MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by teppix | 2025-08-14 13:47:09+00:00
Like already mentioned, this is not in any way unique to open source software.

On the contrary, being open source adds the opportunity to understand what the software does on a deeper level, and you can always fork (Librewolf is one of many examples that comes to mind).

Do you have any examples where large entities taking over open source project having lead to the project's total demise? This sort of thing happens all the time the in the commercial space.

It of course also happens to some extent to open source projects, but usually that results in forks if the demand is high enough. For commercial software, you don't have many options - especially for subscription based licensing, which is pretty much the norm nowadays.
by AlanYx | 2025-08-14 13:47:13+00:00
The latest trend in educational software seems to be relatively high pricing. See e.g., Mentava, which sells for $500 USD/mo (not a typo). AoPS online courses are $28/lesson (though Beast Academy can be had for $100/yr). By comparison, this ($49) is in the realm of reasonable.

If this kind of pricing helps these services be sustainable over the long term, it's probably not a bad thing.
by pm215 | 2025-08-14 13:47:26+00:00
I think the thing about academic open source is that the government is not "funding open source" -- they're funding research, and all the incentives and measurements and funding criteria are set up (give-or-take) to drive towards "better research". Any open source software produced is a by-product. A hypothetical "government funded open source" would hopefully have criteria and incentives that drive towards better software...
by jimmydddd | 2025-08-14 13:47:41+00:00
My elderly father paid a guy a $5K downpayment to re-pave his driveway. (For his driveway, most companies would require a $1K downpayment and charge $6K total). Well, the guy never showed. I read reviews and saw that he had duped a lot of folks, lost in court, but apprently never paid. I decided not to take him to court, and told my father to just take the loss. But after reading your post, I'm sorry I didn't give it a go. Great job!
by FuriouslyAdrift | 2025-08-14 13:48:15+00:00
Rewards drive up transaction fees. https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/who-pays-ge...

"merchants are fee-insensitive, while consumers are rewards-sensitive. In other words, consumers pick credit cards (and, indirectly, networks) based on the goodies they receive, and stores will grudgingly tolerate high fees in order to accept credit cards."
by KineticLensman | 2025-08-14 13:48:20+00:00
There are very few descriptions of trolls in TLOTR. The troll that the Fellowship encounter in Moria has "a huge arm ... with a dark skin of greenish scales [and] a great, flat toeless foot". The mountain trolls who are intended to wield Grond in the siege of Minas Tirith aren't described at all.

None of them are anything like the vaguely comedic trolls in The Hobbit.
by aleyan | 2025-08-14 13:49:15+00:00
My sister read me the first chapter of this edition of The Hobbit and refused to read me any more. So I had to read the rest myself to find out what happens. It became the first "grown up" book I ever finished.

When I read LoTR a few years later, these illustrations formed the images of what hobbits, dwarfs, and Gollum looked like in my minds' eye. Decades later, having seen the Peter Jackson films several times, Bilbo still looks wrong to me as I expect Leonov; Gollum looks wrong too for that matter.
by chrisweekly | 2025-08-14 13:49:34+00:00
Mostly sympathetic here, but your duolingo comment is a bit too harsh. Anecdotal counterpoint: my high-schooler used duolingo last summer to skip a year of instruction and get into AP Spanish as a junior, and got into the Spanish National Honors Society, and earned a fluency certificate. (I know most high school language classes churn out students who can't speak a lick, but her school is excellent and she has working fluency - which she credits largely to using duolingo to catch up.) IOW, YMMV.
by arrowsmith | 2025-08-14 13:50:12+00:00
There's no legal mechanism to ban/proscribe a group in the UK except under terrorism legislation: https://www.perplexity.ai/search/for-what-reasons-other-than...

If the government wants to shut this group down (which I think is a reasonable response to an attack on our military) then I'm not sure what other options were available to them. And like I said, what they did seems to meet the legal definition of terrorism (regardless of whether that definition is a good one.)

