MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Apocryphon | 2025-07-22 22:58:11+00:00
> he basically ends up comparing a year of revenue to two years of Capex

He appears to only be doing that for the seven companies cumulatively, and in each company's case is only comparing year with year.

> Both capex and revenue are growing rapidly, and revenue will lag behind.

Even if his capex estimates are inflated, unless they're off by magntitudes, isn't the ratio between the two figures still alarming? What was, say, Amazon's initial capex for AWS compared to the revenue? Or in any other cases where long-term investment bore fruit?

> What happens when Amazon buys a GPU?

What else are they using GPUs for? Luna cloud gaming? Crypto mining?
by FredPret | 2025-07-22 22:58:20+00:00
That's a phenomenon that can be blamed on low-IQ or disengaged owners.

Some companies have owners that are locked in, who know where the true value of their business lies (usually this involves a high quality product), and holds the management to account to keep the golden-egg-laying goose alive.

But other companies are owned by index funds, ETFs, and/or dumb people who don't know or care how things work. These have no defense against enshittifying.

I've bought some products that are of almost egregiously high quality, and nearly 100% of the time there's family ownership, or it's still run by the founders.
by simpaticoder | 2025-07-22 22:58:24+00:00
Lovely article, and he hints at something that's been on my mind lately, about how the internet enables collisions between groups that cannot (and often should not) mix. For example, the quiet, thoughtful academic giving insightful analysis of Plato's Symposium getting shouted down and called rude names. Or a rowdy bunch of young gamer kids being scolded by a priggish group of college kids for being politically incorrect. The loss of friction, the loss of gate-keeping, sounds good but feels really bad. It's like how we value biodiversity and so lament and control "invasive species" to keep these unique and interesting pockets of the biosphere alive. As a society, we benefit from having quieter, softer, kinder places where sensitive, smart people can do intense work, and yet we are ALSO served by the louder, harder, harsher places where the fighters go. But if we allow these two spaces to mix, the former is quickly eradicated, the latter loses not just its purpose, but eventually the former can no longer offer better fighting tools to the latter. Perhaps this effect has a name, or has been talked about by a more articulate author?
by alganet | 2025-07-22 22:58:34+00:00
> It was not an awful initial concept, but it was neither well thought-through nor well-presented.

I am looking forward to discussing such matters with people that are less compelled to observe style before content.

I don't have the time or the luxury to wear fancy clothes, that's why I'm here on hacker news, which is supposed to be a place that does not require them.

I do understand where you're coming from though.
by seanwilson | 2025-07-22 22:58:56+00:00
I see buttons used as an example a lot but buttons are one of the most style heavy elements on many websites and are only a single element so it's not a good comparison imo.

For a lot of pages, you're often only adding maybe 1 to 5 styles to each element to change some flexbox settings, add some margin, set a background color, or change a font. With the traditional CSS approach, you're forced to come up with class names for each element and put the styling into a separate file, which makes iterating on style and layout really laborious compared to Tailwind.

That's a much bigger benefit to focus on rather than looking at how (single element) buttons are styled. It's not like the CSS for styled buttons is less verbose or even pretty either.
by SchemaLoad | 2025-07-22 23:00:08+00:00
It's honestly such awakening experience to see videos or visit these "poor" low GDP, stagnant economy countries and see their streets are full of happy, healthy people out walking, talking with each other. Kids out playing on the street, old people dancing in the parks. And then see our rich cities where everyone sits in traffic scoffing McDonalds raging out at other people doing the same. Huffing in diesel exhaust and tire microplastics.
by deathanatos | 2025-07-22 23:00:23+00:00
> I could have built this 25 years ago with a single GIF with about 6 frames, that was a couple of kilobytes and would be performant on the (relative) potato computers we had then. […] But modern "web designers" feel the need to spend how long carefully crafting that CSS animation which adds dozens of lines of code to the codebase and burns a ton of CPU...why? Just because you can, I assume?

