MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dgaffney | 2025-09-26 19:59:51+00:00
It’s pithy because the request is pithy- if I have to explain the mechanisms at work here i doubt you’re ever going to buy into the theory at all. A short version is what Dan already said - the entire economic foundation of social media is predicated on high exit costs. ATProto takes substantive steps to lower them. The theory in turn is that new businesses will need to develop less extractive models of viability to survive, which will in turn read legibly to users as less exploitative (you decide your feed, you can switch providers, you can choose moderation layers, etc)
by cdrini | 2025-09-26 20:00:32+00:00
Not OP, but on the off chance you haven't seen this, I found the suno explorer thing quite nice. Hitting random a few times, I'll usually stumble onto something interesting. This was the first demo I heard where some of the AI tunes gave me goosebumps close to what human music does.

https://suno.com/explore/
by xboxnolifes | 2025-09-26 20:01:05+00:00
Practically everything engineers have to interact with and consider are equivalent to a software black box. Rainfall, winds, tectonic shifts, material properties, etc. Humans don't have the source code to these things. We observe them, we quantify them, notice trends, model the observations, and we apply statistical analysis on them.

And it's possible that a real engineer might do all this with an AI model and then determine it's not adequate and choose to not use it.
by kennywinker | 2025-09-26 20:01:26+00:00
Sure 0-2mil is possible, as is all the atoms in your body aligning and allowing you to step thru a wall.

But those who are well informed agree it the data supports a number above 45k, probably above 65k, and the highest estimate published is 680k. If we use a higher number we are just making shit up. If we use a lower number we are choosing to ignore a data point without a specific reason to write it off. “It defies reality” isn’t an actual reason - it’s just an assertion that it’s wrong. Neither is “wouldn’t the GMH cite higher numbers?” - how would you confirm that 1/3 of people in your city are still alive if people are scattered, communication is down, and an unknown number of people have fled?

but either way, the tens of thousands of innocents killed and the complete destruction of the infrastructure of gaza is appalling - and arguing about specific numbers is pretty pointless if we don’t agree on that.
by kypro | 2025-09-26 20:01:37+00:00
I assume you're not from the UK?

If we wanted we could stop illegal immigration extremely fast – as you say we are an island so it's relatively easy to stop people arriving. We don't need drones. At the moment after the French have given life-jackets to the illegal migrants and their boats have set off into the British channel, the people smugglers will call the British coast guard and ask them to go pick up the migrants they're smuggling into the country. The UK coast guard then picks them up and escorts them safely to shore. From here the police will be waiting, not to arrest them, but to take them to their hotel and give them a hot meal. Shortly after this charities in the UK will give them phones (typically iPhones), clothes and bikes to get around. The government will also give them some spending money to spend in our towns and cities.

We obviously don't have to do any of this and ID cards wouldn't stop any of this. We choose to do this and this is why they come.

However between the various reports of migrant hotel stabbings, thefts, sexual assaults, and rapes of children, it's been discovered that some migrants have been working in the UK – primarily in the gig economy. All of the things I've said to this point are not deemed issues and the government has no intention in changing them, but the fact that a small percentage of the migrants coming here are working has caught the eye of our politicians who have stated very strongly that they would prefer the migrants coming here don't work. The digital ID cards will hypothetically help with this "problem"

It's hard to explain to people outside the UK how strange this place is. Most countries want a controlled immigration system and treat border security as a national security priority, and when they do allow immigrants into the country they almost always want them to work and pay their own way. The UK basically does the inverse of this. The explanation varies between some combination of letting hundreds of thousands of Afghans into the country is the right thing to do, to it's the law so there's nothing we can do about it.

