MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Looking for a Book
by phoenixhaber | 2025-09-24 17:59:20+00:00
I'm looking for a book that features a girl that has a dragon tattoo on her arm and I know for a fact that it exists and I read it relatively recently.

It's pre the 2005 book by Stieg Larsson and google says that it doesn't exist

https://share.google/aimode/3jUEc4xVBrQMIphGI

What is the book?
by kansface | 2025-09-24 17:59:25+00:00
People's time is conserved, so a couple of questions: 1. What percentage of decline can be attributed to social media purely as a time sink? 2. What percentage of decline can be attributed to increased political polarization encroaching/claiming/colonizing formerly and nominally neutral spaces?

One remarkable counter example in my neck of the woods is the Orthodox Church, which has done extraordinarily well since covid, picking up tons of converts. Of course, people themselves are conserved, too. That growth has come at the expense of protestant churches which in my reckoning sorta stopped being churches during covid. I'd estimate 1/3 of my local congregation is non-Greek converts who seemingly have no intention of learning the language (services regularly run 1.5 to 2 hours, largely in koine Greek)!
by derefr | 2025-09-24 17:59:25+00:00
> The hot path (... list) are all served by synchronous API servers

Wait; how does that work, when a user is PUTting tons of objects concurrently into a bucket, and then LISTing the bucket during that? If the PUTs are all hitting different indexing-cluster nodes, then...?

(Or do you mean that there are queues/workers, but only outside the hot path; with hot-path requests emitting events that then get chewed through async to do things like cross-shard bucket metadata replication?)
by 9rx | 2025-09-24 17:59:28+00:00
> I have a phd and I assure you it'll come up later.

Will it? One would have to dig pretty deep into one's personal life to learn about that. Someone who thinks COVID was a hoax isn't going to be one to dig deep. And, well, if he really did somehow dig deep enough to find that information, you can just laugh it off as a hoax.
by johnmaguire | 2025-09-24 17:59:31+00:00
Thanks, I missed the second part of this sentence:

> Quite a lot of people don't want TSMC, Waymo and LLMs. They want a job market where one single breadwinner can support their house, spouse and kids.

I stand by what I wrote above. I agree with you that it is possible today at a reduced QoL and I also would like to see society distribute wealth more equitably, which might also achieve the goal at a higher QoL.
by pavel_lishin | 2025-09-24 17:59:37+00:00
> I’ve recently switched to Facebook Dating because they don’t have any commercial incentives (and in fact probably negative incentives) to NOT match you. Thus they can also give you all of the “Premium” features for free.

Don't they still power this via ads? Every set of eyeballs looking for love is slowly trickling nickels into their bank accounts; it seems like they would have the exact same set of incentives as you describe Match Group having.
by prngl | 2025-09-24 17:59:53+00:00
Certainly onto something but misses how much large organizations are actually controlled by small organizations operating in the “large complex system” environment. It is only individuals and small organizations that have agency at all. Large organizations and large complex systems are both emergent, one with hierarchical control, and one with distributed control. What has really changed is how unequal small organizations have become in their influence and power. The small cadres of people at the “top” (of organizations, media, government, tech, etc) control/influence more and more, not only at the expense of other small organizations (power is zero sum) but also at the expense of the decentralized mechanism, ie the large complex system becomes increasingly hierarchically/centrally controlled (vs distributed/decentralized control).
by hopelite | 2025-09-24 17:59:53+00:00
> What I would like to take from this is that, by their own definition, desktop apps are out of scope for Age Verification. So does that mean we will see a return of the 'desktop applications' instead of everything being a web service ?

I doubt it unless something odd happens like triggering some reaction. They’ve looked at the data and see the majority of society using “phones”, which are really just increasingly small computers that happen to have a feature to also make calls; and they’ve decided that this trap they’re leading us all into can and may even need to stay open and inviting for a while anyways until the older people die off and desktop form factors kind of fall by the wayside, before the trap is even ready to be sprung. In the mean time they’ll just gaslight and lie about what they’re doing, to save and protect the children of course, until the day that you tune around from a distraction and the trap door is shut behind you.