The animation (which is not suppose to be constant/static) conveys whether audio is being picked up by the application. I.e., it's VU meter.
by Expurple | 2025-07-22 23:01:04+00:00
No, I can't remember any dead proprietary forks that would support that idea.

But somewhat, I can't remember any counterexamples either. I mean, a proprietary fork killing the permissive original. I can only remember:

- AppGet vs WinGet. But that's one permissive program killing another.

- The proprietary build of VSCode. But it's basically "a set of patches" on top of a still-maintained permissive base. And its popularity is at least somewhat dependent on the existence of that permissive base.
by JohnPDickerson | 2025-07-22 23:01:06+00:00
Good feedback. Some of this is intentional - as an independent and growing ~20-person company, we're able to operate more quickly than the larger Mozilla organizations, and we're purposefully distancing ourselves from the associated bureaucracy that comes with any large organization. We are very much in line with the Mozilla ethos around personal ownership, privacy, control, and agency. We're figuring out how to best push on those principles in the world of AI, and appreciate feedback and contributions from the community.
by mvdtnz | 2025-07-22 23:02:59+00:00
Mazda is responsible for one of the biggest reliability cock-ups in modern automotive history. A lot of Americans are not aware of this because this generation of diesel motor didn't make it to the American market but for many years they sold cars with a diesel engine with multiple critical manufacturing and design issues that resulted in thousands and thousands of defective engines. In many markets this was never recalled and at least in some markets Mazda's response was to draw another line higher up on diesel dipsticks so the owner could monitor if their crankcase was filling up with diesel, which would eventually dilute the engine oil and destroy the turbo and other components.

In my country used car dealers will not touch Mazda diesels for trade-ins because they always come back to them with destroyed engines.
by 1-more | 2025-07-22 23:03:07+00:00
I have used splits for a long time. An improvement I swear by for thumb clusters is making the keys farther from me taller. I have no idea how I'd hit them without that. My keyboard is a Keebio Iris [0]. The thumb keys closest to me have relatively low-profile DSA key caps. The keys above them are SA (edit: row 3). I think this is a decent avenue for keyboard customizers to explore to make their thumbs have a better time reaching up a row.

The Glove uses low profile switches though, so I have no idea if different height caps are even possible with those.

[0] https://keeb.io/collections/iris-split-ergonomic-keyboard
by MITSardine | 2025-07-22 23:03:13+00:00
Necessity is the mother of invention!

Another way to look at it, is only those who could write very optimized code could get anything meaningful running on those machines. Hence all (?) software from far enough back was optimized down to death.

I'm personally grateful I've never had to wrangle hardware bugs into features and other such hacks one stumbles upon in anecdotes from those eras... even though there is a certain charm to it all.
by Waterluvian | 2025-07-22 23:03:18+00:00
The difficult thing for me is that while I believe radon can cause lung cancer, I think products are often sold based on fear. “Second leading cause” doesn’t really mean anything in isolation, does it?

What slice of my mortality pie was radon before and after spending $5000? Could I spend $5000 to cut a bigger slice out of it in another way, like eating better or hiring a grizzly bear to make me exercise more often?

I think action is better than decision paralysis, but I wish I could make much more informed decisions.
by jeffbee | 2025-07-22 23:04:08+00:00
These conclusions are broadly compatible with "The Carbon Footprint of Machine Learning Training Will Plateau, Then Shrink" or, as I prefer, the PDF metadata title that they left in there, "Revamped Happy CO2e Paper".

Despite the incredible focus by the press on this topic, Mistral's lifecycle emissions in 18 months were less than the typical annual emissions of a single A320neo in commercial service.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2204.05149
by legitster | 2025-07-22 23:04:32+00:00
> In those files, Obama officials exchange correspondence about Russian attempts at election interference, concluding that it was unlikely Russian hackers would successfully compromise physical election infrastructure or alter vote totals without detection but might be successful in influencing voter confidence in the election.

The accusations against Obama... is that he did his job and his administration reported accurately about their findings?

The laziness and transparency of what they are doing here is insulting to the intelligence.

