MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kcartlidge | 2025-10-11 15:50:16+00:00
Why are we hearing that "studies" have "uncovered the concept of context rot as the number of tokens in the context window increases"? It's obvious, and we've always known this.

Agents are stateless, hence the need for context. This means that all they know about the ongoing session is what's in that context (generally speaking). As the context grows any particular element within it becomes a smaller and smaller percentage of the whole. The LLM is not 'losing focus'; it's being diluted with more tokens. But then I suppose anthropomorphism comes naturally to a company named Anthropic, and 'losing focus' does make it sound more human.

They didn't need a study and article, but it likely contributes towards the mystique. Hence the use of phrases like "this results in n² pairwise relationships for n tokens" to make it sound more erudite and revelatory.
by MomsAVoxell | 2025-10-11 15:50:21+00:00
The former CIA director is not, at all, someone who can be trusted. They don't present their evidence, either.

Anyone in a position of authoritarian power can say anything. Until it's prosecuted in an open court of law, all bets are off. Hysteria is easily promoted by anyone in the world - even American companies are capable of it - and there is much profit to be made from Russophobia, especially in the heinous market conditions of America's military industrial complex: a very well known hysteria-promoting industry.

In fact, by spreading this rumour, you are more soviet than you might understand.
by Pulcinella | 2025-10-11 15:50:40+00:00
I would agree with this. A lot of PS5 games using UE5+ with all it's features run at sub 1080p30 (some times sub 720p30)upscaled to 1440p/4K and still look & run way, way worse that TLOU2/RDR2/Death Stranding 1/Horizon 1 on the PS4. Death Stranding 2, Horizon 2, and the Demon's Souls remake look and run far, far better (on a purely technical level) than any other PS5 game and they all use rasterized lighting.
by simonw | 2025-10-11 15:51:23+00:00
Here's a counter-example for you from the another day: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/8/claude-datasette-plugin...

> This isn’t necessarily surprising, but it’s worth noting anyway. Claude Sonnet 4.5 is capable of building a full Datasette plugin now.

I do worry a bit about how often I use positive adjectives. If something isn't notable I won't write about it though. In this particle case Jesse's prompting / skills stuff really does deserve the superlatives IMO.
by rkomorn | 2025-10-11 15:51:37+00:00
To be fair, I'm not hugely annoyed about saying "sous-vide it" as short for "vacuum-seal it and cook it in a water circulator (or steam oven)" since it is, after all, a very common use case for vacuum sealing beyond just storage.

But in OPs context, I don't even know what it was supposed to mean. Like... just cooked? Are we including a final sear after the circulator?

Edit: and actually, "sous-vide" means "vacuum sealed" (or even more literally "in a vacuum"), so you technically "cook it sous-vide", you don't "sous-vide it", because it's not a verb. But also yes: language is how people use it.
by mcv | 2025-10-11 15:51:40+00:00
It's not just about the parties, but about the systems. Dutch social democratic parties haven't been in power in ages, but the foundation of our economy is social democratic, and right-wing parties don't dare to touch it. People like not having to worry about paid sick leave, maternity leave, unemployment, healthcare, disability, and a million other little things. That stuff is the fabric of our society.

All over northern Europe, you find high taxes, strong social safety nets, good healthcare, little violence, high levels of happiness and personal freedom, and high GDPs. This is the combination that works.

And the US was also on this path after WW2, but reverted course during the Reagan years, with all the consequences you see today.
by dialmaster | 2025-10-11 15:51:49+00:00
I built Youtarr, a self-hosted “YouTube DVR” for people who care about clean, media-server-correct libraries. This originated because I did not want to give my kids direct access to YouTube, but still wanted to allow them to access a selected set of channel videos via Plex and slowly evolved into something that I think is worth sharing. It automates channel subscriptions, scheduled downloads, and metadata so Plex/Jellyfin/Emby/Kodi can display the downloaded videos nicely :)

I realize there are some other projects out there that are similar, like PinchFlat, but think this is worth sharing. When I initially created it PinchFlat didn't exist.

This is a hobby project and I have a lot of things on my roadmap, but I'd be interested to get feedback from people here on HN. I have a fairly straightforward guide in my README as well as screenshots.