It’s the same MO as always, with the gullible and naive enablers being essentially the worse threat than the actual perpetrators.
by gloosx | 2025-09-24 17:59:58+00:00
the most accurate wording here is "generated".

we generated 35K LOC in 7 hours, 7 days of fixes and we shipped it.

This at least makes it clearer that it is on par with what it would take a senior BAML team member to accomplish this, which is kind of impressive on it's own. Not sure about ignoring the tests though
by nostrademons | 2025-09-24 18:00:01+00:00
Uh, my recent experience is that "Some guy on Substack" is a significantly more reliable source than "The Literal New York Times".

Gel-Mann Amnesia affect applies here: every time I've seen mainstream media cover a subject that I have personal experience or expertise with, it's been shockingly inaccurate. This includes the NYTimes. It includes random guys on Substack too, but I've found that random guys on Substack when speaking about their area of expertise are actually pretty accurate. It's left to the reader to determine whether some random guy on Substack is actually speaking to an area of their expertise, but other comments here have attested that the author actually knows what he's talking about when it comes to SIM farms.
by orionsbelt | 2025-09-24 18:00:24+00:00
Compared to past standards, Trump and Biden were arguably both too old to run in 2020 and had obvious signs of age-related cognitive decline. But they were regular old, not senile. Biden clearly got much worse throughout his presidency, declining to a level that was obviously too far, even for the left. Trump is not there yet, although I wouldn’t be surprised if he gets there during his presidency.

“Politics no longer make sense to me. I say Democrats should just run the candidate with the most charisma and fuck everything else.”

Personally, I think they should focus on running candidates that have the best chance of winning. Politics is a competition!
by epistasis | 2025-09-24 18:00:34+00:00
I would say that Ceph+RadosGW works well with HDDs, as long as 1) you use SDDs for the index pool, and 2) you are realistic about the number of IOPs you can get out of your pool of HDDs.

And remember that there's a multiplication of iops for any individual client iop, whether you're using triplicate storare or erasure coding. S3 also has iop multiplication, which they solve with tons of HDDs.

For big object storage that's mostly streaming 4MB chunks, this is no big deal. If you have tons of small random reads and writes across many keys or a single big key, that's when you need to make sure your backing store can keep up.
by Karrot_Kream | 2025-09-24 18:00:37+00:00
> I'll posit a mechanism: when times are good, small organizations are born, growing out of people's spare time and sense of security in the future. After all, by definition organizations start small. And then when times are bad, small organizations are the first to die, because they lack the economies of scale and financial reserves that allow them to weather a contraction.

I think the biggest flowering of organizations both small and large happened in the post-WWII period. In the US sure that was a very hopeful time. But many of the other belligerents were reduced to rubble and Germany and Japan were occupied by foreign powers. Yet organizations did still sprout in this period of, what we modern people would probably think as, utter despondency. I think there's more to it than just time and security.
by latexr | 2025-09-24 18:00:47+00:00
All of the things you mentioned serve the primary purpose of making the rich and powerful more rich and powerful, not improving the lives of the majority.

We could live without self-driving cars, and most of the world still does; faster chips are nice but not revolutionary when we’re using them to waste away watching six hours of ten seconds disinformation videos a day; LLMs are literally telling people to eat glue, convincing people to kill themselves, making cocky ignorant assholes more sure of themselves, and increasing the spread of lies and misinformation.