Legal note:

This is not an anti-migration post. I am pro-migration.
by vlovich123 | 2025-09-26 20:01:41+00:00
There is no indication what class the CPU they're benchmarking on. Additionally, this is presumably including the overhead of managing the QUIC protocol as well given they mention encryption which isn't relevant for raw UDP. And QUIC is known to not have a good story of NIC offload for encryption at the moment the way you can do kTLS offload for TCP streams.
by simonw | 2025-09-26 20:02:02+00:00
That's a different issue from the lethal trifecta - if your agent has access to tools that can do things like delete emails or run commands then you have a prompt injection problem that's independent of data exfiltration risks.

The general rule to consider here is that anyone who can get their tokens into your agent can trigger ANY of the tools your agent has access to.
by akumpf | 2025-09-26 20:02:51+00:00
There are a lot of cottage food bakers out there, making/selling artisan bread at farmers' markets and through side shelves in established retail/grocery spaces.

The big issue with home baking is scale -- there are often regulations that limit what you can use (often it MUST be in the kitchen within your primary residence, and it can ONLY use a standard residential oven). And if you can't make many loaves, the prices end up being about double compared to industrial produced bread. Hence the $10-25 per loaf at the farmers' market.

So I've been reverse engineering what's possible, given the cottage food law constraints (specifically in Ohio, but applies to a lot of states).

There are lots of non-standard things that I've found actually work quite well for me: Kneading the dough by slowly rotating it in a dough tub (no stretch-and-folds). 18hr+ room temperature bulk fermentation (using just a few grams of starter). Standard oven with 2 "decks" using baking stones. Using only a 10-15 minute bench rest (microproof) then quickly shaping loaves before going straight in the oven (no pans, parchment, banneton, or couche).

So I've put it together as open research for anyone to use. There's also a dynamic recipe page with my production quantities for various breads over here: https://palmbread.com/open_research/baker_recipes/

If you've ever considered baking bread at scale, please give it a look and let me know what you think. Thanks!
by glowcoil | 2025-09-26 20:02:52+00:00
The original article discusses techniques for constraining the weights of a neural network to a submanifold of weight space during training. Your comment discusses interleaving the tokens of an LLM prompt with Unicode PUA code points. These are two almost completely unrelated things, so it is very confusing to me that you are confidently asserting that they are the same thing. Can you please elaborate on why you think there is any connection at all between your comment and the original article?
by dragonwriter | 2025-09-26 20:02:56+00:00
Responding to the proposal (which is unjustly flagged to death, even if I agree that it isn’t a good idea):

> I came up with a solution that eliminates centralized control, trolls, advertising, and really all forms of harassment, and it doesn't even require a special server.

If it behaved as you describe (only followers see top-level updates and only followers of every person i the chain see replies; which I don’t think the concrete features you describe actually support, but I’ll get to that next), then it also eliminates the thing that makes social media work for both audiences and the people looking for audiences—there is zero discoverability, you can’t even encounter people through conversations.

Of course, with public outgoing feeds where visibility limits are a decision of the viewer’s client (to which all the visibility-deciding work of a server is outsourced, to avoid having a dedicated social server and just rely on regular web pages), it can’t be guaranteed to work that way. It can work that way for a viewer who wants to see that restrictive of a view, but that doesn’t prevent other people from having a more expansive view.

You can choose what you see, but not who can see your stuff or who can engage with it (if you have a client that behaves in the described restrictive manner, you won’t see engagement from people you don’t follow, but they can engage and others with a permissive client can see that engagement.)
by freeopinion | 2025-09-26 20:03:17+00:00
Your excerpts don't divulge whether one of the bus manufacturers is required by law to pay health insurance, social security, and other labor costs. Are they required by law to treat the water from their cooling towers before they dump it in the river? Do they have to pay a 50% tariff on imported parts?

I'm sure there is a lot of slop in different purchasing departments. They can probably all tighten things up. But there are legitimate reasons for one product to cost more than its twin. The U.S. should not allow twin products to be sold on the same shelf if one was not manufactured under the same rules as the domestic product. If all three of these products played under the same rules, then we can point fingers. Without that you are just ridiculing the company who knowingly takes a hit for purchasing from responsible vendors. If that is what you are doing, shame on you.
by hn_acc1 | 2025-09-26 20:03:42+00:00
I mean.. if you can still find the archives (pretty sure they're out there, but getting harder and harder to find), I have my name on lots of usenet posts from the 90s. But I'm pretty sure all my BBS posts, GEnie posts, etc from before that are gone - they would stretch back as far as December '84, IIRC. And there's probably very little left from before 2000.

