MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by littlecranky67 | 2025-09-09 06:58:48+00:00
Article is outdated (2008) and makes a single argument: Desalination requires too much energy. Becaues it is outdated, it doesn't account for the excess energy a lot of places and countries have from wind and solar. Water desalination is a prime candidate (along with Bitcoin mining and AI model training, sigh) for using available excess energy from renewable that cannot be stored otherwise. Clean/drinking water can be stored easily - it is called a freshwater lake.
by noduerme | 2025-09-09 06:58:56+00:00
This is another troll. I'm Jewish, and last I checked claiming to be Jewish does not exempt anyone from being called a fascist. Tacking "anti-Zionist" onto that, I could name a dozen explicitly fascist organizations which are anti-Zionist off the top of my head.

So I don't care what identity the person uses to backfill their ideology, it is still a pure fascist troll. And picking such an identity just makes it more obvious.
by MinimalAction | 2025-09-09 06:59:20+00:00
YouTube is a marvelous platform. I know how to live life, thanks to the innumerable passionate souls that produced relevant content and put their voice out there. This library of videos never fails to amaze me on how many weird, fun, informative tidbits of humanity it contains. As much as it is a for-profit endeavor, I wholeheartedly support this well managed space.
by kragen | 2025-09-09 06:59:57+00:00
It does have loops, integer multiplication, and array indexing (mostly reading), and all of those are pretty important.

Subroutine calls are particularly difficult to benchmark because they are so critical to real-world performance and so easy for compilers to remove from a benchmark if they can guess that a particular callsite will be hot. (LuaJIT takes this to the extreme.)

You'd think non-tail recursion would stymie this, but I've seen GCC unroll a recursive loop several layers deep and constant-fold away several layers over the base case. Impressive, useful, and completely invalidated my dumb benchmark.

I would guess that most programs have a subroutine call on the order of once every 100 instructions, spending something like 15% of their time on subroutine call and return. This is a very difficult number to quantify because of the pervasive indirect costs of subroutine calls: less efficient register allocation, forgone opportunities for constant folding and specialization, objects stored in memory rather than in registers, allocation on the heap rather than a stack, etc.
by autoexec | 2025-09-09 07:00:17+00:00
I wonder what Sweden was doing differently

> Take for example this distribution of age at death in Sweden in 1900. You will see, that in 1900, life expectancy was 52 years. However, the median age at death (the age above and below 50% of the population die respectively) is 63 years. Although the life expectancy is only 52 years, an individual has thus a chance of 50% to live past 63 years. Thus, if you went across a Swedish graveyard from 1900 (I'm not sure if the data relates to people born in 1900, or mortality data from 1900, but this is not the point of my comment), you would see that more than half reached an age past 60 years. (https://old.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/zzy2bh/no_avera...)
by fxtentacle | 2025-09-09 07:00:23+00:00
My guess would be that they tried to save money with speculative decoding and they had too loose thresholds for the verification stage.

As someone who has implemented this myself, I know that it’s pretty easy to make innocent mistakes there. And the only visible result is a tiny distortion of the output distribution which only really becomes visible after analysing thousands of tokens. And I would assume that all providers are using speculative decoding by now because it’s the only way to have good inference speed at scale.

As a quick recap, you train a small model to quickly predict the easy tokens, like filler words, so that you can jump over them in the recurrent decoding loop. That way, a serial model can predict multiple tokens per invocation, thereby easily doubling throughput.

And the fact that they need lots of user tokens to verify that it works correctly would nicely explain why it took them a while to find and fix the issue.
by jve | 2025-09-09 07:00:25+00:00
Latvia has it too. We have ID cards which is a smartcard, we use that to set up some authentication app that allows us to authenticate within online services and can even do remotely transactions like selling the house (well that is the extreme case and one needs to connect to teams meeting and show your face and have high quality video/connection and show your id card, along with digital auth). But anyways, it is used all around the place, many many sites support that auth, the banks support it and even remote auth scenarios are possible. Just today was calling mobile operator support and they had to verify me - so after saying my ID, an auth request pops up from app that asks to verify identity to mobile operator (app shows who is asking for auth).

Authentications are separated and if some signature must be placed or money to be sent, you must use other access code and the app shows the intention of what are you authorizing. If it is money being sent, you see where and how much you want to sent before you approve this request on the app.

