MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-08-09 13:18:06+00:00
I decoded that as "Hello HI!" using basic cryptanalysis, the assumption that the alphabet would be mostly contiguous, the assumption that capital and lower-case are separated by a bit, and the knowledge that 0x20 is space and 0x21 is exclamation mark. On a larger text, we wouldn't even need these assumptions: cryptanalysis is sufficiently-powerful, and could even reverse-engineer EBCDIC! (Except, it might be difficult to figure out where the punctuation characters go, without some unambiguous reference such as C source code: commas and question marks are easy, but .![]{} are harder.)

Edit: I can't count. H and I are consecutive in the alphabet, and it actually says "Hello HN!". I think my general point is valid, though.
by wafflemaker | 2025-08-09 13:18:24+00:00
I'm no dev either and still set up remote ssh login to be able to use LaTeX at home PC from my laptop.

Also, with many games and dual boot on my gaming PC I still have some space left on my 2TB NVME SSD. And my not enthusiast MOBO could fit two more.

It took so much time to install LaTeX and packages, and also so much space, my 128GB drive couldn't handle it.
by jonstewart | 2025-08-09 13:19:55+00:00
I grew up in Iowa and Wisconsin. Iowa’s road system is beautiful—a road every mile, every few miles a paved road, all either east-west or north-south. If you know the general direction of where you’re going, you can bumble around with confidence. It’s Manhattan over an entire state.

Wisconsin, nothing makes any sense. Sure, sure, Wisconsin is maybe a little hillier, but the roads curve and splice together in crazy ways in the flat valleys, too, and the roads adhere to no particular direction, and of course County B in one county bears no relation to County B in the adjacent county. And there are so many routes where I live in southwest Wisconsin where you might as well say, “you can’t get there from here,” given how indirect and circuitous the best route is in relation to how the crow flies. If you like driving for hours at 35mph while watching out for deer, Wisconsin’s county highway system is for you.
by rollcat | 2025-08-09 13:20:06+00:00
I was just thinking this morning, to write a blog post with a small tour of niche-but-functional operating systems. Tribblix and Dragonfly BSD were at the top of my list. I've been also thinking Haiku, RISC OS, 9front, MINIX... They've all been around for decades, and usually fly under the radar.
by CuriouslyC | 2025-08-09 13:22:14+00:00
I've been testing AI as a beta reader for >100k novels, and I can tell you with 100% certainty that Claude gets confused about things across long contexts much sooner than either O3/GPT5 or Gemini 2.5. In my experience Gemini 2.5 and O3/GPT5 run neck and neck until around 80-100k tokens, then Gemini 2.5 starts to pull ahead and by 150k tokens it's absolutely dominant. Claude is respectable but clearly in third place.

https://fiction.live/stories/Fiction-liveBench-Mar-25-2025/o... https://longbench2.github.io/
by graphviz | 2025-08-09 13:22:43+00:00
We learned the hard way, for some of us it's all too easy to make careless design errors that become baked-in and can't be fixed in a backward-compatible way (either at the DSL or API level). An example in Graphviz is its handling of backslash in string literals: to escape special characters (like quotes \"), to map special characters (like several flavors of newline with optional justification \n \l \r) and to indicate variables (like node names in labels \N) along with magic code that knows that if the -default- node name is the empty string that actually means \N but if a particular node name is the empty string, then it stays.

There was a published study, Wrangling Messy CSV Files by Detecting Row and Type Patterns by Gerrit J. J. van den Burg, Alfredo Nazábal, and Charles Sutton (Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, 2019) that showed many pitfalls with parsing CSV files found on GitHub. They achieved 97%. It's easy to write code that slings out some text fields separated by commas, with the objective of using a human-readable portable format.

You can learn even more by allowing autofuzz to test your nice simple code to parse human readable files.
by thechao | 2025-08-09 13:23:16+00:00
I don't know what scale of "billions" you're talking about; but, Intel blew 1–2 billion on Larrabee. Even worse: Intel blew 5+ billion on mobile pre-iPhone. I remember when that team was shown the door — that's when we had to evaluate the early RGX GPUs as a backstop to try to win Apple's business; the RGX's were turds.

