MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zamadatix | 2025-09-29 00:21:41+00:00
It looks like they defined that stat internally as "1.046e7", which would be a reasonable number assuming Joules. Elsewhere it defines Kilocalories as "0.000239006"... but I'm guessing they meant it the other way around (i.e. "4184" not "1/4184") based on how they use the data in the functions.

Sure enough, if you do 4e10/4184^2 you get right on target. I think other things in the energy category may have the same "wrong conversion direction" bug as well.
by dylanzhangdev | 2025-09-29 00:21:57+00:00
我觉得在HN上面，很多黑客过于天真，对威权国家抱有梦幻滤镜，因为他们离得足够远。所以，此类文章，隔三差五在首页出现。

而对于一直生活在这里的人们，这是两回事。有句笑话说，我可以捐款100万，因为我没有，但是我不能捐一头牛，因为我真的有。

----

I think many hackers on HN are overly naive, holding a dreamlike view of authoritarian states because they're so far away from them. Therefore, articles like these appear on the front page regularly.

But for people who have lived here their entire lives, it's a different story. There's a joke that goes, "I can donate 1 million yuan because I don't have it, but I can't donate a cow because I actually do have it."
by corimaith | 2025-09-29 00:22:31+00:00
>I don’t believe I have personally witnessed any other advanced economy that so ardently marches towards authoritarianism.

Have you ever been to Asia or South America or really the rest of the world? A digital ID is a pretty mundane. If you're complaining about "authoritarianism", if the government really wants to get you they will get you. Place more faith or care in the plurality of your political systems instead.
by array_key_first | 2025-09-29 00:23:56+00:00
Linux didn't make that choice, some Linux distros did. And it's a trade off - the alternative uses dramatically more disk space. Plus, with a package manager, sharing libraries becomes much, much easier.

If you really, truly, hate that then just statically link stuff. That's always been allowed.

Statically linked Linux binaries will run for decades. The idea that Linux binaries rot while windows has some magic that makes them live is just made up.

"But what about glibc???" Yeah that's made up. Glibc doesn't break ABI like people think they do. If you look, the glibc ABI is incredibly stable across decades. SOME highly specific gnu-only extensions have been broken. You're not using those, it's a made up problem.
by gsf_emergency_2 | 2025-09-29 00:24:01+00:00
Ah yes, a paper from Fan Shanhui's group at Stanford, which kicked off the whole business. Should have linked that instead!

This is 5.7 deg (using metasurfaces to selectively reflect reflect absorb different wavelengths)

compared to a less fancy 4.9 deg from their seminal paper (2014)

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature13883

Maybe comparable cooling can be achieved with even cheaper techniques..?
by asdff | 2025-09-29 00:25:28+00:00
Companies and investors do no behave rationally. If they did, there would be no ai industry, no buying gsuite and ms365 at the same time, no buying teams and zoom at the same time, and no return to office, among many other things that are part and parcel with the "modern" business structure.

Really a lot of these plays are about satisfying preconceived notions of what a company ought to look like based on what other companies are doing in order to make broad comparisons for investment. It is why merely hype is such a strong signal for businesses rather than having a product that can stand on its own two feet.
by lupusreal | 2025-09-29 00:26:14+00:00
I see no material difference between stealing nudes from somebody, and secretly setting up a camera in a bathroom. In both cases the victims don't know, so no harm is done right? Wrong. That's bullshit. Long prison sentences would serves as strong denunciation of their behavior. We need to be sending these freaks to prison so that the rest of society can feel assured that their government takes the matter seriously.
Ask HN: What pain points have you found orchestrating real-time STT and LLMs?
by kojaco | 2025-09-29 00:26:28+00:00
I'm building voice-driven apps/workflows and running into challenges with real-time orchestration of speech-to-text (STT) -> LLM -> structured output and/or function calling.

A few issues I've seen: - Accuracy degradation as the conversation length increases - Latency stacking (STT + potentially multiple LLM sessions) making interactions feel pretty sluggish

I'd love to hear from anyone else who has worked on real-time voice agents, call center bots, or even just personal experiments:

- What pain points have you hit in building these pipelines? - Did you find any workarounds or tools that helped? (Chunking, smarter retrieval, smaller NLU models, streaming tricks, etc) - Anything that you wish existed that would have saved you time?

