MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sota_pop | 2025-08-25 13:55:42+00:00
It was purely luck of the context that I noticed, but I received an email notification that someone had messaged me on LinkedIn via my gmail account. When this happens, the email contains the message contents. However, in this case the message contents did not match between the version within LinkedIn and the version presented in the email. Only two words were different, but that slight change made it even more peculiar and unsettling.
by willtemperley | 2025-08-25 13:55:45+00:00
Actually looking at the DuckDB source I think they re-use a single uint64 and push bits onto this a byte at a time, until bitwidth is reached, then right-shift bitwidth bits back off when a single value has been created. Very neat and presumably quick.

I've just had so many issues with total lack of clarity with this format. They tell you a total_compressed_size for a page then it turns out the _uncompressed_ page header is included in this - but the documentation barely give any clues to the layout [1].

The reality:

Each column chunk includes a list of pages written back-to-back, with an optional dictionary page first. Each of these, including the dictionary are prepended with an uncompressed PageHeader in Thrift format.

It wasn't too hard to write a paragraph about it. It was quite hard looking for magic compression bytes in hex dumps.

Maybe there should be a "minimum workable reference implementation" or something that is slow but easy to understand.

[1] https://parquet.apache.org/docs/file-format/data-pages/colum...
by Borg3 | 2025-08-25 13:55:59+00:00
If you want two-way distributed syncing, that is a bit more complicated and error prone, but most tools support it, even rsync. Simpler aproach is to have central primary node (whatever it desktop or storage) when you sync copy data and sync it to backups.

As I said, handling immutable data (incremental) is easy. You just copy and sync. Kinda trival. The problem I had personaly was all the importand docs (and similar) files I work on. First, I wanted snapshots and history, in case of some mistake or failure. Data checksuming, because they are importand. Also, full peer2peer syncing because I have desktop, servers, VMs, laptop, so I want to sync data around. And because I really like GIT, great tool for VCS, I wanted something similar but for generic binary data. Hence I interested in DVFS system. First I wanted full blown mountable DVFS system, but that is complicated and much harder to make it portable.. Repository aproach is easy to implement and is portable (Cygwin, Linux, UNIX, Posix). Works like a charm.

As for downside, If you think git-annex will work for you, just use it :) For me, it was far too complicated (too much moving parts) even for my DVFS usecase. For immutable data is absolutly overkill, to keep 100s of GBs of data there. I just sync :)
by MangoToupe | 2025-08-25 13:56:35+00:00
I don't suppose I really disagree with any of this, but I do want to highlight that there are really more than two sides on basically all issues. Traditional media did a terrible job of portraying this, typically lazily assuming that the parties form the opposite ends of the political spectrum and that people discontented with both parties naturally fall between them. This is the dynamic that implies one or two "wedge" issues dominate politics, and most things people likely want to discuss/improve/address aren't even on the table. Social media may stoke radicalism, but the underlying discontent was there before—politicians could just act like it was ridiculous.

And yes, there are people—like you—who continue to act like there is "the other side" when the way people characterize themselves outside of partisan affiliation is much more nuanced and complex. Eg there are many, many Americans who are anti-war, but there is simply no anti-war vote on most ballots, nor certainly any anti-war party.

In other words, manufacturing consent got us into this mess, social media just makes us anxiously aware of how bad mainstream media was at capturing the political sentiments of the people who live here. That includes, yes, radicals (violent bigots & ideologues), but this also includes realizing that many or most people have no idea what the party whose candidates they vote for actually stand for.

I've put a lot of effort in surrounding myself with people very unlike myself in the last year for reasons, in-person, around real-life activities and scenarios, where politics is simply not relevant outside of stimulating conversation. What I've put together is that basically nobody in this country is both well-educated about politics and satisfied with either party. We've somehow created a two-legged monster that doesn't want to do, you know, the actual substantial end of democracy. Now, I discovered this in the real world, but social media has made it much easier to see if you relentlessly block all "both sides"/"other side" partisans and look directly to values, struggles, desires, etc.

But, this does take discipline, and if you're trying to tune out, you're a prime candidate to be taken directly into outragetainment.
by shadowgovt | 2025-08-25 13:57:02+00:00
As with so many mistakes Google makes, this is letting the technical people front-run an interaction that should have been spearheaded by the social people.

From a technical standpoint, it's easy to think of AI-based cleanup as in the same category as "improving the compression algorithm" or "improving the throughput to the client": just a technically-mediated improvement. But people have a subjectively-different reaction between decreasing instances of bandwidth-related pixelation and making faces baby-smooth, and anyone on the community side of things could have told the team responsible (if they'd known about it).

