MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by eloeffler | 2025-07-19 22:30:02+00:00
I know one story that may have become such an experience. It's about Wikipedia Germany and I don't know what the policies there actually are.

A German 90s/2000s rapper (Textor, MC of Kinderzimmer Productions) produced a radio feature about facts and how hard it can be to prove them.

One personal example he added was about his Wikipedia Article that stated that his mother used to be a famous jazz singer in her birth country Sweden. Except she never was. The story had been added to an Album recension in a rap magazine years before the article was written. Textor explains that this is part of 'realness' in rap, which has little to do with facts and more with attitude.

When they approached Wikipedia Germany, it was very difficult to change this 'fact' about the biography of his mother. There was published information about her in a newspaper and she could not immediately prove who she was. Unfortunately, Textor didn't finish the story and moved on to the next topic in the radio feature.
by skydhash | 2025-07-19 22:30:52+00:00
My point is whenever the instructions feels repetitive, it's better to write it down and instead have a trigger. And if you find yourself with a lot of trigger, then there's usually some kind of abstraction that reduce them.

> give a fully-autonomous agent instructions like: "Whenever you feel like you've completed a task, run mcp__just-mcp__test and fix errors and warnings until it passes, then you may commit changes locally"

Why not have some script named `work-on` like:

agent --from-file $task_file make test > test.log test_status = $last_status while test_status is error agent --from-file fix-test-errors.txt make test > test.log test_status = $last_status git commit

And then use one of the git hooks to run

message = agent --from-file commit-message-from-last-task.txt

and use $message for the commit.

Then you will only have to run `work-on task-one.txt`. You can also make it an emacs command that runs on the current buffer and bind it to "C-c C-c"
by alganet | 2025-07-19 22:31:04+00:00
It was a rethorical question, but fine.

The idea is that you know inside the way you act. Only you know if I'm wrong or not, it's beyond any reasonable proof and therefore worthless discussing.

I guess someone who sees all the logs for everything you do and everything I do could reach some conclusion. I don't really think that thing exists, but you can imagine it does, as a thought exercise, and it should give you some perspective.
by binwiederhier | 2025-07-19 22:31:20+00:00
Thank you for sharing. A curious read. I am looking forward to the next post.

I've been working on backup and disaster recovery software for 10 years. There's a common phrase in our realm that I feel obligated to share, given the nature of this article.

> "Friends don't let friends build their own Backup and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) solution"

Building BCDR is notoriously difficult and has many gotchas. The author hinted at some of them, but maybe let me try to drive some of them home.

- Backup is not disaster recovery: In case of a disaster, you want to be up and running near-instantly. If you cannot get back up and running in a few minutes/hours, your customers will lose your trust and your business will hurt. Being able to restore a system (file server, database, domain controller) with minimal data loss (<1 hr) is vital for the survival of many businesses. See Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO).

- Point-in-time backups (crash consistent vs application consistent): A proper backup system should support point-in-time backups. An "rsync copy" of a file system is not a point-in-time backup (unless the system is offline), because the system changes constantly. A point-in-time backup is a backup in which each block/file/.. maps to the same exact timestamp. We typically differentiate between "crash consistent backups" which are similar to pulling the plug on a running computer, and "application consistent backups", which involves asking all important applications to persist their state to disk and freeze operations while the backup is happening. Application consistent backups (which is provided by Microsoft's VSS, as mentioned by the author) significantly reduce the chances of corruption. You should never trust an "rsync copy" or even crash consistent backups.

- Murphy's law is really true for storage media: My parents put their backups on external hard drives, and all of r/DataHoarder seems to buy only 12T HDDs and put them in a RAID0. In my experience, hard drives of all kinds fail all the time (though NVMe SSD > other SSD > HDD), so having backups in multiple places (3-2-1 backup!) is important.