Happy to get technical in the discussion. I'm particularly interested in how people are approaching LLM accuracy and context at scale.
by jalopy | 2025-09-29 00:26:47+00:00
Every time I read stuff like this I honestly wonder if the author is using the same tools I am.

I can have Claude Code bang out everything from boilerplate to a working prototype to a complex algorithm embedded in a very complex and confusing code base. It’s not correct 100% of the time but it’s pretty damn close. And often times it comes up with algorithms I would have never thought of initially.

These things are at least a 10x multiple of my time.
by mopsi | 2025-09-29 00:27:19+00:00
> Baltic republics were well-represented in party structures and in Soviet elites.

Name one Lithuanian or Estonian member of the Politburo in the half-century spanning 1940 to 1990. I'll save you time: there were none.

Your knee-jerk reaction of trying to shift blame onto historical oddities like the Latvian Riflemen reminds me of neo-nazis pointing out that the Wehrmacht had some 150 000 Jews in its ranks, "proving" that Germans weren't all that antisemitic and that the Holocaust has been exaggerated. Same impulse.
by westurner | 2025-09-29 00:27:42+00:00
USB pedals for a software modular synth would be a good project, too.

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44120903 :

> BespokeSynth is an open source "software modular synth" DAW that can host LV2 and VST3 plugins like Guitarix, which can also add signal transforms like guitar effects pedals. Tried searching for an apparently exotic 1A universal power supply. Apparently also exotic: A board of guitar pedals with IDK one USB-A and a USB-C adapter with OSC and MIDI support; USB MIDI trololo pedals

From "Python notebooks for fundamentals of music processing" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40555387

> Additional Open Source Music and Sound Production tools:

Brandon's Semiconductor Simulator lists what all is not yet modeled. "Basic equations of semiconductor device physics [pdf]" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44723304 :

> Notes re: "Brandon's circuit simulator", which doesn't claim to model vortices in superconductors or the Quantum Anomalous Hall Effect, for example; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43942279#43948096

electronics.stackexchange has CircuitLab built-in; TinkerCAD has circuit assembly and Python on Arduino in a free WebUI, but it's not open source. Wokwi and Pybricks (MicroPython on LEGO smart hubs over web bluetooth) are open core.

LPub3D is an open source LDraw editor for LEGO style digital building instructions. LeoCAD works with the LDraw parts library.

"WebUSB Support for RP2040" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38007967 :

> USB 2x20 pin (IDE cable) GPIO

FWIU Fuzix and picoRTOS will actually run on a RP2040/2350W. 2350W have both ARM-Cortex and RISC cores, but something like an STM can work for months on a few batteries.
by SilverElfin | 2025-09-29 00:28:38+00:00
This is just too uncomfortable. After the EU pressured a reset of the Romanian elections, after the ban on LePen running, and so on, it feels like European democracies are set on creating certain outcomes while calling it a defense of democracy. If you’re focused on banning candidates or parties, or on eliminating speech / access to speech, you aren’t a democracy. But you’re also going to cause an escalation in response rather than actually suppressing the people you want to ban.

And given that France arrested Durov (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrest_and_indictment_of_Pavel...) and is now allegedly offering “assistance” with his case in exchange for cooperation in censorship, this is all getting very messy and looks bad. Curious what the other side of the story is.
by calvinmorrison | 2025-09-29 00:28:41+00:00
Didn't Biden pardon his own son for Gun and tax evasion charges? In fact, James and Frank Biden got them too.

Obama pardoned his close advisor who lied to the FBI

Clinton pardoned Marc Rich - fugitive who's exwife donated lots of money to the clinton Presidential Library or something.

