MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dabockster | 2025-09-24 17:50:37+00:00
> Take the core technology and just optimize, optimize, optimize for 10x the cost/efficiency.

This is what really grinds my gears about American AI and American technology in general lately, as an American myself. We used to do that! But over the last 10-15 years, it seems like all this country can do is try to throw more and more resources at something instead of optimizing what we already have.

Download more ram for this progressive web app.

Buy a Threadripper CPU to run this game that looks worse than the ones you played on the Nintendo Gamecube in the early 2000s.

Generate more electricity (hello Elon Musk).

Y'all remember your algorithms classes from college, right? Why not apply that here? Because China is doing just that, and frankly making us look stupid by comparison.
by flumpcakes | 2025-09-24 17:50:48+00:00
You can implement any of this without digital ID. Are there any real privacy concerns in Estonia after their digital citizenship? These arguments could be made against passports/driving licenses. It just doesn't seem like real legitimate concerns. Governments already have multiple databases on who you are. If digital ID unlocks more possibilities I am all for it - there is unbelievable amounts of missed opportunities in Government. One example - using a pen tablet to sign your name with the job centre to 'prove' who you are: utterly ridiculous!
by deelowe | 2025-09-24 17:51:01+00:00
I would gladly accept a bit of a slow down on progress if it meant my contributions to society were more meaningful. Additionally, I strongly believe this continuous dwindling of small organizations has resulted in an overall loss of community and a sense of belonging. In my opinion, this is what's causing the overall decline in health that we're seeing in developed nations.

For many, life seems aimless. Your future is to simply contribute what you're told to some faceless multinational for which after 20 years your only recognition will be a small piece of canvas with a mass produced screen printed design.
by wutwutwat | 2025-09-24 17:51:30+00:00
you're putting pressure into a system filled with a fluid that does not compress, and air, which compresses a lot. The procedure for getting the air out of any system is pump the pedal, crack the bleeder, tighten, pump until you have pedal, repeat until no air comes out of the bleeder.

you can get fancy with a vacuum too but one person on the pedal pumping and one person on the bleeder, you'll get all the air out.

if you've been working on cars since the 70s, you'd know that what you're saying about "the usual pumping the clutch and cracking the bleeder valve process" being bad is nonsense. If you didn't bench bleed the master cylinder good enough, you're going to be bleeding things for awhile. Also, if you're dealing with abs, junction blocks, or bleeding wheels out of order you're going to be there awhile.

clutch systems are a single line going from a mc to a hydraulic fork actuator. They take a whole 10 minutes to bleed starting from bone dry and you don't need to tap the air out, that what bleeding them is doing
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-09-24 17:51:45+00:00
It’s a distinction without a difference. Just like flying is a luxury. I paid to sit next to my wife. You can pay to sit next to your infant. Don’t inconvenience me because you want to save a couple of hundred dollars.

You have to pay for all sorts of “necessities” because you have kids - just add that to the list.
by yannyu | 2025-09-24 17:51:59+00:00
Yes, but also we've eroded state and city rights in favor of federalism and standardization in the US as well. It's arguable that many steps in that direction have been for the better, but the consequence still remains that we've eroded the power of smaller organizations as a result.

You're correct to note that this phenomenon crosses all aspects of life in the US, whether talking about churches, PTAs, book clubs, business, forums, fraternities, and politics. There is hardly a part of our lives anymore that isn't intruded on by national narratives anymore. There is a very fundamental question of why that is, why it's allowed, and who benefits from it.
by oakesm9 | 2025-09-24 17:52:03+00:00
I completely get why this pricing is needed and it seems fair. There’s a major flaw in the announcement though.

I get that the pro plan has $5 of tokens and the pricing page says that a token is roughly 3-4 characters. However, it is not clear:

- Are tokens input characters, output characters, or both?

- What does a token cost? I get that the pricing page says it varies by model and is “ API list price +10%”, but nowhere does it say what these API list prices are. Am I meant to go to The OpenAI, Anthropic, and other websites to get that pricing information? Shouldn’t that be in a table on that page which each hosted model listed?

