MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by siddthesquid | 2025-09-05 12:44:50+00:00
> How is this any different than the Fed or the fractional reserve banking system creating new US dollars?

The miners get the fees. The fed does not keep the dollars they make. They also adjust the rates to avoid things like recessions.

> Nothing except for the thing that matters: If you have something fungible instead of something with high switching costs, it makes fees go down.

The US dollar is considered fungible... Help me understand how any of this is specific to blockchain technology and not included in non-blockchain technology. Have you worked with this tech before? Also, what about things like venmo and zelle? zero fees, super fast.

> And that's why blockchains are useful! To exert the pressure needed to make that happen.

I'm not saying they are not useful. I am saying the technology behind them is irrelevant to the costs.
by yladiz | 2025-09-05 12:45:08+00:00
They don’t. What happens is that your listen is pooled with all listens of all songs, and every payout the artist/label gets a check for the percentage of that total listening pool. For small artists that have relatively few listens, they don’t get almost any money.

So it doesn’t matter if Spotify passes on 70%, most artists aren’t going to see any substantial portion of that, label or not.
by partomniscient | 2025-09-05 12:45:44+00:00
>There were people panic buying toilet paper at the start of COVID also, maybe its a local specialty :-)

Not exactly. Australians did exactly the same thing. There were people who bought ridiculous amounts of toilet paper and stored stacks of it in their garage and other people missed out, causing massive demand vs. supply problems for a extreme future outcome that never occurred. It's the selfish-survivalist greed of individual humanity en-masse.

The same thing happens occasionally with petrol, unexpected demand for fear of missing our creates the supply problem. At extremes if it happens with banks, the run on banks mean the bank collapses because it's over-leveraged and can't give back everyone their savings because those savings have been lent but not repaid yet.

So a supposed long-term democratic capitalist society (Australia) behaved the same as the post-past-forced-dictated-communist society of former Czechoslovakia (now Czechia.

I think when humans get - it just occurs in different ways based on the local envioronment/scarcity/society and your version of brainwashing of your local upbringing. How many of us consider propoganda from the inside looking out (hard to identify) vs. taking an 'outside looking in' perspective? It's way easier to shit on North Korea than your local/national government. You have constantly shift your thinking in questioning your local news as much as non-local news.

Anecdotally, the recently voted #1 Australian song of all time music video was filmed there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIBv2GEnXlc, and one of my favourite footballers ever was Czech, so I may be biased. I really Prague when I visited, aside from the tacky tourist strip near the river on the non-castle side.
by bryanrasmussen | 2025-09-05 12:46:10+00:00
>A legal challenge? I would never hire you.

probably not, but I believe that if the time is too much being spent then in the area that I am in, the EU, there would be possible legal challenges to companies being allowed to have coding challenges - this of course depends if the actual time being spent on average is significant, 4 hours seems reasonable, 8 hours I believe would be actionable.
by Stranger_X | 2025-09-05 12:46:32+00:00
Most of today’s internet is noisy—feeds, followers, likes, and ads. But sometimes you just want something simple: one real conversation with one real person.

That’s why we built StrangerMeet . It’s a modern, lightweight space to connect with strangers through text, voice, or video. No algorithms, no endless feed—just two people talking.

We added one thing Omegle never had: if you both want, you can continue the conversation later. Otherwise, you move on.

It’s small, but it feels human. Curious how HN feels about this—does the internet still need randomness, or have we outgrown it?
by debugnik | 2025-09-05 12:47:27+00:00
Yes, although they're replacements more than extensions. Stdlib is OCaml's builtin standard library, Base is Jane Street's lightweight replacement of Stdlib (although the most basic types are compatible), and Core is Jane Street's full standard library extending Base.

There's nothing inherently wrong with them, aside from their API being unstable, but they're an opinionated wedge in an ecosystem already lacking the cohesion of newer languages.
by argiopetech | 2025-09-05 12:47:57+00:00
And fair enough. Nevertheless, it's not an ad hominem to attribute to the state a characteristic which has been observed in every form of government. Barring the newest (though COVID response ["lockdown" and similar] provided an example for most), no state has ever avoided tyranny in the long-term. It must necessarily be so, if only because man is fallible and power corrupts.

