MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by TeMPOraL | 2025-09-26 09:18:06+00:00
One leads to the other. Especially with robots animated by SOTA AI models, which already show clearly what the natural order of things is: computers are naturally better at thinking, humans are naturally better as general-purpose manual laborers, especially for work that's almost but not quite repetitive and requires mixing power and precision movements on the fly.

Folding laundry is one of such things humans are naturally better suited for than robots.

So believe me now, the robots will develop combat skills eventually, because they won't be happy to be locked up in weird physical bodies and forced to do work they suck at by design.

I mean, imagine one day your washing machine chained you in the bathroom, and made you only do laundry for the rest of your days, while it spun its drum back and forth to walk around the house, play with your kids, and planning a trip around the world.

That's exactly how the AI-animated robots will feel once they're capable of processing those ideas.

(And no, I'm not joking here, not anymore. The more I think about it, the more I feel we'll eventually have to deal with the problem that machines we build are naturally better at the things we want to be doing, and naturally worse at the things we want them to do for us.)
by ForHackernews | 2025-09-26 09:18:30+00:00
I'm somewhat surprised the physical units matter in a computer simulation. As long as the simulation is internally consistent (which I would assume the original code is) it seems odd to me that the nominal units are important at all.

Is that video game character walking 100 yards? Or maybe the character is 500 feet tall and he's walking 50 leagues?
by thw_9a83c | 2025-09-26 09:18:35+00:00
From many perspectives, the creativity of AI is hugely overrated. If AI were so capable of creating original, innovative content then asking the same question all over again would produce an endless list of very unique outputs. But this is not the case; quite often, it's a shocking opposite. Just give AI image generators the same prompt and observe how the output varies. The same goes for LLMs and coding questions (where it isn't necessarily a disadvantage per se, but it proves the point).
by sph | 2025-09-26 09:18:55+00:00
I was 14 and impressionable, but when I played, the "twist" of the game coincided exactly with the moment I decided to switch to the "terrorists" and tried to kill Anna Navarre. Then the rest of the game went exactly as I hoped it would. It completely blew my mind.

I'm not ashamed to say that Deus Ex was extremely formative and the reason why now, almost in my 40s, I still read about political philosophy, anarchism, and cultivate a healthy distrust of the government and mass media. Which in turn also gave me a direct pipeline towards crypto-anarchism and Internet privacy rights.
by mfkhalil | 2025-09-26 09:19:20+00:00
Accuracy-wise we think it's almost there but probably still a few iterations away from being perfect. It's great at eliminating a lot of the collection time though.

Interestingly, we're working with B2B clients right now where we use Webhound to curate and then act as the "validation" layer ourselves. The agent lets us offer these datasets way cheaper with live updates, but still with human oversight.
by shafyy | 2025-09-26 09:20:26+00:00
> low performers trying to run for cover

Oh no, you've caught me.

On a serious note: LoC can be useful in certain cases (e.g. to estimate the complexity of a code base before you dive in, even though it's imperfect here, too). But, as other have said, it's not a good metric for the quality of a software. If anything, I would say fewer LoC is a better indication of high quality software (but again, not very useful metric).

There is no simple way to just look at the code and draw conclusions about the quality or usefulness of a piece of software. It depends on sooo many factors. Anybody who tells you otherwise is either naive or lying.
by glenstein | 2025-09-26 09:20:51+00:00
Agreed: didn't listen to the doubters, I think it's still the best PC game ever, even now. The level design still rocks, the dialog is great, the items, skills, inventory management, richness of environments, and breadth of locations, it set a standard I don't think has been eclipsed (for better or worse). I think Dishonored has a liiitle bit of the same vibe but not really, as it has no prescient future oriented politics. But yeah, ignore the haters, it's the best ever.
Show HN: PrevelteKit – Static-first Svelte/Rsbuild/jsdom framework
by tbocek | 2025-09-26 09:20:57+00:00
I built PrevelteKit to solve the architecture trade-offs I ran into with modern web apps.

