MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by DonHopkins | 2026-03-10 22:26:37+00:00
I'd love it if someone could dig up a copy of Digital Lantern's HyperCard based Digital Restaurant Guide (DRG) of San Francisco.

https://www.wired.com/1993/03/digital-guide-done-right/

>The Digital Restaurant Guide (DRG) from Digital Lantern is an elaborately layered HyperCard stack that has nearly 3,000 restaurant reviews of San Francisco eateries. The maps are geo-coded – when you type in two street names, the stack goes right to the map of their intersection. Restaurants are denoted on the map as little dots. […]

http://digitallantern.net/DRG.html

>Brief History of Digital Lantern

>In 1993 Mark Richard Beaulieu created the Digital Cities Restaurant Guide, one of the first computer restaurant guides as written of in Wired Magazine. The software featured geocoded and deep content for the 3,200 San Francisco restaurants[8] and eventually all 14,000 restaurants in the SF Bay Area. The interface was designed by Nathan Shedroff. Designed for Powerbooks, the software was sold by Apple Computer and affiliate stores, the content updated every season. The product was widely reviewed in the Bay Area; even Gary Wolf wrote of it in SF Weekly. Terry Winograd asked him to present the salient concepts of his innovative interfaces, predictions for emerging consumer deep personal content at an HCI seminar at Stanford University. For a synopsis of the lecture click here. Some of the Digital Lantern concepts and user interface are seen on Yelp.com.

>In 1996 Mark transferred Digital Cities assets to Vivid Travel Network and worked as their director of product development helping to develop a 25 language web-based international travel guide. Branded as Digital Cities the name was sold to AOL. When VTN dissolved, Beaulieu created the United States Restaurant Guide.

https://nathan.com/digital-restaurant-guide-application-desi...

>This guide to over 2000 restaurants in San Francisco and surroundings was developed especially for PowerBooks. Each restaurant is located by its geographic coordinates on the many maps. The product allows users to search for restaurants in a variety of different ways, including geographically, alphabetically, by food type, by rating, and from a list of “Bests.” Users are able to start and edit their own “Bests” lists and make changes to the data for their personal uses. The information includes ratings for overall performance, coffee quality, wine list, ambience, and service. Many menus are included, as well as prices, descriptions, hours, and parking information.
by semessier | 2026-03-10 22:27:54+00:00
SIR_TONY_HOARE = μX • (think → create → give → X)

-- process ran from 1934 to 2026
-- terminated with SKIP
-- no deadlock detected
-- all assertions satisfied
-- trace: ⟨ quicksort, hoare_logic, csp, monitors,
-- dining_philosophers, knighthood, turing_award,
-- billion_dollar_apology, structured_programming,
-- unifying_theories, ... ⟩
-- trace length: ∞
The channel is closed. The process has terminated.
The algebra endures.
by Heliodex | 2026-03-10 22:28:13+00:00
The 2 videos linked here are nearing 5 years old now and have been refuted many times, including by some of the developers mentioned in the article. To condense it as much as possible:

The 1st video hinges on a point where they find that developers earn a revenue cut of 24.5%, a number that isn't correct because

1. it's found by multiplying 3 arbitrarily chosen numbers together (the DevEx rate, the default sales fee, and the mean price of Robux) which isn't representative of what the average developer is earning and barely appears in the actual cash flow on the platform,

2. it's using the DevEx rates and sales fees from 2021. Today, DevEx rates are higher and fees are lower. Engagement-based payouts are not accounted for here either (which are also much higher than they were in 2021).

3. it's profit, not revenue. The expenses are paid for before the money is paid out. Comparing this to other platforms that offer revenue shares instead is misrepresentative.

The 2nd video hinges more on moderation, showing how children are exploited by bringing them off platform, namely to Discord, where most of the evidence referenced in the video takes place. Broadly, this is Discord's problem, not Roblox's.