—

I’m only a very casual user of AI tools so maybe this is clear to people deep in this world, but it’s not clear to me just based on Zelda pricing page exactly how far $5 per month will get me.
by klibertp | 2025-09-24 17:52:08+00:00
If I didn't know how quicksort works - and I had to learn, since for some reason in FP languages quicksort is typically next after "hello world" - I would struggle to make sense of the pictures, I think. However, it's absolutely brilliant as a memory refresher: it packs so much info in so little space that it's insanely efficient. I imagine it would pair well with a good textbook on algorithms.
by codyb | 2025-09-24 17:52:11+00:00
Just seconding all of this and how useful (and annoying) the conjugation deck has been for me in Spanish. Not sure if it was the KOFI one, but it runs through from irregular through to the mostly regular. And yea, total pain in the ass, and some still get me lol and I don't regret it in the slightest cause everything else is a ton easier to pick up and everything becomes much more accessible.
by _alternator_ | 2025-09-24 17:52:34+00:00
The article lists the following "strengths", which imply the use cases. Let's discuss!

1. Built-in audit trails. Git's a hash tree, right? So you can't tamper with it? Wrong. You can force push and delete commits. By default, git garbage collects dangling commits and old branches. In order to make a cryptographic audit trail, you'd need to publish the hash tree publicly and non-deniably so your auditor can know if you tampered with the logs.

2. Atomic transactions. Many databases support these, with a lot of granular control over the details. Postgres is one of them. (The ones that don't may have good reasons.) Git does not have much granular control; merges are not guaranteed to keep any data intact.

3. Distributed architecture. Good point. But wait, that's not really true. How do we decide what the real "main" is? It's whatever main is on your upstream, which in almost all cases is a centralized server. And if it's not, git doesn't provide any automated tooling for dealing with conflicts between multiple sources of truth (no algorithm for byzantine generals, for example). So this is a red herring.

4. Content addressing. Does this mean a commit hash? Like, say, an _index_ but without the ability to index over any other data?

In my career, I have seen git used twice as a "database" in a sensible way: for tracking source code changes (that is, changes to structured text files). This is precisely the use case it was designed for. And in both cases, it was actually underutilized---no real merge capability, just file versioning, so they could have gone simpler.

But git is not even good for most "collaborative text editing" since merge handling is not automatic. You wouldn't use it for a google-docs style platform, for example.

Edit: formatting
by mtalantikite | 2025-09-24 17:52:42+00:00
Thanks for the thoughtful response and links! I actually think you've convinced me to go back and try to complete the whole French KOFI deck, as there are certainly gaps in my verb conjugations.

For hearing French, I went through the old FSI French phonology course at the beginning, as well as all the grouped (A1/A2/etc) comprehensible input from this channel: https://www.youtube.com/@FrenchComprehensibleInput/playlists. Oh, and I did a bunch of the French listening comprehension on Yabla for a few months: https://french.yabla.com/.
by TeeMassive | 2025-09-24 17:52:42+00:00
1. By accepting unique protections and benefice of and from the state, they are no longer entirely private. 2. See comments below. It doesn't say what you think it says. 3. Google has a quasi monopoly (it doesn't require having full control) and abused it with YouTube with its search result. While it's true that it's not YT entirely by itself.
by fragmede | 2025-09-24 17:52:47+00:00
Google doesn't capriciously deprecate things in a short amount of time. When they sunset features, there's plenty of warning. They'll tell you that there's a hammer, that it's going to drop on you in 6 months, which is plenty of time for you to get out from under it. Which, I mean, I'd rather there not be a hammer, but it's not like they're gonna announce on a Friday that they're shutting down Google Keep on Monday and I need to wreck my whole weekend in order to save all my notes.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-09-24 17:52:52+00:00
> You’re assuming the talent exists locally. It doesn’t. Companies aren’t doing H1B for savings. This is a myth.

The evidence shows this is false. If it wasn't for cost savings, companies could eat the $100k one time H-1B fee (lifetime employee generated revenue - lifetime total employee costs). I am asking you to prove the assertion that the talent does not exist domestically within the US. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

> It’s more purchasing power.