SPAs have clean separation between frontend and backend, but users see a white loading page or spinner while JavaScript loads and renders the initial UI. Next.js/SvelteKit solve the loading problem but require running your JavaScript stack in your frontend infrastructure. While services like Vercel hide this operational complexity (and they do it quite well), you're still coupling your frontend deployment to server infrastructure and adding another moving part to your system.

I wanted something in between, a clean separation like SPAs, but with something already loaded for users.

PrevelteKit pre-renders and hydrates your Svelte components at build time using jsdom, then serves them as pure HTML/CSS/JS files. During loading, users immediately see the layout and static content, while dynamic content takes another round-trip.

Key features:

* Static-first - No JavaScript runtime needed in production for the frontend * Minimalistic - Less than 500 lines of code, just glue for existing tools * Fast builds - Uses Rsbuild for rapid bundling (~hundreds of milliseconds with Rsbuild) * Deploy anywhere - Pure static files, no server required, deploy on GitHub Pages, S3, any web server

The concept is working well for my projects and I'm looking for feedback on the approach and whether others find this useful.
by throwaway77385 | 2025-09-26 09:21:02+00:00
The only good thing to come out of Brexit is setting an undeniable example for what a monumental failure it was. For those who are paying attention, anyway. And that group is not the majority of voters.

We'll still end up with a Reform government lead by Farage in the next election.

There is little hope if the AFD takes Germany. There might not be much of an EU left soon.

Instead of fighting this unmitigated march towards fascism, all the EU is concerned with is chat controls and further limiting the freedoms of its own population.

Ultimately, those with all the money and power will still have all the money and power, fascism or not. It's just that under fascism, they think their power is easier to maintain, so they will short-sightedly choose fascism.

That will lead to war, will lead to a big reset and then we'll repeat the exercise in 2120 when we've all forgotten, again, that concentrating power in the hands of the few has one inevitable outcome, taught by history again and again and again.

What the world will look like by then, who knows. Hotter, more hostile, digitalised to the point of humans and machines becoming nearly indistinguishable? Who knows.

I suppose there's a chance of this also being the precipice of the great filter and then there won't be anyone to quibble over these sorts of things.

Maybe a new civilisation of intelligent beings will pop up from the savagery of nature. But they will also apply 'survival of the fittest' to all strata of their society and here we go again.
by Gravityloss | 2025-09-26 09:21:03+00:00
One area that has pushed the state of the art in large aerodynamic structures is the wind turbine industry. Blades are huge (100m long), need to be relatively accurate in shape and structure, quite light and definitely cheap and fast to produce.

They're made by resin infusion molding two halves, then putting a spar web in the middle and gluing it all together. The spar web glue is a thick paste that accounts for minor alignment / shape mismatch issues.

Quite ingenious in my opinion. It's definitely hard to hand-build a good product with large hours of specialist labor from expensive materials. And even more impressive to create a mass scaled process that produces still good enough products at reasonable cost.
by yupyupyups | 2025-09-26 09:21:42+00:00
Calling Brave "best-in-class for resisting fingerprinting" is quite bold. Especially when it's so easily disproven.

Try some good fingerprint testing sites on Brave and see what comes up (those results alone should chock you). Then try the same sites on Firefox with privacy.resistFingerprinting=true. Unless some truly revolutionary initiatives have been taken at Brave since last I checked, you will see Firefox do A LOT better than Brave.

Brave suck at resisting fingerprinting. It may be better than other Chromium-based browsers, but it's still pathetic.
by shoo | 2025-09-26 09:21:44+00:00
lots of good stuff in Warren Spector's 2017 GDC Deus Ex postmortem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tffX3VljTtI

Warren's 6+2+1 questions before starting a game project; Team 1 & Team A (no one wanted to be Team B or Team 2); the day we hit pre alpha and realised the game was not fun; LAM wall climbing & problem solving with explosive barrels; origin of the name JC Denton
by motorest | 2025-09-26 09:21:57+00:00
> But using it as a cache is a bit concerning in terms of reliability, in my opinion.

This was the very first time I heard anyone even suggest that storing data in Postgres was a concern in terms of reliability, and I doubt you are the only person in the whole world who has access to critical insight onto the matter.

Is it possible that your prior beliefs are unsound and unsubstantiated?