Grant pardoned his own private secretary

Truman pardoned his own yokel local union mobsters from KC

etc
by pkaye | 2025-09-29 00:28:46+00:00
When Red Hat went public, they gave those who submitted a bug report or fixes a chance to buy pre-IPO shares. I got a chance despite just a minor bug report and bought some shares and despite some poor timing of selling, eventually made enough along with my work related stock to have enough financial cushion to leave my job to get my masters degree and a career change. And it worked out well because not long after the dot com tech bubble burst and many tech stocks plummeted or went out of business while I was focused on my education.
by tim333 | 2025-09-29 00:29:46+00:00
The discussion was on whether Russia targets civilians or not. That is not really a function of whether Ukraine does.

If you want to drag Russia vs Ukraine in, obviously Russia is hugely worse as the aggressor with their rapes and torture chambers and the like. I'm not Ukrainian or Russian and I don't think I've seen a clearer good vs evil war in my lifetime.
by linehedonist | 2025-09-29 00:30:44+00:00
Relevant: “Federal court filings and interviews suggest the company once shielded prize winners from financial risk by purchasing prepaid annuities through banks or insurance companies. That practice ended sometime after 2003, said Darrell Lester, a retired Publishers Clearing House senior executive and author of a book about the company.”

Agreed, feels like the company should have been and should be now required to purchase an annuity or other similar product that protects the winners.

I wonder what happened in 2003. Probably the company’s fortunes were already faltering.
by abustamam | 2025-09-29 00:31:00+00:00
I belong to a local Muslim Chamber of Commerce that is basically this. Every business that wants to be a part of the network pays a membership fee (like $300 a year) and gets put into a directory. We have Muslim plumbers, contractors, real estate agents, etc.

I think such things can only work at small scales. Once there are too many competing interests it's not as effective.
by user3939382 | 2025-09-29 00:32:43+00:00
Been using it for years, it’s cool. Breaks a lot of websites but know to suspect it when you can’t make a payment or login somewhere. EFF does some good work but I’m much less of a fan than I used to be once I realized that at least to some degree more than merely net neutrality, they function as a telecom lobby laundered through digital ethics.
by asdff | 2025-09-29 00:33:03+00:00
Any lawyer you personally know will tell you they are not qualified at all to even opine outside their very specific niche in the law. Merely being a lawyer does not mean you are qualified for office. I would argue the most qualified people for office are the aides and clerks for existing politicians who have spent years working in the sausage factory already. I would argue committee and cabinet appointments are generally terrible because once again, lawyers are chosen to run certain domain specific committees mainly for political reasons rather than domain experts from a given industry. See what happens when we get a laywer as the secretary of health and human services rather than a credible immunologist.
by epidemian | 2025-09-29 00:34:19+00:00
Yes, i thought of doing that. The problem is that, while it would definitely help on the early game, it would also mess things badly on the late game. As you snake grows, it'll take more and more space on the grid, and you'll start seeing more and more janky whitespace-replacement characters.

The game gets faster as you progress, so it's definitely not a good idea to make it jankyer when you're try-harding it :P

I'd love to know of a way of "fixing" this jankyness issue properly. Without admitting defeat and rendering to some other text-admitting output, like the page <title>, as this oher snake game that was recently posted on Reddit does: https://old.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/1n9z77e/snake_in_th...

But, for now, if you're actually trying to get a high score, i think the best approach is rendering the URL on page, by clicking on the "?"
by jqpabc123 | 2025-09-29 00:35:02+00:00
They're A/B testing all the time, and it wouldn't take long at all for them to figure that out.

How? There is no way to A/B test if B doesn't exist.

I'm talking about "B" being a practical ad network alternative to Google's effective monopoly. An offering that provides everything Google does --- except the "personalization". Instead of keying on the person's history , key on the context --- what they are currently searching for or what they are currently looking at.

As far as I know, this really doesn't exist in a generalized, competitive form.

But it would be relatively easy and cost effective to implement. Just bring back the <META name="keywords"> tag and key on it instead of the person. Think about all the time and money Google spends to invade people's privacy --- and simply eliminate it.

The ad networks want advertisers to *believe* that the "black box" they are offering is market based and cost effective but they have no real, practical way to confirm this.
by stevenicr | 2025-09-29 00:35:04+00:00
Thanks for the suggestion, I am looking at it now - for some reason my first scan of the first page about it found on DDG I was convinced it was a non-self-hosted 'service' only.

