MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by randycupertino | 2025-10-03 15:12:55+00:00
Vaccine developer Vaxcyte's deal for long-term US commercial manufacturing in Thermo Fisher's North Carolina plant for their pneumococcal conjugate vaccines (PCVs). Show's their betting on recieving FDA approval for their VAX-31 candidate which is currently in phase III in adults and phase II in infants.

Part of the "onshoring" trend moving more manufacturing to US facilities, probably due to both pandemic response and the current political climate. Overall imo CDMOs are holding more power in this biotech climate.
by AnotherGoodName | 2025-10-03 15:13:30+00:00
Nvidia has a control panel with it's drivers. Open it up -> Manage 3D settings -> Program Settings. Scroll through and see how every single program/game you have installed openly has different defaults in it based on application name. As someone noted above others do the same thing.

Eg. Frostpunk has Antialiasing for transparency layers on. Slay the spire does not. I never set these settings. Nvidia literally does a lookup on first run for what they judge as best defaults and sets these appropriately.

Every single game/program you install has different options from a huge list of possible optimizations.
by af78 | 2025-10-03 15:14:46+00:00
Ukraine was left out of NATO. When Russia first invaded in 2014, European leaders looked the other way. Claims that there plans for Ukraine to join NATO and that Russia felt threatened and was forced to attack are just lies to attempt to justify this war.

At the time fictions like "Russian-backed separatists" were made up to deny the reality: that it was a foreign invasion. Yet all the signs were there: for example, "separatist" leaders like Igor Girkin were citizens of Russia, not Ukraine; OSCE observers found military vehicles containing documentation indicating that the equipment had been maintained in Russia.

European leaders called for "deescalation", "political resolution"; seeing weakness and appeasement in the Minsk agreements, Putin escalated. That's the problem with aggressive leaders like Putin: if you look weak and vulnerable, they will attack you.

Russian leaders see Russia as an empire and regularly say Eurasia should extend from Lisbon to Vladivistok. Putin tries to terrorize us, stating that if we resist it will lead to "World War III" or "nuclear apocalypse". We must not fall for this, or we will gradually lose our freedoms.
by neoeno | 2025-10-03 15:15:14+00:00
Love to see fixed format mode in use :)

For those who are unaware — you can use COBOL in two modes: free mode and fixed format mode.

Fixed format mode is (afaik) the original, based on punch card affordances, and specifies specific columns for specific purposes:

* The first 6 columns for line numbers

* Column 7 for the indicator character (notably: * for comments as you can see here https://github.com/jmsdnns/webbol/blob/main/file-structs.cpy )

* Column 8-11 for special division markers, though they can extend beyond (visible in this file: https://github.com/jmsdnns/webbol/blob/main/webserver.cbl)

* Columns 12-72 for ordinary COBOL statements

* Columns 73-80 for programmer comments or whatever notes you like

All the columns are undoubtedly a bit taxing to the modern developer and their tools, so 'free mode' which discards all the above is the suggested default.

But, I think fixed mode is very charming, and if you're going to write COBOL in 2025, you may as well try to get the most authentic experience!
by jordyjor | 2025-10-03 15:15:51+00:00
Agreed in the general. Though one useful feature in FreshRSS that I've made heavy use of (no idea if there are equivalents in other readers) is the ability to mark new entries in a feed as read immediately upon receiving them. Initially seemed counterintuitive when I first saw the option, but I've found it's actually quite useful for me. It allows for a separation of true feeds coming from a person that I typically will want to read and take manual action on. Or more shotgun feeds that are continuously putting out stuff that I will choose to dip into when I feel like it (HN front page or Slashdot being examples of that). Without the ever-increasing counter of unread articles to think about.
by taylodl | 2025-10-03 15:16:05+00:00
Autumn has rolled around, and it feels like we're heading into another AI Winter. Not the deep freeze of the past, but a milder season where the harvest of LLMs still feeds us - just with smaller yields. The era of exponential gains may be behind us, and the Next Big Thing won't be another LLM, but something that augments or replaces them entirely.
by vixen99 | 2025-10-03 15:16:29+00:00
Good point! Interestingly there is evidence that at least some life forms appear to benefit from 'highly radioactive' water.

https://hal.science/hal-03025146v1/file/Petit%20et%20al%2020...

