MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by guywithahat | 2025-08-26 16:45:09+00:00
It's a game theory problem. There are lots of studies around executive performance, and what people find is that the specific executive/CEO has basically no impact, while things like general industry growth and direction is what matters (suggesting executive/CEO decisions are just a game of chance). But obviously I could also choose a bad executive who would tank the company. What's really happening is when everyone is trying their hardest, all of the executives are as good as they can be, and the things they do tend to look more like luck than performance.

It's the same thing in elections. Because everyone is competitive, who donates what money or it's amount tends to not really matter. If a candidate were to sabotage their campaign they would lose, but in a competitive election it doesn't end up being statistically significant.
by bequanna | 2025-08-26 16:45:29+00:00
> Population of Seoul metro is 26 million people. It's suppose to drop by 2/3rds by 2060 (or worse). That's 1/3 less taxes, a 1/3 less transportation riders, 1/3rd less customers, etc....

If there are only 2/3rds as many people, why would the same infrastructure be required?
by zkagin | 2025-08-26 16:45:41+00:00
When I joined biotech five years ago, I wasn't sure where an engineer could contribute vs. where a biology PhD was needed. This is the guide I wish I had, a brief but hopefully comprehensive overview of the industry, examples where software and AI are contributing, and a framework to help inform which questions to ask next. Now is a fantastic time to join biotech, no PhD needed.
by piotraleksander | 2025-08-26 16:46:08+00:00
Inspired by interactive blog posts: https://worrydream.com/ExplorableExplanations/ https://www.inkandswitch.com/potluck/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43773813

I thought I hack around. App consists of:

- users write Markdown, LLM turns it into interactive MDX post

- MDX with generated widgets is rendered in e2b sandbox

- generation & publishing (sanitization, etc) pipelines run on Inngest (their docs won me over Temporal)

Would it make sense to go mobile first and focus on ‘interactive micro-blogging’ (Twitter with widgets)?
by bilbo0s | 2025-08-26 16:46:21+00:00
Also, you don't realize until you try them out that other issues make running models on the AMD chip ridiculously slow compared to running the same models on an M4. Some of that's software. But a lot is how the chip/memory/neural etc are organized.

Right now, AMD is not even in the ballpark.

In fact, the real kick in the 'nads was my fully kitted M4 laptop outperforming the AMD. I just gave up.

I'll keep checking in with AMD and Intel every generation though. It's gotta change at some point.
by ignaloidas | 2025-08-26 16:46:23+00:00
Sun is continuously running a very nice distillation cycle the size of the world that makes fairly clean water just fall out of the sky. It's only a question of where does it fall, and how much. If you want it even cleaner, wait a couple centuries for it to filter down underground, and get it from there - besides maybe a bit high mineral contents, that can easily be removed, it's essentially free, clean water. The only question is how much it's replenished in the area you're taking it from.

There's plenty of areas where there's more rainfall, than there is outflow/evaporation, with water continuously replenishing deep groundwater. "Saving water" in such areas is of little concern besides the basic, economic one of well maintenance - each one can only pull so much, and more usage means more wells, and more upkeep.
by szymonmaszke | 2025-08-26 16:46:36+00:00
No need for the irony if it's not your cup of tea. :( But maybe you have/know a tool for creating custom linting rules, would love to check it out and use if so! The ones I've tried (e.g. semgrep) had ability to create rules which were file agnostic, while I find it easier to work with the abstractions of specific language (e.g. Python's AST, maybe with more to come) and didn't want to redo the logic for these tools over and over.
by Jun8 | 2025-08-26 16:46:55+00:00
"The young man then quoted with approval what Socrates had said on learning that the Delphic oracle had proclaimed him the wisest man in Greece. "If I am the wisest man," said Socrates, "it is because I alone know that I know nothing."

This is a common misquote with similar frequency to perhaps "Play it again, Sam." In his Apology (not meaning apology, from apo-logia, speaking for oneself, i.e. defense) Socrates says:

"... ἔοικα γοῦν τούτου γε σμικρῷ τινι αὐτῷ τούτῳ σοφώτερος εἶναι, ὅτι ἃ μὴ οἶδα οὐδὲ οἴομαι εἰδέναι."

