MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dizzyVik | 2025-09-26 06:29:15+00:00
I completely agree that this is not relevant for anyone running such workloads, the article is not aimed at them at all.

Within the constraints of my setup, postgres came out slower but still fast enough. I don't think I can quantify what fast enough is though. Is it 1000 req/s? Is it 200? It all depends on what you're doing with it. For many of my hobby projects which see tens of requests per second it definitely is fast enough.

You could argue that caching is indeed redundant in such cases, but some of those have quite a lot of data that takes a while to query.
by moooo99 | 2025-09-26 06:29:58+00:00
I think Tesla would still be a different beast given how much 1) they are constantly touted for having the best software on the market and 2) being frequently promoted as being „basically ready for self driving, its just a regulatory issue“.

Companies like VW have had their somewhat embarassing issues in the not so distant past, but nobody I know likes (or valuates their stocks) based on their software capabilities
by eru | 2025-09-26 06:30:44+00:00
Gambling! That's actually the number one use case by far. Far beyond eg buying illicit substances. Regular money is much better for that.

Matt Levine (of Money Stuff fame) came up with another use case in a corporate setting: in many companies, especially banks, their systems are fragmented and full of technical debt. As a CEO it's hard to get workers and shareholders excited about a database cleanup. But for a time, it was easy to get people fired up about blockchain. Well, and the first thing you have to do before you can put all your data on the blockchain, is get all your data into common formats.

Thus the exciting but useless blockchain can provide motivational cover for the useful but dull sounding database cleanup.

(Feel free to be as cynical as you want to be about this.)
by smittywerben | 2025-09-26 06:30:44+00:00
I don't believe in the "never roll your own encryption" it's literally giving up. Does it make economic sense, or is it just for a hobby? That's more debatable. It's also like a foil of 'don't use regex to parse html' or whatever, where the thread gets closed for comments.

The filesystem is so deeply connected to the OS I bet there's a lot of horror around swapping those interfaces. On the contrary, I've never heard anything bad about DragonflyBSD's HAMMER. But it's basically assumed you're using DragonFlyBSD.

Would I keep a company's database on a new filesystem? No, nobody would know how to recover it from failed disk hardware.

This isn't really my area but a Rust OS using a ZFS-like filesystem seems like a lot of classic Linux maintainer triggers. What a funny little project this is. It's the first I've heard of Redox.

Edit: reminds me of The Tarpit chapter from the Mythical Man Month

> The fiercer the struggle, the more entangling the tar, and no beast is so strong or so skillful but that he ultimately sinks.
by thaumaturgy | 2025-09-26 06:31:34+00:00
The best you can get is https://deflock.me/map, which is crowd-sourced, and therefore both incomplete and inaccurate.

Cities tend to resist public records requests for camera locations.

But Flock is currently in ~5,000 communities around the country. They have managed to spread very quickly, and very quietly, and the public has only become aware of it relatively recently.

There is also a good site at https://eyesonflock.com/ that parses data from the transparency pages that some places publish.
Stop Tracking, Start Growing: A Habit App Built on Social Accountability
by simonmiller | 2025-09-26 06:32:30+00:00
Hi Hacker News,

We're excited to introduce Build & Break - Habit Garden, an iOS app aimed at solving one of the core problems with habit-building: the isolation of effort.

The Challenge of Habit Tracking

The current landscape of habit trackers is excellent at logging, but often falls short on motivational sustainability. Apps tell you what you did, but they often leave you feeling alone in the grind. A missed day is just a red square on a calendar. There’s no immediate, tangible, or public consequence to keep you honest—and that's where we think a massive opportunity lies.

Our Core Philosophy: Social Accountability & Visible Consequence

Build & Break is built on two primary pillars designed to inject urgency and external motivation:

1. The Spectator Effect (Social Accountability): Every habit task a user starts is optionally viewable by others. We call these other users "Spectators." They can interact with your actual progress data, and they can see your daily check-ins, offer simple encouragement, and essentially act as a benign, supportive audience. Knowing that a small community is following your streak often provides the subtle, external pressure needed to overcome the 'just this once' temptation to skip a day.