(I have more stuff I wanted to write down, but it's late and the kids will be up early.)
by wglb | 2025-07-19 22:31:21+00:00
Disputed charges by the user. I know of one payment processor that specifically seeks out these high-risk businesses. Consider one of many possible scenarios would be that of a spouse who is alarmed at a charge to a clearly risque service and says "What the heck is that??" and the offender says "What the heck I don't know. Cancel the charge!"
by MoltenMan | 2025-07-19 22:31:47+00:00
From what I've seen the majority of the deaths are either a. intentional or b. really not the trains fault. That's not to say it isn't horrible that it happens, but IMO the solution is train safety awareness (don't stop on a railway crossing!!!), and if anything building more high speed rail in the US will improve public awareness of how to be safe around trains.
by pjc50 | 2025-07-19 22:31:48+00:00
"Bloodless takeover" is assuming a lot. Pro unification is a very fringe position: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Unification_Promotio...

It seems very unlikely to me that between KMT loyalist troops and angry mobs that China would simply be allowed to take Taiwan without violence, and that nobody would decide to use TSMC as a hostage.

See the Swiss strategy, where every bridge and tunnel has its explosives pre-placed when it was built.
by areoform | 2025-07-19 22:32:55+00:00
Neighboring countries that trade and are in each other's supply chains + economic zones don't go to war.

See: the US' painful and bizarre attempts at butchering its relationship with Canada. The integration of the two economies means that such ham fisted manoeuvres take money out of people's pockets pretty fast.

In a pre-mass travel world, I can see someone like a certain leader attempting to annex Canada. Now? It's unthinkable. Just saying it causes billions in damage.
by hibert | 2025-07-19 22:33:39+00:00
You are saying they should leave DCs and never go back? To be blunt they could never explain their prices without sprinkles and no one is going to care when they are back at AMDs level if they burned that in the interim. Selling for a dollar less than AMD is not a model Intel can sustain.

Clear Linux itself is afaik irrelevant it is a vehicle for getting their code for optimizations developed and out to make FUDish claims that maybe an AMD won't be as good for your workloads, etc.
by taylodl | 2025-07-19 22:33:47+00:00
I know a lot of people here are tired of these teaser headlines and don't want to be told anything until there's an actual cure. But here me out - I'm old enough to have lost several friends and family to cancer. Along the way there have always been headlines like this where it seems that a breakthrough is imminent, and you know what? We are much better at preventing, detecting, and treating cancer than we were 40 years ago!

I personally know several people who have gotten breast cancer and survived! I remember when that was practically a death sentence. Ditto for colon cancer. Even your prospects for lung cancer have improved dramatically.

What has made this progress possible is this relentless research. Research that leads to reports being published. Promising leads being discussed. A huge portion of this research leads to dead ends - BUT - some leads to real progress and has in turn lead to real lives being saved. So I say continue with the research and continue publishing and sharing the research results.
by kevingadd | 2025-07-19 22:34:39+00:00
Not that weird of a strawman:

> According to the Metro, several states have prosecuted women for miscarriages or stillbirths. They include South Carolina, Georgia, Arkansas, Texas, California, Mississippi, and Ohio. It appears West Virginia has joined the ranks as well.

> Though California has since passed laws banning criminal charges and investigations of pregnancy loss, it previously jailed two women for stillbirths.

Also:

> Raleigh County Prosecuting Attorney Tom Truman told WVNS 59News that a number of criminal charges under state code, including felonies, could be levied against a woman who flushes fetal remains, buries them, or otherwise disposes of remains following an involuntary abortion, also called a miscarriage.

We've established arbitrary lines on when the embryo progresses to the point of having a legally mandated funeral in some parts of the US.

https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/new-law-in-us-state-could-le...
by areoform | 2025-07-19 22:34:41+00:00
> and the quicker disease can spread.

People who haven't been on HN for a while tend to think HN keeps getting worse etc. and that's rarely the case, but I do think something has changed in the site's core audience.

HN has attracted its share of luddites. People who aren't interested in building a better future. But are very interested in tearing it down.

