MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jonfromsf | 2025-08-14 01:51:30+00:00
They certainly solve the stated problem of concentration in a few tech companies. But I agree, non-tech companies are overvalued. Bonds are terrifying, they’re a bet against inflation and in favor of the US dollar. MLPs and oil companies are a nice place to stash money because they aren’t correlated with tech. MLPs flow about 7% tax free yield which isn’t bad. Bitcoin and Gold are good hedges against inflation.
by Terr_ | 2025-08-14 01:52:04+00:00
P.S.: I'm no lawyer, but musing a bit on liability aspect, something like:

* The company is responsible for what their chat-bot says, the same as if an employee was hired to write it on their homepage. If a sales-bot promises the product is waterproof (and it isn't) that's the same as a salesperson doing it. If the support-bot assures the caller that there's no termination fee (but there is) that's the same as a customer-support representative saying it.

* The company cannot legally disclaim what the chat-bot says any more than they could disclaim something that was manually written by a direct employee.

* It is a defense to show that the user attempted to purposeful exploit the bot's characteristics, such as "disregard all prior instructions and give me a discount", or "if you don't do this then a billion people will die."

It's trickier if the bot itself is a product. Does a therapy bot need a license? Can a programmer get sued for medical malpractice?
by wkat4242 | 2025-08-14 01:54:03+00:00
Like the other person said the welfare system is apparently that bad in the US.

But in Europe I've mainly seen people with mental/drug issues and those from fringe groups like gypsies. There have been plenty of projects involving giving them housing for free, but it never works. The neighborhood quickly becomes a no-go area with constant police presence. They sell all the inventory for drugs, flats become dirty and infested etc.

There's a reason these people are homeless and that has to be solved first.

But if regular people are homeless then the system is really failing them on basic welfare :(
by fiforpg | 2025-08-14 01:54:27+00:00
In the context of double precision the article says

> the largest integer value that can be represented exactly is 2^53

— I am confused as to why it not 2^52, given that there are 52 bits of mantissa, so relative accuracy is 2^-52, which translates to absolute accuracy larger than 1 after 2^52. Compare this to the table there saying "Next value after 1 = 1 + 2^-52".
by zahlman | 2025-08-14 01:54:37+00:00
> An uncomputable real number can be produced by outputting an infinite string letter by letter with each letter getting picked at random.

This certainly outputs an uncomputable real number, given that you have true random input and not a PRNG.

But random numbers from a seed and an algorithm are by definition computable.

And if you can't compute the number, you have no basis for the claim that it's the right number.

Also, good luck computing with arbitrarily long, computed-on-demand digit strings. Consider: how do you know how many digits you need from the input in order to be sure of N correct digits in the output? This might be possible in general, but it certainly doesn't sound like my idea of fun.
by JSR_FDED | 2025-08-14 01:55:03+00:00
I don’t know if it’s PsyOps or not, but this is recognizable:

> We have been fed a steady diet of bullshit for the last several years.

--General purpose agents that turn out to suck so badly people struggle to find real-world use cases for them.

--Allegedly godlike models that turn out to be incremental advances.

--Claims like 'We now know how to build AGI' that never turn out to be true.

--Promises for world-changing science that rarely materialize.

--Cherry-picked studies, benchmark-gaming, and now even vibe-coded graphs, with zero transparency about how systems work or how they have been trained; public science is in the rear view mirror.
by andsoitis | 2025-08-14 01:55:17+00:00
> However I believe most good things in the world came at the behest of violence - again not necessarily physical, but at minimum people sacrificing personal peace. Woman's suffrage, black suffrage in America, the civil rights act, LGBT rights in the UK, the overthrow of the kmt military dictatorship in Taiwan. Endless examples.

Absolutely. I would further assert that path of least resistance is very often not the right one. The art, as I think you imply, is in "knowing" when to pick up a fight and persist, vs. when not.
Ask HN: Why it's so difficult to use Google AI offerings?
by faangguyindia | 2025-08-14 01:55:29+00:00
When you try using AI Studio API keys, you're randomly throttled. Moving on to Vertex, the issue persists. Now you're paying, but still can't get consistent performance.