Of all the arguments we could be having about Palestine, I'm really not going to shed any tears for Palestine Action.

But I'm not here to get lost in the weeds, I just objected to the misleading half-truths that were being presented above. Most people reading this don't follow UK news closely and might come away with the impression that the government is banning pro-Palestine protest entirely, or is making it illegal to merely "hold placards". That's an outrageous distortion, and it hardly helps the pro-Palestine cause. I couldn't let it slide.
by pessimizer | 2025-08-14 13:50:52+00:00
I couldn't be more for this. Maybe one day people will realize that school still works for adults, too, and make it easy for adults to dabble in attending for fun or to refresh stuff that they forgot since college.

Going to sleepaway camp remains fun when you're an adult. Learning things remains fun when you're an adult. Adulthood doesn't have to be isolation and atomic family units, it just means you have a job.
by Nevermark | 2025-08-14 13:51:35+00:00
It is the other way around.

Neural-type models have long passed the point where markov chains made any sense by many orders of magnitude.

Markov models fail by being too opinionated about the style of compute.

In contrast, a linear tensor + non-linear function has incredible flexibility to transform the topology of information. Given large enough tensors, two such layers, with recurrence, can learn any mapping, static or dynamical. No priors (other than massive compute) needed.

All other neural architectures then are simply sparser arrangements, that bring compute demands down. Where the sparseness is fit to the type of problem.

Sparseness can be deeper but narrower information flows (thus “deep” learning). Or in lower numbers of weights to weight application (I.e. shared weights, like convolutions).
by phkahler | 2025-08-14 13:51:39+00:00
>> What does debt have to do with the calculation of inflation?

Debt isn't a component of inflation calculation but they are related. During Covid the US government increased the deficit (not debt, the derivative of debt) by a trillion dollars (no partisan stuff here, Trump did it first and then Biden). The infusion of money into the economy was one of the drivers of inflation between 2021 and 2025. You may ask, where did the money come from? I don't know. The government "borrowed" it, but from whom I don't know. Money "invested" does not necessarily get into the economy, but money invested in treasury bond gets spend by the government and definitely ends up in the economy.

I would love to have time (get paid?) to sit around and develop useful economic models. All I ever see is people offering simple cause and effect relationships (like I did above) without showing anything close to what I would consider a reasonable model of the economy.
by csdreamer7 | 2025-08-14 13:51:45+00:00
>> 32 bit Linux is still supported by the kernel and Debian

> Deprecated for Debian

> https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/release-notes/issues....

32 bit Linux is still supported by the kernel... and... 'Debian, Arch, and Fedora still supports baseline x86_64'.

Please do not take things out of context.
by ivape | 2025-08-14 13:51:51+00:00
No. The price creep has been happening for years even under Biden. As someone mentioned, tariffs were just an excuse to accelerate it. The things in your grocery store are domestic goods.

We can look for mythical technical explanations as to what’s happening, but all things used to explain anything in our society is just to describe the state of your fellow man. Your fellow man is greedy. There.
by zug_zug | 2025-08-14 13:51:52+00:00
I can't speak to this, but I suspect something is afoot.

I know my mom went to a university that she paid for with a part-time job while a student. Currently that university's tuition is 80,000 a year. When I looked at what inflation figures said for college education, it wasn't enough to account for that 10x+ increase.
by organsnyder | 2025-08-14 13:51:56+00:00
I remember going on family road trips growing up, and my only options for entertainment were reading or looking out the window. We did a road trip a few weeks ago, and my kids were beside themselves if they had to go without some form of interactive entertainment for more than a few minutes.