"Direct Meta-Analyses Reveal Unexpected Microbial Life in the Highly Radioactive Water of an Operating Nuclear Reactor Core"

https://journals.asm.org/doi/pdf/10.1128/spectrum.01995-22

"Culturomics of Bacteria from Radon-Saturated Water of the World’s Oldest Radium Mine"
by District5524 | 2025-10-03 15:16:30+00:00
I used to feel the same, but nowadays, I have very few normal calls, mostly from close relatives only, but a dozen of spam calls a week. And that used not to be the case before 2024. I know robocalls are/were a terrible affliction in the US for like the last 10 years, but they were very few of these in Hungary. I wish I'd know what caused this change..
by Centigonal | 2025-10-03 15:16:32+00:00
If I could ask you to speculate for a second, how do you think we will go from here to a clear successor to Parquet?

Will one of the new formats absorb the others' features? Will there be a format war a la iceberg vs delta lake vs hudi? Will there be a new consortium now that everyone's formats are out in the wild?
by 6stringmerc | 2025-10-03 15:16:39+00:00
What the actual fuck? The homeless problem here in Dallas is at an all time high. I've been in and out of the Downtown proper for 20 years now.

Completely unbelievable premise and not worth reading.

Citation: I was recently homeless following a stint in jail on a bogus Felony charge, and still frequent some of the resources / areas where I got help. 24 Hour Club. Dallas Public Libraries.

Tarrant County has a very good homeless program. They throw them in jail. Then let them out to do meth, then put them back in. They were my company in Lon Evans.
by cameldrv | 2025-10-03 15:16:40+00:00
It’s a different coalition now though. The FDR Democrats were labor focused. Then the 60s happened. The New Left student movements reoriented away from labor and towards racial/gender/sexual equality, and Kennedy signed the Civil Rights Act. Southern whites opposed this and you had George Wallace pop up, splitting the Democrats, and then Nixon swooped in with the Southern Strategy. The Democrats needed a new coalition and they went with disadvantaged racial/gender/sexual groups instead of labor.

The transition didn’t really finish until Clinton and the New Democrats though. Campaign money and TV ads got to be really important in Presidential politics, and to get that money, Democrats had to appeal to rich people, so they got rid of most of the labor aspects of the platform. Clinton signed NAFTA and MFN for China. Now there were two pro-business parties that served different identity groups. Ironically the last gasp of labor was the billionaire Ross Perot in 92 and 96 who ran on an anti-NAFTA platform. The only way he could do this credibly was to use his own money to buy TV time.
by bspammer | 2025-10-03 15:16:42+00:00
Visiting China will shake your world view as a westerner. It did mine.

I’m still grateful at a personal level to live in a democracy, but I’m not as certain as I used to be that it’s the only way to run a country that benefits the people.

The infrastructure is incredible yes, but the complete lack of fear on the streets, and the positive consequences of that, are something to behold. Women are not afraid to walk home alone at 2am. People young and old dance together in the street. You never feel on your guard, at all.

They haven’t completely eradicated poverty, but they seem to be giving it a real go. In one very rural area I saw an elderly couple living in a rundown shack, but they had a bunch of modern medical equipment, provided to them for free by the state.
Ask HN: What tools are best for ripping CDs/DVDs with deliberate read errors?
by HansGreebo | 2025-10-03 15:17:05+00:00
I've been meaning to back up my old Windows game library and have been consistently running into deliberate read errors placed by the manufacturers way-back-when to discourage copying. I've tried tools like ImgBurn but they seem to take longer than directly copying every file from the disc manually. Is there a generally agreed upon program that works for this function?
by m000 | 2025-10-03 15:18:12+00:00
Literally any Android smartphone should do:

- install one of WhatsApp, Viber, Telegram, Signal - install one of Gmail, Outlook, Proton Mail - protect/hide away settings and app store - lock homescreen icons

Done.