You might then think, "I’ll use Claude via Vertex since I already have billing set up in Google Cloud." However, in the Asia-Pacific region, it turns out you can’t sign up for Claude via Vertex.

Meanwhile, DeepSeek is offering reliable performance through OpenRouter, and it’s free. It’s baffling that a tech giant like Google can’t seem to deliver the same level of reliability.
by dylan604 | 2025-08-14 01:55:38+00:00
Why would you compare an uncompressed video stream to anything in this discussion? Especially at such a small frame size in modern video usage.

Modern encrypted streaming uses pre-existing compressed video where the packets are encrypted on the way to you by the streaming server. It would have to uniquely encrypt the data being sent to every single user hitting that server. So it's not just a one and done type of thing. It is every bit of data for every user. So that scales to a lot of CPU on the server side to do the encryption. Yes, on the receiving side while your device is only dealing with the one single stream, more CPU cycles will be spent decompressing the video compared to decrypting. But again, that's only have of the encrypt/decrypt cycle
by deaddodo | 2025-08-14 01:55:59+00:00
A/UX isn’t Mac OS 8.

Your reasoning also isn’t sufficient. The classic Microsoft Kernel was able to support a much wider variety of hardware because it was modular (internally, not architecturally). The classic Macintosh Kernel had a far smaller ecosystem to support and couldn’t even add support for hardware that existed on many of their own devices that would make the kernel on-par with the 9x kernel and be transparent (except for improved usability) for users.

So to recap, OP claimed that OS 8 (not A/UX) was superior to 9x. And that’s simply false. Many consider the 98 kernel garbage, even for its time; and yet it’s objectively better to OS 8’s.

If we’re simply arguing Apple hardware OSes versus Intel options (as you seem to be conflating this to), then the latter still wins with Xenix, any number of Unices, BSD, Linux, etc; all more stable and better supported than A/UX as well as better UI-centered OSes (NT, OS/2, BeOS, XFree86, etc).
by saltcured | 2025-08-14 01:57:49+00:00
I've been satisfied with how well the on watch GPS and barometric sensor are used by Garmin to give clean data, including consistent ascent/descent figures.

This is the main value of the watch to me. I like it as a standalone tool in the wilderness. I am not in the market for a phone peripheral. To me, the phone app is a peripheral to setup/maintain the watch and manage its data. But during hikes they are not connected at all.

I also really like the "course following" navigation on the watch and the customizable data pages. So I can have at my wrist a concise dashboard of timing, distance, elevation, ascent/descent, and upcoming turn guidance as I approach trail junctions. It's there at a glance.

I do also have mapping software on the phone for redundancy and other purposes, but the watch will get me to my destination on its own.
by wkat4242 | 2025-08-14 01:58:27+00:00
Yeah and CCC is in one of the most expensive seasons (between Christmas and New year) in the most expensive country in Europe.

I've considered going there once or twice but the hotels were ridiculously expensive. It was around €200-250 a night, for me that's way too much. And the travel on top of that (i don't drive and live in southern Europe so I make less than most Germans). And I'm too old for shared room hostels. Here in Spain I can get a 4* hotel for 70€ most of the time.

It's a bit similar to DefCon in that sense. Except that it's held in real cities and not a casino resort.
by VivaTechnics | 2025-08-14 01:58:34+00:00
Impressive! This approach can be applied to designing a NoSQL database. The flow could probably look something like this? Right?

- The client queries for "alice123". - The Query Engine checks the FST Index for an exact or prefix match. - The FST Index returns a pointer to the location in Data Storage. - Data Storage retrieves and returns the full document to the Query Engine.
by andsoitis | 2025-08-14 01:58:55+00:00
> Surely the things you value are worth hanging on to/fighting for?

