of these don't reach the scale where the technical limitations become a problem.

Personally my view is that the main problem when they do this is that it gets much harder for non-technical people to contribute. At least that doesn't apply to package managers, where it's all technical people contributing.

There are a few other small problems - but it's interesting to see that so many other projects do this.

I ended up working on an open source software library to help in these cases: https://www.datatig.com/

Here's a write up of an introduction talk about it: https://www.datatig.com/2024/12/24/talk.html I'll add the scale point to future versions of this talk with a link to this post.
by PunchyHamster | 2025-12-26 16:31:01+00:00
You could at least argue while there is plenty of negatives, at least we got to use many services with ad-supported model.

There is no upside to vast majority of the AI pushed by the OpenAI and their cronies. It's literally fucking up economy for everyone else all to get AI from "lies to users" to "lies to users confidently", all while rampantly stealing content to do that, because apparently pirating something as a person is terrible crime govt need to chase you, unless you do that to resell it in AI model, then it's propping up US economy.