It's a pretty foolproof setup. And I'm not sure why you would need a brand specialist to get help for such basic stuff. Walk with a Motorola into a Samsung store, I'm pretty sure they will be able to help you, especially if you are a polite senior.
by menaerus | 2025-10-03 15:18:18+00:00
I found the old discussion here on HackerNews although I haven't seen it before. I only found it now because I wanted to double-check my hypothesis and see if my understanding is really off. Seems like not: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42387013

https://godbolt.org/z/aPcr1bfPe
by dotancohen | 2025-10-03 15:18:26+00:00
> Arguments are more powerful if you engage with the strongest form of the counter-argument, not the weakest.

Your are correct, thank you. I'll emphasize that there was no international concern expressed when Jordan changed the demographic composition of Jerusalem and the West Bank by expelling the Jews. Only when Jews moved back to Jerusalem and the West Bank, after 19 years of absence, is there suddenly concern the demographic composition of of the city.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_Jerusal...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamization_of_Jerusalem#Isla...
by ta20240528 | 2025-10-03 15:18:33+00:00
> "And your equivalence of administrative detention to the taking of babies hostage and murdering them and their mothers in captivity "

I did no such thing - I just joined the thread, go lick a battery and calm down.

But seriously, this tactic of hysterically conflating replies in a long, tedious reply to create a straw-man which then becomes the topic is taught to propagandists and zealots the world over.

Source: my govt taught it to me.
by alganet | 2025-10-03 15:19:04+00:00
https://blog.samaltman.com/abundant-intelligence

> Maybe with 10 gigawatts of compute, AI can figure out how to cure cancer.

> But we have been hard at work on this and believe it is possible.

I am glad they are serious and focused on the mission. Can you imagine what a disaster it would be if these people handling billions of investment were jerking around with toy apps that produce viral garbage?
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-10-03 15:19:32+00:00
It’s probably possible to minimize warts without negatively impacting other aspects of the software. It just isn’t done very often, probably because that requires either a full feature freeze (allowing all resources to go towards disposing of the figurative bathwater while keeping the baby). At minimum a pointedly slow, judicious approach to feature additions that helps designers and devs to get more right the first time and only ship fully baked products to users is required.

No, everything today is about endless frenzied stacking of features as high as possible, totally ignoring how askew the tower is sitting as a result. Just prop it up again for the 50th time and above all, ship faster!
by Yizahi | 2025-10-03 15:19:51+00:00
"Russia started the war in Ukraine to stop the NATO expansion."(c) - tell me now, exactly which NATO expansion has happened before the invasion of Ukraine, to trigger the war? You are lying, that's what it is.

PS: to anyone else reading this, the last NATO expansion in the Russian direction has happened 10 years before the invasion, when Putin was hugging western leaders and not bothered at all by the "scary NATO". This user is posting a retcon propaganda by a Kremlin. A lie.
by bee_rider | 2025-10-03 15:19:54+00:00
The most important note is:

> The software titan is rather late to the custom silicon party. While Amazon and Google have been building custom CPUs and AI accelerators for years, Microsoft only revealed its Maia AI accelerators in late 2023.

They are too late for now, they realistically hardware takes a couple generations to become a serious contender and by the time Microsoft has a chance to learn from their hardware mistakes the “AI” bubble will have popped.

But, there will probably be some little LLM tools that do end up having practical value; maybe there will be a happy line-crossing point for MS and they’ll have cheap in-house compute when the models actually need to be able to turn a profit.
by jijijijij | 2025-10-03 15:19:58+00:00
> The power of this isn't just where geometry and dimensions are known. It's when the geometry and dimensions are critical to the function of whatever's being modeled.

Yes, but I meant making a case for workflow differences.

CAD is bad at aiding visual thinking and exploration, since you kinda have to be precise and constrain everything. You can pump out a rough idea of an object, edit it much, so much faster in Blender.

Sketching on paper, or visualizing in one’s mind, is pretty hard for most people when it comes to 3D. CAD is not at all inviting for creative impulses and flow. People who can do this in CAD are probably trained engineers who learned a very discipled, analytical way to approach problems, people who think in technical drawings.