And yet, I don't lament that 10-15 years of my online life have "vanished" - I was an ignorant little snot back then, and actually, am VERY glad they HAVE vanished. And thankfully I've generally used aliases / usernames instead of my actual name in most places (other than the usenet posts that were from my university account) so that wayback can't be used against me easily. Heck - I wish I could assert/enforce a "right to be forgotten" (vanish) on some websites. Rarely have I wished (especially in this current administration) that I was MORE visible / persistent online.
by libraryofbabel | 2025-09-26 20:04:00+00:00
And even if you do use Claude for actual work, there is also immense pedagogical value in writing an agent from scratch. Something really clicks when you actually write the LLM + tool calls loop yourself. I ran a workshop on this at my company and we wrote a basic CLI agent in only 120 lines of Python, with just three tools: list files, read file, and (over)write file. (At that point, the agent becomes capable enough that you can set it to modifying itself and ask it to add more tools!) I think it was an eye-opener for a lot of people to see what the core of these things looks like. There is no magic dust in the agent; it's all in the LLM black box.

I hadn't considered actually rolling my own for day-to-day use, but now maybe I will. Although it's worth noting that Claude Code Hooks do give you the ability to insert your own code into the LLM loop - though not to the point of Eternal Sunshining your context, it's true.
by izzylan | 2025-09-26 20:04:41+00:00
This isn't actually a sob story, and I'm not saying he's entitled to labor of others. What I am asking is how your proposed system handles a case such as this.

And while it may be an edge case, these are large, broad systems that directly impact the lives of millions of living, breathing people. Such systems must be robust and well-examined.

And I'd also like to ask what a society would look like, that invests so heavily in the education of it's young generation, and relies on them to bring innovations and new ideas to the table, only to cut them down the moment they need any sort of assistance. It certainly seems to me like a huge waste of resources.

What if healthcare was just an investment in our society? Our young 22-year-old gets healthcare covered not because he's entitled to it but because society is invested in his well-being in order to continue existing and improve itself. Because the ROI of the young being kept healthy and able to work and pay into the system is greater than the cost of the ICU doctors and surgeons and wheelchairs and physical therapy.
by roflcopter69 | 2025-09-26 20:04:44+00:00
It's unfortunate that this one is not really open source, it has Elastic License 2.0 license.

But it's still a wonderful example for how far you can get with brute-force vector similarity search that has been optimized like crazy by making use of SIMD. Not having to use a fancy index is such a blessing. Think of all the complexities that you don't have when not using an index. You don't have these additional worries about memory and/or disk usage or insert/delete/update costs and you can make full use of SQL filters. It's crazy to me what kind of vector DBs people put up with. They use custom query languages, have to hold huge indices in memory or write humongous indices to disk for something that's not necessarily faster than brute-force search for tables with <5M rows. And let's be honest who has those gigantic tables with more than 5M rows? Not too many I'd assume.
by ericmcer | 2025-09-26 20:05:13+00:00
It's even worse, I will use my healthcare just because it is free. I would feel like a moron not get my free physical, bloodwork and other labs every year. If it was $20 I wouldn't bother but its almost obligatory to take something "because its free".

Once I learn something is free it is like I already own it, so now I don't get it if I take it, I lose it if I don't.
by SpicyUme | 2025-09-26 20:05:19+00:00
I go back and forth on that, the bus tunnel was useful. But a tunnel with 3(4?) stops seems like a good place for a train of some sort. I guess the buses are why there are no center stops in there? It seems like a missed opportunity. Not sure about the history of the tunnel but there were tracks there years ago so they must have planned to put trains in eventually.
by dariosalvi78 | 2025-09-26 20:05:36+00:00
what Apple (and most US companies) do not understand is that the DMA is made to protect EU companies first and foremost. The EU is doing what US should have done decades ago: fight monopolies. Giving up part of Apple's market is the intended purposes. If Apples leave the continent entirely (spoiler: they won't) it's all gained for other companies.