But the app is all tied to digital identity from the id card in the first place - to set up these strong authentication guarantees in the first place you use your ID card. Some time ago we had to use computer with smartcard reader to set it up, nowdays I dunno whether it is NFC or something, but the mobile phone can read the ID card.
by hdjrudni | 2025-09-09 07:00:30+00:00
From the article,

> First, OOXML was, in material part, a defensive posture under intensifying antitrust and “open standards” pressure. Microsoft announced OOXML in late 2005 while appealing an adverse European Commission judgment centered on interoperability disclosures. Thus, it was only a matter of time before Office file compatibility came under the regulatory microscope. (The Commission indeed opened a probe in 2008.)

> Meanwhile, the rival ODF matured and became an ISO standard in May 2006. Governments, especially in Europe, began to mandate open standards in public procurement. If Microsoft did nothing, Office risked exclusion from government deals.

So... maybe they weren't directly asked to open their file format, but what then? Adopt ODF which is surely incompatible with their feature set, and... just corrupt every .doc file when converting into the new format? And also have to reimplement all their apps?
by frontsideair | 2025-09-09 07:03:28+00:00
14B Qwen was a good choice, but it became outdated a bit and seems like the new version of 4B surpassed it in benchmarks somehow.

It's a balancing game, how slow a token generation speed can you tolerate? Would you rather get an answer quick, or wait for a few seconds (or sometimes minutes) for reasoning?

For quick answers, Gemma 3 12B is still good. GPT-OSS 20B is pretty quick when reasoning is set to low, which usually doesn't think longer than one sentence. I haven't gotten much use out of Qwen3 4B Thinking (2507) but at least it's fast while reasoning.
by specproc | 2025-09-09 07:03:46+00:00
The problem with the UK is not population growth. 20 percent over 30 years is neither exceptional nor unmanageable.

Population growth is by and large a good thing, it means more people working, paying tax, making pension contributions. More doctors, scientists and devs, but also more carers, cleaners, builders and farm workers. If you want to see what a falling population does, go check out a small town or village across most of Europe, it's not pretty.

The problem is that we've sold everything important to a private sector that has zero incentive to invest for the long term. The government has a vital role to play in everything from water to homebuilding, which a cross party consensus has abdicated.

In the case of water, we've not had a new reservoir built since Major. The argument for privatisation was that the market would allow for more efficient allocation of resources in line with supply and demand, but the experience of the last thirty here has pretty conclusively disproved this logic. See also the retreat from housebuilding.

Yet somehow this is all the fault of population, and implicitly immigration. We're hurtling towards Nigel Fucking Farage as PM because no mainstream politician is willing to rock the boat with our rentier "investors".
by jjani | 2025-09-09 07:05:04+00:00
They already have a track record of messing with internal system prompts (including those that affect the API) which obviously directly change outputs given the same prompts. So in effect, they've already been messing with the models for a long time. It's well known among founders who run services based on their products that this happened, everyone who does long output saw the same. It happened around November last year. If you had a set of evals running that expected an output of e.g. 6k tokens in length on 3.5 Sonnet, overnight it suddenly started cutting off at <2k, ending the message with something like "(Would you like me to continue?)". This is on raw API calls.

Never seen or heard of (from people running services at scale, not just rumours) this kind of API behaviour change for a the same model from OpenAI and Google. Gemini 2.5 Pro did materially change at time of prod release despite them claiming they had simply "promoted the final preview endpoint to GA", but in that case you can give them the benefit of it being technically a new endpoint. Still lying, but less severe.
by rtpg | 2025-09-09 07:05:06+00:00
"You have to standardize the format"

"OK we will standardize our serialization format"

It's... I guess malicious compliance, though also if you don't care about interop you're not going to try to abstract away your internal application structures, are you!

I appreciate the standard existing rather than it not existing. Trying to have the standard exist in this way has always felt like an uphill battle, and at least now there's _something_.

Just you will have a better time if you emulate how Office does things. But you have a bit more documentation to go along with it.
by gonzopancho | 2025-09-09 07:05:09+00:00
I'm not lying.

From the URL

---

The Complainant is the owner of the European Union trademark registration Nos. 012771457 for OPNSENSE (figurative mark), filed on April 8, 2014 and registered on August 20, 2014, for goods in class 9, and 016287716 for OPNSENSE (word mark), filed on January 26, 2017 and registered on May 9, 2017, for goods in class 9.

The Complainant also owns the domain name <opnsense.org>, registered on September 4, 2014, at which it promotes and enables users to download its open-source OPNSENSE firewall.

The disputed domain name <opnsense.com> was registered on April 8, 2014, and is not pointed to an active website.

---

I want you to look closely at the date April 8, 2014, and then I want you to look for anything that occurred before that date, vs. all that occurred after.
by p_v_doom | 2025-09-09 07:05:51+00:00
The problem is not so much IMO that all models hallucinate. Its more that our entire reality, especially as expressed through the training data - text, is entirely constructed. There is no difference in the world made by the text, say when it comes to the reality of Abraham Lincoln and Bilbo Baggins. We often talk about the later as if he is just as real. Is Jesus real? Is Jesus god? Is it hallucination to claim the one you dont agree with? We cant even agree amongst oursevles what is real and what is not.