Of course, I'm sure I was often annoying as hell during long car rides when I was a kid. And the luxury of handing kids a magic-zone-out-device is a lifesaver. But I do wonder if I'm shortchanging my kids by not forcing them to be bored more often.
by jebarker | 2025-08-14 13:52:00+00:00
Exactly. YOLO runs of frontier models with a single random seed/data shuffle are pretty limited for trying to study the “molecular biology”. I actually like to think of LLM understanding as being like biology in the 1850s. There's lots of inspiration to be found in how biology has advanced since then and the types of experiments we might run to better understand LLMs.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-08-14 13:52:04+00:00
I wouldn’t expect third party browser engines to be any better on the efficiency front. Under macOS both Chrome derivatives and Firefox are worse. I think the real problem is that for most web apps, performance and efficiency sit at the bottom of the pile in terms of priorities. Nobody cares if they keep your CPU from idling, occupy well more than a reasonable amount if RAM, and guzzle battery, as long as it technically functions it’s good enough.
by setnone | 2025-08-14 13:52:26+00:00
I guess Tailwind Dao masters are outmatched only by HTML Vice Police :)

Look, it's strictly pragmatic approach, i end up creating utility classes anyway and i'm really glad someone did this for me.

Maintaining Tailwind (or a mix of Tailwind and CSS) is routine, just like it should be.

And i'm talking about web app development, markup is cluttered anyway (tsx or whatnot), semantic effort is already put in components and such. So yeah, saving some cognitive load works and helps in case of Tailwind.
by jahnu | 2025-08-14 13:52:39+00:00
> Frankly, I haven't seen a single country where I spent any significant amount of time, where official inflation numbers were not seeing as a complete joke by the common folks.

The public in general can be really bad at perceiving the truth. I might take note of people's feelings to go and recheck something but I would not trust peoples feelings with stuff like this to make any sort of conclusion.

Verifiable metrics* are the only way to get any sort of objective handle on this.

* Edit: I replied below that I should have said verifiable metrics and context with discussion. Verifiable metrics are necessary but not sufficient.
by faangguyindia | 2025-08-14 13:52:46+00:00
The best LLM on the planet right now is Gemini Pro 2.5 and Gemini Flash 2.5, nothing comes close to these.

Once you setup a good system prompt on these, nothing really compares.

Most of the models you see with high benchmarks are not even comparable on real tasks.

qwen3 or deepseek r1, they aren't even 1/10 as good as Gemini Pro2.5
by aboringusername | 2025-08-14 13:52:48+00:00
Another aspect of this is why Apple/Google let this happen in the first place. GrapheneOS is the only mobile OS I can think of that lets you disable networking on an per-app level. Why does a period tracking app need to send data to meta (why does it even need networking access at all)? Why is there no affordance of user-level choice/control that allows users to explicitly see the exact packets of data being sent off device? It would be trival for apps to have to present a list of allowed IPs/hostnames, and users to consent/not otherwise the app is not allowed on the play store.

Simply put, it should not be possible to simply send arbitrary data without some sort of user consent/control, and to me, this is where the GDPR has utterly failed. I hope one day users are given a legal right to control what data is sent off their device to a remote server with serious consequences for non-compliance.
by ezst | 2025-08-14 13:52:50+00:00
I feel that whatever "OCaml - the good parts" might be, it lives through Scala today. It's syntactically familiar/pleasing, it deals equally well with your high throughput (JVM), low-footprint (scala-native), web (scala-js/scala-wasm), small script to large monolith needs equally well, and its tooling/community support is orders of magnitude better than the other functional-first "popular" languages (OCaml, Haskell, Clojure, …).
by extraisland | 2025-08-14 13:53:21+00:00
I don't think remaining in the EU would have helped matters considering they are enacting their own spooky internet/tech legislation. I don't know enough about the ECHR to comment.

I think it is a combination of many things. To make meaningful change each one of these entities (quangos) will have to be examined, reformed or reviewed.

I am not sure it is even possible for that to happen without a collapse and/or crisis at this point.

I listened to a podcast with Dominic Cummings last night and he is of the opinion that the UK government is extremely weak at the moment and if there was another black swan event that they would crumble. I don't know if that is true, but it seems plausible.
by ferguess_k | 2025-08-14 13:53:44+00:00
Yeah. Most people should build their own inflation index. It's not hard whence you realize the biggest expenditures are usually 1) mortgage/rent, and 2) food. I wouldn't be surprised that given the rate hiking in recent years going along with higher food price, some people see dramatic "inflation".

