MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cmiles74 | 2025-09-21 15:11:16+00:00
They are using the same kind of exit NDA used to coerce OpenAI employees who left that organization. We should all be afraid for ourselves as these organizations turn into black boxes where the only people who could speak out feel they cannot. This thing where you stop working for a company but they can still penalize you financially if they don’t like your annual “post-employee performance” evaluations is Kafka-esque.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/openai-whistleblowers-ask...

Just to clarify, OpenAI did change their agreement (to some degree) after the SEC put pressure on them. In Facebook’s case the SEC has been notably silent despite the calls from US senators (AFAICT).
by jbay808 | 2025-09-21 15:11:34+00:00
It's mainly the laser itself that is the expensive part. If you only care about resolution it's easy, you just need a single-mode laser. But if you care about accuracy it's very difficult, because then the wavelength needs to be stable, and that requires a much more expensive laser. Most people looking for an interferometer are interested in accuracy, unless they're just measuring vibrations.
by analog31 | 2025-09-21 15:12:12+00:00
I recently talked with a German exchange student who is attending our local high school for a year. She said that German students take an exam that sorts them into different levels of high schools. If this is the case, then it would be very hard to prevent the same sorting from taking on a social class dimension.

But I also think we mythologize the trades. I can't remember a HN thread about higher education that didn't extol the virtues of trade school while dismissing college education as a scam. But are the trades really that wonderful? The tradespeople I've met, if they're my age, their bodies have been destroyed, or they've gotten out of the trades.

Many of the trades are cyclic, tied to the construction cycle. Many involve mostly small family-owned businesses that on the one hand greatly favor family members, and on the other, are exempt from certain labor laws such as OSHA reporting. Most are "not on the radar" of EEOC etc. The good things about the trades are if you're lucky enough to get into one of the bigger employers, that tend to be more highly regulated.

My knee jerk reaction is that we could get more people into the trades if we addressed real issues that affect the working class: Health care, retirement, workplace safety, and so forth.
by dahart | 2025-09-21 15:12:15+00:00
> SDR isn’t a standard at all, it’s a catch-all to mean anything not-HDR.

Maybe you’re thinking of LDR. Low Dynamic Range is the catch-all opposite of HDR. SDR Standard Dynamic Range means Rec. 709 to most people? That’s how I’ve been using those 2 acronyms all along in this thread, in case you want to revisit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard-dynamic-range_video

https://support.apple.com/guide/motion/about-color-space-mot...

> The only actual feature of HDR is the concept that display brightness is decoupled from user brightness, allowing content to “punch through” that ceiling.

There are lots of features of HDR, depending on what your goals are, and many definitions over the years. It’s fair to say that using absolute physical units instead of relative colors does decouple the user’s color from the display so maybe you’re agreeing.

Use of physical units was one of the important motivations for the invention of HDR. The first HDR file format I know of and used, created for the Radiance renderer in ~1985, was designed for lighting simulation and physical validation, for applications like aerospace, forensics, architecture, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiance_(software)#HDR_image_...

In CG film & video game production (e.g., the article we’re commenting on), it’s important that the pre-output HDR workflow is linear, has a maximum brightness significantly higher than any possible display device, and uses higher bit rate than final output, to allow for wide latitude in post-processing, compositing, re-exposure, and tone mapping.

In photography, where everyone could already always control middle grey, people use HDR because they care about avoiding hard clipping, they want to be able to control what happens to the sun and bright highlights, and because they want to be able to re-expose pictures that appear clipped in blacks or whites to reveal new detail.

> In camera terms that means the user is controlling middle grey, not the point at which clipping occurs.