What we perceive as "not hallucination" is merely a very big consensus supported by education, culture, personal beliefs and varies quite a bit. And little in the existence of the model gives it the tools to make those distinctions. Quite the opposite
by pembrook | 2025-09-09 07:05:52+00:00
YouTube has the highest monopoly tax in all of tech.

They take 45% of YouTube premium subscription revenue. That’s higher than the App Store (30%), Spotify (30%), and any other content marketplace on the internet.

I think they get a free pass for now because they allow creators to monetize with their own native ads within videos. If I had to guess, this may become a point of contention in the future…
by CursedSilicon | 2025-09-09 07:06:27+00:00
The Complainant further points out that the Respondent registered and used the disputed domain name in bad faith because the Respondent has no business activity at the disputed domain name and the only purpose of the registration and use of the disputed domain name is to bring discredit on the OPNSENSE products of the Complainant, by using degrading words and publishing a video, showing an actor interpreting Hitler, with the following phrase above it: “From deep within the OPNSENSE development bunker”.
by hdjrudni | 2025-09-09 07:06:30+00:00
This is an interesting point. Couldn't the OS give access to the pixel data without access to the EXIF data? i.e. doesn't need to give direct access to the image file, just convert it first to strip the metadata.

That still gives you the image data which might be private, but we should be able to lock that behind a permission dialog "Allow access to current desktop background image" or whatever. It's a weird and very specific permission but it might be worth having.
by fjfaase | 2025-09-09 07:06:32+00:00
I had a quick look at these instagram links and except for the last two, they do not feel like 'Art', just like most novels are not considered literature. In the past years, I have visited a lot of art exhibitions (at museums and art galleries) and graduation shows of art schools here in the Netherlands. See: https://iwriteiam.nl/Exhibitions.html Even at those, I feel that a lot is crap, too conceptual. But there always some artists that stick out for some (often unexplained) reason. They have some new idea or make you view the world in a different way. They are not just repeating some gimmick or showing (exceptional) craftsmanship. Craftsmanship is not equal to art.
by atoav | 2025-09-09 07:07:09+00:00
Privatization just means that if you were interested in the outcome before (having water), they are now interested in the money that can be extracted from it.

And that means their interest is to but a modern branding onto an operation that has been stripped for wires as long as it works.

I grew up during a privatization wave in my country and the promise of the proponents always was that private ownership means waste is cut. Now all these sectors that produced decent services before have gone to shit. Be it postal, trains, highways, whatever. Everything is broken, underfunded, services less people for more money.

10 years ago when I said the same thing I would get a lot of counter arguments that all boiled down to: "Trust it bro" or "But governmental is more waste". Now these arguments don't come up nearly as much. Everybody can see it.

The thing is, if you want to avoid waste then literally the best strategy is to go into a desert where there is no service. No service means no waste. But it also means no service.
by bluehatbrit | 2025-09-09 07:07:29+00:00
Large roundabouts are pretty safe, if you've gone through the learning process we have in the UK. I did about 30-40h of practical lessons with an instructor, over half of which would have included multi-lane roundabouts.

The lights control the flow, so no need to worry about giving way. You pick your lane in the lead up using the signs and road markings. Then you follow your painted lane, the markings of which guide you all the way through. The markings and lights do all the work for you, unless you're in the wrong lane at the start. All your awareness is focused on looking for hazards of people who are in the wrong lane because your route is dictated by the road markings.

I will admit, they look complicated - especially if you've never driven one before. My first time around one was a bit nerve-wracking, but they quickly become second nature.
by lapsis_beeftech | 2025-09-09 07:07:47+00:00
I was a daily, active, and paying Youtube user until recently and am quitting entirely. I was still able to work around many of Google's dark patterns – like the aggressive bot and adblock measures – but it was a chore I do not care to continue, and the emotional distress caused by the extreme hostility and toxicity around everything Youtube is too high a price to pay for content. I support content creators on Patreon but unfortunately many of them still use Youtube for hosting and those videos are not accessible to me any longer.
by aprilthird2021 | 2025-09-09 07:08:14+00:00
Everything is logged, but no one really cares, and the "business reasons" are many and extremely generic.