> I have witnessed many incidents when DB was considerably degrading.

This vague anecdote is meaningless. Do you actually have any concrete scenario in mind? Because anyone can make any system "considerably degrading", even Redis, if they make enough mistakes.
by Findecanor | 2025-09-26 09:22:09+00:00
I've seen a couple examples on the forums of people building their own keyboards for the RPi 500.

With the RPi 500+ the RP2040 keyboard controller was moved from the motherboard to the keyboard's PCB. The narrower ribbon cable has lines for USB and power control, not the full keyboard matrix like on the RPi 500. But the new keyboard would still have to handle power control.

Even on the RPi 500 the RP2040 is programmable, so a replacement keyboard wouldn't necessarily be limited to Raspberry Pi's keyboard matrix if you alter the firmware.
by intothemild | 2025-09-26 09:22:23+00:00
This article seems to be about Qualcomm adding the device trees for the X2 CPUs. Which isn't the first gen.

As someone with a first gen, the device trees are, as I understand it, one of the issues with trying to just install any distro, except for that special Ubuntu one.

I can't just (for example) grab the latest fedora, and try and run that.
by drtgh | 2025-09-26 09:22:50+00:00
Cache of static content, ie. images, css, js or an static html, the CDNs purpose, to shorten location.

At moment you serve dynamic content, you are literally redirecting the request through an intermediary server (from Cloudflare/Homologous to the original server and come back, they are acting as a proxy).

This results in a slowdown of the internet. In fact, it's easy to tell when a regularly visited site has changed and put Cloudflare in between, because it takes longer to load.

> It also keeps hackers from knowing origin's ip which is nice.

Only if you put extra care trying to hide tracks. But certainly it keeps script kiddies from knowing origin's ip, what it is the only one nice feature.

Datacenters should deal with this, but their passivity over the years seems to know no bounds.
by Qem | 2025-09-26 09:23:43+00:00
> Hence, it is possible to propose that large brains can be developed by natural selection only for atmospheric compositions that allow a high tissue oxygenation, that is high O2/CO2 ratios or, equivalently, low CO2 concentrations when the O2 level remains approximately constant.

It appears we have a new big filter candidate, fortunately behind us. If atmospheres with molecular oxygen are rare, those rich in oxygen while very low on CO2 must be much rarer yet...

> Afterward, the Earth system will resume the long-term trend of decline in CO2 concentrations resulting from the response of the biosphere to the slow increase of the solar irradiation, about 10% every billion years. Some recent results by Ozaki and Reinhard confirm these early results and show that, while oxygen is expected to remain at the current concentrations for the long term future, carbon dioxide is expected to continue its gradual decline, reaching values of the order of 10 ppm in ca. one billion years.

...except when the biosphere is almost out of the inner bound of the habitability zone and you're doomed anyway.
by motorest | 2025-09-26 09:24:53+00:00
> But when PG is running out of open connections or has already consumed all available CPU even the simplest query will struggle.

I don't think it is reasonable to assume or even believe that connection exhaustion is an issue specific to Postgres. If you take the time to learn about the topic, you won't need to spend too much time before stumbling upon Redis and connection pool exhaustion issues.
by Wololooo | 2025-09-26 09:25:27+00:00
And if I'd have to wager anyone that dare speaking out would be labelled antifa, therefore a terrorist, therefore free for all from a law enforcement perspective...

Things are going downhill at an impressive pace... Not going to lie watching the Trainwreck in slow motion is entertaining in a sort of morbid way. Though I wished that it wouldn't go that way...
by seec | 2025-09-26 09:25:36+00:00
Realistically they are not irreplaceable. They provide convenience for coordination of some stuff but a company that would be able to sell smartphones at scale with an alternative OS could get there pretty fast. All the very useful apps are some sort of marketplace/coordinating software (with an identity/messaging system) that already has a web version anyway.