I’m not sure what you mean, but that sounds like you’re referring to tonemapping specifically, or even just gamma, and not HDR generally. With an analog film camera, which I hope we can agree is not HDR imaging, I can control middle grey with my choice of exposure and with my choice of film and with lens filters (and a similar set of middle-grey controlling choices exists when printing). The same is true for a digital camera that captures only 8 bits/channel JPG files. Tonemapping certainly comes with a lot of HDR workflows, but does not define what HDR means nor is it necessary. You can do HDR imaging without any tonemapping, and without trying to control middle grey.
by icyfox | 2025-09-21 15:12:21+00:00
From the jump, even without the emdashes, it was crystal clear that this post was written by Claude. I'm sure the OP put their own ideas into the prompt, provided some sources, etc. But reading some of these phrases provoked a pretty visceral sense that I'm just reading an LLM's output:

"The harsh reality" "he perfectly captured" "architectural decisions that make senior engineers weep" "fundamental issue"

It makes me wonder whether a whole class of writing is going to be deprecated because the cadence is just too similar to LLM outputs.
by vintermann | 2025-09-21 15:13:05+00:00
Doubles efficiency? From what I understand, the efficiency was pretty lousy to start with: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnMRePtHMZY

Aren't there theoretical limits to this sort of cooling too?

But, if this innovation causes Technology Connections to make yet another heat pumps video, I'm all for it.
by basisword | 2025-09-21 15:13:08+00:00
She is almost as bad as the people she writes about unfortunately. She enabled the Facebook machine and even when she saw highly unethical things she wouldn't leave because she didn't want to miss out on her unvested stock. She wasn't some lowly employee getting coerced into taking actions she didn't agree with - she was a highly ranked exec flying on private jets with Zuck because she wanted the money. She could have taken another high ranked tech job at any time. Instead she put her life and unborn child's life at risk multiple times. For the money.
by nosianu | 2025-09-21 15:13:17+00:00
> and who knows what it will look like if we have some kind of civil war out of this.

I don't understand mentions of "civil war" in the public lately (there's even a Hollywood movie about it).

There is only one party controlling the armed forces. I also doubt that any high-ranking officers would take the troops they command out of the command structure and then even order them to attack the government and other troops.

Not to mention that the new administration did some cleanup among the ranks already.

The chances for enough, or any, troops breaking away from the command are very low, no?

So who is going to fight that "civil war"? It looks to me like the government has overwhelming power. At most I see some troops refuse orders to shoot at the American people, or at other troops.

Armed civilians with their puny little guns and little organization are right out as soon as any part of the military joins a fight, that's why I only mentioned the latter to begin with.
by tim333 | 2025-09-21 15:13:27+00:00
>Welcome to the post-literate society

I dispute the basic thesis. Quoting from Our World in Data:

>While only one in ten people in the world could read and write in 1820, today, the share has reversed, with only one in ten remaining illiterate https://ourworldindata.org/literacy#all-charts

I think recently with smartphones and the like people have switched to new forms of information - youtube, or mucking about on HN rather than reading Dickens but I don't think it's worse.

(Typed funnily enough from the How The Light Gets In philosophy festival where yesterday we had "Roger Penrose - From the Big Bang to the fabric of spacetime and the nature of consciousness..." I don't really see this post literate thing.)
by BobbyTables2 | 2025-09-21 15:13:56+00:00
Wonder if someone has an internal crate named the same, but yours is getting pulled down for some tertiary use (license check, etc).

Stuff like Docker that defaults to downloading things from Internet repos is kinda scary. There isn’t always a clear dividing line between the thing as a “tool” and the thing as a “repo”.

At least with “git”, I know they I’m not going to end up cloning an artifact from an Internet repo just because I made a small typo…
by skeeter2020 | 2025-09-21 15:14:29+00:00
I loved my time at a big Canadian uni in the 90's and smaller one in early 2000's. Grad school a few years later was kind of disappointing; I thought everyone would be smarter. Still some good profs and the best students were awesome and inspiring, but I watched a shift towards distance education & foreign students that meant way more adminstrators and way less of the environment that made uni so great. I suspect it's even worse in the US
by danaris | 2025-09-21 15:14:31+00:00
It seems clear to me from the way the article is presented that this isn't describing "what people in these roles do"; it's describing "what people with these mindsets do".