They then suggest Unity as an alternative platform, which I personally think is a much worse option. I used to be more cynical about this and believe the video creators were clearly being pushed by companies that had a financial incentive in the downfall of Roblox, though nowadays I just attribute it to bad journalism and watchbait.

I suggest reading EcoScratcher's brilliant response <https://medium.com/@ecoscratcher/7e1c1f0fc493> and follow-up articles <https://medium.com/@ecoscratcher/e51651da6bf4>, of which their 2nd video briefly mentions and claims it misquotes (it doesn't) and misrepresents (it doesn't) their position.

Edits in response to parent comment edits:

> They pay a lot less than it costs to buy Robux, further incentivising you to never actually make real money, because your Robux is "worth more" inside the Roblox walled garden

Specifically through the DevEx programme, Roblox pays a small amount less than it costs to buy Robux to enable them to pay for server upkeep, platform hosting & support, and app store fees (when a developer's game is available through an app store, the app store fees for purchases are paid by Roblox). The rest (any Robux taken out of the economy, including that spent on advertising or first-party avatar items) goes towards platform investment and employee costs.

> This is on top of the 75% cut they take!

The DevEx rates have already been factored into this inaccurate "75%" figure. Taking the DevEx rates out a 2nd time (which, emphatically, never happens on the platform) makes it more inaccurate. The actual figure, calculated at <https://create.roblox.com/docs/monetize-experiences>, is 67% given to developers, making for a near industry-standard 33% cut.
by quuxplusone | 2026-03-10 22:28:36+00:00
What an ad-infested website.

The full AP story from 1984 (including the last two sentences, which were snipped off of the clipping in TFA for some reason) is available in a few places, e.g. in the Lake City Reporter of 1984-10-31, under the headline "Fight With Phone Lost":

https://newspapers.uflib.ufl.edu/UF00028308/08196/zoom/18
by john_strinlai | 2026-03-10 22:28:46+00:00
surprisingly fun.

not knowing anything about color, i will admit i am a bit confused. i scored 0.0034 and was told "if you're not already calibrating displays for a living, you're leaving money on the table". which, to me, implied i did quite well!

but, reading the scores posted here, most people are doing a lot better than me. i doubt all of us are crazy good...

so, i assume the front page is a typo: "most people land around 0.02" (should be 0.002, not 0.02)? if yes, then i am back to not understanding the message i got about calibrating displays, because i did quite a bit worse than 0.002.

edit: nerd-sniping myself a little bit. but it appears (stressing: i know nothing) the "0.02" is accurate, but calculated by showing someone two colors and asking "are these different" until the person answers the question correctly 50% of the time. which is a different question than "where, precisely, is the line between these two colors". with the different question, it ends up compressing the result down by about an order of magnitude.
by rationalist | 2026-03-10 22:28:49+00:00
The U.S. GDP is about 31 trillion, so 3 percent of that isn't bad, as long as we can continue to grow more than that, forever.

Federal Outlays: Interest as Percent of Gross Domestic Product (FYOIGDA188S)
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYOIGDA188S

Although according the the article, the interest payments account for one fifth of revenue, projected to be one quarter in ten years.
by AngryData | 2026-03-10 22:29:00+00:00
I mean businesses, the government, and capital economies in general treat me like garbage to be disposed of when its convenient, so while ideally I would like to agree with you, in practice I don't see that much difference. I can't even count how many times my life has been put on the line because some asshole wanted to save $10 or 2 minutes.

Also many domesticated animals would be completely extinct if we didn't eat or farm them, which isn't a great prize, but it isn't nothing either.