Anyhow, I hope others might find this useful. If you find bugs that are not in my issues list, please submit and I will try to address as I have time :)
by kburman | 2025-10-11 15:52:22+00:00
I recently learned that semantic search embeddings mostly represent topics and concepts, but they don’t handle negation or emotion very well.

For example, if you search for “paintings of winter landscapes but without sun and trees,” you’ll still get results with trees. That’s because embeddings capture the presence of concepts like “tree” or “landscape,” but not logical relationships like “without” or “not.”

Similarly, embeddings aren’t great at capturing how something feels. They can tell that “sad poem” and “happy poem” are different mainly because of the words used, not because they truly understand emotional tone.

This happens because most embedding models (like OpenAI’s or sentence-transformers) are trained to group things by semantic similarity, not logical meaning or sentiment. Negation, polarity, and affect aren’t explicitly represented in the vector space.

Might be common knowledge to some, but it was a cool TIL moment for me, realizing that embeddings are great at what something is about, but not how it feels or what it excludes.
by itrummer | 2025-10-11 15:52:30+00:00
We use mocking to replace actual LLM calls when testing for the correctness of the ThalamusDB code. In terms of performance benchmarking, we ran quite a few experiments measuring time, costs (fees for LLM calls), and result accuracy. The latter one is the hardest to evaluate since we need to compare the ThalamusDB results to the ground truth. Often, we used data sets from Kaggle that come with manual labels (e.g., camera trap pictures labeled with the animal species, then we can get ground truth for test queries that count the number of pictures showing specific animals).
by 0xEF | 2025-10-11 15:53:18+00:00
I'm not the person you asked, but on my OG Pebble, I get about 2 full days of battery on a full charge. However, that's down from about 4 or 5 that I recall from early adoption of the device.

The battery is clearly unhealthy, but hanging on. When I charge my old Pebble, after about 15 minutes or so, it claims to be fully charged. It isn't. If I take it off the charge after only 15 minutes, it will show a full charge, but deplete rapidly, usually within about 20 hours. If I leave it on the charge for a few hours, then use it, I get 2 solid days or sometimes a bit more than that.

My OG model is also one of the originals that does _not_ have the fours screws in the back, making it impossible to change the battery should it finally fail. A few years back, I picked up some original Pebbles on eBay for cheapr since the batteries would no longer hold a charge on those, all models that did not have the four screws on the back, just to see if I could find a way to open them clean. Every attempt I made failed, damaging the display and housing.

If you want to try an old Pebble, find one of the ones with the screws on the back panel and you can buy fresh batteries that will fit. Or get an old Pebble Time/Steel model, which are easier to maintain. I see them go on eBay for between $30 - $50 USD and maybe like $10 USD for a new battery. That's nothing for a basics smartwatch with a cool history.
by chneu | 2025-10-11 15:53:22+00:00
China has spent the last year(arguably the last decade) moving their supply chain to not rely on the US.

Trump is about to bail out a handful of US industries because of it. Specifically agriculture has taken tens of billions of dollars in losses because China entirely stopped importing US soy and other crops in the last year.

Trump's whole shtick is that the world NEEDS the US no matter what. He's absolutely wrong.

China has heavily invested in countries to avoid this exact situation.
by randycupertino | 2025-10-11 15:53:24+00:00
https://archive.ph/oY3XL

> The hack goes like this: First, you delete your profile completely and begin anew at noon on Sunday, using the typical mix of photos that work well: pictures of your face, body, with friends, and while doing activities. Then fork over the $29.99 for a “Superboost,” which ensures your profile will be more likely to show up on people’s feeds for a full 24 hours (Sunday famously being the most active day on dating apps). Don’t interact with the app at all during this time. Then, for the next seven days, reject every person in both your Standouts tab and your regular feed, showing the app that you’re an active user but that “you are not seeing what you want and therefore are desirable, so it pumps your profile out to more people.” And voilà! “I was swimming in men,” says one friend who tried it.
by teiferer | 2025-10-11 15:53:45+00:00
> we should euthanize another human

You are shiftinf the topic. This is about self-euthanization, assisted suicide. Not others.