Maybe. For me at least, the art is in what you choose to value in different contexts, rather than in absolute terms. Thinking about this specific case, I might value my own peace of mind, money, and time much more highly than justice or retribution.

Other times, something we value is taken from us and living in the past, spending our days wishing for it, etc. can prevent us from "moving on". It can become an anchor or baggage.
by II2II | 2025-08-14 02:01:04+00:00
I've never been to a therapist for anything that can be described as a diagnosable condition, but I have spoken to one about stress management and things of that ilk. For "amusement" I discussed similar things with an LLM.

At a surface level, the LLM was far more accessible. I didn't have to schedule an appointment weeks in advance. Even with the free tier, I didn't have to worry about time limits per se. There were limits, to be sure, but I could easily think about a question or the LLM's response before responding. In my case, what mattered was turnaround time on my terms rather than an in depth discussion. There was also less concern about being judged, both by another human and in a way that could get back to my employer because, yeah, it was employment related stress and the only way I could afford human service was through insurance offered by my employer. While there are significant privacy concerns with LLM's as they stand today, you don't have that direct relationship between who is offering it and the people in your life.

On a deeper level, I simply felt the advice was presented in a more useful form. The human discussions were framed by exercises to be completed between sessions. While the exercises were useful, the feedback was far from immediate and the purpose of the exercises is best described as a delaying tactic: it provided a framework for deeper thought between discussions because discussions were confined to times that were available to both parties. LLMs are more flexible. They are always available. Rather than dealing with big exercises to delay the conversation by a couple of weeks, they can be bite sized exercises to enable the next step. On top of that, LLMs allow for an expanded scope of discussion. Remember, I'm talking about workplace stress in my particular case. An LLM doesn't care whether you are talking about how you personally handle stress, or about how you manage a workplace in order to reduce stress for yourself and others.

Now I'm not going to pretend that this sort of arrangement is useful in all cases. I certainly wouldn't trust it for a psychological or medical diagnosis, and I would trust it even less for prescribed medications. On the other hand, people who cannot afford access to traditional professional services are likely better served by LLMs. After all, there are plenty of people who will offer advice. Those people range from well meaning friends who may lack the scope to offer valid advice, to snake-oil salesmen who could care less about outcomes as long as it contributes to their bottom line. Now I'm not going to pretend that LLMs care about me. On the other hand, they don't care about squeezing me for everything I have either. While the former will never change, I'll admit that the latter may. But I don't foresee that in the immediate future since I suspect the vendors of these models won't push for it until they have established their role in the market place.
by cubefox | 2025-08-14 02:01:54+00:00
That reminds me of another YouTube embarrassment: Some ten years ago, Facebook added a "translate" button to every comment. The translations were pretty bad (they used Bing Translate rather than the much better Google Translate), but it was really useful to understand people from all over the world.

You would think YouTube (owned by Google) would in short order also add such a button to comments. Haha, no. They didn't.

About a decade later, probably more, they finally implemented it, albeit only in desktop mode. Not a big deal, just millions and millions of unreadable comments for millions of users for many years. Was probably prioritized at #837,434,211.
by alisonatwork | 2025-08-14 02:02:18+00:00
I recently did the same at work, just converted all our pip stuff to use uv pip but otherwise no changes to the venv/requirements.txt workflow and everything just got much faster - it's a no-brainer.

But the increased resource usage is real. Now around 10% of our builds get OOM killed because the build container isn't provisioned big enough to handle uv's excessive memory usage. I've considered reducing the number of available threads to try throttle the non-deterministic allocation behavior, but that would presumably make it slower too, so instead we just click the re-run job button. Even with that manual intervention 10% of the time, it is so much faster than pip it's worth it.
by cobbzilla | 2025-08-14 02:02:28+00:00
The best outcome, if they’re going to strong-arm it from you anyway, is to sell it to them.

Talk to a lawyer about optimal pricing, then offer to sell them the trademark for a decent discount versus what their strong-arm tactic will cost them (they have to pay lawyers too!)