Personally I don't believe, until energy is so plentifully produced to be approaching on free for individuals, that we can even really afford to forgo animal agriculture. Oh yeah sure, we use farmland to grow animal feed and not human feed, but the animal feed we grow is often much easier to grow, and in many cases reduces artificial fertilizer usage which is a huge usage of fossil fuels. Take cows for example, they are fed 90% grass or alfalfa to grow, yeah their last month or two of life they are given grain to fatten them up (which is optional but customers prefer it), but that alfalfa they ate for 90% of their growth required no fertilizer or pesticides, and even produces nitrogen fertilizer in the ground, while harvesting consists of mowing it down and packing it into bails, and can be stored for years almost anywhere, including outside or in just random pits or 100 year old barns. Dent corn does require fertilizer (especially if you don't rotate with alfalfa or other legumes), however dent corn can also be stored for years with no more processing than is done within 10 seconds of harvest by the combine that is harvesting it, and can be fed to animals directly, while sweet corn is far more delicate, less fertilizer efficient, and doesn't store for long without refrigeration, canning, or freezing. Also animals like pigs are often fed otherwise bad or inedible food.

Meat/animals it also a great emergency store of food for disaster. A volcano can reduce global yields by 30%, and while crop subsidization will help as we might have an extra 10% growing to start with, that still may end with shortages because people keep fighting crop subsidization to keep it low not understanding why it exists (to prevent famine which it has successfully done for over 100 years in every country that implements it). But you can give yourself an extra few years of food from animal stores by slaughtering them down and feeding them on old animal feed stockpiles, either just to wait for overall crop yields to increase again, or to give time to increase farming efforts.

In a more ideal world I would definitely go along with reducing or even eliminating most animal agriculture, but in the world we currently live in it seems like a liability to me. I simply don't trust the people controlling most of our capital and wielding most of the power of human civilization to manage it well enough now or anytime in the near future. Not to mention the educational requirements to most cultures to switch to a pure vegetarian diet without all sorts of side effects from poor nutritional balance.
by bsder | 2026-03-10 22:29:01+00:00
> Don't blame the ISA - blame the silicon implementations

That's true, but tautological.

The issue is that the RISC-V core is the easy part of the problem, and nobody seems to even be able to generate a chip that gets that right without weirdness and quirks.

The more fundamental technical problem is that things like the cache organization and DDR interface and PCI interface and ... cannot just be synthesized. They require analog/RF VLSI designers doing things like clock forwarding and signal integrity analysis. If you get them wrong, your performance tanks, and, so far, everybody has gotten them wrong in various ways.

The business problem is the fact that everybody wants to be the "performance" RISC-V vendor, but nobody wants to be the "embedded" RISC-V vendor. This is a problem because practically anybody who is willing to cough up for a "performance" processor is almost completely insensitive to any cost premium that ARM demands. The embedded space is hugely sensitive to cost, but nobody is willing to step into it because that requires that you do icky ecosystem things like marketing, software, debugging tools, inventory distribution, etc.

This leads to the US business problem which is the fact that everybody wants to be an IP vendor and nobody wants to ship a damn chip. Consequently, if I want actual RISC-V hardware, I'm stuck dealing with Chinese vendors of various levels of dodginess.
by protocolture | 2026-03-10 22:29:31+00:00
Google scrapes the entire internet to generate a searchable index of the internet. But the resulting search engine is only infringing where it reproduces entire copies of scraped news articles and images. Both places where they have been put back in their place through legal means.

Like LLM's, it retains the produced index but not the original data.

The big concern is whether producing an LLM is competing with artists directly, but as artists dont make LLMs, this seems to be consistently ruled as non competing.
by unshavedyak | 2026-03-10 22:29:49+00:00
> For a person (senior or otherwise) to examine code or configuration with the granularity required to verify that it even approximates the result of their own level of experience, even only in terms of security/stability/correctness, requires an amount of time approaching the time spent if they had just done it themselves.

Hell, often it feels slower/worse. Foreign code is easily confusing at first, which slows you down - and bad code quickly gets bewildering and sends you down paths of clarifications that waste time.
by hodgehog11 | 2026-03-10 22:31:13+00:00
I mean no offense here, but I really don't like this attitude of "I thought for a bit and came up with something that debunks all of the experts!". It's the same stuff you see with climate denialism, but it seems to be considered okay when it comes to AI. As if the people that spend all day every day for decades have not thought of this.