When did HN become a place where dreams of a better future were met with proclamations of disease?
by highfrequency | 2025-07-19 22:34:48+00:00
Pricing is disappointing - no cheaper than the existing AMD server equivalent Epyc Turin 9655 ($11.5k for 96 cores). https://www.amd.com/en/products/processors/server/epyc/9005-...

Significantly worse price/core than the earlier Threadripper 64 core 3990x for $3900.
by BurningFrog | 2025-07-19 22:35:08+00:00
Improving the genetic quality of a human population seems like a good cause.

What got"eugenics" in disrepute was the evil things done to people with "bad" traits:

- Killing them

- Forced sterilizing of them

- Forced abortion of their fetuses

That's awful, but because of the means, not because the goal of a healthier population.
by FireBeyond | 2025-07-19 22:35:14+00:00
> Apple CBA to have support for DP MST

They do this for MBP market segmentation now, but really, this started with the ProDisplay XDR.

At the time, people wondered about how they were able to drive the 6K 10 bit display, as the math didn't fit the spec.

People like me found out. Because they completely fucked with DP1.4 specs to make it happen with Big Sur.

In Catalina, my Intel Mac Pro happily drove 2 4K HDR monitors at 144 Hz. Upgrade to Big Sur, not any more. 95Hz for 4K SDR, 60Hz for 4K HDR. Not the cables, not the monitors. Indeed, "downgrading" the monitors advertised support to DP 1.2 gave better options, 120Hz SDR, 75Hz HDR.

Hundreds of reports, different card/cable/monitor combos.

Was at least still the case as of Ventura, which makes sense, because it wasn't a bug, it was just an Apple style fuck you to anyone not fully invested in "all Apple, all the time".

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25437219
by jtrn | 2025-07-19 22:35:30+00:00
It's really hard to answer without imposing values. For instance, I value productivity, progress, knowledge, the survival of humanity, and such things. In that sense, most substances referred to as "drugs" have a bad track record (heroin, cannabis, amphetamines, ethanol). I'm not sure if I think the world would suffer with regard to any of my values if all of them magically disappeared.

Then again, I think it's important that my views are never imposed on anybody. So it's perfectly fine to be a pure hedonist and use everything under the sun.

The dose makes the poison, though. So I think that limited use of alcohol, cannabis, shrooms, and LSD might be useful to gain new perspectives, serve as a social lubricant, or even provide some form of temporary relief.

The drug isn't really the problem; it's the pattern of use. So maybe I should have said that "most drugs are mostly used in a terrible way, to such an extent that they become terrible by default."

If I were to try anything, psilocybin would be high up the list of stuff I would like to try. Just to see what effect it would have on me. I suspect little (every life-changing, perspective-changing experience people yab on about never changed anything for me once they actually happened to me, and I am 100% immune to hypnosis and personality change when drunk), but it would be interesting to see.
by GuB-42 | 2025-07-19 22:36:38+00:00
The downloads are (presumably) already compressed.

And there are strong ties between LLMs and compression. LLMs work by predicting the next token. The best compression algorithms work by predicting the next token and encoding the difference between the predicted token and the actual token in a space-efficient way. So in a sense, a LLM trained on Wikipedia is kind of a compressed version of Wikipedia.
by Arathorn | 2025-07-19 22:37:04+00:00
The only problem with this statement is that it’s untrue.

Element Web/Desktop is 11 years old and has never been rewritten, and while we’re just starting to experiment with the Rust SDK for it, it’s unclear yet whether we migrate the current app to Rust SDK or write an Element X Web.

Element iOS is also 11 years old, and as fun and expensive as it was maintaining three entirely separate codebases between iOS/Android/Web, we only switched to Rust with Element X as of Sept, and have no plans to switch again.

Now, it’s true that Riot Android did get rewritten in ~2019 (into RiotX, which became Element Android) - mainly because it needed to get a proper storage layer and to move from Android 2.x vintage UI code. Now we have a common rust SDK to do all the heavy lifting it is reasonable to switch the app to use it, which is what Element X Android is.

In other words, this whole exercise is trying to simplify development on to one stable Rust codebase, rather than hunting bugs and reimplementing features over 3 entirely separate codebases.