So, CAD is good at getting a precise and workable digital representation of a "pre-designed" object for further (digital) processing, analysis, assembly and production. I think Blender is better at the early design process, figuring out shapes and relations.
by cjbgkagh | 2025-10-03 15:20:06+00:00
I guess Microsoft’s investment into Graphcore didn’t pay off. Not sure what they’re planning but more of that isn’t going to cut it. At the time (late 2019) I was arguing for either a GPU approach or specialized architecture targeting transformers.

There was a split at MS where the ‘Next Gen’ bayesian was being done in the US and the frequentist work was being shipped off to China. Chris Bishop was promoted to head of MSR Cambridge which didn’t help.

Microsoft really is an institutionally stupid organization so I have no idea on which direction they actually go. My best guess is that it’s all talk.
by jMyles | 2025-10-03 15:20:09+00:00
The shared knowledge base with my agent has some graph-like areas, some table-like areas, and some that seem to evolve back and forth.

So far, I'm using postgres and helping the agent develop MCP functions for it. As we find some optimizations (or at least, reliably performant daily routines), I might make the choice to represent some relationships in a graph database.

One thing I'm building that seems plausibly likely to eventually call for a graph DB is "The Oracle of Bluegrass Bacon" (like the Oracle of Kevin Bacon, but for string band pickers). And it's nice for the agent to have fairly optimal access to this data as we build other adjacent projects.

But yeah, so far just postgres.
by thewebguyd | 2025-10-03 15:20:09+00:00
The new wallpaper/lockscreen customization is so insane to me. You can't select any of Apple's built-in wallpapers without creating a new lock screen first (which requires re setting up all your widgets). Whose idea was that?

Trying to set a photo from photos as your wallpaper also creates a new lockscreen.

the only way to modify an existing, already set up lock screen is to long press, tap customize, and then tap the little photo square.

Did a UX designer even look at this? Because it sure doesn't seem like it.
by alias_neo | 2025-10-03 15:20:39+00:00
This is quite the revelation. I had no idea that matches can't be watched on TV as they play. is there not even a pay-to-watch service, like with fights?

I've certainly got something to talk about next time I see some of my football fan friends, and I'll have to ask what they do to watch the games, I'm not aware of any of them actually going to the matches when I've known the local (Premier League) team to be playing.
by MarkusWandel | 2025-10-03 15:20:44+00:00
I watched my dad - a fine craftsman - utterly fail to comprehend pointing and dragging with a computer mouse when introduced to one in his late 60s. My mom would end up printing out emails for him to read. She, enthusiastically adopting this new technology in the early 2000s when she herself was in her early 60s, gradually lost the neuroplasticity to adapt to new things, and clung to her Windows XP laptop (32 bit) until that was obsoleted by Gmail POP/SMTP access going to Oauth, which the obsolete software couldn't accommodate.

It was still possible to teach her Whatsapp, SMS and Gmail on an Android smartphone when she was around 80, but that was the window of opportunity closing; by a couple of years later, while she could still use those skills (and still had the finger dexterity and vision to do it) nothing new would go in. This was an issue when her hands got less steady and she sometimes would tap or click the wrong thing and then get confused. The concept that a message, ever so slightly clumsily tapped so the tap was seen as a right swipe and therefore "archive" was getting difficult.

So it goes with old folks. At one point someone got her a "Doro Phone Easy", a retro flip phone with big buttons and simplified UI. She never took to that one, but I can see the point of it.

And why not just set up your elders with tech that they are familiar with? You can take an old landline phone - even a rotary dial one! - and plug it into a VOIP adapter and register that with, say, voip.ms, and provide the old familiar calling experience. Didn't work for my mom, because long before becoming uncomfortable with technology, she was already deaf enough to not be able to hold phone conversations - so email was crucial to her.

As for iphones and confusion. As they got more and more locked down, they didn't just get locked down against purse snatchers and such. I've seen several otherwise still fine iphones become ewaste because the giver couldn't figure out how to unlink them from "Find my phone" or activation lock or whatever it's called. These are people who can't fathom the difference between their Google account password and their Apple password. Not old people. Just people who can't give a crap about any of that, they just have a phone that someone helped them set up, and it works and that's that. That was one of Steve Jobs's talents - to see technology as a neurotypical non-geek sees it and make it work for them.
by edude03 | 2025-10-03 15:20:51+00:00
> I wonder if it will spur nvidia to work on an inference only accelerator.