"Although I do not suppose that either of us knows anything really beautiful and good, I am better off than he is – for he knows nothing, and thinks he knows. I neither know nor think I know" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_that_I_know_nothing?utm...).

The context is that Socrates was puzzled by the Delphic Oracle's declaration that he is the wisest man. The man mentioned is an unnamed politician who was known to be wise.
by gia_ferrari | 2025-08-26 16:47:14+00:00
+1. My basic structure is a big share/ directory that is mounted on all my machines (over sshfs + tailscale if need be). There's some basic top-level organization (Projects, Financial Documents, Photos) but other than that, the key thing for me was a Projects/Active/, Projects/Ice/, Projects/Done folder that I move things between. If I don't know where to file a thing, I just make a new folder under Projects/Active/, keep an eye on your workflow, and reorganize if you see an issue. Stick to the process, not the plan[1].

The absolute worst approach I tried was to curate things. Nothing got filed. Embracing the chaos allowed the pattern to evolve around my revealed workflows, and now after a couple years I pretty much know where to instantly find or file things.

[1] https://youtu.be/7D8sXR0ozeE?feature=shared&t=4474
by somenameforme | 2025-08-26 16:47:27+00:00
I'm not deflecting anything. Rather you've brought us down a tangent that has literally nothing to do with the initial issue of whether or not one supports immigration. I'm more than happy to continue the discussion, but I'm not entirely sure what we're even debating at this point. So I suppose I'll just consider it a discussion, it's interesting in any case!

The US does not get to dictate what happens to a person in a country once they're deported. That is up to the host country. El Salvador has been going through an extreme crackdown on gangs over the past several years sending them from one of the most dangerous countries in the world with one of the highest homicide rates in the world, to a country with a homicide rate a fraction of the US' and one of the 10 safest countries in the world! [1] The deal between the US and El Salvador for hosting prisoners was for a relatively small number of deportees who were vile enough that even their home countries refused to accept them back, leaving them in a state of limbo.

And the deportees were overwhelmingly not in the country legally. The media made this claim based on people who were admitted to the country via the CBP One app. But those admittances were all rescinded in April. At that point users of the App were notified of the change, the app was updated to 'CBP Home' and updated to work as a tool to help people self deport in a way that would not imperil their chance of legally applying for a visa or citizenship to the US in the future. Those who chose to stay in the US beyond that point were doing so illegally, and were informed that they would be arrested, deported, and permanently prevented from ever legally entering the US.

https://www.gallup.com/analytics/356996/gallup-global-safety...
by criddell | 2025-08-26 16:47:40+00:00
I use a P1 and I don't think I'd buy another. The fan runs a lot. When I carry it in my backpack, I have to remember to do a complete shutdown otherwise I'll pull a very hot machine with a mostly depleted battery out of my backpack when I get to my destination.

Outside of Apple, there doesn't seem to be many good fanless laptops. I'd love to see Framework come up with something.
by 0xcafefood | 2025-08-26 16:47:48+00:00
That is _one_ assumption.

Another is that immigrants into these countries can and will just plug right into the local economy and be adequate substitutes for the economic effects of the local population decline.

There's everything about a country unrelated to economics that isn't even addressed too that will likely have ... big implications for these countries receiving the mass immigration too. These will likely also affect the economy.
by sandreas | 2025-08-26 16:48:22+00:00
+1

And if not, could you elaborate?

It would also be a huge benefit to use a replaced mainboard as a homelab base WITH ECC support in the future.

Same goes for the Framework Desktop, which features Strix Halo without ECC support, whereas ECC IS possible with Ryzen AI MAX+ 395+ PRO (e.g. HP Z2 Mini G1a).
by plorkyeran | 2025-08-26 16:48:57+00:00
They turned out to be expensive theater. One major problem is that company names aren't actually unique. An EV cert for "Stripe, Inc" still doesn't tell you that you're talking to the correct "Stripe, Inc". The other big problem was that users had no clue they were a thing, and when browsers tried to emphasize them in the UI it just confused users and made phishing easier.

You can still buy EV certs if you want to donate money to a CA, but that's about all they accomplish.
by hajile | 2025-08-26 16:49:03+00:00
M4 Pro was a massive step back in perf/watt over M3 Pro. To my knowledge, there aren't any M4 die shots around which has led to speculation that yields on M4 Max were predicted to be really bad, so they made the M4 Pro into a binned M4 Max, but that comes with tradeoffs like much worse leakage current.