Then a downloads page (which I clicked to wonder if it was 'you need a client to interact with our cloud service' kind of page.. seems to point to self hosting as an option - so I will give this a go.

I recently gave a presentation for another biz about chat community options. During the research I stumbled upon rocket chat with a totally grown up look and feel quite shockingly, and found trillian.im as possible self host contenders.

There were a couple others but some things in my features matrix made them less likely as a replacement for matrix as an option for those needs.

I'm still hopeful for matrix to become easier to deploy and easier to use, as it has real potential.

One reason wordpress got so popular is it's famous 5 minute install; and that was doing it manually.

Any noob can rent a $10 shared host, login to cpanel (or other panel these days) and click a button that installs wordpress, it's needed DB, creates the admin and emails you the details. Up an running in seconds.

somebody get matrix to run via one click with softalicious / fantistico like abilities please!

Of course wordpress benefits from lots of paid addons (for hundreds of developers not just wp/automattic) and a healthy 'pay for development ecosystem' - but most of that grew from the ease of install (and at the time lots of fancy free themes that were subsidized from many groups with different reasons).

With matrix I wish there was a chart of wanted features / fixes and people could escrow vote with dollars for things and they get released to everyone.

I think I group funded a feature for rocket chat years ago with options via bug county source? Something like that.

I also think Matrix would be better as a no federated self hosted install and connect some sort of bridge on a different server if someone wants to connect the federated stuff - less complaints and support issues with being bogged down.

The agony of trying to install has made me find other things to do so I can avoid having to do it this weekend, and I should of redone it last weekend. sigh.
by scarface_74 | 2025-09-29 00:36:53+00:00
That was not my intention at all (to have multiple accounts on the same conversation). I knew not to upvote myself or downvote a reply - which I did not do.

But back to the point, i always thought of custom bespoke enterprise apps were ones that usually ignored the Mac and especially ARM Macs.

Fair point - but a niche case I don’t see Apple going out of their way to support.

Before iPad OS 26 and real windows, I would have thought that the iPad would be frustrating even for mainstream office work. I could definitely see myself using my wife’s iPad 13 Air now full time - she does except for development tasks.

My old A12 iPad Air fromn 2019 runs iOS 26 halfway decently even with only 3GB RAM.

And Apple has never really cared about “the enterprise”
by jongjong | 2025-09-29 00:37:13+00:00
This makes sense. I do feel like intelligence has hard limits. Maybe knowledge doesn't have limits but intelligence definitely feels like it has limits.

If you consider IQ tests, a lot of it is about seeing a sequence and seeing all possible patterns and then figuring out which one is the most certain/obvious based on the limited sample given. One could imagine all sorts of complex patterns beyond the 'correct answer'. But there's a point it loses all utility value. But it's not right either to assume that the most obvious/simplest pattern is always the right one. Not all logic is elegant, especially not when it comes to human matters.
by SeanAnderson | 2025-09-29 00:38:05+00:00
https://totalrealreturns.com/ I always like to keep an eye on this chart just for a rough feel on how over/undervalued the market is. I'm sure it has plenty of faults, but I think it's pretty fair to say the market is in an abnormal state right now - both stocks and bonds are divergent from historic trends.
by chmod775 | 2025-09-29 00:38:30+00:00
> but I am not sure treating school kids like adults always works out great either.

This is why there is juvenile courts and juvenile justice. These "kids" are about to be adults. At some point you have to make the transition. Physically and intellectually they are already able to inflict just as much damage as most grown adults. A third grader who decides to go on a killing spree is probably not going to get very far, but a 16 year old is incredibly dangerous.

Whether 16 year old teenagers should be held to higher standards than children who just learned to spell their own name is not a question: doing so is a necessity both for their own development and those they interact with.
by jay_kyburz | 2025-09-29 00:38:42+00:00
I can imagine an industry where we describe business rules to apply to data in natural language, and the AI simply provides an executable without source at all.

