MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by onli | 2025-07-07 14:47:42+00:00
Hey, I do try to make the site as transparent as possible - but admit that the site does not make it obvious. For such a doubt, go into the comparison of the two (https://www.pc-kombo.com/us/benchmark/games/cpu/compare?ids%...) where all benchmarks used that the two processors share are listed. The benchmark bars are clickable and go to the source.

It does get really complicated to address something like that when all comparisons are indirect. Thankfully, that's not the case here.

The 13900K and 14900K in games really have been that close, see https://www.computerbase.de/artikel/prozessoren/intel-core-i... for an example, where the two have a 2% FPS difference.
by dathinab | 2025-07-07 14:48:07+00:00
not just Spotify pretty much any (most?) current tech giant was build by

- riding a wave of change

- not caring too much about legal constraints (or like they would say now "distrupting" the market, which very very often means doing illigal shit which beings them far more money then any penalties they will ever face from it)

- or caring about ethics too much

- and for recent years (starting with Amazone) a lot of technically illegal financing (technically undercutting competitors prices long term based on money from else where (e.g. investors) is unfair competitive advantage (theoretically) clearly not allowed by anti monopoly laws. And before you often still had other monopoly issues (e.g. see wintel)

So yes not systematic not complying with law to get unfair competitive advantage knowing that many of the laws are on the larger picture toothless when applied to huge companies is bread and butter work of US tech giants
by lazyant | 2025-07-07 14:49:00+00:00
A server that has a spike of load and can't cope with it is pretty normal, hard to characterize as "broken".

When the client(s) can send more work than the server can handle there are three options:

1 - Do nothing; server drops requests. 2 - Server notifies the clients (429 in HTTP) and client backs-off (exponential, jitter). 3 - Put the client requests in a queue.

Interview question/solution does 2 in a poor way (just adding a pause), it's part of the client and does 3 in the client, when usually this is done in an intermediate component (RMQ/Kafka/Redis/Db/whatever).
Show HN: Boxvy, Boost Desktop Experience, Quick Access to Most Important Content
by tufik2 | 2025-07-07 14:49:40+00:00
I’d like to invite you to download and try Boxvy — a productivity app designed to give you quick, easy access to your most important content right from your desktop.

And, if possible, I’d really appreciate your feedback!

Quick Description: This app is a lightweight yet powerful productivity tool designed for Windows and Mac, transforming your desktop into a dynamic workspace. With Boxvy, users can add customizable content — including notes, timers, shortcuts, any browser content, and more — directly to their screen in the form of widgets, movable bubbles, or minimalist status bar icons.

This intuitive interface allows seamless access to essential content without interrupting your workflow. Whether you're managing tasks, tracking goals, or organizing quick-access tools, Boxvy enhances focus and efficiency through a clean, modern user experience.

You can also watch the promo video on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsawlyFUDKk
by jazzyjackson | 2025-07-07 14:50:16+00:00
chronically worrying about climate change is no different than chronically worrying about death. it's simple, stone age, existential fear.

ancient men and women coped with existential fear by either embracing that everything is a cycle, or inventing some semblance of immortality by raising children or believing in life after death.

I guess I have no stress about climate change because it seems very normal to me that society and biosystems occasionally collapse. The stress comes from thinking there's something that can be done to stop it, and feeling that you're unable to achieve it. Maybe that's me throwing my hands up and accepting death instead of trying to stave it off, I just want to throw out there that the stress is self imposed, not environmental.
by mike_hearn | 2025-07-07 14:50:19+00:00
It's more than that. You can measure salaries too, measurement isn't the issue.

The problem is that if you let people spend the companies money without any checks or balances they'll just blow through unlimited amounts of it. That's why companies always have lots of procedures and policies around expense reporting. There's no upper limit to how much money developers will spend on cloud hardware given the chance, as the example above of casually running a test 10,000 times in parallel demonstrates nicely.