Sometimes Google's tech-expert-driven-company approach has negative consequences.
by sunir | 2025-08-25 13:57:11+00:00
I have been developing long lived self-directing agent loops. Longest with problem solving has been about 4 hours. Longest without problem solving has been nearer 8 hours until it was done.

The biggest problem is simply what we think is clear is confusing to the AIs. They seem like they speak English fluently but they are aliens. You need to force them to active listen first and write out what they understand then reload them with a clean context with the written understanding and confirm.

Ideation is also mostly limited to synthesis. So it’s better to work on problems that get progressively more complete towards a known objective rather than problems that require exploration.
by DrThomasAger | 2025-08-25 13:57:22+00:00
I created (: Smile after over two years of iterating on how to structure prompts. As I often iterate with Chat models (like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity or Kimi), use a variety of inference API’s, and open source models, I needed something that would work across all of them without compiling into a different language.

When I looked around, I found some great prompt engineering tools, especially for leveraging programming (Like POML), but most instruction languages seemed to be based on existing markups that people were already familiar with. Like a language in react components.

It wasn’t satisfying to me. So I made (: Smile! As the backbone of my own LLM apps, agents and prompts I’m ready to open it up to feedback and ideas for extending it into something that you would use.

Let me know what you think!
by crazygringo | 2025-08-25 13:57:33+00:00
Again, this isn't GenAI.

The idea of it being "without consent" is absurd. Your phone doesn't ask you for consent to apply smoothing to the Bayer filter, or denoising to your zoom. Sites don't ask you for consent to recompress your video.

This is just computational image processing. Phones have been doing this stuff for many years now.

This isn't adding new elements to a video. It's not adding body parts or changing people's words or inventing backgrounds or anything.

And "experiments" are just A/B testing. If it increases engagement, they roll it out more broadly. If it doesn't, they get rid of it.
by micromacrofoot | 2025-08-25 13:57:56+00:00
You need a lot of weight. IMO for home use the risks heavily outweigh the benefits for anything outside of a hobbyist project... that's just a lot of potential energy in a system that can go wrong. Weights falling quickly, pullies and cables under tension.

The same is true for batteries of course, but at the very least there are protections and checks for failures in most consumer accessible home solutions (and decades of engineering at this point). Worst case you at least have smoke detectors... not sure if there's a "cable is wearing thin and might snap and decapitate you" warning system.
by Barrin92 | 2025-08-25 13:58:16+00:00
It's pretty straight forward, using its dominance when it comes to internet platforms to try to impose American speech standards and values on foreign countries, the vice president has been quite explicit about that when he interfered in political discourse in several European countries.

Any country that has its wits together would do well to establish sovereignty over its communications infrastructure. It's quite telling that the only country that has been able to stand up to American bullying is China because they were smart enough to not outsource control over their information space to the US.
by franktankbank | 2025-08-25 13:58:32+00:00
> If a giant corpo fails the project, it's not your fault.

Why does this make sense? Failing is failing. The only reason it could be true is that the giant corpo has deep projects to pay back for the failure (in theory) but does that work in practice? They've got lawyers for their lawyers and more lawyers for those lawyers. Guess who is going to out lawyer who.
by mikewarot | 2025-08-25 13:58:52+00:00
The thing is, this is a financial bubble, not a capabilities bubble.

If you're worried about money, this is horrible news. If you just want to get shit done, it's great news, only if you can avoid losing personal agency long enough to survive the crash.

We're headed towards the hockey stick in terms of what people using AI can do. I'm rapidly learning that even ChatGPT5 can get confused, and lose sight of goals, but not in the hallucination variety, just the bog standard way people end up trapped in rabbit holes. I'm learning how to talk to it and get it back on track.

AI really can be productive, but it still needs guidance to be really useful.
by bostik | 2025-08-25 13:59:33+00:00
For a brief period of time, binary configs[0] were a thing. In mobile world only, but still. It wasn't that people generally wanted them, but because random seek I/O latency on early mobile devices (and especially on their eMMC storage devices) was atrocious.

Opening up tens or hundreds of XML config files for resync was disgustingly slow. I've developed software on Maemo and Scratchbox; the I/O wait for on-device config changes was a real problem. So of course someone came up with a modified concept of Windows registry - a single, binary format config storage, with a suitably "easy" API. As a result you'd sacrifice write/update latency for the cases where you wanted to modify configurations and gain a much improved read/refresh latency when reading them up.