Humanity would probably benefit from moving slower, not faster.
by throwaway894345 | 2025-09-24 18:00:58+00:00
This reminds me of a project I built in a class during my EE degree--I wanted a thing that would pick out the beat in a song and flash an LED accordingly. I thought it would be pretty easy to just look for spikes, but you can't have a constant threshold or else you will just run the LED for the entire duration of some high-energy portion of the song (or else you will hardly ever run it at all). It needed to be adaptive, but the adaptive threshold needed to be able to respond quickly to changes in the "average energy" of a song. It took quite a lot of calibrating to make it work properly, and I learned a lot in the process.
by seec | 2025-09-24 18:01:11+00:00
Exactly. And with a proper color scheme it is so much easier to "parse" a document as a human. But JSON popularity is linkend to the web and javascript so not much that can be done. Coming up with new ambiguous markups just for config files is just a waste.

I really don't get it; the whole point of computing is to make stuff rigorous and precise so that you don't have to run a whole guesstimate translation layer as you need to with humans.
by ceejayoz | 2025-09-24 18:01:18+00:00
> I only have the vaguest memories of cancel culture around 9/11.

Maybe you agreed with the canceling enough it wasn't noticeable; I cited two specific examples directly related to that day. It was… not a fun time to be anti-war.

Go back a few years and you'll find further prominent examples, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Puppy_Episode

> On the other hand, consider Karen Attiah.

I disagree with her firing, but there are no First Amendment concerns here. The Washington Post is free, under the First Amendment, to be shitty, even with regards to employment. They canceled her, as is their right, and as our ape evolutionary cousins do despite a lack of language, social media, or political parties. "I don't like you, so I won't associate with you" is deeply ingrained in us.
by mbreese | 2025-09-24 18:01:43+00:00
Gluster has been slowly declining for a while. It used to be sponsored by RedHat, but tha stopped a few years ago. Since then, development slowed significantly.

I used to keep a large cluster array with Gluster+ZFS (1.5PB), and I can’t say I was ever really that impressed with the performance. That said — I really didn’t have enough horizontal scaling to make it worthwhile from a performance aspect. For us, it was mainly used to make a union file system.

But, I can’t say I’d recommend it for anything new.
by billy99k | 2025-09-24 18:02:39+00:00
"All of your examples are profit-driven, and not necessarily (even if we do benefit) done for the greater good of all or advancement of society."

Without profit as a motive, innovation would be decades behind (if not longer than this). Governments can barely afford crumbling infrastructure maintenance as it is. I seriously doubt they are going to invest in projects for the 'greater good'.

"We've ran high-risk R&D projects successfully before as public projects - Manhattan project, the space race & moon landing, ARPANET, etc."

Yes, for defensive or offensive military purposes. Not much beyond this.

Even big pharma supplies the world. The rest of the world with socialized medicine create knock-offs at a fraction of the cost, because they didn't have to spend decades going through testing and billions of dollars developing it.
by Confiks | 2025-09-24 18:02:55+00:00
> So given that the current spec is not in use, this seems incorrect.

No, that's not what they mean. They just mean that the spec (and for now only the spec, not the implementation) will be amended with an experimental feature, while the implementation will not (yet).

I understand (?) that you are interpreting this as: "we'll later document something that we've already implemented", but this is not the case. That isn't how this project operates, and I'm intimately familiar with the codebase so I'm completely certain they haven't implemented this at all. There is no beginning or even a stub for this feature to land, which is problematic, as an unlinkable signature scheme isn't just a drop-in replacement, but requires careful design. Hence privacy by design.

> If you have a key with the attribute of course you can 'bypass' it, I don't think that's bug.

Anyone of age can make an anonymous age attribute faucet [1] for anyone to use. That it's not technically a bug doesn't make it any less trivial to circumvent. I wouldn't expect the public or even the Commission to make such a distinction. They'll clamor that the solution is broken and that it must be fixed, and at that point I expect the obfuscation and weakening of privacy features to start.

So as we already know that the solution will be trivial to circumvent, it shouldn't be released without at least very clearly and publicly announcing it's limitations. Only if such expectations are correctly set, we have a chance not to end up in a cycle where the open source and privacy story will be abandoned in the name of security.