That said Hardware Canucks did a review of the 395 in a mobile form factor (Asus ROG Flow F13) with TDP at 70w (lower than the max 120w TDP you see in desktop reviews). This lower-than-max TDP also gets you closer to the perf/watt sweet spot.

The M4 Pro scores slightly higher in Cinebench R24 despite being 10P+4E vs a full 16P cores on the 395 all while using something like a 30% less power. M4 Pro scores nearly 35% higher than the single-core R24 benchmark too. 395 GPU performance is than M4 Pro in productivity software. More specifically, they trade blows based on which is more optimized in a particular app, but AMD GPUs have way more optimizations in general and gaming should be much better with an x86 + AMD GPU vs Rosetta 2 + GPU translation layers + Wine/crossover.

M4 Pro gets around 50% better battery life for tasks like web browsing when accounting for battery size differences and more than double the battery life per watt/hr when doing something simple like playing a video. Battery life under full load is a bit better for the 395, but doing the math, this definitely involves the 395 throttling significantly down from it's 70w TDP.
by 9x39 | 2025-08-26 16:49:27+00:00
Anyone using Framework for a daily driver that can compare to an M-series Macbook? Specifically, battery life on your OS. Does anything compare to a MBP these days?

From a value proposition, it seems good. Our group definitely goes through keyboards and mainboards from spilled tea at least annually it seems, but AppleCare is just a no-brainer, and away we go.

I still drive on my original M1 at home without complaint, and use my M3 at work. Anyone have the early Frameworks still in daily use? How are they?
by bevr1337 | 2025-08-26 16:49:28+00:00
I'm a wet blanket, but I despise documentaries that lie about the sound of their recording. I was pretty far into adulthood before I realized most nature docs have fake audio. The backing track of this video helps me know there is no useful audio for this video - no Foley or ambient mic. It's not quite as narrative as Ride of the Valkyries, granted ;)
by uecker | 2025-08-26 16:49:34+00:00
The real-world is complex with many trade-offs. The real question if in a 1:1 comparable situation and using similar efforts, you could achieve good memory safety in C. I believe this to be the case. I think the statistics we have seen are highly biased and partially misleading and the actual differences in the number of CVEs have many reasons (including legacy code, priorities, usage scnarious, culture etc). I mean, why even mention Curl, a project with portability requirements so extreme that it sticks to a long obsolete C version (30 years!). Proving the absence of memory safety issues entirely may indeed be harder, but ensuring a reasonable safety level is quite possible in my opinion. One should also point out that only safe Rust has guaranteed absence of memory safety issues, but it is Rust - and not safe Rust - that is competing with C.
by vunderba | 2025-08-26 16:49:39+00:00
I've updated the GenAI Image comparison site (which focuses heavily on strict text-to-image prompt adherence) to reflect the new Google Gemini 2.5 Flash model (aka nano-banana).

https://genai-showdown.specr.net

This model gets 8 of the 12 prompts correct and easily comes within striking distance of the best-in-class models Imagen and gpt-image-1 and is a significant upgrade over the old Gemini Flash 2.0 model. The reigning champ, gpt-image-1, only manages to edge out Flash 2.5 on the maze and 9-pointed star.

What's honestly most astonishing to me is how long gpt-image-1 has remained at the top of the class - closing in on half a year which is basically a lifetime in this field. Though fair warning, gpt-image-1 is borderline useless as an "editor" since it almost always changes the whole image instead of doing localized inpainting-style edits like Kontext, Qwen, or Nano-Banana.

Comparison of gpt-image-1, flash, and imagen.

https://genai-showdown.specr.net?models=OPENAI_4O%2CIMAGEN_4...
by hyability | 2025-08-26 16:49:54+00:00
Reliability is king. Why not just buy 50 sq mi of ranch land in Arizona for a data center complex, install a solar and battery storage system and eliminate electricity concerns for the next 20 years? Using LFP or sodium-ion batteries for storage effectively eliminates fire risk.