Of course that all broke down when reading a single config block required to read the entire freaking binary dump and the config storage itself was bigger than the block device cache. Turns out that if you give app developers a supposedly easy and low-friction mechanism to store app configs, their respective PMs would go wild and demand that everything is configurable. Multiply by tens, even low hundreds of apps, each registering an idle-loop callback to re-read their configs to guarantee they would always have the correct settings ready. A system intended to improve config load/read times ended up generating an increased demand for already constrained read I/O.

0: https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/dconf
by potato3732842 | 2025-08-25 13:59:35+00:00
It's the wealthy and wealthy-ish (so like HN-tier) people of the boston-ny coastal areas who have no bigger problems than than hand wringing about some offshore windmills who are the locusts here. It just so happens that for this particular round the locusts have the head of the executive on their side. This is a long term ongoing debate that Trump basically walked into and picked the side that suited him for a few cheap political points. The battle lines were drawn long before he cared.

The potential for resource (energy) extraction here is undeniable. That's why various parts of this area have been suggested for wind farms for so long.

When the locusts have decimated the region and moved on and there is nobody left to fund the fight the resource extraction will happen. Because that's just the economically sensible thing to do. And without anyone to stand in the way sensible things tend to happen.

In a sort of perverse "you are why the history books have the horrors they do" sort of irony, Trump is very much a continuation of the broad social trend wherein people in the US have less rights and their governments have more arbitrary power as the years go on. To ascribe the problem to a particular politician, as bad as said politician may (or may not) be is to deny that trend, which is a stupid thing to do.

And just to be clear here, I am very much pro wind-farm and have been since before any of the current major political personalities were relevant.
by dmix | 2025-08-25 14:00:53+00:00
It does seem culturally popular in UK to have rules and government hoop jumping for every small thing, to the point it's become a tired meme on the internet. The backlash on this one was likely because it happened very quickly and very broadly across the internet at once. They should have slowly expanded the scope as most governments do and maybe the backlash would have been lower.
by jordanb | 2025-08-25 14:01:03+00:00
I suspect part of this is rich people coming up with use cases. If you're rich enough money means nothing but product selection feels like a burden so you have an assistant who does purchasing on your behalf. You want your house stocked with high quality items without having to think of it.

For the rest of us, the idea of a robot spending money on our behalf is kinda terrifying.
by immibis | 2025-08-25 14:02:27+00:00
I have a small public gitea instance that got thousands of requests per hour from bots.

I encountered exactly one actual problem: the temporary folder for zip snapshots filled up the disk since bots followed all snapshot links and it seems gitea doesn't delete generated snapshots. I made that directory read-only, deleted its contents, and the problem was solved, at the cost of only breaking zip snapshots.

I experienced no other problems.

I did put some user-agent checks in place a while later, but that was just for fun to see if AI would eventually ingest false information.
by shazbotter | 2025-08-25 14:02:29+00:00
I don't think that's what the parent was saying. They are saying the Nazis are truly evil, but the Brits are also truly evil. A different truly evil, of course, I'm not going to weigh tragedies against one another.

And they're not wrong. The British empire killed millions through policy -- read up on the Bengali famine to understand one example where Britain killed millions. Britain was one of the earliest users of concentration camps, deploying them during the Boer War.
by mark_l_watson | 2025-08-25 14:02:35+00:00
I was just reading the code: it looks like minor tweaks to utils.c and this should run nicely with local models using Ollama or LM Studio. That should be safe enough.

Off topic, sorry, but to me the real security nightmare is the new ‘AI web browsers’ - I can’t imagine using one of those because of prompt injection attacks.
by lordofnork | 2025-08-25 14:02:50+00:00
Hi HN,

I’ve been working on a weird little passion project: Flourish & Decay, a board-/digital hybrid game inspired by slime-mold and Conway’s Game of Life. It's completely decentralized and 100% free to play.

What is it?: A tactical deck-builder where you play action cards / spend resources to place “cells” onto a game board; they live, die, or mutate based on local rules. Compete with other players to grow the largest over 100 generations!

Why I’m sharing: I want feedback from the HN community on:

- The game mechanics – are you able to effectively use Conway's Game of Life to gain a strategic advantage?

- Performance – the app uses instanced meshes and ~many other performance tricks; curious if it runs smoothly on your hardware.

- The computer engine - are computers sufficiently "smart" as to enable fun gameplay?

- General design/UX thoughts.

Try it: flourishanddecay.com (demo link) – works in browser, no install.

The project is open to iteration; rules, balance, and art are all evolving. Would love your thoughts on gameplay, tech stack (React 19 + R3F v9), or just whether the concept makes sense.

Built with React Three Fiber, DREI, NextJS, Trystero and GSAP.