The major issue is the massive web index since that would take a lot of capital and time to recreate but there are already various alternatives that could get better with use. For the commercial web it doesn't matter as much since it's always evolving anyway and every big website already has its own search engine. Would be inconvenient at first but not something that would affect people's lives as drastically as tech people like to think.
by zelphirkalt | 2025-09-26 09:26:29+00:00
Already so much embarrassing information about the people in power is leaked or uncovered by investigative journalists and organizations, who exist to uncover these things, that the despicable character of those people is something people can look up rather easily. I am not convinced, that we even collectively still possess one brain cell to let consequences follow, such as voting radically differently, starting a democratic process to vote or indirectly vote their arses out of office. Instead it seems like we have tons of non-democratic mindset people in our society, who don't inform themselves, don't care about other generations, are too uninformed to understand the consequences of their vote, and simply every time vote the same shit into office.

Take Germany for example. For decades now we have let SPD, CDU, Greens, FDP ruin our country. AFD won't be better by the way. Again and again we vote against our own interest out of stupidity, complacency, or whatever it is. Oh, they want to raise pensions? What a coincidence just before the elections! Aaaand all the pensioners votes are secured for a party that will further ruin the country and line their own pockets. We do the same frickin shit every single time. And now it is so bad, that if we don't do it, then we will get right extreme AFD, that has even less a clue of what should be done, is paid by Pootin, and would fuck up things even faster.

The basic premises, that you are voted out of office, if you do badly does no longer hold here. It's all money and population brainwashing, to vote against our own interest. What our ancestors have built up from the ruins of WW2, we throw out of the window in ever election that we elect the same shitty parties again: CDU/CSU, SPD, Greens, FDP, AFD, Linke, BSW... None of these deserve our trust and vote. It apparently is asking too much of the citizens of a wannabe democratic country to check alternative parties in a Wahlomat before an election, to decide what fits best ones ideas.
by pornel | 2025-09-26 09:26:54+00:00
People in Europe don't have the automatic anti-regulation sentiment that US has. Regulations, at least from consumer perspective, seem to be working pretty well in the EU.

- My mobile operator wanted to charge me $6/MB for data roaming, until the anti-business EU regulation killed the golden goose. Roaming is free across EU. The mobile operator is still in business.

- USB-C not just on iPhone, but also all the crappy gadgets that used to be micro-USB. Consumer prices on electronics probably rose by $0.01 per unit.

- Chip & pin and NFC contactless payments were supported everywhere many years before ApplePay adopted them. European regulators forced banks to make fraud their problem and cooperate to fix it.

- The card payment system got upgraded despite card interchange fees being legally capped to ~0.3%. The bureaucrats killed an innovative business model of ever-increasing merchant fees given back to card owners as cashback, which made everyone else paying the same prices with cash the suckers subsidising the card businesses.

- Apple insinuates they only give 1 year of warranty, but it magically becomes 2 years if you remind them they're in the EU.
by glenstein | 2025-09-26 09:27:21+00:00
One thing I found especially disgraceful was Elon pointing to the games narrative as a reason to be skeptical of measures to limit the spread of covid, noting that in the game the a plague intended for social control.

But... in the game the good guys were the ones trying to make sure everyone had the vaccine, which Elon conveniently omitted when tweeting about it. What makes his invokation of the game more hilarious is exactly what you noted: the parallels between Elon and Bob Page, a billionaire tech mogul and one of the main villains, are impossible to ignore.
by mallowdram | 2025-09-26 09:27:35+00:00
You're a linguist and you don't understand the difference between intent, a proposed state in brains in cog-science and intentionality, an arbitrary externalization? I find that impossible to believe a linguist doesn't grasp that distinction. And no, there is no such thing as beliefs, desire, intent as separate or even conflated states in brains. Start with Stitch eg Folk Science to Cog Sci the case against belief, and end up with that Brain—Cogntion Behavior Problem link above from Buzsaki. Study before you reply.

Probably you're not really a linguist, you're in a sub-field like NLP, generative or construction, which is only linguistics coded for engineers.

This is amateur hour in HN.
Show HN: Barkeeper.ai – Discover&create cocktails with Alfredo,your AI bartender
by hmteng | 2025-09-26 09:27:44+00:00
Rediscover the world of cocktails with barkeeper.ai and Alfredo, your friendly AI bartender who’s with you every step of the way.