The role of the programmer would then be to test if the rules are being applied correctly. If not, there are no bugs to fix, you simply clarify the business rules and ask for a new program.

I like to imagine what it must be like for a non technical business owner who employees programmers today. There is a meeting where a process or outcome is described, and a few weeks / months / years a program is delivered. The only way to know if it does what was requested is to poke it a bit and see if it works. The business owner has no metal modal of the code and can't go in and fix bugs.

update: I'm not suggesting I believe AI is anywhere near being this capable.
by gsf_emergency_2 | 2025-09-29 00:40:15+00:00
I think a better question is of the form "known by Ginsparg?" Conjecture: "no" :)

"aP,aS" is a recipe for achieving an equilibrium of (semipermanent) purgatory . Yet there could be tiny (cross-community, even though not community-wide) pockets of optimism/mutual learning:

https://www.w2cxm.org/

Could use better photos for their balloon launches, has backstage access to outdoor events, only a tad identarian etc

How's business at the Daily Sun?
by FridayoLeary | 2025-09-29 00:41:26+00:00
The police are overreaching massively. They are making 30 arrests a day and "interview" many more.

We do not rely on the ECHR to protect our free speech. If we did the UK would no longer be a democracy. I'm offended by the suggestion that our democracy and society is so fragile that without them we would have no rights. Expect a police raid very soon.
by thorncorona | 2025-09-29 00:42:32+00:00
> In summary, we introduce a general principle governing neuronal evolution and suggest that the exceptionally high prevalence of autism in humans may be a direct result of natural selection for lower expression of a suite of genes that conferred a fitness benefit to our ancestors while also rendering an abundant class of neurons more sensitive to perturbation.

I don't see how the title "Autism may be the price of human intelligence, linked to human brain evolution" is at all related to the paper?
by IgorPartola | 2025-09-29 00:43:27+00:00
Yeah I mostly use Django ORM and TortoiseORM these days and have used SQLAlchemy in the past. FTS is nice but things like locks, pubsub, stored procedures, triggers, views/materialized views, and many others are not supported out of the box and for some of these I don’t even see where they could be hooked up. And this is before you get into things like replication and multi-server clusters.
by mabster | 2025-09-29 00:43:53+00:00
We purposefully didn't use shared_ptr and hence weak_ptr. With these, it is all too easy to construct the "bad" version which has the stub reference count and pointer stored far away in memory from the object itself requiring a double dereference to access the object which is bad for cache performance. Instead we derived off a shareable class that has the reference count to make sure it is close in memory.

We were happy to use unique_ptr, however.
by godelski | 2025-09-29 00:44:05+00:00
> I have written a 1000 LOC program in C using an LLM. > I have reviewed it "line by line" though, I do not know why I would not do this.

1k LOC is not that much. I can easily do this in a day's project.

But it's pretty rare you're going to be able to review every line in a mature project, even if you're developing that project. Those can contain hundreds or even thousands of files with hundreds (hopefully not thousands) of LOC. While it's possible to review every line it's pretty costly in time and it's harder since the code is changing as you're doing this...

Think of it this way, did you also review all the lines of code in all the libraries you used? Why not? The reasoning will be pretty similar. This isn't to say we shouldn't spend more time exploring the code we work with nor that we likely wouldn't benefit from this, but that time is a scarce resource. So the problem is when the LLM is churning out code faster than you can review.

While coding you are hopefully also debugging and thinking. By handing coding over to the LLM you decouple this. So you reduce your time writing lines of code but increase time spent debugging and analyzing. There will be times where this provides gains but IME this doesn't happen in serious code. But yeah, my quick and dirty scripts can be churned out a lot faster. That saves time, but not 10x. At least not for me
by al_be_back | 2025-09-29 00:44:08+00:00
Cyber risks notwithstanding (they concern me greatly), I still think the Gov is better placed than Private sector to guarantee citizens privacy and security (at that level). Why? The Gov is better placed to be the ultimate non-profit org: can fund, can legislate, can draw expertise, is non-profit etc.

Treat the digital ID as critical national infrastructure, or else it'll fail massively.