[1] Because of the linkable signature scheme in principle misuse can be detected by issuers, but this would be in direct contradiction with their privacy claims (namely that the issuer pinky promises not to record any issued credentials or signatures).
by bananapub | 2025-09-24 18:03:07+00:00
seems fine - they're aligning their prices with their costs.

presumably everyone is just aiming or hoping for inference costs to go down so much that they can do a unlimited-with-tos like most home Internet access etc, because this intermediate phase of having to count your pennies to ask the matrix multiplier questions isn't going to be very enjoyable or stable or encourage good companies to succeed.
by nsedlet | 2025-09-24 18:03:10+00:00
Another factor with the vibes being off (at least in the US): mass outsourcing of jobs thanks to remote work. You used to have to be a multinational company with global entities and offices. Now you can be a 10-person startup with half your people outside the country.

When the world went remote many folks were happy with the better work-life balance. But it means that we compete in a ruthless global labor market.

That's why companies rejecting remote work is good for the American worker in some ways.
by hombre_fatal | 2025-09-24 18:03:12+00:00
Well, the $200/mo plan model works as long as people on the $100/mo plan is insufficient for some people which works as long as the $17/mo plan is insufficient for some people.

I don't see how it matters to you that you aren't saturating your $200 plan. You have it because you hit the limits of the $100/mo plan.
by tracerbulletx | 2025-09-24 18:04:56+00:00
You can build consensus around the decision making process and build a culture where the outcome of that process is widely accepted. As long as people have the time and pathways to make their case and input, and understand there will be some verdict that may or may not align completely with their opinion. Then its just the decision makers duty to synthesize things in good faith but probably has bought themselves some leeway.
by sokoloff | 2025-09-24 18:04:59+00:00
Then the airlines should offer those more flexible people the option to buy a cheaper ticket that doesn’t include seat assignment. Just brainstorming here, they might call those tickets “Basic” or something.

Then, people with that flexibility could offer that flexibility to the airline in exchange for a cheaper ticket that meets their needs and people who don’t have the same level of flexibility could buy tickets that reflect their needs.

I say this as a parent who pays for assigned seats because we choose to buy tickets that reflect our actual level of flexibility.
by deelowe | 2025-09-24 18:05:16+00:00
And what exactly makes "Robert Graham" such an expert in this particular domain? I don't know who this person is or why I should trust their personal blog over the NYT. The article itself is rather hand-wavy in it's assessment of the report. The thesis is essentially "bot farms use lots of sims & this is an example of using lots of sims, therefore this is a bot farm and not espionage."
by matwood | 2025-09-24 18:06:00+00:00
My trick is that I always just buy the base economy ticket that can still be upgraded. Then I check for upgrades every couple days. What I found is that prices to move classes will vary wildly as they try to sell all the seats. It also makes it easier to upgrade a single leg - an overnight flight is more important to be lay flat than a daytime flight for example.

The other part of my equation is that I put a 'dollar figure x flight time' that I'm willing to pay to be more comfortable. If I see a price that hits my threshold I upgrade, otherwise not.
by jacobgkau | 2025-09-24 18:06:08+00:00
> And yes, "oh no, I need to learn something new for my video workflow."

That's rude and uncalled for. I didn't say I was unwilling to learn something new. I said the economics don't work out for the solution someone else proposed. And I also disputed the statement, "we can write 1 HTML tag and have an embedded video on the page." Now you've moved the goalpost to "learn something new" (which actually means "design and deploy an entire new system").
by us-merul | 2025-09-24 18:06:32+00:00
The section “Breaking up is hard to do” covers this without inflammatory rhetoric. By first declaring Tylenol to cause autism, it can be ruled out as a recommendation for reducing fever. With no alternatives to reducing fever, vaccines can now be not recommended, and therefore not covered by insurance, if there’s any chance of fever complications. The announcement is not really about autism, but providing a justification to portray the fever risk as unavoidable.
by drakythe | 2025-09-24 18:06:34+00:00
For companies where that is their entire business model I absolutely agree. Zed is a solid editor with additional LLM integration features though, so this move would seem to me to just cover their costs + some LLM integration development funds. If their users don't want to use the LLM then no skin off Zed's back unless they've signed some guaranteed usage contract.
by cbeach | 2025-09-24 18:06:47+00:00
Everyone on the establishment-friendly Left ought to bear in mind that a Reform government is nearly guaranteed in 2029 (or earlier)