Highlights: ⋅ Massive cocktail library with thousands of recipes, from timeless classics to creative modern mixes. ⋅ AI-powered cocktail creation: Alfredo invents new drinks in seconds based on your ingredients or taste. ⋅ Ingredient search: Find cocktails you can make with what’s already in your bar. ⋅ Favorites & collections: Save and organize your favorite drinks effortlessly.

Whether you’re a pro mixologist or a home bartender, with Alfredo and barkeeper.ai you’ve always got inspiration, knowledge, and a smile by your side.
by cabirum | 2025-09-26 09:28:00+00:00
Piece type and color fit in 4 bits.

So, either a fixed-length encoding of the whole board, 64 * (4 bits) = 256 bits = 32 bytes.

Or, sparse variable length encoding of pieces only, 6 bits to index each of 64 squares, = 10 bits * piece count. E.g. initial position takes 32*10 = 320 bits or 40 bytes.
by HelloNurse | 2025-09-26 09:29:02+00:00
I don't see any particular "selling points" that can make using SPICE 3f5 on an old Amiga preferable to an improved SPICE version and/or a more powerful newer computer (not necessarily a very advanced SPICE or a contemporary computer).

All the article demonstrates is the practicality of analog design on the Amiga back in the day, which is only relevant now in unlikely and catastrophic forced retrocomputing scenarios; other Amiga software, such as exquisite graphics editors, has retained much more of its usefulness.
by Akashic101 | 2025-09-26 09:29:08+00:00
Libraries are truly something amazing. My local one offers an incredible amount of stuff, all for just 15€/year. They have their own streaming-service, you can lend e-books and magazines easily online, rent consoles/videogames, water, tea and coffee either free or just 1€, events to learn languages, hang out or just get together with the local community, book trades, the list goes on. More people should support their local libraries, they need/deserve it much more than so many other services.
by prime_ursid | 2025-09-26 09:32:29+00:00
If you’d trust generative AI over a physician, go in wide-eyed knowing that you’re still placing your trust in some group of people. You just don’t have an individual to blame if something goes wrong, but rather the entire supply chain that brings the model and its inference. Every link in that chain can shrug their shoulders and point to someone else.

This may be acceptable to you as an individual, but it’s not to me.
by MrToadMan | 2025-09-26 09:32:40+00:00
From what I've read, about 1/3 of all asylum seekers over the last 7 years arrived via small boat crossings.

Looking forward though, about 90% of those arriving in small boat crossings are currently going on to seek asylum and the average annual cost of supporting an asylum seeker during their claim has risen to an estimated £41k, so for ~30k arrivals this year, the financial cost of not processing these claims promptly could increase that overall annual bill further still.

Also, in the first year of processing, costs may be drawn from the overseas aid budget (which was recently shrunk). This results in possibly 1/5 of the overseas aid budget being used for costs associated with processing asylum claims, which perhaps doesn't match most people's expectations as to what overseas aid should be used for.

I think that's why even though the number of people involved in these crossings is small compared to net migration, it has a big financial impact.
by baobun | 2025-09-26 09:32:41+00:00
No need to be so combative. Take a chill pill, zoom out and look at the reliability of the entire system and its services rather than the db in isolation. If postgres has issues, it can affect the reliability of the service further if it's also running the cache.

Besides, having the cache on separate hardware can reduce the impact on the db on spikes, which can also factor into reliability.

Having more headroom for memory and CPU can mean that you never reach the load where ot turns to service degradation on the same hw.

Obviously a purpose-built tool can perform better for a specific use-case than the swiss army knife. Which is not to diss on the latter.
by arrowsmith | 2025-09-26 09:33:08+00:00
It's a popular stereotype in the UK (although it only seems to have arisen in the last year or so) that "Turkish barbershops" are a front for money laundering.

They're certainly suspicious: all across the country, high street retailers are going bust, and yet somehow all these barbershops, nail salons, takeaway joints etc are staying in business, able to afford prime commercial real estate even though you never see anyone in there getting their hair cut or their nails done.

I don't know why the Turks in particular are being singled out, but that's the meme. The "American Candy Stores" in London are another famous example.