Happy to answer any questions about the anti-entropy gossip networking layer (future online multiplayer), the art pipeline (GLTF-JSX, Draco, WebP), or an eventual physical version.

BONUS:

- Have an idea that would benefit from an Open Source, decentralized, p2p lobby / matchmaking? Hit me up. That is completely decoupled from my core game and I'm trying to carve out time to make it OS.

Thanks for checking it out!
by johnisgood | 2025-08-25 14:03:40+00:00
4F-* are mainly research chemicals (still?), still being sold widely, especially where there is not a blanket ban on them.

I remember 3-FPM, that was what I imagined stimulants should be doing. It did everything just right. I got it back when it was legal. Any other stimulants come nowhere as close, maybe similar ones, but 4FA or whatever is for example, mostly euphoric, which is not what I want.

No clue about IBM's part in it.
by jaybrendansmith | 2025-08-25 14:03:53+00:00
And when you say 'We', you mean explicitly the current MAGA, the President and including also the entire Republican congress and the Supreme Court. We are in the midst of a hostile takeover of our government, and of course we blame the Constitution. I didn't have this on my bingo card, and I think most of us, relatively comfortable and wealthy, don't have the stomach for what needs to happen next. They have taken self-rule government away from the people, and they are not gonna to just give it back.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-08-25 14:04:41+00:00
Gravity based with weights is generally considered not cost effective; others already did the math that your 100 ton proposal can still only store a fraction of what a consumer grade battery pack can do, but on top of inefficiency there's space and maintenance requirements. It works in situations where e.g. trains go uphill empty and full downhill, but generally it doesn't work.

Water based systems work better because water is easy to move, plentiful, and there's natural basins to pump into / flow out of that can contain billions of liters.
by behnamoh | 2025-08-25 14:05:18+00:00
Adobe Reader is the first app I don't install on new machines.

It's slow and sluggish, riddled with dark patterns and annoying pop ups, disrespects the user in every possible way, and hides basic editing functionality behind subscriptions.

The trashiest piece of crap software. It's up there with MS Word (which gets progressively more bloated on Mac).

Edit: Added "software" after crap for clarity.
by shazbotter | 2025-08-25 14:05:34+00:00
> It's why you don't have to fear getting put on a show trial if you piss off the wrong people or they just want your stuff

Civil asset forfeiture suggests that's very much a thing to fear.

> It's why you know the water's safe to drink

Tell this to the people of Flint, Michigan. Or the many communities near fracking sites.
by A_D_E_P_T | 2025-08-25 14:05:46+00:00
Most of the shows they mention won't teach you anything about economics. The Spice and Wolf merchant might be the world's worst businessman, and it's about mercantile caravan-style trading rather than economics per se. Trillion Game was terrible -- basically a power fantasy with self-insert characters. I checked out after the secondary protagonist started bench-pressing 200kg to show off. I should have dropped the series long before then -- after he casually beat up some Yakuza. The apparent message of the series, that being a bullshitter pays off more than anything else, is also rather pernicious.

Though bizarre, The Dungeon of Black Company is the only anime series that might teach you something about economics and labor relations.
by alexdme | 2025-08-25 14:06:05+00:00
I also used to use git-annex on my photos, ended up getting frustrated with how slow it was and wrote aegis[1] to solve my use case.

I wrote a bit about why in the readme (see archiving vs backup). In my opinion, syncing, snapshots, and backup tools like restic are great but fundamentally solve a different problem from what I want out of an archive tool like aegis, git-annex, or boar[2].

I want my backups to be automatic and transparent, for that restic is a great tool. But for my photos, my important documents and other immutable data, I want to manually accept or reject any change that happens to them, since I might not always notice when something changes. For example if I fat finger an rm, or a bug in a program overrides something and I don't notice.

[1]: https://git.sr.ht/~alexdavid/aegis

[2]: https://github.com/mekberg/boar
by adinhitlore | 2025-08-25 14:06:18+00:00
"I'm fairly confident anthropic and grok have agi internally." - see sofia coppola is a fantastic director but we don't want to be characters in her movie "lost in translation", speaking of which: define AGI? It's a bold claim to say any company has it internally, and frankly given my definition of AGI if anyone has it they will definetly not be selling grok imagine for 99.5$ (autumn sale!), i can assure you that. AGI basically means: i don't care about sales, can i or should i go to Mars now since i can do it without a doubt? You'd be tormented by these kinds of questions even without ASI. I define ASI as something far more dangerous than a very powerful tool, an agent we cannot understand which will affect greatly the life of anyone/mostly anyone be it positively or negatively.