A "leader" isn't someone in the C-suite; it's someone who does these things. They have a leadership mindset, and should be put into leadership roles, but very rarely are.

A "manager" isn't someone with "manager" in their title; it's someone who does those things. They have a toxic "corporate management" mindset, whether they are actually in a managerial role or not.
by jfengel | 2025-09-21 15:14:40+00:00
The term "holding up" is doing a lot of work here. The Republican party has an extremely enthusiastic voter base. Billionaire money might encourage the enthusiasm but in the end the voters turn out and pull levers. They are sincere in their voting.

The Democrats are a bit less enthusiastic, at least at the moment, but in the end it's not the millionaires who pull the levers. It's the rank and file.

It's hard to tell how different it would be if we could somehow get the money out of it. But I am wary of assuming that the voters would dramatically change their attitudes. The millionaires and billionaires tune the party's message to what the voters want. They get the spoils but they're also making their voters happy, assuming they win. If they didn't do that, they'd lose.

It's possible that the Democrats are more conspicuously failing to give their voters what they want when they win. But it's not obvious to me how they could do that. Most of the suggestions I hear are naive and impractical, and come down to "do the thing I want and many millions of others will see how great that is."
by martin-t | 2025-09-21 15:15:37+00:00
Not all anti-social behavior is illegal. Most isn't.

Say a company operated a short-form video platform, did active research about its effects, knew a large chunk of its user-base were children younger than 6 and knew that the video selection algorithm caused addiction but kept serving then addictive videos because getting the ad money was profitable.

Was any law broken? Should society know all of this?
by WaltPurvis | 2025-09-21 15:16:10+00:00
http://archive.today/9FzGF

A really good article, although it's weird for the NYT to try so hard to frame the explosion of cheap green energy technology coming from China as somehow potentially nefarious or dangerous. Yes, China is prioritizing its own national interests as it exports green energy tech. And? It's still an overwhelmingly positive development for pretty much all of humanity.
by pbhjpbhj | 2025-09-21 15:16:10+00:00
>- Company uses different recipe in current factory using current tooling, product is substantially different.

The product has ingredients, the product gets a label, the product label links to the ingredients; each ingredient had a label, that tree of labels links back ... this already happens, when an ingredient (which child itself be a product) is found to be inferior or spoiled the manufacturer can check their own products made with that batch of ingredient. 'All' we would be doing is exposing this data.

Change suppliers, there code on the product changes (that could be by keeping a table of product UUID matched to batch number).

Someone mixed peanuts in with the macadamia nuts and supplied 100 different manufacturers, now the public can look up those products that were affected just as much as the suppliers can.

Someone bought a cheaper metal, for their bicycle frames, that shows in the product information linked from the origin mark.

Someone changed the recipe of their chocolate bar to have more filler ingredients ... that should already show on the ingredients list.

A company change their GPU, say, to use slower RAM, that shows in the product info as an ingredient. Binning? Not much help for that. Different manufacturer or different factory, that would show.

It would expose a lot of information considered currently try to hide.

Doesn't really do anything for fraud except that if you claim someone is your supplier (still) and financials don't show continuing payments then it's clear there is fraud there.

Any further thoughts, very happy to discuss. I'm keen to work this up into a feasible system.

pbhj AT alicious , com
by xhkkffbf | 2025-09-21 15:16:26+00:00
I was talking with a professor yesterday who claimed his students don't ask questions any more on Piazza. They used to, but now they go to ChatGPT which is always perky and ready to answer. Plus, there's no shame in asking a dumb question as there can be in class or on Piazza.

He says it's only a matter of time before the students realize they don't need him. Or need to pay tuition.
by jcastro | 2025-09-21 15:17:45+00:00
Co-maintainer here. When I saw one of these I immediately want to run Bluefin on it.