CI doesn't require you to fill out an expense report every time you run a PR thank goodness, but there still has to be a way to limit financial liability. Usually companies do start out by doubling cluster sizes a few times, but each time it buys a few months and then the complaints return. After a few rounds of this managers realize that demand is unlimited and start pushing back on always increasing the budget. Devs get annoyed and spend an afternoon on optimizations, suddenly times are good again.

The meme on HN is that developer time is always more expensive than machine time, but I've been on both sides of this and seen how the budgets work out. It's often not true, especially if you use clouds like Azure which are overloaded and expensive, or have plenty of junior devs, and/or teams outside the US where salaries are lower. There's often a lot of low hanging fruit in test times so it can make sense to optimize, even so, huge waste is still the order of the day.
by jibal | 2025-07-07 14:50:22+00:00
Point out to an LLM that it has no mental states and thus isn't capable of being frustrated (or glad that your program works or hoping that it will, etc. ... I call them out whenever they ascribe emotions to themselves) and they will confirm that ... you can coax from them quite detailed explanations of why and how it's an illusion.

Of course they will quickly revert to self-anthropomorphizing language, even after promising that they won't ... because they are just pattern matchers producing the sort of responses that conforms to the training data, not cognitive agents capable of making or keeping promises. It's an illusion.
by taylodl | 2025-07-07 14:50:22+00:00
A degree in Event Planning? A Ph.D. in Anthropology?

Look, even going back to the 80s a job was never guaranteed by getting a degree. I knew lots of people going back to school to get a Masters in CIS because they couldn't find work - employers either wanted experience or a Masters. That was 1985. Getting an MBA was a thing in the 90s to secure your employment, even as a software developer.

Then, sometime in the late 90s/2000s people got this idea that getting a college degree would somehow grant them a good-paying job. But too many students weren't able to connect their skills to the needs of the job market. To wit, getting a theater degree was never a good strategy to getting a good-paying job (but a great strategy if you had a passion for theater and understood what you were getting into).

At least someone with a degree in Event Planning ought to be able to start their own business. But a Ph.D. in Anthropology? What kind of job did they think they were going to get?
by chmod775 | 2025-07-07 14:50:25+00:00
> I said the gesture is "not OK" to use (meaning inappropriate), not that it doesn’t mean "OK". Those are two different things. The gesture can mean OK in some places while still being not OK (inappropriate) to use in many others.

Fair. That's clearly how I should've read that.

Though it does not materially affect this conversation, since demonstrably there's over 4 billion people to whom the gesture is not inappropriate. The claim "[it] has always been very inappropriate in most parts of the world" is wrong, regardless of what reasonable definition of "most" you use.

You edited your comment to add this, so I'll respond here:

> Also, I always said "parts of the world". You introduced population into the argument.

Right. And you're being vague on how you actually arrive at your claim of "most", which conveniently keeps the waters muddy while you attack attempts to turn this into something measurable.

So what other measure would you use? Most others are nonsense.

For example "places" isn't a useful measure, but even then: It can only be offensive to people. If I dropped you on a random point on the globe and you made that gesture, there's about a 99% chance nobody would be around to be offended.

By land area and predominant culture? Just Antarctica (hardly anyone there to take offense), the US, China, Canada, Australia, and India together are going to dwarf the opposition.

Counting countries? It's clearly inappropriate in around 10, with about another 20-30 where it can be misunderstood easily (Arab world, some of eastern Europe, scattered ones). A far cry from ~195 countries.

Either way there needs to be someone to take offense, so population is a pretty good measure.

You may disagree, but the onus was always on you, the one making the claim, to pick a measure and a definition of "most", then show that the bar is met. Feel free to now make more of an argument than "trust me I traveled".
Show HN: FireClass – Wrap Any Educational Website with Real-Time Classroom Tools
by mlivneh | 2025-07-07 14:50:30+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m a teacher and developer who wanted to bridge the gap between great web-based learning content and real classroom use. I built fireClass — a simple wrapper that lets you take any web-based educational tool (games, simulations, quizzes) and instantly run it in a live classroom setting with session management, real-time student data, and AI-powered feedback.