This is less necessary forward looking with global decoupling and de-globalization.

Citations, again:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45305623

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42454509
by mothballed | 2025-09-24 17:53:14+00:00
If you want to deregulate airlines you have no complaint from me. I couldn't give a shit if there's anti-kid airline who's advertising message is "Fuck dem kids."

If you're talking about a private company choosing who to subsidize once government regulations are removed, then I don't see how you have room to complain. It's not like taxes. You can charter a flight or rent a cessna to pilot if you don't agree to the private terms of carriage of anyone offering tickets.

Taxes are way worse because a guy with a gun can show up and put anyone who disagrees with the majority's idea of charity or subsidy into a tiny cage; if you disagree you can't even escape it by leaving the country because the USA has worldwide taxation. I would classify private flight subsidization as a much more ethical, moral, and wildly less violent regime than taxing people for the healthcare of others.
by remus | 2025-09-24 17:53:26+00:00
The instagram app is infuriating for this. What possible reason is there for not allowing the user to select text in captions? I just want to put it into google translate so I can get a non-garbage translation of foreign language captions, or look something up on wikipedia, or paste a name in to my contacts, or...

So the workaround on android is to long press the bottom bar, send the screen off to gemini to OCR it, it'll recognise it's foreign language and then translate it for you. What a complete waste of time! You've got these remarkable LLM capabilities at your fingertips, and we're forced to burn energy working around these asinine restrictions for something as simple, as universal and as well understood as copying text.
by rpdillon | 2025-09-24 17:53:57+00:00
This is exactly right. Another note: they tried to time the announcement with Trump's speech - the actual devices were found weeks ago. The NYT article mentions August in the same sentence it mentions the 35 miles.

The cherry on top is that at the end of the article, they sort of let it slip that this isn't something that they expect would be unusual:

> “This is an ongoing investigation, but there’s absolutely no reason to believe we won’t find more of these devices in other cities,” Mr. McCool said.
by wenc | 2025-09-24 17:54:29+00:00
This is the classic tradeoff. (it's similar to the bias variance tradeoff, or fox and hedgehog analogy)

Monolithic systems are scalable and efficient when well-governed, but brittle under errors or bad leadership (e.g. China closing its ports in the 14th century had centuries-long repercussions).

Distributed systems are less efficient but more resilient to errors and poor governance.

It’s not always one or the other though. American founding fathers found a right set of tradeoffs in designing checks and balances (like separation of powers) and federalism structures that harden the system against bad governance (though this is under strain today).
by claviska | 2025-09-24 17:54:37+00:00
Shoelace has matured into Web Awesome and has a whole team behind it, as well as an attractive pro offering. Quiet is my creative outlet. Some components from Quiet have been adapted to Web Awesome, but many probably don't make sense to such as joystick, mesh gradient, stamp, etc.

The theming layers are completely different. Web Awesome's theming system is more robust, with over a dozen pro themes already available with interchangeable, professionally-curated palettes. In contrast, Quiet has just one theme with a palette that's generated with color-mix().
by cactusplant7374 | 2025-09-24 17:54:53+00:00
Firefox is in decline and Brave will soon overtake it. Brave blocks ads natively. There is a lot of advantage in that but we also may eventually have a new model that funds the internet. And I don't see Firefox or Safari disrupting advertising.

https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity

https://brave.com/transparency/
by simpaticoder | 2025-09-24 17:55:05+00:00
There are different kinds of scarcity. I remember a time when people would "charge what it's worth" instead of "what they could get". Decency imposed self-restraint on those who were in a position to take advantage of a buyer. It was also the tail-end of the American era of employer-employee loyalty that went both ways. Those who famously violated those norms were looked down on, not admired. The American medical industry has been most visibly effected by this cultural shift, but it's everywhere. Scarcity isn't always about the availability of material goods. By that measure, we're doing better than ever!
by chermi | 2025-09-24 17:55:25+00:00
"Wouldn't it have happened regardless, once everyone realized that increasing the scale of early models like GPT-2 and GPT-3 was key to improving performance?" Notice how it was massive private spending that uncovered the power of scale in the first place. Would've been hard to say, get a federal grant for that. Would've probably happened gradually, with some gains from moderate scale justifying slightly larger grants for successively larger scale.