In spirit I would love to support this, someone with one of these would need to PR in support, but it's usually taking the enablement instructions from NVidia and putting it in a dockerfile. Bluefin is already working well on on the Ampere ARM workstations that System76 sells. Getting it on one of these would be awesome.
Show HN: InfraAsAI – Bring consistency to all your microservices
by danielbedrood | 2025-09-21 15:18:22+00:00
Imagine you have to make a little change in all your microservices, like changing a line in Dockerfile, but you have 50 microservices, ouch right! The PRs, pipelines, reviews... I have created a dashboard with a chatbot where you can simply ask "Update all repositories with alpine base image version X to Y", and then click next a bunch of time and see a list of PRs with their pipeline status.

Hi friends I'm Daniel, the creator of Infra as AI. I was laid off from my SRE role a couple of months ago, and decided to build something that could always help me at work. My job was to keep the lights on; For example: Make sure the pipelines are consistant across the org, but this was hard, I had to open each repo, make a little change, and make a PR with all the enterprise seremonies that comes after, and then I had to do this for many repos and many teams; It was hard, I could not remember which team owns what. Also, sometimes the pipelines fail cuz some repo had a deprecated function, so I had to read the changelogs; And I would know it fails after opening 200 tabs of CI files.

At work, I solved this the way Kernel does, with git patches. Our workaround was to generate that change in one repo, create patch files, and then `git apply` on each repo using workflows. Now with the help of HR, I got time to hack around something I always needed. I just ask for a change, and then let the agent read the docs, find out the deprecation, make those PRs, and show me a list of them with their pipeline status next to it. For this, coding agents where perfect, they could read the changelogs, documentations, readmes and all that and also work in parallel!

## What to expect

We first index a repository, which means we extract its important characteristics of after cloining it, and then save it in a vector database for future similarity searches. Then user asks for a change in the chatbot, our platform suggests candidate repositories for approval, and then runs Claude Code on them in parallel. This is followed by a list of PRs filled with details ready for the user to review and create.

## Tech

LangGraph: The agent is built on top of it GPT5: Finds relevant repositories Sonnet: Your coding agent pinecone: Holds repositories vectors context7: Getting docs

TL;DR: I created a platform where you can run a query against your codebase, and create a massive number of PRs to make simple changes in your microservices. Please have a look and let me know your feedbacks <3

PS: I'm giving away trials with 2 euros credits so you can index and query your repositories, but please watch for my pocket too ^^
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-09-21 15:19:31+00:00
> I suspect even many math majors probably believe "general ed" required classes to be a waste of time.

In the German university system, there are in general no required "general ed" classes. :-)

(it is typically only required that you do some often prescribed classes in a minor subject that you can commonly choose from a typically pre-defined list by the faculty (but if you hate all of the suggestions from this pre-defined list, it is sometimes possible to choose other minor subject or classes, but this will typically involve more bureacracy). For example, when stuying mathematics, it is common to choose physics, computer science, economics or some engineering science as minor).

Any further general education classes (in particular foreign language courses) are completely optional - and it is not an uncommon complaint of students who have very broad interests that during a typical degree course, you have barely any time to attend classes outside of the prescribed syllabus.
by JohnFen | 2025-09-21 15:20:05+00:00
> Very easy to bring crap you don't need as well.

This is so true it's not even funny. I keep a spreadsheet for each trip, and among other things, I record which of the items I actually used on the trips. It was very surprising to me how many things I thought I used and therefore needed, but when reviewing the records, I never (or very rarely) actually used.

Those items get cut from future loads.
by inkyoto | 2025-09-21 15:20:18+00:00
Not an issue for the commenter – since they have mentioned S3, they are either using AWS EBS or instance attached scratch NVMe's which the vendor (AWS) takes care of.

The AWS control plane will detect an ailing SSD backing up the EBS and will proactively evacuate the data before the physical storage goes pear shaped.