Have there been any formal studies looking at OpEx ROI for offgrid carbon free generation + storage for data centers? Exiting the grid and vertically integrating on site generation eliminates a lot of risk when dealing with an external utility.

FAANG has the market cap to drive down costs for reliable carbon-free generation and storage, like Alphabet is doing[1].

Microsoft is demonstrating water-free cooling solutions[2]. As long as there's a fiber backbone nearby, FAANG can slash energy OpEx and not worry about the rest of the grid. Or natural gas prices.

[1]https://dataconomy.com/2024/12/11/why-googles-800m-bet-on-cl...

[2]https://datacentremagazine.com/news/how-are-companies-pionee...
by whynotmaybe | 2025-08-26 16:49:59+00:00
Yes, those rules always come from legal.

In some regulated places, someone is legally responsible for authorizing a change in production.

If it fails, that person's on the hook. So the usual way is to have a manual authorization for every change. Yes, it's a PITA.

One place I've worked changed their process to automatically allow changes in some specific parts for a specific period during the development of a new app.

And for some magical reasons, the person usually associated with such legal responsibility are the one that don't trust automatic process.
Show HN: First background agents in Jetbrains IDEs [video]
by kevo1ution | 2025-08-26 16:50:04+00:00
TLDR: made the first background coding agent that has an isolated workspace and runs locally

Howdy - I’m Kevin, co-founder of Firebender, and we built the first background coding agent in android studio / Jetbrains!

Why not just use Cursor background agents or OpenAI Codex?

Both of these require setting up a cloud container and cloning your existing developer environment, and maintaining it. Then when you want to iterate on changes as AI inevitably makes a mistake, you either throw away the work, or have to pull down the branch and clean it up. This feels really clunky. With Firebender, background agents run locally in a lightweight git worktree/IDE tab. This means when the agent is done, you can easily clean up the changes and run code with a few clicks.

Under the hood, the agent behaves similarly to claude code (didn’t want to reinvent the wheel), but also leverages all of the hooks into IntelliJ sdk like go-to-definition, find usages, auto-imports for accuracy, and it gives a cleaner visual UI for reviewing changes and merging them. You can use any frontier model like gpt-5/sonnet-4 as the base.

We’ve had to do quite a bit of reverse engineering of the IntelliJ codebase to cleanly set up and manage the isolated environment, and I think you’ll appreciate the simple UX of hitting cmd+enter to run a background agent anywhere.

get started docs: https://docs.firebender.com/get-started/background-agents

download the plugin: https://firebender.com

Would love to get your feedback to help us improve the tool for you! Thanks!
by HankStallone | 2025-08-26 16:50:31+00:00
Yeah, the open borders folks like to paint a rosy picture of, "If we let a bunch of people come here and work cheap, it'll make things better back in their homelands too as they take their training and wages back sometimes." But if that's true, pretty soon they won't have any reason to come here and work cheap, and then the reason the bosses wanted them in the first place is gone.

I don't think they really expect that to happen (and we can observe that it hasn't); it's just a sales pitch.
by toastercat | 2025-08-26 16:50:37+00:00
I was really close to getting a Framework earlier this year, but ultimately landed on a Thinkpad T14 Gen 5 because at the time, the price gap was significant (the Thinkpad was $250 cheaper) and the T14 still had a better CPU. Not to mention the T14 has expandable RAM, replaceable battery, screen, and keyboard, and is acceptably thin and light.

In the end, I think the Framework is worth it if you have a desire to support the company and the mission, but I think most people should go refurbished if they only care about value.
by starkparker | 2025-08-26 16:50:59+00:00
Specifically 11:04: https://youtu.be/0RzUBqtgODM?t=664

> Something that we hear over and over again across our entire product lineup is that people want pointing sticks. You might know it as trackpoint from other brands. The little nubs that you can use as a mouse. Obviously, if you're a ThinkPad user, former ThinkPad user, that might be something that you're very familiar and comfortable with. And so, it is something that actually on all of our products several times over the last 5 years, we have tried to prototype and make work. The big challenge on this actually is just that there's very, very little space here. That the Zstack here is incredibly thin.

> And for a keyboard, it works because the keys are compliant. If there's force that's put on the lid, like let's say you're got your laptop in a backpack with a book or something, it's just being pressed on like that, the screen is going to touch the keys and the keys are going to give way because they're just on these uh on these scissor mechanisms and the screen will be okay and you may get a little smudge you have to wipe off. You've got like finger grease on there.