These are empty threats that are honestly pathetic given the power and the history that company has.
by myrmidon | 2025-09-26 20:05:42+00:00
Life cycles costs are not what is being argued here, but operating costs of a battery electric bus compared to a diesel one.

The electric variant is clearly significantly cheaper to operate (like my linked source shows) even taking charging infrastructure and maintenance into account.

Battery electric busses becoming CAPEX competitive with diesel ones is also just a matter of time in my view (case in point: singapore already gets those for less than the US currently pays for diesel ones).
by nostrademons | 2025-09-26 20:06:01+00:00
It's worth designing a system of government that works for everybody, if only for the simple reason that we will very shortly (if we don't already) have a system that works for nobody, and likely everybody shooting everybody else will follow soon after that. A utopia at least gives people something to shoot for, and if you get very lucky you might end up with an idealist in power who's willing to give it a shot.
by mfkhalil | 2025-09-26 20:06:08+00:00
Hey, appreciate the feedback. Will address all your points.

Regarding Reddit, we have our own custom handler for Reddit URLs which uses the Reddit API, which we are billed for when we exceed free limits.

For Terms of Service, you're right, that is definitely an oversight on our part. We just published both our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy on the website.

When it comes to comparing with GPT-5 and Claude, we do believe that our prompting, agent orchestration, and other core parts of the product such as parallel search results analysis and parallel agents are improvements on just GPT-5 and Claude, while also allowing it to run at much cheaper costs on significantly smaller models. Our v1 which we built months ago was essentially the same as what GPT-5 thinking with web search currently does, and we've since made the explicit choice to focus on data quality, user controllability, and cost efficiency over latency. So while yes, it might give faster results and work better for smaller datasets, both we and our users have found Webhound to work better for siloed sources and larger datasets.

Regarding account deletion, that is also a fair point. So far we've had people email us when they want their account deleted, but we will add account deletion ASAP.

Criticism like this helps us continue to hold ourselves to a high standard, so thanks for taking the time to write it up.
by vkou | 2025-09-26 20:06:32+00:00
Given the choice between clogging up the city grid for car commuters, and clogging up the rail grid because buses are pushed to share rail lines, I'm going to pull the trigger on the first option, every day of the week.

Clogging up the rail grid was somewhat acceptable when it was a few end-of-line terminal stops, but now those tunnels are in the middle of the rail network. A bus breaking down and blocking the tunnel was bad enough when it affected end-of-line service, but would be an absolute nightmare when it affects middle-of-line service.

Sorry, downtown single-occupant vehicle drivers, you're just going to have to deal with the consequences of spending tens-to-hundreds of thousands of dollars on your choice of the least space-efficient, gridlock-inducing form of transportation.
by arjie | 2025-09-26 20:08:14+00:00
That was very well written. I have to admit that because AT Protocol was Bluesky's I thought it was some corpo version of ActivityPub, but based on this post it makes a lot of sense. The data is in a 'repository' of my choice. I think I like that very much and it aligns with the kind of general principle I have where it's better to apply filtering etc. on the read side rather than on the write side so that I can publish all sorts of things that I want into my repo and others can then read etc. that stuff.

The arrows do seem to imply that commenting on my posts goes into my repo, but I'm sure that's just an imprecision trying to express an idea. The whole thing seems very cool and decentralized.