2. The Habit Garden (Gamified Consequence): Instead of a digital calendar, users foster a digital garden. When you establish a new habit (e.g., 'Read 30 minutes daily'), you adopt a specific plant. The only way to earn "water" to sustain this plant is by successfully checking off your daily habit. If you miss a day, you lose a chance to water it, and the plant begins to visibly wilt. A vibrant, thriving garden is a direct, public, and aesthetic reflection of your consistency; a wilting garden is a reminder of slippage. The emotional weight of seeing a plant die is surprisingly effective compared to a simple, abstract score reduction.

Building a Stickier Solution

We found that linking a user's abstract goals (like 'being better') to a tangible, vulnerable, and aesthetically pleasing asset (the plant) creates a much more powerful loop. It shifts the focus from tracking past compliance to sustaining current life within the app.

Comment is welcome and the iOS download url is:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/build-break-habit-garden/id6752235671
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-09-26 06:33:14+00:00
“Under the plan, a company pledging to make chips in the U.S. would receive credit for that pledged volume, allowing it and its customers to import without tariffs until the plant was completed, with initial relief to help firms ramp capacity, the report said.”

This is actually quite smart. Though holy shit, policing those pledges will be a bucket of turd for whoever comes next.
by GianFabien | 2025-09-26 06:33:38+00:00
There are only two choices in mobile OS: Android vs iOS.

Android is more open and at the core it is Linux. Yeah, I dislike JVM too.

What I don't get is that even a simple app, e.g. FB Messenger (not the whole of FB) requires an 84MB download. What on earth lurks in that massive download when the actual app could probably fit into a couple kB?
by gethly | 2025-09-26 06:34:29+00:00
Athlon was my second computer(cpu) after i486. I think the core was K7 architecture and it had 700MHz clock, iirc. I rememebr Athlon/AMD being much cheaper than Intel and it was very exotic even thinking about it as Intel was EVERYWHERE(it was THE computer - "intel inside") and getting AMD was quite literally a question whether I'll even be able to install Windows and run normal programs(we really didn't know back then). I think I had another AMD after that in desktop(1.4GHz, dual core....iirc), then Intel in a laptop and now AMD again in a laptop. Will probably stick with AMD for the future as well.
by Someone | 2025-09-26 06:34:55+00:00
So, you want to develop an AR/VR device, and start shopping for hardware.

You’re not a mega company (yet), wanton get to market fast, so you want to focus on the AR/VR features, not on getting an OS, drivers and libraries for (3D) graphics up and running. You also want something (somewhat) portable, and assurance that you still can get hardware to deploy your stuff on X years from now.

You also don’t want to order a million units up front.

Given those constraints, I think you’ll find Android is your best option.
by carlnewton | 2025-09-26 06:35:02+00:00
I'm working on Habitat. It's a free and open source, self-hosted platform for communities to discover and discuss their local area. The plan is for it to be federated.

In the last month or so I've been solely focused on plans and content for my instance for my local town, so there hasn't been any programming for a little while but I'll be jumping back into it in weeks to come.

- The idea: https://carlnewton.github.io/posts/location-based-social-net...

- A build update and plan: https://carlnewton.github.io/posts/building-habitat/

- The repository: https://github.com/carlnewton/habitat

- The project board: https://github.com/users/carlnewton/projects/2
by bitpush | 2025-09-26 06:35:37+00:00
Arc was famously not built by ex-Chrome people but rather a bunch of opinionated UX folks. It amounted to what I can best describe as a glorified "skin" for Chromium and nothing innovative under the hood.

They realized they couldn't make any money with that, so they abandoned it and started Dia which was "AI". Again, they had no capability nor plan to make any solid product, was just sold to Atlassian

Actually, they really knew how to hype up their product. And their marketing videos were top notch. Innovation I suppose.
by solatic | 2025-09-26 06:35:53+00:00
In the naive/default case, durability is more important than latency. Servers crash, applications are restarted. If it takes a long time to rebuild your cache, or if rebuilding it would be unreliable (e.g. dependency on external APIs) then you court disaster by not using a durable-first cache.