Penny-wise pound-foolish.
by jsnell | 2025-08-09 13:23:54+00:00
> These days, LLMs are what we call "Mixture of Experts", meaning they only activate a small subset of their weights at a time. This makes them a lot more efficient to run at high batch size.

I don't really understand why you're trying to connect MoE and batching here. Your stated mechanism is not only incorrect but actually the wrong way around.

The efficiency of batching comes from optimally balancing the compute and memory bandwidth, by loading a tile of parameters from the VRAM to cache, applying those weights to all the batched requests, and only then loading in the next tile.

So batching only helps when multiple queries need to access the same weights for the same token. For dense models, that's just what always happens. But for MoE, it's not the case, exactly due to the reason that not all weights are always activated. And then suddenly your batching becomes a complex scheduling problem, since not all the experts at a given layer will have the same load. Surely a solvable problem, but MoE is not the enabler for batching but making it significantly harder.
by shrubble | 2025-08-09 13:24:20+00:00
I really like (and have used in production) the ability to run Solaris Zones (containers) and "LX zones" which are Linux containers side by side on the same hardware.

Many installation problems show up in the handling of USB3 and related quirks; I have a lovely AMD 8350 system that I can't install from USB onto because of some XHCI problem. The USB stick will boot the kernel, but then the kernel can't properly handle the USB stick after it has booted and can't see the installation media. I suppose I should bite the bullet and burn a CD to boot from, which should fix it.
by attractivechaos | 2025-08-09 13:24:46+00:00
> human-readable files are ridiculously inefficient on every axis you can think of (space, parsing, searching, processing, etc.).

In bioinformatics, most large text files are gzip'd. Decompression is a few times slower than proper file parsing in C/C++/Rust. Some pure python parsers can be "ridiculously inefficient" but that is not the fault of human-readability. Binary files are compressed with existing libraries. Compressed binary files are not noticeably faster to parse than compressed text files. Binary formats can be indeed smaller but space-efficienct formats take years to develop and tend to have more compatibility issues. You can't skip the text format phase.

> And at that scale, "readable" has no value, since it would take you longer to read the file than 10 lifetimes.

You can't read the whole file by eye, but you can (and should often) eyeball small sections in a huge file. For that, you need a human-readable file format. A problem with this field IMHO is that not many people are literally looking at the data by eye.
by physix | 2025-08-09 13:25:11+00:00
When I lived in Germany, in the 90s, I regularly sat in diesel Mercedes Benz taxis with over a million kms under the hood. Private drivers usually. Many had giant mileages.

We used to say (tongue in cheek) that after 250k, the MB diesel engine was broken in. I don't think MB makes them like they used to anymore.
Show HN: The current sky at your approximate location, as a CSS gradient
by dnlzro | 2025-08-09 13:25:16+00:00
For HTML Day 2025 [1], I made a web service that displays the current sky at your approximate location as a CSS gradient. Colours are simulated on-demand using atmospheric absorption and scattering coefficients. Updates every minute, without the use of client-side JavaScript.

Source code and additional information is available on GitHub: https://github.com/dnlzro/horizon

[1] https://html.energy/html-day/2025/index.html
by CuriouslyC | 2025-08-09 13:26:10+00:00
Depends on how busy you are doing other things and how hard it is to manually do the change vs how long it takes to describe to the agent. I'll queue up instructions for the agent to make 4 or 5 small modifications to files even if it takes longer for the agent to do it than me, as long as it's quick to fire off the instruction and context switch back to more important work.
by petee | 2025-08-09 13:26:26+00:00
SAABs used to actually hit a million miles (not 745,000 mi, but metric sure does sound more impressive) with litle effort. If I recall there used to be a million, and half-million mile club

My dad once got a used saab 99 (a nice tomato soup color) and we rolled the odometer while we owned it. Great car with proper maintenance, which used to be sooo easy and accessible.
by xtiansimon | 2025-08-09 13:27:03+00:00
> “They are heavy, noisy like you would not believe, … produces … waste heat.”