> A pointing stick though is not compliant. Not compliant in that way. So, you've got this like sharp point basically sticking out from the keyboard. And if there's pressure placed on the lid, that's going to go right onto that point on the tracking stick and end up damaging screen or have a high likelihood of damaging the screen.

> And so, we've just kept over and over, we've kept trying this and seeing if we could get a low enough profile pointing stick solution to make that work, not risk the screen at all. And so far, that doesn't exist. That is something that we keep going into the supply base to try to find.

> Hopefully we that is something we find in the future because of course with this input module system on framework laptop 16, it would end up being relatively straightforward for us to just make an input module a keyboard that you can swap in that's got that pointing stick unlike uh you know even our other laptops where you'd have to have an entirely new input cover to get that kind of functionality.
by sixonesixo | 2025-08-26 16:51:05+00:00
i've found out that is possible! with k9s plugins. you need to create a yaml file with the gonzo command you want to launch

the file is `$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/k9s/plugins.yaml`

and here's an example:

plugins: gonzo-ai: shortCut: g description: "Gonzo: AI log analysis" scopes: - po command: sh background: false args: - -c - "kubectl logs -f $NAME -n $NAMESPACE --context $CONTEXT | gonzo --ai-model=gpt-4"
by IAmBroom | 2025-08-26 16:51:12+00:00
> Ooh go on, what do they say about Germans?

That they don't have a healthy sense of humor.

I remember a comedian who toured Europe, and said it wasn't true - Germans laughed as much as anyone else at his jokes. However, afterwards they took him aside and explained, "It was very funny, you see, the joke about combs being like salad forks, but we just want you that we don't discriminate against forks here. That was an unfortunate incident from during the War, but today we are much more enlightened and invite all kinds of cutlery!"
by ActorNightly | 2025-08-26 16:51:15+00:00
>For decode you have a single Q vector (relating to the in progress token) and multiple K and V vectors (your context, i.e. all tokens that have already been computed).

Sure, but the K/V matrices are pretty much arbitrary weights, and so is the Q vector since its derived from the multiplication of the input vector by a learned matrix.

The thing im trying to convey is that the nomeclature of Key/Query/Value doesn't mean anything, so when people learn about transformers, they don't need to understand that those matricies correspond to some predefined structure that maps to the data in a specific way. You can have 2 identical model initialized with random values and trained on same datasets, and end up with different KQV matricies for the same input.

>This isn't correct, again because of attention. The classic perceptron has static weights, they are not an input.

K/Q/V are all derived by multiplying the input vector by static learned weights, then those are all multiplied together in the attention calculation. Basically just a whole bunch of dot products. You would just have flattened matricies with intermediate layers acting as accumulators.

>Indeed I wonder if it's actually possible for a bunch of perceptrons to even 'discover' the attention mechanism

It is. It won't be attention in a classical sense, it would just be extra connections on a wider dimension single layer stacks. The learning process would put the right values in the correct place.
by loeg | 2025-08-26 16:51:29+00:00
It is a major flaw. Birth rate is falling basically everywhere and below replacement (~2.1) even in places people think of as booming in recent history -- India is at 1.98, South America somewhere around 1.8. It's really just portions of Africa that still have TFR above 2.1 and the rates there are declining over time, too. Immigranting your way of a demographic collapse only works if there are lots of births happening somewhere else.
by keiferski | 2025-08-26 16:51:50+00:00
This seems like a big number, but frankly in context it's actually quite trivial. We're talking about the lead office in the world's most dominant country, and the amount spent on the election is roughly equivalent to...the amount spent on ice cream or manga/comic books, per year.

There is a lot of money in America, and comparatively not that much is actually spent on the election. Maybe it's still too much in an ostensibly democratic system, but it's worth noting.
by elcapitan | 2025-08-26 16:51:53+00:00
Oh wow, this is absolutely amazing. It's one thing to read about computers like the Altair in history overviews, but to see ads for it and how they were discussed at the time, that's really interesting.

Connects well to the Halt and Catch Fire syllabus that was posted yesterday :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45007414