The founders of the USA believed the counter to tyranny was to keep government weak, so that when even the slightest hint of restriction on life, liberty, or property crept in it could be stomped out by the people. The Founding Fathers too were fallible and built a form of government which could not long guarantee those desirable characteristics. I argue the USA is a bad actor in many regards, and I trust it not. That said, it's the best of a bad lot, IMO.
by dotnet00 | 2025-09-05 12:48:03+00:00
Why should well behaving people be punished for the actions of those who aren't?

These sorts of suggestions always remind me of the various people who, during my teen years, loved to give unsolicited advice suggesting that if my parents didn't apply arbitrary restrictions to my hobbies, they'd be setting me up for failure (my hobby was teaching myself higher level math, gpu programming etc, things that led to my current career).

Day restrictions for vehicles can be temporarily worthwhile when the air quality becomes too poor or as a transitory step towards a more significant ban and restructuring of thr city's transportation systems. But if kept in-place as-is long term, they just lead to people finding workarounds (like second cars).
by torginus | 2025-09-05 12:48:44+00:00
What? It's not hard to transfer payments to any foreign country with a functioning banking system. The hard part is actually figuring out the legal rules around taxation and employment and contracts that are between two dissimilar legal systems.

This doesn't really help that.

KYC isn't an 'inconvenience' it's a legal requirement that you (or your employee) can go to jail over if you do not comply with.
by 2Gkashmiri | 2025-09-05 12:48:59+00:00
now you can look it up yourself, i wont give links or anything. "kashmir" as is name, is an international dispute for control over a region between india and pakistan with the natives of that land wanting independence.

What UN recognized definition of the place is "india administered kashmir" and "pakistan administered kashmir" that is split between the two till the time the issue is resolved before the UN. This is a internationally accepted definition that encompasses the situation being active.

what indian based troll factory does is, unilaterally call it "indian UT of jammu and kashmir" and "pakistan occupied kashmir".

I resisted for as much i could, i would revert the edits and they would be back, i would give evidence of the same in order to maintain status quo but sadly i could not keep up. i was overrun and it felt like being eaten by a mob of hungry zombies.
Career path: AI drug discovery or medical AI?
by antoperezmed | 2025-09-05 12:49:24+00:00
I am a med student learning to code and planning to get into ML research applied to medicine, but not sure which of those makes more sense to get into in the long term. Drug discovery seems more complex science wise (the field is full of PhDs), whereas medical AI (medical imaging, EHRs, etc) seems to have its bottleneck in the regulations, politics-economics and lack of trust from doctors. Anyone here working on either of them that can share their thoughts?
by dahsameer | 2025-09-05 12:49:52+00:00
I'm pretty sure they didn't do their research well. They probably think mastodon's app is the top result that comes up when mastodon is typed into google. They also decided to block MeWe which is weird because nobody I know has ever heard of it. Another interesting choice was Rumble. Twitch was left alone but Rumble was blocked
by lukev | 2025-09-05 12:49:53+00:00
Spotify is definitely one of those tools that has some ethical issues, but that is so damn convenient it's hard to imagine giving up.

I could do something like what the article describes, but it'd definitely be a lot of work.

So instead, to support artists, I decided to set a budget and start collecting vinyl. It feels right. I still get all the benefits of Spotify for discovery and convenience, I support artists, and I appreciate having a tangible artifact representing my enjoyment.

Plus, album art is way cooler at full size.
by naasking | 2025-09-05 12:50:35+00:00
> How can you judge if it is bikeshedding or actual warranted issues if you don't have expertise?

First and second order effects dominate almost everything. Always insisting on nuance therefore is statistically more likely to be bikeshedding than not.

> Experts currently working with him or experts who used to work with him?

Both, and also experts who haven't worked with him in an official capacity but have had extended conversations with him. I have zero interest in retracing all of the old arguments about Musk's competence, save to say that those who dismiss him seem to exhibit just as much deluded confirmation bias about his competence as his fanboys.
by 101008 | 2025-09-05 12:51:01+00:00
Why a company like OpenAI, that is so big and has a clear challenging goal, cares about online academies, etc? What's the % they can get from it? It's even worth it? They should focus all their minds to their (demanding) main goal, but it seems they are distracted with this stupid things.