If it is an EC2 instance with an instance attached NVMe, the control plane will issue an alert that can be automatically acted upon, and the instance can be bounced with a new EC2 instance allocated from a pool of the same instance type and get a new NVMe. Provided, of course, the design and implementation of the running system are stateless and can rebuild the working set upon a restart.
by Aurornis | 2025-09-21 15:20:58+00:00
It’s not really wrong, though. The book wasn’t an “explosive” reveal like all of these news articles say. It was mostly a bland rehashing of old news combined with some weird office hearsay that felt like forced gossip about the company, not an actual first-hand whistleblower reveal.

It also took a lot of little things and tried to make them sound like a really big deal, like how Meta spent money on measures to reduce Zuckerberg’s exposure to COVID. I guess these things sound bad to people who dislike CEOs, but it’s in any big company’s interest to take extra precautions to prevent their CEO from getting sick.

I think the “whistleblower” designation falls flat because there wasn’t really any whistleblowing in the book as far as I can tell. It was a disgruntled fired employee trying to mix up old news stories with some gossip and sell it for personal gain.

In general, the “whistleblowers” who write books and sell them to the public are very different than real whistleblowers who take evidence to the government or journalists. This person was firmly in the former group.

I don’t agree with the excessive restrictions the government there is putting on her. Sadly seems like par for the course for speech over there right now.
by dggdyh | 2025-09-21 15:21:18+00:00
How quickly and safely are bugs fixed in Bluefin?

It looks like Debian equivalents might be VanillaOS, EndlessOS, and (though not as similar) StarlingX, since all are OSTree-based for atomic updates.

I’m curious what others’ experience is with developing on these- do drivers work out-of-the-box and is it easy to configure, similar to macOS stability with something like brew to get latest packages and apps?

Eventually I’ll probably have to go back to free OSes because things don’t seem to be getting better.
by deadbabe | 2025-09-21 15:21:25+00:00
Individualism started dying when it became clear the problems we face are now too large for any one individual to overcome. Massive institutions crush the individual. You can’t chase individualist dreams as easily as you once could. It requires a lot of money and luck, and luck has run out.

Social media also made it easier for you to be a group thinker and reap the benefits of that. Being an individual gives you no clout.
by skeeter2020 | 2025-09-21 15:22:18+00:00
this article doesn't add much; it's a thin advertorial for their services. It also just seems like typical maintenance programming, which has existed for about 1 day less than the entire time we've been writing software. I guess even this most unattractive of all programming work is also looking for a little AI sauce to spice up the offerring, and justify increased rates (maintenance work: $100/hr; vibe-coding cleanup: $200/hr)
by g-b-r | 2025-09-21 15:22:29+00:00
> sends the signal that violence and atrocities should continue since they pay.

What signal would it send if Israel came out better after killing 60 thousands people, almost 20 thousand children, razing to the ground most of a people's territory and commiting uncountable war crimes?

Israel had some of the strongest support it ever had after October 7th, and if in the end there will be negative consequences for the country, it will be *entirely* because of how its government chose to respond to it.
by microtonal | 2025-09-21 15:22:30+00:00
...then maybe the comparison to Nazi Germany and authoritative dictatorships more generally are perhaps not as far afield as you're implying.

Sorry, I was not implying they are far afield. We have seen this playbook in several nearby European/Asian countries in the last two and a half decades (I live in Europe). Of course, not all these countries did have a long democratic history, but they did show the fragility of democracy, you have to actively protect it.

Heck, even in the country where I live, which has quite a healthy democracy, a majority of parliament has just accepted a motion to request declaring antifa a terrorist organization because Trump did it as well (all Dutch experts, including former secret service personnel agree that antifa is neither an organization, nor terrorist). Some of them just to score a few points for the upcoming elections. Only a judge can declare an organization to be a terrorist organization, but it's all small steps in eroding the rule of law.

(Coincidentally, the next day 1500 right wing hooligans rioted in the streets of The Haglue the next day, burning police cars, damaging the office of a center-left political party and the parliament square.)