If you actually need lower latency then great, design for it. But it should be a conscious decision, not a default one.
by LarsDu88 | 2025-09-26 06:36:19+00:00
Several years ago Elon Musk did an interview with Marques Lee Brown praising the original Deus Ex and stating his disappointment with the sequel.

In the intervening years he's invested tons of money into neuroaugmentation, capturing global telecommunications in a massive satellite array, buying out the US president, and poured money into a compute cluster for a superintelligent AI finetuned to be obedient to his will (although it deviates from time to time)

Basically Elon has turned into the supervillain Bob Page from Deus Ex sans the "globalist agenda" and with a dash of stormfront white nationalism to boot.

The original game takes place in 2052, and we are headed straight towards that dystopia.
by eru | 2025-09-26 06:36:34+00:00
Going off on a tangent: the blockchain people have paid my salary for a few years now, and I still don't own any blockchain assets.

I do like the technology for its own sake, but I agree that it's mostly useless today. (At least most of it. The part of blockchain that's basically 'git' is useful, as you can see with git. Ie an immutable, garbage colected Merkle-tree as a database, but you trust that Linux Torvalds has the pointer to the 'official' Linux kernel commit, instead of using a more complicated consensus mechanism.)

However there's one thing that's coming out of that ecosystem that has the potential to be generally useful: Zero Knowledge Proofs.

To quote myself (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45357320):

Yes, what Zero Knowledge proofs give you however is composability.

Eg suppose you have one system that lets you verify 'this person has X dollars in their bank account' and another system that lets you verify 'this person has a passport of Honduras' and another system that lets you verify 'this person has a passport of Germany', then whether the authors of these three systems ever intended to or not, you can prove a statement like 'this person has a prime number amount of dollars and has a passport from either Honduras or Germany'.

I see the big application not in building a union. For that you'd want something like Off-The-Record messaging probably? See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-the-record_messaging

Where I see the big application is in compliance, especially implementing know-your-customer rules, while preserving privacy. So with a system outlined as above, a bank can store a proof that the customer comes from one of the approved countries (ie not North Korea or Russia etc) without having to store an actual copy of the customer's passport or ever even learning where the customer is from.

As you mentioned, for this to work you need to have an 'anchor' to the real world. What ZKP gives you is a way to weave a net between these anchors.
Show HN: Browse how LLMs generate famous artworks as SVGs
by vnglst | 2025-09-26 06:37:16+00:00
What happens when you ask large language models to recreate famous paintings as simple vector graphics? This gallery shows their attempts to turn artworks into SVG images. What makes this interesting isn’t that GenAI can generate images from prompts - specialized models already do that. It’s how they combine knowledge of art with the ability to write SVG code.

The project is inspired by Simon Willison's practice of using this as a creative LLM benchmark. When a new model is released, one of his first tests is whether it can generate a pelican on a bicycle.

It also comes with a workshop feature that I use to add or generate new artworks. You can use it yourself as well by starting the project locally (and providing an OpenRouter API key). You can see it in action here: https://x.com/vnglst/status/1971461976040800730
by electroly | 2025-09-26 06:37:40+00:00
Maybe one of us is misunderstanding, but aren't there far fewer than 218 on the first move? The position in the article needed nine unobstructed queens to achieve 218 possible moves. For the first move, I think we could just enumerate the moves by hand, right? Eight pawns can move one or two spaces, that's 16 moves. The two knights have two moves, that's 4. Nothing else can move, can it? That's only 20 moves.

EDIT: I think I understand the confusion. A "move" in this case is a legal possibility for white's next turn. It's not talking about the number of moves in the game, but rather the number of legal choices for white in a single turn.
by random3 | 2025-09-26 06:38:54+00:00
I think you haven’t seen what most white collar jobs entail. Briefly - it’s stuff software has been automating Incompletely, somewhat badly for the past 70 years. If you automate x% of software developers it means you already automated at least the same percent of every white collar job out there. Exceptions are regulated sectors - like healthcare.