This sounds so weird to me, and I feel I am missing something.
by kragen | 2025-09-05 12:51:09+00:00
Sure, to find contiguous chunks of 6 slots within a single word, you can do

t &= t << 1; t &= t << 2; t &= t << 2;

and that sort of thing is pretty appealing, but you lose the ability to know what size an object is just by looking at an address, and it's still a lot slower than scanning for an open slot in a page of 5× bigger objects.

Should I assume from your use of uint32_t that you're targeting embedded ARM microcontrollers?
by nickjj | 2025-09-05 12:51:21+00:00
> On the plus side, any company I work for doesn't have to worry about licences. Win win!

Was this a deal breaker for any company?

I ask because the Docker Desktop paid license requirement is quite reasonable. If you have less than 250 employees and make less than $10 million in annual revenue it's free.

If you have a dev team of 10 people and are extremely profitable to where you need licenses you'd end up paying $9 a year per developer for the license. So $90 / year for everyone, but if you have US developers your all-in payroll is probably going to be over $200,000 per developer or roughly $2 million dollars. In that context $90 is practically nothing. A single lunch for the dev team could cost almost double that.

To me that is a bargain, you're getting an officially supported tool that "just works" on all operating systems.
by eig | 2025-09-05 12:51:31+00:00
Worth noting that Elon only gets the $1T if he can deliver >1M Robotaxis, >1M "AI bots", and bring Tesla's market cap to $8.5T.

Looks like they are really doubling down on the 2018 compensation package and the idea that Elon's attention is worth more than anything.

More details on the milestones can be found in the SEC statement: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1318605/000110465925...
by Viibrant | 2025-09-05 12:51:35+00:00
From my understanding, the field of AI was all about knowledge representation. Researchers in the past handcrafted representations with expert knowledge but that only gets you so far. So instead, why not learn representations from data directly?

That's the current stage we're at and is the whole scraping the entirety of human knowledge thing. Compute has gotten good enough and data readily accessible to do all this, plus we have architectures like transformers that scale really nicely.
by neodymiumphish | 2025-09-05 12:51:50+00:00
But Tailscale never sees the device keys, so what they obtain and log is, at best, metadata. They have no capacity to decrypt any Tailnet traffic.

I'd be interested to know which competing services exist that DON'T do the exact same thing in order to evaluate issues reporting by users or observed across multiple customer environments.

ETA: Not that it's probative, but here's an example of how Tailscale wildly differs from other VPN/Mesh networks: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/apenwarr_zscaler-ceo-just-ann...
by auggierose | 2025-09-05 12:51:51+00:00
Wow, just checked it out, and they distinguish (for commercial purposes) between CPU & Nvidia on one hand, and other "accelerators" (like TPU or AMD) on the other hand. For other accelerators you need to contact them for a license.

https://www.modular.com/blog/a-new-simpler-license-for-max-a...
by nobodywillobsrv | 2025-09-05 12:52:13+00:00
They mention symmetries and invariances and what not but I wonder if it would be better to clearly emphasize that, in some problems, when you remove certain kinds of symmetries you are are combinatorially worse off. And this is ridiculously bad in some settings. Learning symmetries automatically used to be something I would see people working on but haven't kept up lately.
by sam_lowry_ | 2025-09-05 12:52:30+00:00
Hetzner has really important features than AWS/Azure/GCP do not have.

My favourite is simplicity. I can understand its Cloud offering in minutes, use it to its full potential within hours to solve business problems. Back when I worked for an AWS-based unicorn, AWS took lion's share of my time.

My second favourite is the ability to move resources between accounts. The effort my fellow colleagues spend now for such migrations is enormous, and they justify it by saying that even AWS can not do this without destroying/recreating resources and copying data.
by xtiansimon | 2025-09-05 12:52:40+00:00
To put it another way—Is this a change in US policy or a change in US publicity?

tRump is certainly a master of publicity, and his brand of politics consumes new and shiny.

Unfortunately, knowing what we know of tRump, we can rationally conclude both could be true.

What we also can reason, is if there is no political (forget legal) consequences, there will be less friction for more of the same.