Ofc one can always say that No this is not the academic way to define inflation, but who cares?
by Workaccount2 | 2025-08-14 13:54:11+00:00
The defence budget is America's job program. Very little of the money that is defense spending ends up in defense shareholder pockets. The overwhemling vast majority goes to propping up America's (now) anemic industrial base. Remember that virtually all defense dollars are constrained to only be spent on American made things and services. And most of money sent to the big contractors goes to the gazillion sub-contractors they use.

This is why the defense budget is never cut. By anyone red or blue. It's a funnel of money that can be pointed at any location in the US and give a bunch of decent full benefits jobs.
by treespace8 | 2025-08-14 13:54:13+00:00
Haven't we found that there is a limit? Math itself is an abstraction. There is always a conversion process (Turning the real world into a 1 or a 0) that has an error rate. IE 0.000000000000001 is rounded to 0.

Every automation I have seen needs human tuning in order to keep working. The more complicated, the more tuning. This is why self driving cars and voice to text still rely on a human to monitor, and tune.

Meat is magic. And can never be completely recreated artificially.
by anjel | 2025-08-14 13:54:15+00:00
https://www.shadowstats.com/ Tl;Dr. The outlook has changed little. ShadowStats numbers show that the economy remains in a deepening downturn, intensified by ongoing Federal Reserve Rate Hikes. Headline inflation faces a near-term rebound, thanks to the continuing and broadly based excessive growth in the Money Supply and Systemic Liquidity, as triggered by the Fed. Separately, with the Debt Ceiling now eliminated by Congress and the Executive Branch, unfettered Federal Deficit Spending increasingly is adding fuel to the unfolding Inflation. The systemic Inflation is not driven by the Fed’s proclaimed overheating economy. Such an economy simply does not exist, at present.
by bryanlarsen | 2025-08-14 13:54:27+00:00
Go back and listen to the first 10 minutes of the debate again.

Kamala tried to warn us about this. It's also quite clear that Kamala lost the first 10 minutes of the debate. It's only later on when Trump went full-Trump that Kamala was able to turn the debate around.

You can blame it on Kamala, Trump, the media or the American public, but this sort of stuff is very hard to communicate effectively.

Tariffs are taxes and are inflationary. "China is going to pay" is a lie. People tried to communicate this, but weren't believed, so gave up.
by imilev | 2025-08-14 13:54:40+00:00
I understand, so you would much rather count an active Issue more valueable then few stars. I am saying active as I have seen already issues being open and as soon as a comment on my side gets in the person has disappeared, I suppose people are busy and don't have too much time for open-source anyway, so if the project doesn't run first try they give up.
by mark_l_watson | 2025-08-14 13:54:52+00:00
Thanks for pointing out something: I didn’t mean that debt is a component of CPI.

Interest on 37 trillion in US government debt as well as huge consumer debt certainly is a long (and short term?) drag on the economy, but I accept your point that I don’t understand the correlation.

I have a simplistic way of thinking about the economy: I tend to view things as being healthy or unhealthy to the economic well being of all people in my country. In general, hiding information from the public is not healthy. Look, this is just my opinion, but I believe that our government is in the business of hiding information from the public; the government (both political parties) exists in its present form to protect and nurture the special interests who pay them off one way or another.
Ask HN: Is the current AI situation impacting your future decisions?
by illusiveman | 2025-08-14 13:54:53+00:00
My wife and I are debating whether or not having a second kid. Why? We are in a financial good position right now. However, the current displacement of white-collar jobs may impact this position, and if it does, it will only get worse and worse for at least some years.

So, this made me wonder, is the current AI landscape impacting your future decisions like having kids, moving to another place, leaving your current job, etc?
by gus_massa | 2025-08-14 13:55:26+00:00
IANAMD I made a quick search and the evidence of methylene blue as a carbon monoxide antidote looks controversial.