When I went to see what it takes to run a separate PDS on AT, though, I see that it's all nice and packaged up and has certain assumptions:

1. It takes care of SSL etc.

2. It will stand up HTTPS/WSS servers to handle a bunch of RPC

So in practice, you don't get https://roshangeorge.dev and at://roshangeorge.dev because for the latter you kind of need https://roshangeorge.dev/xrpc and wss://roshangeorge.dev

Therefore, you probably end up with https://roshangeorge.dev and at://at.roshangeorge.dev and then you can run https://at.roshangeorge.dev and wss://at.roshangeorge.dev

All minor stuff and doesn't take away from the main point, but it was a thing.
by iamnothere | 2025-09-26 20:08:48+00:00
As an observer and occasional Genode user, not a Genode developer, the non-Linux option with the highest development focus is the NOVA microkernel (default for Sculpt OS), with seL4 also receiving a lot of attention. Genode on Linux is most often used for development. I am not clear on the tradeoffs between different kernels but you may ask in the forums if interested. I suspect that the (formally verified) seL4 fully works, but at a performance cost.
by ekr____ | 2025-09-26 20:09:04+00:00
Certificate verification in Firefox happens at a layer way above HTTP and TLS (for those who care, it's in PSM), so which QUIC library is used is basically not relevant.

The reason that Firefox -- and other major browsers -- make self-signed certs so difficult to use is that allowing users to override certificate checks weakens the security of HTTPS, which otherwise relies on certificates being verifiable against the trust anchor list. It's true that this makes certain cases harder, but the judgement of the browser community was that that wasn't worth the security tradeoff. In other words, it's a policy decision, not a technical one.
by verdverm | 2025-09-26 20:09:09+00:00
So it sounds like multiple things then

1. Run the PDS, many people who would not group themselves with technical folks do this. (data hosting, handles)

2. Use or create an alternative client app, depending on if you want to intermingle Bsky data

3. Relay, moderation, algorithms. If you want to divest completely from Bluesky, there is more to run. If you build your own lexicon, you have to do all the moderation and algorithms, among the many other things.
by mothballed | 2025-09-26 20:09:16+00:00
Look like the effective tax rate has went up rather than down since I started working in 2010, most of which I was closer to the top 1% than the middle 20%. []

There is no savings I can identify there, nor in my tax records, which have only increased in % as I've made more money. And all well above the 10% of the income I would pledge to donate to charity if taxes are eliminated. But yes I have donated to charity on occasion (sometimes formally, sometimes directly in cash to people that needed it), despite the fact I keep getting taxed harder every year and despite the fact the government robs me of ~20-30% of my income under its own bloated forcible charity scheme.

[] https://www.concordcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/...
by salt4034 | 2025-09-26 20:09:40+00:00
This part is unclear; what exactly did you change? Are you saying that the LP relaxation has value 271.666, but, when you enforce integrality, Gurobi can actually find and prove optimality of a solution with value 218?

Were you really just solving LPs up to this point in the article? How can these intermediate LPs be so slow to solve (6+ years) and yet Gurobi is able to solve the integer-restricted problem?
by bossyTeacher | 2025-09-26 20:09:59+00:00
>AI is a powerful tool for those who are willing to put in the work.

Can we please call this technology transformers? Calling it AI makes it seem something more than it is (ie 2100 tech or something like that). Yes, transformers are great but it would be naive to ignore that much of the activity and dreams sold have no connection with reality and many of those dreams are being sold by the very people that make the transformers (looking at you, OpenAI)
by venatiodecorus | 2025-09-26 20:11:30+00:00
not to mention normal folks not used to wfh, who were used to spending half their day chatting between cubes or getting coffee. i worked in a very strange office, the coding team of a regional grocery store that maintained our in-house COBOL applications. most of those folks had worked there for 20-30+ years, so it was a huge departure from anything they had ever known.
by renewiltord | 2025-09-26 20:11:48+00:00
No, we shouldn't. I think we'll find that as we excuse bad behavior with certain political alignments, those with opposed alignments will find it easier to excuse other bad behavior with the net effect being a total lowering in quality of life as median behavior becomes less good.

So yes, I'm in agreement that neither is good. I'm accusing people of supporting a bad thing and opposing a crime less than that bad thing.