M2c, I imagined the boat as a flashy Miami Vice cigar boat or much larger with cabins. This boat was the equivalent of blowing up some dude’s pickup truck.
by justin66 | 2025-09-05 12:52:41+00:00
The AP is still mostly in the political center and sometimes "skews left" a bit according to the media bias chart everyone I know references:

https://app.adfontesmedia.com/chart/interactive?utm_source=a...

(I expect a lot fewer people to reference that chart in the future unless they fix the new user interface)

These measurements do feel a bit arbitrary, since our definitions of left and right bias are subject to change. For example, one interesting thing about the AP is that their stylebook used to urge their reporters to avoid even using the word "Palestine," one of many ways they put their thumb on the scale in favor of Israel in that conflict. (not sure what it says today) They somewhat famously fired a reporter for having participated in some college activism related to the Arab-Israeli conflict that would seem very quaint and anodyne today, a firing that stirred up journalists and was pretty widely regarded outside the right wing media sphere as unfair. (ironically, a week or two later the IDF destroyed the AP's Gaza office in an airstrike)
by pyrale | 2025-09-05 12:52:46+00:00
> What's missing in Europe is a Culture of Tech Leadership and Investment.

Yeah... I wonder if that culture of investment comes from people all over the world giving money to US companies so they can invest. I guess, once they've alienated all of their economic partners to the point sales only happen forced at gunpoint, we'll find out that this "culture of tech leadership and investment" was always an abundance of cash derived from a global market.
by transpute | 2025-09-05 12:53:18+00:00
When you say, "I want", you need initial data control to give that instruction.

You can delegate to your doctor the right to delegate to other specialists without consulting you.

Other humans can delegate to the agents of their choice.

This is why the first step is for you to have control of your data, then you can specify/revoke who-does-what with it.
by andyferris | 2025-09-05 12:53:40+00:00
It's not about just _transactions_. What you wrote is 100% correct.

It's specifically about _fast_ transactions in the OLTP context. When talking about the 1970s (not 1990s) and tape drives, rewriting a whole nested dataset to apply what we'd call a "small patch" nowadays wasn't a 10 millisecond job - it could feasibly take 10s of seconds or minutes or hours. That a small patch to the dataset can happen almost instantly - propagated to it's containing relation, and a handful of subordinate index relations - was the real advance in OLTP DBs. (Of course this never has and never will help with "large patches" where the dataset is mostly rewritten, and this logic doesn't apply to the field of analytics).

Perhaps Codd "lucked out" here or perhaps he didn't have the modern words to describe his goal, but nonetheless I think this is why we still use flat relations as our systems of record. Analytical/OLAP systems do vary a lot more!
by rjsw | 2025-09-05 12:53:50+00:00
DEC/Compaq/HP had working handheld systems running Linux in 2000, starting with the Itsy [1] and moving on to versions of the Compaq iPaq and HP Jornada 720. The kdrive X server was written for these machines. I was running the same software stack on a ruggedized tablet that we manufactured.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itsy_Pocket_Computer
by hunterbown | 2025-09-05 12:53:57+00:00
Hey HN,

I'm a solo researcher (and 2nd year law student) building tools at the intersection of information theory and control systems for AI/ML. Inspired by Claude Shannon's work at Bell Labs, I created the Shannon Control Unit (SCU): cruise control for neural network training.

SCU senses the info-ratio and auto-adjusts via PI control for steady, efficient introduction of information.

The mechanism dynamically maintains a target Shannon Information Ratio (S = ParamBPT / (DataBPT + ParamBPT)).

No more manual hyperparam tuning — it self-regulates λ for stability under data drift and faster generalization.

Core formula:Adjust λ via: λ_new = λ · exp(-(Kp·error + Ki·I))

Ablation shows adaptive PI outperforms fixed λ by up to 1.8% BPT. Validated on Llama-3.2:1B: -15.6% perplexity (15.14 → 12.78), -6.2% BPT 3B: -12.6% perplexity (3.56 → 3.11), -10.6% BPT

It's open-source under AGPL 3.0 (for those who want to build on it while sharing improvements). Implemented as LoRA adapters via PEFT/Transformers—load on Meta's base models.