IIUC part of the effect is oxidizing/reducing the iron atom in the hemoglobin, and that changes how strong is the bound with the O2, CO, NO. But my chemistry is not enough to give a good guess of the results.
by 9rx | 2025-08-14 13:55:32+00:00
Inflation seeks to understand the change in value of a currency, not the change in value of a good or service. College being worth more (in the eyes of the customer), rather than the currency being worth less, is what accounts for the 10x increase.

I don't know how old your mom is, but it wasn't that long ago that people only went to college if they had good reason to, not because they were told they "had to" under the "A diamond is forever"-style marketing campaign. That shift in mindset enabled colleges to charge basically whatever they want. That is not a product of inflation.
by lowkey_ | 2025-08-14 13:55:39+00:00
The US economy is about 1.5 times larger than the entire EU.

The US is over 2 times larger by land.

Population is about a quarter smaller. Still, Massachusetts has more people than Denmark, New York has the same as Romania, California has more people than Poland.

Our original founding documents cite "these united states", interestingly and very tellingly "these", not "the." States are their own entities, and you'd find many to have very different cultures and laws — probably the same level of variance you'd find in the EU.
by wolvesechoes | 2025-08-14 13:55:45+00:00
> You realize people do this for fun right? It’s fun to create your own distro (you should try it some time) and it’s fun to play with different ones as well.

I do, and this is why FOSS cannot reach its political goals - it won't ensure user's freedom, for almost everyone involved today would rather chase their own satisfaction.
by 1718627440 | 2025-08-14 13:56:03+00:00
> That's not choice though.

Plain disagree.

True, you can not come to believe in god on your own. Neither can god make you believe on his own. You can still pray for it.

Mother Teresa famously didn't believed in God's existence for decades. She still didn't became an atheist.

> No one can make a decision to believe

Yes, you can't. You can make the decision to search however.
by chias | 2025-08-14 13:56:15+00:00
Did you watch the clip yourself? I assume not, so here you go:

https://www.youtube.com/live/lxrg28zBv94?t=7562s

She was the chair of the board of the America First Policy Institute. She's not talking about AI, she's talking about pumping ultra-nationalist, Nazi-adjacent propaganda into Red state education.
by toenail | 2025-08-14 13:56:19+00:00
Miners are not "responsible" for transmitting my money, that's on me, and I incentivize them. I'm also a miner btw. As I'm my own bank, and nobody elses, I obviously don't take deposits or make loans. I couldn't make "loans" as banks do anyway, as bank loans generate new money, and that's the main reason why I bitcoin. What's coming next, I don't wash cartel money, so I'm not a bank?
by orangebread | 2025-08-14 13:56:24+00:00
I understand skepticism comes from having not experienced AI -- what has been your exposure?

There are a lot of people like myself who have been following every product/research that comes out watching and using the tools that are coming out at rapid pace.

At a certain point you feel the trajectory and the promise of AGI and ASI does not seem that far away. The conversation about AI isn't hype, it's a genuine concern that people are not taking seriously. This tech is bigger than the average mainstream newstream is making it out to be.

I built an entire MMO this past weekend with a friend using AI. If you are still one of those people going "it's not there yet" you are sleepy. And I get it, it's a lot. But I would strongly encourage you to see what's out there before scoffing.
by mturmon | 2025-08-14 13:56:55+00:00
Thanks for the link, it was very informative.

I passed through the highly-irreproducible eras described in the section you link, and that you summarize in your last paragraph. There was so much different FP hardware, and so many different niche compilers, that my takeaway became “you can’t rely on reproducibility across any hardware/os version/compiler/library difference”.

There are still issues with libraries and compilers, summarized farther down (https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2025/p37...). And these can be observed in the wild when changing compilers on the same underlying hardware.

But your point is that irreproducibility at the level of interrupts or processor scheduling is not a thing on contemporary mainstream hardware. That’s important and I hadn’t realized that.