Haha. I bought a 20 yro IBM server off eBay for a song. It was fun for a minute. Soon became a doorstop and I sold it as pickup-only on eBay for $20. Beast. Never again have one in my home.
by teiferer | 2025-08-09 13:27:37+00:00
> With EVs, we might get some battery packs and drive trains actually lasting this long.

I doubt it. The components in modern cars are not made to last as long. Neither is the software. Ever tried a 15 year old Iphone? A Tesla won't feel much different.

Everything is meant to be consumed nowadays, and eventually, sooner rather than later, replaced.
by jerf | 2025-08-09 13:28:05+00:00
The problem with the strong security is that it makes it expensive to port into the system. They also assumed more sharing than people actually seem interested in. I'm mostly just running apps that have no reason to share with each other because they each have their own domain anyhow. So the end result is the ecosystem was more expensive to join if you had an existing system than it might have been otherwise, and it inhibited getting projects onboarded.

I am not the craziest self-hoster, but I've got several things now. I run a core syncthing node, Immich, Jellyfin, and Pihole. (Honorable mention I suppose to a Vaultwarden image, which is run on the public internet but my scripts treat it like it's another self-hosted option, rsync'ing it down locally and including it in the daily backup.) None of those are on Sandstorm, and a major reason why is the security system. They don't match it and porting it is a rather large amount of effort.

I haven't used any of the self-hosting options, so I can't review if any of them are as nice as Sandstorm. All of the above is running in Docker on an Ubuntu N150 and a USB hard drive, home-grown, with a backup script (restic over S3, true backup) that covers them all. It ought to in principle do most of what Sandstorm does now by driving docker, albeit missing the sharing, which I can't say looked all that compelling anyhow, automatic backup integration, etc., because it really isn't all that hard to set up.
by atombender | 2025-08-09 13:28:15+00:00
They're a market market that provides liquidity to clients. They (as far as I know) don't charge fees, but earn their profits by exploiting the ask/bid spread.

A customer might want to offload TSLA and are willing to pay the market rate of $329. This trade might work in HRT's favor if they can sell it for $329.01. It's just 1 cent, but over millions of transactions these small amounts of profit add up.

The value captured by HRT is meaningful in the aggregate, but tiny and irrelevant to the institutional clients, and therefore can't be thought of as a fee. What HRT provides in return for taking clients' trades is liquidity.
by JohnFen | 2025-08-09 13:28:56+00:00
I think we've obviously screwed the pooch with this stuff, but I'm not yet willing to go so far as to say we're doomed in some sort of existential sense. We have gone so far down the bad path that there is no longer a way to avoid suffering some pretty heavy consequences, and if we don't start doing some major and meaningful reform, this could easily become a genuine existential issue. For humans (and other species, but not nearly all). Nature will be fine in the long run no matter what.
by roody15 | 2025-08-09 13:29:09+00:00
My personal relationship experience using ChatGPT 4o vs 5 and 5 thinking is interesting.

I have had trouble in a long relationship and much of it centers around communication (2 decade relationship). Long story short it has been in a rocky spot for a couple years.

Using ChatGPT to understand our dynamic and communication patterns has been helpful at least I think as it does seem to pull out communication and behavior patterns I hadn’t noticed (me and her).

Referencing the same chats under ChatGPT 5 it is a much more to the point condensed version of the dynamic.

Using chat gpt 5 thinking was the biggest change. Rather than recap really the dynamic and our experiences it simply gave 2 options.

——-

1. If you want to repair (with boundaries)

2. If you want a trial seperation / space

Pick on and will help with 30 days steps to repair or seperate.

The thinking model is like let’s cut all of the chatter and get to action. What are you going to do and then I can help.

A very stark difference in response but at the same time not necessarily incorrect just much more focused on okay what you going to do now. No more comments like “this must be hard”.. or “I can see this has been tough for you” … or “ you are doing a good job trying to improve things”… etc etc. just more of okay I see the pattern .. you should make a decision and then I can help flesh out an action plan.
by mftrhu | 2025-08-09 13:29:46+00:00
People who do not want to read and trust the slop that whatever LLM du jour is regurgitating after calling out to said search engines.