Dataset limitations have been well understood since the dawn of statistics-based AI, which is why these models are trained on data and RL tasks that are as wide as possible, and are assessed by generalization performance. Most of the experts in ML, even the mathematically trained ones, within the last few years acknowledge that superintelligence (under a more rigorous definition than the one here) is quite possible, even with only the current architectures. This is true even though no senior researcher in the field really wants superintelligence to be possible, hence the dozens of efforts to disprove its potential existence.
by filleduchaos | 2026-03-10 22:31:17+00:00
Political organizing around unions, state regulations of the labour market, and agitational political parties did nothing to prevent the severe decline of clothing quality that was the Luddites were advocating against. But of course, propaganda has very successfully reduced their entire platform to "worker's pay" alone, which is an even easier line to feed to people that over the decades have become accustomed to literal slop as apparel. And I mean that very literally - clothes that straight-up lose their structural integrity after a handful of laundry cycles.

Of course, there's definitely absolutely nothing about the state of the garment industry that's applicable to the current discussions about AI re: software quality and worker compensation. It's not as if this industry has not already seen its fair share of quality going to the dogs with only a small handful of people still knowing and caring enough to call it out while most others cheer for the Productivity™.
by tsoukase | 2026-03-10 22:31:38+00:00
All actors already know your age with 99% accuracy: tech giants (Google/Meta etc through your searches/choices) and government though your... birth. The same holds for your gender, job, spouse and more. And they share all of it to many other endpoints. They just want age verification to cover the rest 1% and to transfer the responsibility to the user.

The problem with any online age verification system is not only that many other info is leaked (personal, IP address etc) but even the fact that YOU apply for such a service and might use it for nasty things.
by refulgentis | 2026-03-10 22:32:02+00:00
I have no idea or practical experience with anything this low-level, so idk how much following matters, it's just someone from the crowd offering unvarnished impressions:

It's easy to believe you're replying to something that has an element of hyperbole.

It's hard to believe "just do 2x as many instructions" and "ehhh who cares [i.e. your typical C program doesn't check for overflow]", coupled to a seemingly self-conscious repetition of a quip from the television series Chernobyl that is meant to reference sticking your head in the sand, retire the issue from discussion.
by nickpsecurity | 2026-03-10 22:33:42+00:00
Thanks for thr tip.

The closest thing to real neurons are called spiking, neural networks. Here's a list of libraries for building them on GPU's:

https://github.com/open-neuromorphic/open-neuromorphic

For academic papers, the phrases they use include "biologically plausible," "Hebbian learning," and "backpropagation free." Searching for those with "neural networks" or "neurons" will turn up cutting-edge techniques.
by burningChrome | 2026-03-10 22:34:18+00:00
Had someone at work as me about this and they visibly cringed with I told them its my understanding you let the agent unfettered access to everything on your machine so it can do a lot more stuff than say a Siri can.

They immediately said, "Why in the fuck would I want to do that?"

I didn't know either and then we both stood there in an awkward silence. I think he was expecting OpenClaw to be some insanely cool AI Agent and discovering the "juice isn't worth the squeeze" kind of hit him harder than I expected.
by jjmarr | 2026-03-10 22:34:43+00:00
I'm learning more than ever before. I'm not a master at anything but I am getting basic proficiency in virtually everything.

> Do you ever take the time to validate what one of the agents produces by going to the docs? Or is all debugging/changing of the code done via LLMs/agents?

I divide my work into vibecoding PoC and review. Only once I have something working do I review the code. And I do so through intense interrogation while referencing the docs.

> I'm more like level 2 right now and genuinely curious if you feel like learning continues for you (besides with agentic orchestration, etc.)

Level 8 only works in production for a defined process where you don't need oversight and the final output is easy to trust.

For example, I made a code review tool that chunks a PR and assigns rule/violation combos to agents. This got a 20% time to merge reduction and catches 10x the issues as any other agent because it can pull context. And the output is easy to incorporate since I have a manager agent summarize everything.