Arguably that's a GPU? Other than (currently) exotic ways to run LLMs like photonics or giant SRAM tiles there isn't a device that's better at inference than GPUs and they have the benefit that they can be used for training as well. You need the same amount of memory and the same ability to do math as fast as possible whether its inference or training.
by dspillett | 2025-10-03 15:20:57+00:00
> because growing up my parents simply could not afford to go buy me an assembler cartridge for the machine

I was lucky in that my elder bother did the research and my parents (who paid for the things at the time) saw the wisdom and spent the extra on the Acorn machines, that were best educationally (while falling behind considerably wrt the availability of games, despite being more than capable enough alongside other popular machines on the market), despite the extra cost (which for my parents at the time, though I didn't realise it back then, was a very significant issue).

That sort of “investment” in us kids, and general encouragement of our interests, by our parents did a lot for us, me in particular (by luck rather than favouritism: I was just the most techie minded of me and my brothers, they invested in my younger brothers interest in music too), long term. They didn't have much, but they made every effort to make the most of it for us.
by kakacik | 2025-10-03 15:21:32+00:00
What do you mean eating horses is not OK, in Switzerland we have plenty of horse butchers, you can find horse meat products like salami in all bigger supermarkets.

Its not consumed in same amounts as beef for sure, but its not shunned by most. And yes there is no logical reason to eat beef (especially calves if we consider the cuteness factor) but not horses, horse meat is even healtier.
by WASDAai | 2025-10-03 15:21:37+00:00
This compressive sensing framework maps SMS text to graph-wavelet features and performs evidence-weighted sparse recovery under covariate shift. The breakthrough: achieving 96.6% accuracy and 0.960 AUC on the UCI SMS Spam Collection dataset, outperforming traditional approaches. By combining Chebyshev-approximated heat-kernel wavelets with density-ratio estimation (uLSIF) and evidence weighting, his method solves a critical problem in production spam filters—maintaining performance when data distributions shift. Full implementation with reproducible benchmarks included.
by everdrive | 2025-10-03 15:22:39+00:00
>So it goes with old folks. At one point someone got her a "Doro Phone Easy", a retro flip phone with big buttons and simplified UI. She never took to that one, but I can see the point of it.

We've got to keep churning UX constantly, for no reason whatsoever. The elderly be damned, usability be damned! What matters is that UI conventions always change and often get worse, and most importantly that this happens for no reason whatsoever.
by IAmBroom | 2025-10-03 15:23:02+00:00
They don't exist.

A French kid can reasonably spell words they hear, even if there are a lot of unpronounced or apparently useless letters.

I've heard from a Chinese friend that the same is true for Mandarin. Apparently most written words have a "meaning" component and a "pronunciation" component (excepting the most common words, which are easy to learn by rote).
by wrs | 2025-10-03 15:23:13+00:00
Cols 73-80 were sometimes used for sequence numbers so when you spilled your cards on the floor you could run them through the sorting machine.

This may help you get the feel (pick the COBOL card at the top). [0]

For an even more authentic experience, write the program on a coding form first, then give it to an assistant for keypunching. [1]

[0] https://www.masswerk.at/keypunch/

[1] https://www.mainframestechhelp.com/tutorials/cobol/coding-sh...
by john-tells-all | 2025-10-03 15:23:27+00:00
I've paid for Feedly for years and use it daily.

One section is "Hacker News People". When I find someone on HN who writes well, I subscribe to their comments in a RSS feed, so I can read everything they write. Very often they comment on a link I don't see on my main HN page, which is useful.

App http://hnapp.com/ converts names to RSS feeds. Example: `author:nickjj`
by CharlesW | 2025-10-03 15:23:41+00:00
> So similar to Apple Silicon.

Yes, in the sense that this is at least partially inspired by Apple's vertical integration playbook, which has now been extended to their own data centers based on custom Apple Silicon¹ and a built-for-purpose, hardened edition of Darwin².

¹ https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/ ² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(operating_system)