No vendor lock-in, no special integration — just add one line to a config file, and any site becomes “classroom-ready.” It works seamlessly with existing slide decks (PowerPoint, Google Slides) and requires no student accounts or passwords — just a name and a room code.

I’d love feedback, questions, or ideas — especially from teachers, edtech builders, or anyone who’s struggled to connect good content with real-time classroom workflows.

Demo: https://meir.world/fireClass-demo/

Thanks for reading!
by dathinab | 2025-07-07 14:50:39+00:00
but it's not some small things

but systematic wide spread big things and often many of them, giving US giant a unfair combative advantage

and don't think if you are a EU company you can do the same in the US, nop nop

but naturally the US insist that US companies can do that in the EU and complain every time a US company is fined for not complying for EU law
by obirunda | 2025-07-07 14:50:49+00:00
The point I'm driving at is why? Why program in English if you have to go through similar rigour. If you're not actually handing off the actual engineering, you're putting the solution and having it translate to your language of preference whilst telling everyone how much more productive you are for effectively offloading the trivial part of the process. I'm not arguing that you can't get code from well defined, pedantically written requirements or pseudo code. All I'm saying is that that is less than what is claimed by ai maximalists. Also, if that's all that you're doing with your "agents" just write the code on not deal with the pitfalls?
by dragonwriter | 2025-07-07 14:51:17+00:00
> I keep seeing this argument over and over again, and I have to wonder, at what point do you accept that maybe LLM's are useful?

The post you are responding to literally acknowledges that LLMs are useful in certain roles in coding in the first sentence.

> Like how many people need to say that they find it makes them more productive before you'll shift your perspective?

Argumentum ad populum is not a good way of establishing fact claims beyond the fact of a belief being popular.
by criddell | 2025-07-07 14:51:29+00:00
The AGI test I think makes sense is to put it in a robot body and let it navigate the world. Can I take the robot to my back yard and have it weed my vegetable garden? Can I show it how to fold my laundry? Can I take it to the grocery store and tell it "go pick up 4 yellow bananas and two avocados that will be ready to eat in the next day or two, and then meet me in dairy"? Can I ask it to dice an onion for me during meal prep?

These are all things my kids would do when they were pretty young.
by dmurray | 2025-07-07 14:51:35+00:00
> Yeah as far as I know, in French words are always pronounced consistent with how they're spelled.

It's far from as bad as English, but here's a Reddit thread with lots of French words which are not spelt as they are written. Not esoteric words either; along the lines of hier and monsieur

https://www.reddit.com/r/French/comments/1269a2x/is_there_a_...
by sfn42 | 2025-07-07 14:51:38+00:00
It's a common mistake. Just this weekend I followed a recipe from a well known cooking website for beef stroganoff that said to brown the beef in batches together with batches of onion. That's not a good idea, the onion will release liquid which prevents the beef from browning and once that cooks off the heat required to brown the meat will burn the onion. So I cooked the beef and onion separately instead. The onion can easily be cooked in one big batch, and if you take care not to burn the fond built up by the beef you can deglaze it with the onion. It's a good way to add extra flavor to the finished dish.

I also had a discussion with a roommate once, he criticized my way of cooking pasta. I keep it just barely boiling, but he insisted I should crank it up to max. I explained that it doesn't matter, the water won't get any hotter. I'll just waste electricity making steam. He didn't believe me so I got a thermometer and proved it.

If you want liquid water to go above 100C you need a pressure cooker.
by theshackleford | 2025-07-07 14:52:11+00:00
> I don't know, I can't really justify spending say 8 hours sitting -- and much less more time.

You mentioned "sitting," but I never brought that up. Maybe for you, gaming equals sitting. I use a sit/stand desk. Even when I didn’t, I had a job where I was on my feet 8+ hours a day and so if I wanted to spend a weekend sitting for 8 hours, again, that’s my choice and I’d certainly not have been interested in passing that decision through some government department of "appropriate sitting time."