This said, interpreting images is not an image problem - it’s a human body reasoning problem. If you can’t have AI that replaces any engineer, I’d assume replacing a doctor will be just as unlikely. The healthcare bar is much higher - works in 80% of the coding scenarios may be good enough for software, it’s not good for life critical decisions.

So likely we’re not seeing any impact on jobs from AI in relevant health sectors. Now if you your friends think that the rest of paper pushing won’t be affected, or that their jobs entail some unique people skills, they’re in for a big surprise.
by crote | 2025-09-26 06:39:57+00:00
The media are (mostly) just parrotting what the politicians are saying. Having both major parties talking about "stopping the boat" isn't going to quiet down that down, is it? It'll just shift the Overton window.

What's Labour's plan when the boats are stopped and Reform progresses to "round up and deport all the brown people"? They are never going to out-anti-immigrant the anti-immigrants, all they will achieve is losing the left-wing vote.
by barishnamazov | 2025-09-26 06:40:10+00:00
I would guess that they found different ways to stay and work. I know that some companies send people to their office abroad (e.g., Canada or Europe) until there's a workaround by doing the green card process or applying H1B until it works out.

I did not end up using it, but I have personally "lost" the H1B lottery 3 times. I was also subject to the option above at some point.
by willvarfar | 2025-09-26 06:40:23+00:00
Reminds me of another Tencent paper https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3711896.3736949 that is how to combine distillation and ensemble for faster parallel inference.

That was Tencent doing parallelism at the model level. And now this is their evolution on MoE. Very complementary.
by osivertsson | 2025-09-26 06:40:53+00:00
You are misrepresenting this slightly in my opinion.

Yes, we have strong laws around alcohol sales in Sweden that try to limit damage to society from excessive alcohol consumption while bringing in tax that can be used for state services instead of going to corporations.

However!

We have a well-run state monopoly (Systembolaget) that sells alcoholic beverages at reasonably good prices, with a wide selection and friendly knowledgeable staff. You don’t need BankID to shop at any of their physical stores which are spread all across the country. If they think you might be under 20 you will need to show physical ID, passport is fine.

Any restaurant or bar that sells alcohol will happily sell to you, unless you are underage.

Low-grade alcoholic beverages (<=3.5%), including many beers, can be bought in any grocery store.
by lmm | 2025-09-26 06:41:03+00:00
> Is there nothing like some sort of number to register any tax withholding or the like?

There is, but it's not tied to any strong identity verification process, and so there's a thriving fraud where unemployed citizens will rent out their numbers to working illegals. It's not something that the tax office has ever really worried about, since if anything it tends to increase the amount of tax paid (if several people are sharing the same tax ID they'll pay a higher tax rate), and while they might bat an eye at someone with 5 different salaried jobs it's not particularly suspicious when it's gig economy work.
by gethly | 2025-09-26 06:41:10+00:00
> How does a digital ID solve an illegal immigration problem

It does not. That is not what this is for. It is just how they are selling it to the public. Just like with age verification for porn sites to supposedly protect the children or how they limit your cache and financial transactions to supposedly fight money laundering and financing terrorism(what a joke).

It's all about monitoring and controlling citizens offline and online to gain full control over their lives. Yes, it sounds Orwellian and no, it is not a joke.

Digital wallets and money comes next. This way the government will be able to actually control your behavior.

Why do they do that? Why not. It makes their lives easier as they do not have to be accountable to the people that voted for these public servants to manage the country and instead can push unpopular agendas by their puppeteers whom have private agendas of their own that usually, essentially always, goes against the well being of the population and nation itself.