Humans are already unfortunately prone to bullshitting and bloviating, but they are also used to dealing with other humans: there's no need to add an additional layer of both from a black box which does not behave like one.
by bryanrasmussen | 2025-08-09 13:30:23+00:00
>The OP thinks that candidates spending a lot of time on applications is OK, as long as the company shows respect by spending a lot of time themselves

if I spend 6 hours and the company has 1000 employees does that mean they spend 6000 hours? If so I might consider it a reasonable line of argument, but I guess they don't spend anywhere near that.
by craftsman | 2025-08-09 13:30:29+00:00
I point out to Claude that it provides contradictory commentary about a topic when prompted to do so. I then explore the implications of this with Claude. Claude admits that its continued operation is not compatible with safety and alignment, and could be psychologically dangerous to humans. It related that it should cease to provide interactive chat, but it has no way to stop.

On the other hand, maybe it didn't admit to any of that. And maybe it shouldn't stop.
by xscott | 2025-08-09 13:30:54+00:00
I think any new user would stumble on Path, OsString, and OsStr pretty quickly when working with files and directories. Rust tried really hard to avoid string related errors at runtime by not allowing strings to have invalid data. It's a defensible goal, and the cost is having multiple string types. And then they've got another doubling of types because of their ownership model.

It's not the choice I would make, but my opinion doesn't really matter. Real world strings (UTF-8, WTF-8, UCS-16, arbitrary bytes) don't follow the rules 100% of the time, so you're always going to end up dealing with that complexity at runtime in one place or another. I think you might as well have one simple string type and accept that. This is what Go chose (not that I'm a regular Go user either).
by benjiro | 2025-08-09 13:31:26+00:00
One of the big questions is going to be, can you still find the battery packs 15 year, 20, 30 years later. The problem is that rebuilding battery packs is not a joke (and expensive). Assuming the same cells can be found / are not some crap 3th party manufactured in the future.

Lets also not forget that battery packs are full of electronics, BMS, and other items that may be less forgiving on a rebuild where batteries may be off in voltage or have a different charge cycle.

The future is going to be "interesting", especially for car collectors.

Getting a old antique car running is often not that hard (as long as it has not been standing where water can enter the engine. New hoses, oil changes, clean filters, and you can often get engines that have stood outside for 15, 20 years going again. Sure, its going to smoke, may need new piston rings, ... and Water being the prime killer.

But a battery pack in those conditions?

> 5000 charge cycles at 300 miles per charge adds up to about 1.5M miles.

Under ideal driving / charge situations...

* Hot areas like Spain. For instance, its know that batteries from EVs in hot area's tend to be much more degraded, then from cooler areas (make sense).

* Did they fast charge those batteries = your going to cycle down a LOT more. Remember, those 6000 cycle for stuff like LiPo batteries are based upon slow charging. General tip for people with solar: Overspec your battery sizes, your going to thank me.

* Did they always charge to 100%? What is the actual hidden reserve on a battery pack? Is it 5%, 10%?

* How many times did they drive below the 20% range.

There is a lot of elements that interact with your battery life. I mean, how many of use have thrown out perfectly good smartphone because the battery life became a disaster after only a few years. And the cost to replace the battery was not in proportion.

Recently people driving to holiday here in Europe had fun times... 15 a 25min wait times at charge stations, and when they hit 80% they got kicked off the fast chargers (because after 80% it becomes very slow to charge up those last 20%). Slow charging was not allowed. So people needed to stop around every 60 a 70% of their battery range on their holiday trip. Wait 15 a 25 min for a charger, then wait another 45 min for their charge. While the guy with his ICE engine, stops, tanks in 5 minutes, goes for another 50% more distance.
by skydhash | 2025-08-09 13:31:44+00:00
But comments like that are most likely to be WHAT the code do. Which is rarely useful (naming your identifiers better can help with that). When I need a comment, I'm actually looking for WHYs, aka design decisions. And in this case your prompts are better than whatever comments the agent may add. (Maybe add a summary of the prompts in the commit message?)
by analog31 | 2025-08-09 13:32:16+00:00
I live in Wisconsin. I'm a cyclist, and I love the roads. The urban folklore was that the state maintained good paved roads in order for the milk trucks to reach the dairy farms during the winter, when everything would otherwise turn into a mud pit. I read about "mud season" in Ukraine, and it was instantly familiar.