Likewise, I'm working on an automatic performance tool right now that chunks code, assigns agents to make microbenchmarks, and tries to find optimization points. The end result should be easy to verify since the final suggestion would be "replace this data structure with another, here's a microbenchmark proving so".
by aucisson_masque | 2026-03-10 22:34:58+00:00
No idea why you're getting downvoted, it absolutely makes sense.

Attacking countries that have no nuclear weapon only strengthen the need for others to acquire it.

Middle eastern, especially, where there is only one country that has the nuclear weapon. Other countries relied on usa support for their own defenses but seeing the mess they're in because of Trump blindly following israelian will and attacking Iran, they might consider acquiring it.

Who'se to say that Israel won't take more land after it finish annexing Palestine and Liban ?
by observationist | 2026-03-10 22:35:02+00:00
>>> However this idea of semi-defined words and memes that get combinatorially and dynamically redefined -- or even undefined -- seems different

Take a look back at Shakespeare again. Every line has this sort of semantic shapeshifting quality, where the meaning and intent can be radically changed, sometimes multiple times, after each successive line, and on top of that, the rhyme and meter are all proper and structured. Sometimes the puns and memes and 5 dimensional wordplay are really dependent on knowing the culture and current events of the time, but a whole lot of it hits on human basics.

It'd be really cool if a whole generation had that sort of wordplay and meta-meme construction kit baked into their slang, and kids are growing up in worlds where meaning and memes are radically changing in ways humans have never dealt with before. Makes sense that their language would be malleable and suited to purpose.
by coatmatter | 2026-03-10 22:35:02+00:00
You're using the motte-and-bailey fallacy. Pocket and scientific calculators have never caused anywhere near as much grief as current LLMs do as a loss-leader for near-trillion dollar corporations that are primarily responsible for artificially keeping the US economy afloat (at least prior to the latest war/not-war effort).

Calculators have never led to anything like AI-induced psychosis: https://theconversation.com/ai-induced-psychosis-the-danger-...

That's merely one example of a long list of very real unresolved problems. It's not a "pretty clean parallel" in the slightest.
by MikeTheGreat | 2026-03-10 22:35:45+00:00
> org is likely in the 10's of thousands, there is no way to even have a mandatory meeting for that many people.

Ok, this is pretty off-topic, but is this still true? I get that you can't have 10K people all actively participate in the meeting at the same time, but doesn't Zoom have a feature where you can broadcast to thousands and thousands?

Doesn't X/Twitter have a feature like this? (Although, to be fair, the last time I heard about that it was part of a headline like "DeSantis announcement of Presidential run on X/Twitter delayed for hours as X/Twitter's tech stack collapses under 200K viewers")

But still - nowadays it seems like it should be possible to have 10K employees all tune in at the same time and then call it a meeting, yes?
by philipp-gayret | 2026-03-10 22:35:50+00:00
Floating what you call levels 6, 7 and 8. I have a strong harness, but manually kick off the background agents which pick up tasks I queue while off my machine.

I've experimented with agent teams. However the current implementation (in Claude Code) burns tokens. I used 1 prompt to spin up a team of 9+ agents: Claude Code used up about 1M output tokens. Granted, it was a long; very long horizon task. (It kept itself busy for almost an hour uninterrupted). But 1M+ output tokens is excessive. What I also find is that for parallel agents, the UI is not good enough yet when you run it in the foreground. My permission management is done in such a way that I almost never get interrupted, but that took a lot of investment to make it that way. Most users will likely run agent teams in an unsafe fashion. From my point of view the devex for agent teams does not really exist yet.
by ycombiredd | 2026-03-10 22:36:04+00:00
As a former SUN sysadmin/netadmin (from SunOS 4.1.4 days), I vaguely remember the Solaris releases after 2.5.1, maybe to another re-version/branding called Solaris 7, maybe? And then not paying any attention after Oracle absorbed it. I was honestly surprised enough by this headline to click TFA, simply because I did not think Solaris even existed anymore.