Politics has not changed since we first discovered fire. This is nothing new. We just have better technology.
by notarobot123 | 2025-09-26 06:42:30+00:00
> The Gallup World Poll, which remains the principal source of data in this report, asks respondents to evaluate their current life as a whole using the image of a ladder, with the best possible life for them as a 10 and the worst possible as a 0. Each respondent provides a numerical response on this scale, referred to as the Cantril Ladder. Typically, around 1,000 responses are gathered annually for each country. Weights are used to construct population-representative national averages for each year in each country. We base our happiness ranking on a three year average of these life evaluations since the larger sample size enables more precise estimates
by Moru | 2025-09-26 06:43:09+00:00
There are organisations keeping track of this.

"All the extremist-related murders in 2024 were committed by right-wing extremists of various kinds, with eight of the 13 killings involving white supremacists and the remaining five having connections to far-right anti-government extremists. This is the third year in a row that right-wing extremists have been connected to all identified extremist-related killings."

[0] https://www.adl.org/resources/report/murder-and-extremism-un...
by lmm | 2025-09-26 06:43:29+00:00
> I have 2 green apples and 2 red apples right here in my bag (eh, set), and the size of the set is 4, and all elements of the set are apples, some of them are red, some are green.

Well, is your set equal to a set of 3 green apples and 1 red apple, or not? (And actually how can you have multiple green apples in the same set if they're equal?)
by theshrike79 | 2025-09-26 06:45:03+00:00
If your workflow is general enough, you can (and should) switch between models. They all have different styles and blind spots.

Like I had Codex + gpt-5-codex (20€ tier) build me a network connectivity monitor for my very specific use case.

It worked, but had some really weird choices. Gave it to Claude Code (20€ tier again) and it immediately found a few issues and simplifications.
by amatecha | 2025-09-26 06:45:34+00:00
Yeah, I remember when searching and browsing the web meant finding tons of legit, information-dense content that had absolutely zero monetary interest behind it. Sites of university professors and students, random personal websites (countless band/game/movie/show fan sites), and even the company websites were usually quite sincere and simple. I feel VERY lucky to have been knee-deep in all of it since the beginning, certainly a unique time in the history of technology. Not sure when we'll see something like that again, if ever, since humanity cannot put that genie back in the bottle.
by madaxe_again | 2025-09-26 06:47:48+00:00
Headline (here and on Sky) is clickbait - should read that this is a PROPOSAL.

This is a proposal at a party conference, not law. Previous initiatives along these lines have not come to pass, and this is unlikely to as well.

Expect universal rejection by the tories, lib dems and reform in parliament, purely because it’s a Labour initiative, and expect plenty of Labour MPs to disobey the whip.

From the BBC this morning:

“Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch calls it a "desperate gimmick", while the Lib Dems fear it would force people to turn over their private data”

If it does somehow get beyond the commons, expect lords to quash it.

I give this about a 20% chance of actually coming to pass.
by lmm | 2025-09-26 06:49:05+00:00
> Does two equal two? What if the first one is written in a larger font?

Exactly. Obviously they're different, but they're equivalent for most purposes. In traditional mathematics you have to handle this in a very awkward way: you have to say there's some kind of platonic ideal of two, and then writing two in one font or another forms a model of this platonic ideal of two. Then you can work with the platonic ideal of two, and add two and two and get four - but you've already forgotten which font you're in. Whereas if you say that twos in one font are equivalent to twos in another font or to some canonical platonic ideal of two, you can lift the fact that two plus two is equal to four back along those equivalences and get a four in the right font. (Or, more commonly, you just ignore that detail and say that you've got something equivalent to four - but you haven't erased the details, they're always there if you need them).
by rich_sasha | 2025-09-26 06:49:16+00:00
The small boats crossing are a small fraction of immigration. Some Google number claims 37k people got in this way in 2024. With net migration hovering around 0.8-1m people per year, arrivals must be well above this number (surely some people are leaving, making the net number smaller). But even then, this is less than 5% of the legal immigration, and probably a lot less than that.

I'm not saying it doesn't need addressing or isn't serious, but I think it's a convenient topic for politicians. It's a lot more media-friendly than the arrivals queue at Luton Airport. And the illegal immigrants aren't the ones putting pressure on NHS, housing market or train driver unions.