That being said, maybe I'm dumb but I guess I don't see the huge risk here? I could certainly believe that 1500 employees had basically complete access with little oversight (logging and not caring isn't oversight imo). But how is that a safety risk to users? User information is often very important in the day to day work of certain engineering orgs (esp. the large number of eng who are fixing things based off user reports). So that access exists, what's the security risk? That employees will abuse that access? That's always going to be possible I think?
by chasil | 2025-09-09 07:08:44+00:00
SQLite has specific naming advice:

"For most SQL code, your safest bet is to never use any English language word as the name of a user-defined object...

"SQLite adds new keywords from time to time when it takes on new features. So to prevent your code from being broken by future enhancements, you should normally quote any identifier that is an English language word, even if you do not have to."

https://sqlite.org/lang_keywords.html
by boomskats | 2025-09-09 07:08:50+00:00
This last year I've noticed a disproportionate number of burst mains water pipes pissing ridiculous amounts of water everywhere, with whole roads flooded for days, sometimes weeks, before Thames Water's subcontractors managed to get round to dealing with it. This has happened before on occasion, but this year I've seen maybe 10x more leaks than any previous year. Critical infrastructure is bursting in unison because it has been criminally undermaintained for over three decades in favour of dividends on profits from critical national infrastructure.

Articles like this, with subtle mentions of how it was all our fault and all the water companies were doing was prioritising low cost for the consumer, are the equivalent of 'were the nazis really that bad or were they just a bit sad and lonely', but national infrastructure edition. They exist only to soften up and distract public opinion so that we're less likely to want any of the people involved to be held to account.
by namibj | 2025-09-09 07:09:32+00:00
While it sounds likely true for the US, it's the opposite in Germany: likely due to societal expectations on "creature comforts" and German homes not being framed with 2x4's but instead getting guild-approved craftsmen to construct a roof for a brick building (with often precast concrete slabs forming the intermediate floors; they're segmented along the non-bridging direction to be less customized).
by wcrossbow | 2025-09-09 07:10:01+00:00
This is the stuff nightmares are made of. We already live in a you have nothing to hide society. Now imagine one where mega corps and the government have access to every thought you have. No worries, you got nothing to hide right? What would that do to our thought process and how we articulate our inner selfs? What do we allow ourselves to even think? At some point it will not even matter because we will have trained ourselves to suppress any deviant thought. I'd rather not keep on going because the ramifications of this technology make me truly sick in the stomach.
by hliyan | 2025-09-09 07:10:55+00:00
Shifting goalposts of AI aside, intelligence as a general faculty does not require sentience, consciousness, awareness, qualia, valence or any of the things traditionally associated with a high level of biological intelligence.

But what it does require: the ability to produce useful output beyond the sum total of past experience and present (sensory) input. An LLM does only this. Where as a human-like intelligence has some form on internal randomness, plus an internal world model against which such randomized output could get validated.
by derriz | 2025-09-09 07:11:22+00:00
Not really - renewable curtailment and negative wholesale electricity prices happen but not frequently enough that you can generally afford to leave a capital intensive investment like a bitcoin mining setup, a water desalination plant or a hydrogen electrolyser idle 90% of the time waiting for cheap electricity.

And the market and technological developments (batteries) are actively working against this pricing anomaly - I can see the phenomena of negative pricing disappear completely in electricity markets in the next few years given the current explosion in grid battery deployment.
by metadat | 2025-09-09 07:11:45+00:00
Does this qualify as bike shedding? What is the business impact either way? If someone prefers one or the other, so what!

All arguments seem pretty frail, always reduced to some form of "well this way makes it easier for ME to reason about!". I used to have opinions on this crap, and nowadays I've got way bigger fish to fry than worrying about table name plurality. As long as it's human-legible and consistent, who cares?
by freehorse | 2025-09-09 07:11:48+00:00
Not sure if this is relevant, but while moving the slider around, in chromium i see 40% gpu utilisation, while in firefox less than 20% (macbook m3 pro). I do not observe any noticeable difference otherwise in terms of quality.

PS Neat website and explanations, but talking about the liquid glass as a design principle in general, I would rather ui elements in a random website not use that much of gpu for not great reasons but maybe that's my problem of not thinking different.
by tempfile | 2025-09-09 07:11:51+00:00
Water companies in the UK operate under regional monopoly, so most people only get a single company they can buy water from.

The free market approach seems to require allowing water companies to even build and maintain parallel infrastructure that can't be shared, if they consider it to be economical. That would require immense capital investment, meaning the barrier to entry would likely be very high. The "efficient" case, where joining an existing pipe infrastructure is cheap, due to competition, would entail having several parallel networks of pipes running between reservoirs and people's homes. This was viewed as profoundly wasteful, even by the Thatcher government that privatised water, and that's why it's forbidden by regional monopoly.