"In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it... The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
by cyanydeez | 2025-07-22 23:04:39+00:00
look up pastel qanon. You can always graft motivated reasoning on top of anything that's socially derived definitions.

The black community has dealt with social appropriation of it's culture for centuries.

At the end of the day, I believe the diversity we see exploding within humanity is driven by the social need for diversity, and the FOMO is what rent seekers look for to grift.
by dwattttt | 2025-07-22 23:04:40+00:00
Shared libraries are linked together in a lossy step. I don't believe it's theoretically impossible; as an unsatisfying proof of concept, you could 'statically' link the .so by archiving it in the final binary, unpacking it at runtime, and dynamically linking it.

The static linker would be prevented from seeing multiple copies of code too.
by potatolicious | 2025-07-22 23:05:24+00:00
> ” A very small model could run on device to automatically switch and choose the right model based on the request.”

This is harder than it looks. A “router” model often has to be quite large to maintain routing accuracy, especially if you’re trying to understand regular user requests.

Small on-device models gating more powerful models most likely just leads to mis-routes.
by tialaramex | 2025-07-22 23:05:31+00:00
For radar, RV Jones' "Most Secret War" has an anecdote where the British raid a German coastal radar site (in France), nab the radar operator and are annoyed to discover that they know almost nothing about German radar. Pre-war Germany is already a fascist dictatorship so "ham" radio operators are enemies of the state because they're outside of your centrally controlled narrative. Whereas pre-war Britain has the usual amount of amateurs with radios. So when war broke out and they're conscripting towns at a time the British would see you're a ham and divert you from infantry training or whatever and make you a radar operator - which means the average British radar operator actually has some idea how radio works but the Germans are obliged to basically just pick a soldier and train him to operate the radar from scratch.

This apparently had significant operational consequences because if you don't know how it works all you can do when there's a fault is order spare parts. So German radar stations would be offline more often and for longer. Although Chain Home's transmitters were wildly more powerful than anything even a rich British amateur might have seen before, not to mention operating on frequencies unachievable with prior technology, the principles were familiar.
by evrimoztamur | 2025-07-22 23:06:23+00:00
What is the levelised cost per token? As in how we calculate levelised cost of energy.

If we take the total training footprint and divide that by the number of tokens the model is expected to produce over its lifetime, how does that compare to the marginal operational footprint?

My napkin math says per token water and material footprints are up 6-600% and 4-400% higher respectively for tokens on the order of 40B to 400M.

I don't have a good baseline on how many tokens Mistral Large 2 will infer over the course of its lifetime, however. Any ideas?
by LorenPechtel | 2025-07-22 23:06:27+00:00
There's a liability issue here.

You must have a charge controller in Li-Ion between each voltage point because overcharging a cell is asking for trouble.

Sealed battery pack, you can put a little controller in there with it. Loose cell, you either give up some capacity and add some cost by putting a controller in each cell, or you trust that the controller in whatever charges it is good. Bare cell, good charger, fine. Bare cell, iffy charger, you might get the blame when the cell goes up. Thus it's very hard to find good bare cells.
by zdragnar | 2025-07-22 23:06:53+00:00
A better seal maintains the pressure in the house better.

Drafts form either from temperature differential and wind outside pushing in.

Radon coming up from the ground is still heavier than air, so it won't mix in very well if it can't displace anything.

It's not a perfect solution, as air movement from circulation will help it mix in, but a good envelope will help a mitigation system out quite a bit.
by cadamsdotcom | 2025-07-22 23:07:24+00:00
The trick to keeping the agents effective is complexity management.

You know you’ve hit a complexity barrier when your agent claims to have implemented something but it’s just.. missing. That’s your sign it’s time to clean things up - maybe simplify it to a pattern that funnels many things through one place. Then the models can work again.

This complexity reduction is a key step in engineering anything really. It makes for a healthier codebase.

And of course, incremental improvements in models will let them go further before hitting their own specific complexity barriers.