If we did it again perhaps we’d try for a replace-the-engine like Signal did rather than rewrite-the-app - or perhaps do a big bang replacement when the rewrite is ready. But instead we wanted to get the new apps in the hands of users earlier, and we do not remotely have the funding to develop both old and new in parallel.

Hopefully history will show this was an okay approach in the end, even if everyone hates us in the final stages of the transition.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-07-19 22:37:12+00:00
Dave Barry is the best!

That is such a classic problem with Google (from long before AI).

I am not optimistic about anything being changed from this, but hope springs eternal.

Also, I think the trilobite is cute. I have a [real fossilized] one on my desk. My friend stuck a pair of glasses on it, because I'm an old dinosaur, but he wanted to go back even further.
by timschmidt | 2025-07-19 22:37:14+00:00
> American corporations are what created "Silicon Valley" in the first place.

According to https://steveblank.com/2009/04/27/the-secret-history-of-sili... and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo the creation of Silicon Valley had more to do with academic expertise in radio research and Department of Defense funding circa World War II. Corporations were the "second wave".
by timmytokyo | 2025-07-19 22:37:30+00:00
The author explained why he used contrived examples. It's because the pain arises most acutely only after your project has become large and mature but demands a small ownership-impacting change. The toy examples demonstrate the problem in the small, but they generalize to larger and more complex scenarios.

He's basically talking about the rigidity that Rust's borrow checking imposes on a program's data design. Once you've got the program following all the rules, it can be extraordinarily difficult to make even a minor change without incurring a time-consuming and painful refactor.

This is an argument about the language's ergonomics, so it seems like a fair criticism.
by Aurornis | 2025-07-19 22:37:41+00:00
> This needs to be regulated. They should be held accountable for spreading false information or rumours,

Regulated how? Held accountable how? If we start fining LLM operators for pieces of incorrect information you might as well stop serving the LLM to that country.

> since it can have unexpected consequences

Generally you hold the person who takes action accountable. Claiming an LLM told you bad information isn’t any more of a defense than claiming you saw the bad information on a Tweet or Reddit comment. The person taking action and causing the consequences has ownership of their actions.

I recall the same hand-wringing over early search engines: There was a debate about search engines indexing bad information and calls for holding them accountable for indexing incorrect results. Same reasoning: There could be consequences. The outrage died out as people realize they were tools to be used with caution, not fact-checked and carefully curated encyclopedias.

> I'm worried about this. Companies like Wikipedia spent years trying to get things right,

Would you also endorse the same regulations against Wikipedia? Wikipedia gets fined every time incorrect information is found on the website?

EDIT: Parent comment was edited while I was replying to add the comment about outside of the US. I welcome some country to try regulating LLMs to hold them accountable for inaccurate results so we have some precedent for how bad of an idea that would be and how much the citizens would switch to using VPNs to access the LLM providers that are turned off for their country in response.
by leagreeer | 2025-07-19 22:39:03+00:00
Agreed that native interface support is table stakes for any language now. It would avoid so much boilerplate - nevermind the time wasted examining the code to see what kind of ad-hoc interface any given piece of code is using - and how to retrieve the ridiculous zig vtable data member for each pseudo class instance. It just amounts to useless noise in the code, rather than succinctly stating the intent.
by ZenoArrow | 2025-07-19 22:39:22+00:00
You're missing the key point, which is that the size referenced as the semiconductor manufacturing node is no longer an accurate description of the true transistor size, it's more of a marketing term.

Even if it's possible to build transistors that are 1.4nm in size (or smaller), that is not what "1.4nm" means in the context of this announcement. I get that this can be confusing, it's just a case of smoke and mirrors because Moore's Law is already dead and semiconductor manufacturers don't want to spook investors. The performance gains are still real, but the reasons for getting them are no longer as simple as shrinking transistor size.