As for TSMC, the counterfactual assumes such technology would've happened regardless. Just because technology seems to happen inevitably, doesn't make it so. We have evidence of one approach (private) giving incredible results. And also some examples of public (in wartime) giving incredible results. I don't know the evidence for peacetime public incredible results. Maybe warpspeed?
by philipkglass | 2025-09-24 17:55:30+00:00
As I see it, the lineage of modern automated cars started with public funding from DARPA, with the first signs of success appearing in 2005:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge

After the DARPA Urban Challenge of 2007 I naively thought that commercial self driving urban vehicles were about 5 years away. It actually took until 2020 for Waymo to offer services to the public, and just in one city to start:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waymo

That's a long timeline from "tech demo" to usable technology. I don't know how to maintain government funding for that long in a democratic system. No president, senator, or representative goes that long without fighting for re-election. Any technology that still isn't working after 12 years is likely to be considered a dead end and canceled. The big impressive government projects of the 20th century delivered results faster; there were only 7 years between Kennedy's "We choose to go to the moon" speech and NASA actually landing on the moon.

Companies with large resources can behave more like "planned economies" that aren't subject to short term whims of the electorate. Of course they can also exhibit even more short-term orientation -- the notorious "next quarter's earnings report" planning horizon.
by westurner | 2025-09-24 17:55:39+00:00
Graphene based chips would have less thermal loss.

Graphene heat sinks without thermal paste:

"Graphene based CPU coolers" (2025) https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/processors/cyberpower-begin...

"Graphene thermal pad for AMD CPUs promises 17X better conductivity than thermal paste, 2X improvement over Thermal Grizzly" (2025) https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/thermal-paste/gra...

...

What work can channeled heat do?

"Electrically gated molecular thermal switch" (2023) https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abo4297 ... "Thermal transistors handle heat with no moving parts" (2023) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38270523

FWIU it takes extra heat to heat pipe heat e.g. to a thermal energy recovery area of a datacenter.

New advances in thin-film thermoelectrics for cooling not energy harvesting IIUC: "New thermoelectric cooling breakthrough nearly doubles efficiency" (2025) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45323213
by insane_dreamer | 2025-09-24 17:55:39+00:00
I've found it to be a significant productivity boost but only for a small subset of problems. (Things like bash scripts, which are tedious to write and I'm not that great at bash. Or fixing small bugs in a React app, a framework I'm not well versed in. But even then I have to keep my thinking cap on so it doesn't go off the rails.)

It works best when the target is small and easily testable (without the LLM being able to fudge the tests, which it will do.)

For many other tasks it's like training an intern, which is worth it if the intern is going to grow and take on more responsibility and learn to do things correctly. But since the LLM doesn't learn from its mistakes, it's not a clear and worthwhile investment.
by axiolite | 2025-09-24 17:55:50+00:00
The turbulence is no worse being up high in the plane vs being down in a seat. In the 1950s, NONE of the passengers would have been using seatbelts...

“When an airplane crashes, the safety belt…may become a deadly hazard.”

- Scientific American Dec 1951 “The Dangerous Safety Belt”

"Aviation requirements for basic safety features, including passenger safety belts, were codified in 1972"

- https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/how-airlin...
by klibertp | 2025-09-24 17:56:41+00:00
Yeah, that's about it. Personally, I'm not sure I'd get this much out of the picture, but you can see the information is there.

> surely it can't be just three iterations?

To save others a search: you stop when the remaining sub-arrays are sorted by definition (ie. [] or [x]/size of 0 or 1).
by lwansbrough | 2025-09-24 17:56:56+00:00
I strongly believe Match Group is single handedly deteriorating relations between genders in regions where they are popular.