I truly believe there IS a durable role for “AI whisperers” of this kind. Folks who can tamp down the complexity as something is built, to keep it under the complexity ceiling of present-day models - and as the crazy pace of the industry lifts that ceiling again and again, folks who know where the limits are so they can work as fast as possible within them.

It’s a very different type of engineering driven by a very different set of constraints. It’s unfamiliar and it’s fascinating watching engineers grapple with it. But it’s here and we have no terminology for what it’s doing to our work, so some people are frightened while others get on with it.

Best you be among the latter.
Show HN: Cryptographic proofs that algorithms stay fair over time [pdf]
by skylessdev | 2025-07-22 23:07:42+00:00
This technical brief introduces a novel dual-baseline verification framework utilizing Zero-Knowledge Proofs (SNARKs) to enhance algorithmic fairness. It tackles a critical gap in traditional auditing by not only verifying that declared rules were followed (Symbolic Consistency) but also ensuring that rule application remains consistent across time and stakeholders (Temporal Consistency). The framework prevents selective rule enforcement and post-hoc manipulation.

The current implementation leverages Circom + SnarkJS with a roadmap for integrating Succinct's recursive proving system (SP1) for enhanced scalability. This system is actively deployed for collaborative research, enabling verifiable claims on areas like long-term bias detection, stakeholder equity, and behavioral consistency in algorithmic and social systems.

Current Deployment: Full working system with dual research applications:

Technical Documentation: https://docs.skyless.network — Comprehensive framework documentation with dual-lens analysis (governance verification + behavioral social trust) Live Prototype: https://www.meetskyla.com — Interactive demonstration of cryptographic verification of symbolic state transitions Open Source Architecture: https://github.com/skylessdev/skyla/blob/main/ARCHITECTURE.m... The current implementation runs production-ready proof engines using Circom + SnarkJS with full API functionality. The system supports chained verification via previousProofHash, with symbolic reasoning, recursive state logic, and identity mathematics actively deployed for collaborative research.
by jonplackett | 2025-07-22 23:08:07+00:00
Ive driven 5000 miles since I bought the car as a panic purchase at the start of lockdown.

So according to that article it’d take 13.5 years of driving an electric car to pay it back.

You let me know an electric car that lasts 13.5 years and I’ll head on down to the dealership.

Otherwise I will wait out the remaining 8.5 years as best I can
by seanhunter | 2025-07-22 23:08:18+00:00
I don’t own one, but Volvo certainly still stands for safety. The XC90 (the non-fully electric version of this car) had the most amazing safety record in the UK I’ve ever heard of. For the first 10 years or so it was in service no driver or passenger was killed in an XC90 in any accident in the UK.
by j-pb | 2025-07-22 23:08:23+00:00
You can try to misconstrue and ridicule the argument, but that won't change the math that if you have one thing that causes 1 unit of damage, and another thing that causes 100.000 units of damage, then for all intents and purposes the thing that produces 1 unit of damage is irrelevant.

And any discussion that tries to frame them as somewhat equally important issues is dishonest and either malicious or delusional.

My guess, as I've expressed earlier in the comment chain, is that it's emotionally easier for people to bike-shed about the 0.01% of their environmental impact, than to actually tackle things that make up 20%.

And no it's not only beef (which is a stand-in for meat and diary), another low hanging fruit is also transport, like switching your car for a bike.

But switching from meat and diary to a vegan diet would reduce up to 20% of your personal environmental impact, in terms of CO2.

And about 80-90% of rainforest deforestation is driven directly or indirectly by livestock production.

So it's simply the easiest most impactful thing everyone can do. (Switching your car for a bike isn't possible for people in rural areas for example.)
by lucumo | 2025-07-22 23:09:29+00:00
> Bookmarks definitely sync

Yeah, I meant search engines. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44647014

> Extension settings can sync, I don't know exactly if it is opt-in or opt-out but some extensions do sync on desktop.