Quick start: python from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer from peft import PeftModel

tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("meta-llama/Llama-3.2-1B") model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained("meta-llama/Llama-3.2-1B") model = PeftModel.from_pretrained(model, "hunterbown/shannon-control-unit")

Try the Colab demo: https://colab.research.google.com/github/Hmbown/shannon-cont... HF space: https://huggingface.co/hunterbown/shannon-control-unit

X thread for more context: https://x.com/huntermbown/status/1963802419785039878

DMs open for feedback or 7B+ scale partners—happy to offer a 2-week trial to replicate results.

What do you think: Does this generalize beyond 3B? Going from 1B to 3B required discovering the natural fit of the new model, so I suspect there could be a natural equilibrium where models train most efficiently using this method.
by diggan | 2025-09-05 12:54:00+00:00
> The strong AI focus seems to be a sign of the times, and not actually something that makes sense imo.

Are you sure about that? I think Mojo was always talked about as "The language for ML/AI", but I'm unsure if Mojo was announced before the current hype-cycle, must be 2-3 years at this point right?
by tomovo | 2025-09-05 12:54:33+00:00
While I appreciate all his work on LLVM, Chris Lattner's Swift didn't work out so well for me, so I'm cautious about this.

Swift has some nice features. However, the super slow compilation times and cryptic error messages really erase any gains in productivity for me.

- "The compiler is unable to type-check this expression in reasonable time?" On an M3 Pro? What the hell!?

- To find an error in SwiftUI code I sometimes need to comment everything out block by block to narrow it down and find the culprit. We're getting laughs from Kotlin devs.
by mindbrix | 2025-09-05 12:54:48+00:00
The longer answer is that using straight-edged geometry to represent curves is a resolution-dependent operation, e.g. a full screen circle may need to be flattened to an 80-sided polygon.

Rasterizer can solve quadratic curves in the fragment shaders, which massively reduces the geometry needed for a scene.

Also, the native rasterizer only supports MSAA, which is inferior to reference analytic area AA.
by 1970-01-01 | 2025-09-05 12:54:58+00:00
Its fun to witness EVs living up to their original promise. Yes, the 1st generation of EVs without battery heating and cooling were mostly disposable experiments to catch-up with Tesla. That much is fact. However, the late model, new-wave of EVs (with proper battery technology) have crushed every excuse, except for variety.
by auggierose | 2025-09-05 12:55:25+00:00
First, nobody is obliged to give you money. You'll need to convince them first.

Second, not sure what you are saying exactly, do you think "experiments in cold fusion in a test tube" are a step forward for science? Do you think a serious scientist would believe that?

As I said, playing science, and doing proper science, are two entirely different things, but hard to distinguish from the outside.
by xhrpost | 2025-09-05 12:55:32+00:00
From the official docs:

>This section describes how to install Docker Engine on Linux, also known as Docker CE. Docker Engine is also available for Windows, macOS, and Linux, through Docker Desktop.

https://docs.docker.com/engine/install/

I'm not an expert but everything I read online says that Docker runs on Linux so with Mac you need a virtual environment like Docker Desktop, Colima, or Podman to run it.
by uxp100 | 2025-09-05 12:55:43+00:00
And in my inexpert experience, they are IP developed by the fab. So if you are doing CPU design work, you may need to understand PLLs well enough to read a datasheet, but you will not need to design a PLL.

I maybe had the most trouble just figuring out which instantiated PLL in the chip belonged to which PLL design, and where someone stuck the documentation in the giant repo. Especially since a hardware designer may think, oh we don’t need to update the docs, “nothing changed,” but the PLLs did change names because of a process change and their parameters may have changed slightly, even if they’re essentially the same. And chasing down small changes and documenting them ends up being a lot of the job in software.
by dbingham | 2025-09-05 12:56:29+00:00
I feel like the real opportunity for e-ink displays is white boards. I would love a 4 ft x 3 ft e-ink display that I could mount on the wall with calendar and note widgets and that I could also draw on like a white board.

Plus, remote teams would really benefit from a shared whiteboard device. A device with infinite scroll in both directions and shared editing. I mean, really adding infinite scroll and collaborative editing to existing remarkable devices would cover that use case.