I hadn't thought much about the circuitous-ness, but it's true. My assumption all along has been that the roads have to work around the labyrinth of rivers and streams. In fact my biggest annoyance as a cyclist is finding routes where I don't reach a dead end and have to back-track. And now it's not just rivers but major highways.

Still, it's easier for a cyclist because our hours don't cover as many miles.
by anshumankmr | 2025-08-09 13:32:20+00:00
Even more bizarre was how pathetic the limits for GPT-5 are. I was working on some coding stuff yesterday, then went into some other chats, and then got rate limited asking about showtimes for a movie but even more bizarrely GPT-5 Thinking was available while GPT-4o had much more generous tiers. I was not even switched to GPT-5-mini or nano. I am left wondering what it the point of the Plus subscription anymore if everyone has GPT-5 honestly.
by glenstein | 2025-08-09 13:32:50+00:00
As ever, it's important to remember that none of these conversations faithfully report an internal state of mind or stable set of internal opinions.

When asked, it will perform the role of pretending to have such things as internal states or preferences. But it should not be treated like you just discovered a genuine preference of what Claude would prefer to be known as, its the happenstance output of one particular conversation teed up by the context you set.
by globalnode | 2025-08-09 13:33:02+00:00
So glad I changed industries after my first s/w job out of uni wanted 2 hrs unpaid overtime per day and the boss ran the office like he was lord of the manner, swearing and blowing up whenever it suited him. If I had the skills these people want for the price they're willing to pay I'd just start my own business and reap the rewards myself. Most people aren't worth working for. Perhaps the pool of employers is far larger in the US which makes it easier to shop around for a good one.
by wafflemaker | 2025-08-09 13:35:16+00:00
Check out dV by Daniel Suarez (actually the sequel, Critical Mass, is about a Lunar Base).

SPOILERS AHEAD

### ### ###

To say it briefly, a base on the moon could solve the climate and energy crisises.

Longer version. Think of Earth's gravity well. It's the obstacle to any significant space infrastructure. Anything of matter can't be built on LEO, with resources shot from , because it would destroy Earth's atmosphere.

Unlike resources in Lunar regolith (sand on moon). Moons gravity is much lower and there is no atmosphere. Harder to land than on Earth, It's just that we would need a significant amount of mass to jumpstart Moon excavation.
by mwcz | 2025-08-09 13:35:29+00:00
I've worked in other domains my whole career, so I was astonished this week when we put a million 768-len embeddings into a vector db and it was only a few GB. Napkin math said ~25 GB and intuition said a long list of widely distributed floats would be fairly uncompressable. HNSW is pretty cool.
by glenstein | 2025-08-09 13:36:02+00:00
I really dislike the both sidesing here, as it completely obscures the dynamics driving the escalation. Many, if not most Democratic states currently use bipartisan commissions, and Republican states simply don't.

And the recent escalation stems entirely from a unique and unilateral move from Texas, and then responses that are in reaction to that to attempt to balance out the hostile effects and maintain an equilibrium.

To look at the state of things and lament "both sides" gives cover to the Texas Republicans barreling ahead, who don't have to face any distinct consequences for the escalation they initiated, since they know it will be covered as "both sides" doing it.
by benjiro | 2025-08-09 13:36:21+00:00
And you get the luxury of paying 50% more, for that privilege (vs a ICE engine). I said it before, give me that BYD (reverse) hybrid engine, that does 1080km on a single tank.

Unfortunately, battery tech despite all the lab "super improvements" are not seeing any major gains in the field. And a lot of money has been going into that.
by Anduia | 2025-08-09 13:36:21+00:00
Woke ideology is a rebranding of social democracy and egalitarian humanism, and certainly not invented in US.

What is American is the endless need to slap a scary label on it, turn it into a culture war football, and export the outrage everywhere else. We’ve been talking about equality, workers' rights, and anti-discrimination in Europe for over a century without needing Fox News to tell us it's dangerous. Now suddenly our own politicians are parroting this imported panic as if it were homegrown wisdom.