I mostly tried with uBO. Couldn't get it to work.
by dudeinjapan | 2025-07-22 23:09:38+00:00
Its not clear how much of the increase is due to tourist demand vs. global price inflation in general. 5000 yen is now $33. Thats an unthinkably low price in the US unless you are going for bedbugs and a piss-stained mattress…

Prices in Japan seem to be de-coupling from the rest of the world… e.g. the “Japanese only” language-locked Nintendo Switch 2
by evan_a_a | 2025-07-22 23:10:23+00:00
FedNow is a technological solution for instant payments, not a regulation. It’s a voluntary system for the banks to join. Further, banks are not required to offer instant payment services to their customers. The analogous technological solution in the EU is TIPS [0], which has been operational since 2018.

The IPR is a regulation that requires banks to support instant payments and offer them to customers.

[0]: https://www.ecb.europa.eu/paym/target/tips/html/index.en.htm...
by irrational | 2025-07-22 23:10:27+00:00
$5000? I got a bunch of quotes and none came anywhere near that high and I live in a home that made it difficult to install the system (finished basement, large footprint, three stories tall, concrete outer walls (ICF), etc. I think the highest was $3,000 and the lowest $1,600. I ended up installing it myself for about $500 in materials.
by sixtyj | 2025-07-22 23:10:50+00:00
Last days I have spent with Tailwind. But honestly, even if I know all abbreviations now :), and it it eye-bleeding syntax, is there something better in the wild? I know that I could use vanilla CSS, but… how many times do you have enough time to build your own CMS when you can install WP… life is short. Most of us are not building a sustainable system that will be here in next 20 years. Life is short. Deliver fast.
by benreesman | 2025-07-22 23:11:04+00:00
Yeah, I read this:

"Although pkg-config was a huge step forward in comparison to the chaos that had reigned previously, it retains a number of limitations. For one, it targets UNIX-like platforms and is somewhat reliant on the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard. Also, it was created at a time when autotools reigned supreme and, more particularly, when it could reasonably be assumed that everyone was using the same compiler and linker. It handles everything by direct specification of compile flags, which breaks down when multiple compilers with incompatible front-ends come into play and/or in the face of “superseded” features. (For instance, given a project consuming packages “A” and “B”, requiring C++14 and C++11, respectively, pkg-config requires the build tool to translate compile flags back into features in order to know that the consumer should not be built with -std=c++14 ... -std=c++11.)

Specification of link libraries via a combination of -L and -l flags is a problem, as it fails to ensure that consumers find the intended libraries. Not providing a full path to the library also places more work on the build tool (which must attempt to deduce full paths from the link flags) to compute appropriate dependencies in order to re-link targets when their link libraries have changed.

Last, pkg-config is not an ideal solution for large projects consisting of multiple components, as each component needs its own .pc file."

So going down the list:

- FHS assumptions: false, I'm doing this on NixOS and you won't find a more FHS-hostile environment

- autotools era: awesome, software was better then

- breaks with multiple independent compiler frontends that don't treat e.g. `-isystem` in a reasonable way? you can have more than one `.pc` file, people do it all the time, also, what compilers are we talking about here? mingw gcc from 20 years ago?

- `-std=c++11` vs. `-std=c++14`? just about every project big enough to have a GitHub repository has dramatically bigger problems than what amounts to a backwards-compatible point release from a decade ago. we had a `cc` monoculture for a long time, then we had diversity for a while, and it's back to just a couple of compilers that try really hard to understand one another's flags. speaking for myself? in 2025 i think it's good that `gcc` and `clang` are fairly interchangeable.

So yeah, if this was billed as `pkg-config` extensions for embedded, or `pkg-config` extensions for MSVC, sure. But people doing non-gcc, non-clang compatible builds already know they're doing something different, price you pay.

This is the impossible perfect being the enemy of the realistic great with a healthy dose of "industry expertise". Do some conventions on `pkg-config`.

The alternative to sensible builds with working tools we have isn't this catching on, it won't. The alternative is CMake jank in 2035 just like 2015 just like now.

edit: brought to us by KitWare, yeah fuck that. KitWare is why we're in this fucking mess.