https://www.politico.eu/europe-poll-of-polls/united-kingdom/...

You might feel less bullish about state tracking and control of the public when Nigel Farage is in charge of the state.
by jimbo808 | 2025-09-24 18:07:00+00:00
I think you're looking at it too abstractly. An LLM isn't representing anything, it has a bag of numbers that some other algorithm produced for it. When you give it some numbers, it takes them and does matrix operations with them in order to randomly select a token from a softmax distribution, one at a time, until the EOS token is generated.

If they don't have any training data that covers a particular concept, they can't map it onto a world model and make predictions about that concept based on an understanding of the world and how it works. [This video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=160F8F8mXlo) illustrates it pretty well. These things may or may not end up being fixed in the models, but that's only because they've been further trained with the specific examples. Brains have world models. Cats see a cup of water, and they know exactly what will happen when you tip it over (and you can bet they're gonna do it).
by giancarlostoro | 2025-09-24 18:07:05+00:00
I was just thinking this morning about how I think Zed should rethink their subscription because its a bit pricey if they're going to let you just use Claude Code. I am in the process of trying out Claude and figured just going to them for the subscriptions makes more sense.

I think Zed had a lot of good concepts where they could make paid AI benefits optional longer term. I like that you can join your devs to look at different code files and discuss them. I might still pay for Zed's subscription in order to support them long term regardless.

I'm still upset so many hosted models dont just let you use your subscription on things like Zed or JetBrains AI, what's the point of a monthly subscription if I can only use your LLM in a browser?
by somethingsome | 2025-09-24 18:07:17+00:00
I like programming, I like clean code, so it's something I struggled with when I began research.

But actually, producing easy to read code when you don't have specifications, because you don't know yet if the idea will work, and you are discovering problems on that idea as you go doesn't lead to readable code naturally.

You refactor all the time, but then something that you misunderstood becomes a concern, and you need to refactorer again everything, and again and again.. You loose much time, and research is fast paced.

Scientists that spend too much time cleaning code often miss deadlines and deliverables that are actually what they need to produce. Nobody cares about their code, as when the idea is fully developed, other scientist will just rewrite a better software with full view of the problem. (some scientists rewrite their full software when everything is discovered)

I think a sensible goal would be easy to write code instead of easy to read for scientists.
by esafak | 2025-09-24 18:07:18+00:00
In https://github.com/ducaale/xh it's something like

xh POST api.github.com/repos/owner/repo/issues \ Authorization:'Bearer ghp_token123' \ Accept:application/vnd.github.v3+json \ title='Bug Report' \ body='Something is broken' \ labels:='["bug","priority-high"]' \ assignees:='["developer1","developer2"]'
by pornel | 2025-09-24 18:07:23+00:00
All of the differences are attributable to the language.

The Apache runtime isn't sent over the network every time it's used, but JS in the browser is.

JS ecosystem has got several fix-everything-at-once libraries. However, JS is very dynamic, so even when "compiled", it's very hard to remove dead code. JS compiling JS is also much slower than C compiling C. Both of these factors favor tiny libraries.

Abstractions in JS have a higher cost. Even trivial wrappers add overhead before JIT kicks in, and even then very few things can be optimized out, and many abstractions even prevent JIT from working well. It's much cheaper to patch a few gaps only where they're needed than to add a foundational abstraction layer for the whole app.