The commercial incentive Match Group has to prevent churn means the optimal outcome for them is that you never find a partner. And so if you’re outside that top N percentile of popularity, they’ve optimized their apps to abuse you emotionally and financially. They’re engineering the perfect carrot on a stick.

One such behaviour, for example, is that when you buy Tinder Plus, they will feed you a couple matches, but withhold more than they give you. Once the subscription expires, they feed you rest of the “Likes You” people into the page where they’re obscured, forcing you to resubscribe if you want to see them. And of course you will never encounter those people just by swiping, they’re purposefully held from you.

I’ve recently switched to Facebook Dating because they don’t have any commercial incentives (and in fact probably negative incentives) to NOT match you. Thus they can also give you all of the “Premium” features for free.

What Match Group is doing probably isn’t illegal, but I think it probably should be. It’s the same kind of emotional manipulation that casinos are guilty of.
by simonw | 2025-09-24 17:57:44+00:00
OK got there in the end! I didn't time it but felt like around 10 minutes or more.

It did give me one warning message:

% wasmer run python/python Python 3.13.0rc2 (heads/feat/dl-dirty:152184da8f, Aug 28 2025, 23:40:30) [Clang 21.1.0-rc2 (git@github.com:wasix-org/llvm-project.git 70df5e11515124124a4 on wasix Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. warning: can't use pyrepl: No module named 'msvcrt' >>>
by stuffbymax | 2025-09-24 17:57:53+00:00
This script sets up a Debian system for retro gaming and lightweight desktop use with a PS3 controller-driven boot menu. After running it:

The system auto-logs into tty1 and launches a menu navigable with a PS3 controller.

You can choose to launch RetroArch (fullscreen), IceWM, or XFCE4 desktops, or reboot/shutdown.

A Python script maps PS3 buttons to keyboard keys, allowing full menu navigation without a keyboard.

AntimicroX is auto-started in desktops to enable gamepad input for applications.

RetroArch directories are prepared for cores, and optional code exists to download them automatically.

Essentially, it turns a Debian machine into a controller-friendly retro gaming station with lightweight desktop environments.
by sergeyprokhoren | 2025-09-24 17:58:45+00:00
Offsetting the timestamp is much better. Use the uuidv7(INTERVAL shift) function in PostgreSQL 18

https://www.postgresql.org/docs/18/functions-uuid.html

in Percona Server for MySQL: https://docs.percona.com/percona-server/8.4/uuid-versions.ht...
by drakythe | 2025-09-24 17:58:48+00:00
Unless companies also donate money to sponsor the code review that will be required to be done by real human being I could see this idea being a problem for maintainers. Yes you have to code review a human being as well but a human being is capable of learning and carrying that learning forward and their next PR will be better, as well as being able to look at past PRs to evaluate whether the user is a troll/bad actor or someone who genuinely wants to assist with the project. An LLM won't learn and will always spit out valid _looking_ code.
by sarchertech | 2025-09-24 17:58:51+00:00
Obvious hyperbole aside, I never said "never saw any concurrency testing". I said I never saw a place that was generally and reliably testing for concurrency bugs.

That is to say that following the standard practices at that company, an average developer introducing a concurrency bug will only tend to find out about that bug in production. And even if the developer wants to implement concurrency testing they will probably find it difficult enough to do that they'll give up because it's not a normal part of the test suite.

This is less true for people working on infrastructure like operating systems, and databases than it is for web developers.
by karmelapple | 2025-09-24 17:59:01+00:00
I am scared that special grants to research rare diseases will go away, too.

If we're trying to figure out what the most benefit for each taxpayer dollar is, then a rare disease won't win out over, say, cancer research.

Someone may consider researching a rare disease as "waste," even though to everyone including the previous poster who is a widow because of HD, it is far from a waste.

When there is not much of a profit motive to do something - whether going to the moon or fighting a rare disease - public money is the best way to do it. And even throwing a fairly small percentage at it can create big achievements.

And that's one reason I'd like to see how much money and time went into this. We might be surprised that it's fairly small in the grand scheme of biomedical research costs!