As for the true physical limits of transistor sizes, there are problems like quantum tunnelling that we aren't likely to overcome, so even if you can build a gate with 7 atoms, that doesn't mean it'll work effectively. Also note that "gate" does not necessarily mean "transistor".
by ram_rar | 2025-07-19 22:41:41+00:00
As a non-native English speaker, I’ve often struggled to communicate nuance or subtlety in writing—especially when addressing non-technical audiences. LLMs have been a game-changer for me. They’ve significantly improved my writing and made it much easier to articulate my thoughts clearly.

Sure, it can be frustrating that they don’t adapt to a user’s personal style. But for those of us who haven’t fully developed that stylistic sense (which is common among non-native speakers), it’s still a huge leap forward.
by hoistbypetard | 2025-07-19 22:43:34+00:00
I appreciate that. I would add that she might be able to do everything I did (with my 8-bit micro when I was 10) with the pi I set her up with. The thing I was impressed with about the pi was how little I had to help her interface with sensors that touched the real world, like light sensors and temperature sensors. The GPIO there is much more accessible to her than the user port on the C64 or the expansion slots on the Apples were to me.

I had to help find the references and explain some of them to her, but I've been pleased with how little help it's required from me. Probably only a little more help than I needed to learn how to connect cables and format a floppy before I ran off on my own as a kid. But she's getting more independence at the end of my help than I got with the hardware of my day.
by badsectoracula | 2025-07-19 22:44:07+00:00
I've found this amusing because right now i'm downloading `wikipedia_en_all_maxi_2024-01.zim` so i can use it with an LLM with pages extracted using `libzim` :-P. AFAICT the zim files have the pages as HTML and the file i'm downloading is ~100GB.

(reason: trying to cross-reference my tons of downloaded games my HDD - for which i only have titles as i never bothered to do any further categorization over the years aside than the place i got them from - with wikipedia articles - assuming they have one - to organize them in genres, some info, etc and after some experimentation it turns out an LLM - specifically a quantized Mistral Small 3.2 - can make some sense of the chaos while being fast enough to run from scripts via a custom llama.cpp program)
by NalNezumi | 2025-07-19 22:44:14+00:00
Can someone more versed in macro economics clarify to me, to what extent "price differences between countries." goes?

Like are we just comparing simple goods: grocery, white wares, cars, fuel/electricity etc the price of these things there. Or are we also considering things such as: need to save money for Healthcare, University, credit card transaction fee, housing cost (mortgage), required amount of fuel for basic functioning of everyday life?

The latter is basically stuff that is either cheap or free in certain places while astronomically high in other (US, but I guess housing price is everywhere if city).

I feel like layman AND economist doesn't truly account (or even understand) how different some countries have it on those metrics; A person in Tokyo or most capital cities in Europe can get away with ZERO fuel + car cost, while for Americans that's a death sentence. Same for Healthcare. So comparing those prices doesn't even make sense to begin with, but leaving it out is a major boost to places where salaries are high (US) but the (hidden) cost are not measured.
by gamblor956 | 2025-07-19 22:44:15+00:00
You're not wrong. A single class action lawsuit would destroy Rest as a going concern, assuming there were enough false-positives generated to be an issue.

(Rest would have to demonstrate how its technology works in court in order to have any hope of defeating such a lawsuit. And as the hotel guests don't have contracts with Rest, they aren't bound by any arbitration agreements.)
by comrade1234 | 2025-07-19 22:45:16+00:00
> The exemption was restricted over time to largely benefit foreigners who don’t expect to live in the U.K. permanently.

Sounds like it worked out as planned, since they're leaving now.

Plus, 40% inheritance tax is crazy. You'd have to sell off half of what you inherit to pay the tax. Sucks if you're a farmer or a multigenerational family business
by spaniard89277 | 2025-07-19 22:45:43+00:00
- Searching for a guide on say a car infotainment system would be totally different here from someone explaining in the USA or germany. Now I see a ton of titles in my language, only to find out it's information is completely useless to me because a menu, button or whatever doesen't even exist.

This is so annoying. I can't believe they couldn't understand this, and there are many multilingual people.