> Maybe there could be an hour bank or something and you can do a 8 hour stint once in a while if you really wanted.

Or hear me out, maybe it should just stay the way it is: a personal decision that is nobody elses business.

> When you're young that doesn't feel so painful, but as you get older you start noticing the health implications of this kind of habit...

I’m not looking for a lecture on the dangers of sitting. Occasionally spending a day deep in a game isn’t the same as living a sedentary lifestyle for decades. It’s a false equivalency. And any attempt to hard regulate leisure time would restrict both behaviors the rare indulgence and the chronic one. Neither of which are your business or the government’s.

> Again I don't think this is just a matter of regulation, but requires both a game dev and gamer culture that favors the healthier and more full of wonder, communication and learning (opposed to just gambling addiction) kind of games.

There is no monolithic “gamer culture.” People play for different reasons, with different tastes, in different ways. The kind of games you're advocating for already exist, no one is stopping you from playing them. That’s the beauty of a free market: choice. However you are free to choose only for yourself, not for the rest of us.
by pizzafeelsright | 2025-07-07 14:52:14+00:00
How?

Irreversible is bad because mistakes happen. I lost ~$1,000 in a bad transfer because of a typo.

Publicly verifiable -- not good because I don't want the public knowing what I buy.

Pseudonymous is the worst of both. Is it or is it not me? them?

I am thinking digital cash using pub keys on a network run from space on something like starlink sats.
by taeric | 2025-07-07 14:52:14+00:00
My question was to ask if we are really that much different than other places? Because, I've heard anecdotes of similar situations from everywhere. And, indeed, the link I posted calls out that the US is basically typical for most things.

And fair that flu or something shouldn't need emergency room, but there are also urgent care clinics that are good for that sort of thing. And the few times I've had to call my doctor, I got through just fine.

Which is all to say, in a distribution, you expect variance. I've largely always found myself on the low end of these distributions, so I'm curious what the distribution is.

And I fully cede that we should continue to strive to get better.
by morsecodist | 2025-07-07 14:52:42+00:00
Not really. These other industries are evaluating people somehow. Whether it's vibes, connections, resume, or some sort of technical evaluation you'll have a grown adult evaluating you. Hiring will always feel a bit lame and arbitrary, you have limited time and information to pick someone. You're not going to be able to understand candidates fully and you'll probably pick wrong a fair bit. So we come up with criteria that's a bit arbitrary but you need at least some effort and smarts to meet them so it's at least a bit correlated with a good hire. I don't think the non technical methods are any more or less dignified.
by mystified5016 | 2025-07-07 14:53:05+00:00
IME it's less of a "throw more resources" problem and more of a "stop using resources in literally the worst way possible"

CI caching is, apparently, extremely difficult. Why spend a couple of hours learning about your CI caches when you can just download and build the same pinned static library a billion times? The server you're downloading from is (of course) someone else's problem and you don't care about wasting their resources either. The power you're burning by running CI for there hours instead of one is also someone else's problem. Compute time? Someone else's problem. Cloud costs? You bet it's someone else's problem.

Sure, some things you don't want to cache. I always do a 100% clean build when cutting a release or merging to master. But for intermediate commits on a feature branch? Literally no reason not to cache builds the exact same way you do on your local machine.
by wing-_-nuts | 2025-07-07 14:53:17+00:00
>You see this same thing with LLMs as tutors. Why no, Mr. Rothschild, you should not replace your team of SAT tutors for little Melvin III with an LLM.

I actually think cheap tutoring is one of the best cases for LLMs. Go look at what Khan academy is doing in this space. So much human potential is wasted because parents can't afford to get their kids the help they need with school. A properly constrained LLM would be always available to nudge the student in the right direction, and identify areas of weakness.
by juliendorra | 2025-07-07 14:53:57+00:00
You should be able to use Google Takeout to get all of your YouTube data, including your watch history.