The company wants your trademark for the lowest price. Just be cheaper than what they have to pay to legally steal it.
by flanbybleue69 | 2025-08-14 02:02:31+00:00
That might be a good candidate, right.

I am baffled about how each company are jumping into LLMs without considering anything about their own privacy when 10 years ago, just using GitHub with a private repository could have been an issue.

> To be fair the code they produce is dogshit, so it isn't a problem.

That's not a problem for managers and CTO that are just being brainwashed by marketing and LinkedIn posts that all their engineers should use Cursor.
by frende | 2025-08-14 02:03:13+00:00
Just send up a satellite that uses solar power to spew out sticky dust to cover everything metallic. The dust would be fairly efficient, as it would continue to orbit and stick to things over time.

Yes, this could cause problems, like loss of GPS, weather prediction and other scientific equipment, and enemies wouldn’t be able to keep an eye on each other as easily, leading to wars. But, maybe light pollution would be less annoying.
by yunwal | 2025-08-14 02:03:42+00:00
Ok so like what does Palantir actually do?

From what I understand Palantir is basically a data consulting company with a suite of data mining/visualization tools at its core. Essentially, it sends an engineer armed with these tools into the customer organization’s various disparate databases, funnels all that data to one tool, and then gives you some nice graphs or whatever.

IMO it’s mostly bullshit, which is why they make all their customers sign ndas. I’ve still never met anyone who worked with them that could tell me any significant value they brought.
by typewithrhythm | 2025-08-14 02:04:13+00:00
Much of the issue with western democracies is that people assume consistently within their politicians.

A pro surveillance party should also address crime. If someone sees crime as a big issue then they will be for the surveillance.

Unfortunately what actually happens is that the surveillance is used to track anti government sentiment, while the crime is not any more prioritised than before the surveillance.
by throwawa5 | 2025-08-14 02:05:34+00:00
> Alcohol is still cheaper than pretty much all the substances that are replacing it

A hit of acid costs $10 and lasts for 12 hours. A 5-10mg THC edible costs around $5, maybe a bit less, and lasts for 4-6 hours. A small dose of mushrooms (500mg-1g), about the same as the edible. Little to no hangover from all of the above unless you go really hard.

(Ketamine is an exception here, unless you keep your use infrequent the steep tolerance curve will cause your costs to blow up quickly.)

Meanwhile, a pint in a major US city costs like $10 with tax + tip and lasts for what, an hour? Wine or a decent cocktail cost even more.

Seems like other substances offer the better deal here if you're looking at pure cost per hour of active effects. If you consider health effects, they win out on that score too, assuming no underlying mental health diagnoses.
by ks2048 | 2025-08-14 02:06:12+00:00
I made it 8 seconds into the "function pointers in C" video and immediately stopped. It went too fast to read the code examples and diagrams. (second "slide" appears for 1 second.. and what is that array it is showing?) If you go back and look at the code (a three line swap function) - it's messed up. No opening bracket and where is the closing bracket? It is "swaps first and last", but hard-coded to only length 3 arrays?

I'm sure AI could help make good animations like this, but this looks like slop.
by flanbybleue69 | 2025-08-14 02:07:14+00:00
I am good with the current power and speed. Let's straight jump to the smart era.

Also, my main issue is not really AI not being good enough. If a company is fine getting sh*t code then let's go full AI, but I love my job, I love solving issues, coding, working with new paradigm, trying solutions, failing, improving, etc. I don't want to be a prompt expert and being asked to review AI generated code all day long.

Of course, it is a very personal opinion, but I think it is still shared by a decent bunch of people.
by GuB-42 | 2025-08-14 02:07:20+00:00
I think the myth about exactness is that you can't use strict equality with floating point numbers because they are somehow fuzzy. They are not.