This article is a nice example of someone using it:

> When I downloaded all my YouTube data, I’ve noticed an interesting file included. That file was named watch-history and it contained a list of all the videos I’ve ever watched.

https://blog.viktomas.com/posts/youtube-usage/

Of course as an European it's a legal obligation for companies to give you access, but I think Google Takeout works worldwide?
by 93po | 2025-07-07 14:54:05+00:00
this is exactly my point. right wing politics in the US is absolutely uniquely harmful, they are objectively worse than left wing parties. however to think that the WSJ, CNN, WaPo, etc don't routinely lie/distort/twist/misrepresent ALL THE TIME about EVERYTHING is just completely completely wrong. these are publications owned and controlled by billionaires and are absolutely mouthpieces of what those billionaires what to distribute. and its not always "mr evil overlord yelling at the editor to run a fake narrative and lie about XYZ". it's "selfish narcissist billionaire will only hire an editor that already believes all this and does it without being asked to".
by bee_rider | 2025-07-07 14:54:14+00:00
How would the payment work?

You pass along a message, and get a token in return. Then, some options:

1) the message never makes it through

2) the message makes it through, via your path

3) the message makes it through, but via some other path, and yours is really a dead end

Also, how would you handle the case where multiple peers all get the message and send it through the same bottleneck node? I guess you’d want to have some incentive to widen bottlenecks, so that no nodes become important…
by orbital-decay | 2025-07-07 14:54:35+00:00
One works in the coarse-to-fine direction, another works start-to-end. Which means different directionality biases, at least. Difference in speed, generalization, etc. is less clear and needs to be proven in practice, as fundamentally they are closer than it seems. Diffusion models have some well-studied shortcuts to trade speed for quality, but nothing stops you from implementing the same for the other type.
Ask HN: How do you deal with data backups in servers?
by atomicnature | 2025-07-07 14:54:39+00:00
Recently, we lost some data during migrating our servers due to a missing backup.

We thought we had something backed up - but was not really the case.

We have multiple databases and apps - each having its own data store often.

How do you usually deal with server backups? What has worked for you and what has not?
by FeepingCreature | 2025-07-07 14:55:08+00:00
You just train it on the goal. Then it has that goal.

Alternately, you can train it on following a goal and then you have a system where you can specify a goal.

At sufficient scale, a model will already contain goal-following algorithms because those help predict the next token when the model is basetrained on goal-following entities, ie. humans. Goal-driven RL then brings those algorithms to prominence.
by ronbenton | 2025-07-07 14:55:17+00:00
>Do companies not just double their CI workers after hearing people complain?

They do not.

I don't know if it's a matter of justifying management levels, but these discussions are often drawn out and belabored in my experience. By the time you get approval, or even worse, rejected, for asking for more compute (or whatever the ask is), you've spent way more money on the human resource time than you would ever spend on the requested resources.
by bryanlarsen | 2025-07-07 14:55:25+00:00
Overbuilding is significantly cheaper than either months worth of storage or intercontinental HVDC electrical links. It's probably worth building links with Romania, but probably not equatorial North Africa. Instead if you want to hit 100% carbon free, overbuild solar to almost your 5X, mix in a good amount of wind, a couple days of storage and links with Romania or nearby.

IMO 99% is a much better target than 100%: almost all of the benefits for a lot less cost. Idle natural gas plants don't emit carbon.

(And by 100% I mean 99.99%. The grid isn't reliable enough to make more than 99.99% worth the cost).
by andrewflnr | 2025-07-07 14:55:28+00:00
That ignores the co-evolution between throat anatomy and brain structures related to language. There's no reason to select for language ability in the brain over evolutionary time if the throat can't use it. If mere ability to use sign language was enough to push language development, chimps would do much better with human-invented sign languages. Deaf and/or mute humans are, I presume, co-opting language skill "meant" (selected) for vocal language.