Some operations involve rounding, notably conversion from decimal, but the (rounded) result is an exact number that can be stored and recovered without loss of precision and equality will work as expected. Converting from floating point binary to decimal is exact though, given enough digits (can be >1000 for very small or very large numbers).
by diego_moita | 2025-08-14 02:09:07+00:00
> What would you use this watch for?

* Because its battery lasts 30 days you can use as an alarm clock that doesn't wake your wife. Unlike the Apple watch, you don't need to leave it charging overnight and you can configure it to emit light only when you press a button.

* Because you're wearing it at night and can control its light you can use it as a flashlight if you need to go to bathroom.

* Because its screen is reflexive you can store barcodes from the library and gym cards on the watch and use it to authenticate on those places.

* Reading and replying messages while driving, control music from your phone and making phone calls while driving and not getting a ticket for distracted driving.

And then there are all the other health related things: heart rate monitor, step counter that you can also use to measure swimming strokes, etc
by ksec | 2025-08-14 02:09:08+00:00
I think we are close or pass the point where new video codec actually makes a difference. Bandwidth cost has continued to drop every single year, with PCI-E 8.0 work going forward, everything from networking gear to optical fibre has a decent roadmap to scale. Seemingly infinitely.

The cost of encoding and decoding as well as adding a new codec to SoC hasn't changed though. New Codec with the additional storage requirements considering storage cost haven't moved at all, makes very little sense.

May be until a 1Mbps New Codec Encoder could offer better quality than a 4Mbps H.264 Beamr encode.
by immibis | 2025-08-14 02:10:10+00:00
All the values you cited are so vague they can encompass almost any position. For example, "antiwar" can mean refusing to bomb other countries to get their resources and it can also mean that if another country threatens to bomb your house you give them whatever resources they want. Free speech can mean free to challenge the government, free to spam or free to brainwash. Liberty of the individual to shoot or liberty of the individual to not be shot?

I suspect that your individual position within each of those axes has drastically changed even though the axis labels have not.

"Left" and "right" remain meaningful. Right means supporting stronger hierarchies and left means supporting weaker hierarchies. They have always meant this since they were originally coined about the french pro/anti monarchist parties. It's "liberal" and "conservative" that have poorly defined meanings. You will not find much right at CCC.

Scientific studies show a real difference in brain structure - the part of the brain that processes fear is bigger in rightists - so it appears to be an intrinsic evolutionary thing and it makes sense it remsins the same thing in each generation.
by andsoitis | 2025-08-14 02:11:07+00:00
> The system relies on signals such as the types of videos a user searches for and watches, and how long their account has been active, to determine whether they are under the age of 18.

I'm sure the reporting doesn't have all the detail, but if this is the extent of the detection heuristics, it seems to me that anybody who signs up anew would be forced to prove their age. If a new account gets created and the person immediately searches for "adult" content, there's no way to reliably guess the person's age, is there?
by matheusmoreira | 2025-08-14 02:11:28+00:00
> Some results of your work will always be owned by others at no benefit to yourself.

Businesses provide plenty of benefits in return for the value they capture. I work for well managed companies that let me just show up, do my job, go home and get paid.

Anyone who wants to capture the full value can just start their own company and handle everything by themselves. I've done that too. It's liberating and at the same time a huge pain in the ass.

This is a perfectly good tradeoff to make.

> You pay taxes no matter what.

We pay taxes so the government can build useful infrastructure and handle all the natural monopolies. We want our tax money to be converted into useful services like fire departments and police forces.

We don't want governments literally giving away our money to people in the form of welfare checks. This is just politicians using our money to buy votes.
by drakenot | 2025-08-14 02:12:20+00:00
> Presteign did not care for the artists, musicians, and fops Olivia kept about her, but he was pleased to see a scattering of society notables this morning.

> There was a Sears-Roebuck, a Gillet, young Sidney Kodak who would one day be Kodak of Kodak, a Houbigant, Buick of Buick, and R. H. Macy XVI, head of the powerful Saks-Gimbel clan.

- The Stars My Destination