> Where do we draw the line?

As written elsewhere, having to draw a line does not mean that the only reasonable conclusion is to make it illegal in general. It's a hard topic without easy answers. "Don't allow it" is an easy answer that doesn't do justice to the topics complexity.

A good friend of mine passed away a year ago with an incurable disease, diagnosed 3 months before his death, and it was essentially guaranteed that he'd have to endure unbelievable suffering during the last weeks of those months. He didn't have the choice to end it early. It was heartbreaking.

I for my part hope that I can choose myself when the time has come.
by simonw | 2025-10-11 15:54:20+00:00
I think that's one of the key things: skills don't take up any of the model context until the model actively seeks out and uses them.

Jesse on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/s.ly/post/3m2srmkergc2p

> The core of it is VERY token light. It pulls in one doc of fewer than 2k tokens. As it needs bits of the process, it runs a shell script to search for them. The long end to end chat for the planning and implementation process for that todo list app was 100k tokens.

> It uses subagents to manage token-heavy stuff, including all the actual implementation.
by dunham | 2025-10-11 15:54:30+00:00
Yeah, table 3 (path 37) here: https://www.fsis.usda.gov/sites/default/files/media_file/202...

That gets you your log7 reduction of salmonella, so it is safe to eat, but I don't know if it would be "cooked" (changing to an acceptable texture) if you could instantaneously bring it to 165 F.

I have no idea what that cooking process is like. In a water bath, I run chicken breast at 62C instead of 60C because the texture is better for dicing and putting in kid's lunches or wraps. I might try 60C if I was searing and serving whole. I haven't done dark meat this way, but I suspect it'd need a higher temperature or time to break down connective tissue. And I know that for lower temperatures (58C? - I haven't made that in years), you need to hold short ribs for a couple of days.
by ptero | 2025-10-11 15:54:50+00:00
> Should we go back to the shack era? Of course not.

I am not sure. Different people want different things. I ran a Hetzner cloud instance where I toss a simple webpage with locally hosted travel photos for friends and family. And a Jupiter server (with a very weak password) on the same instance for myself and any friend when we want something more powerful than a calculator.

And this messy, improperly organized, breaking all design patterns way works just fine for me. So I'm fine with a shack for personal communication and as a personal space. My 2c.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-10-11 15:54:54+00:00
In the US, from at least 1950 through at least the 1970s, there was such a thing.

You had, for example, the editor of the New York Times who, knowing that his reporters leaned left, deliberately steering the editorial policy to the right, trying to have the net result be unbiased. He literally had them put on his tombstone "He kept the paper straight."

Was it perfect? No. But it tried.

I have lived through it ending. As I have said, the difference matters. You see that in the distrust for the media. You see it in our civic discourse, where the two sides can't agree on basic facts because they can't trust anyone to tell them something that is not just one side's narrative.

But to all those who have replied, claiming that unbiased reporting is a fantasy, that everybody is pushing a narrative: When you say that, are you sure that you haven't bought someone's narrative? Or is that a narrative that you are deliberately trying to create?
by airbreather | 2025-10-11 15:55:29+00:00
I saw someone interviewed who had set the criteria of being able to enjoy some ice cream with his children and grandchildren at the regular family dinner on Sunday late afternoons.

He said that alone made life worth living, for him and them, but once any deteriorating conditions rendered him permanently unable to participate in this weekly activity then he felt it was time to go.

Maybe having a pre-set condition like this is less arbitrary, and also allows everyone involved to understand as the time comes closer.
by franga2000 | 2025-10-11 15:56:20+00:00
So:

1. camera manufacturers and film crews both do their best to produce a noise-free image 2. in post-production, they add fake noise to the image so it looks more "cinematic" 3. to compress better, streaming services try to remove the noise 4. to hide the insane compression and make it look even slightly natural, the decoder/player adds the noise back

Anyone else finding this a bit...insane?
by Pulcinella | 2025-10-11 15:56:35+00:00
The hardware 3D audio acceleration (basically fancy HRTFs) is also really cool, but almost no 3rd party games use it.

I've had issues with Xbox instant resume. Lots of "your save file has changed since the last time you played, so we have to close the game and relaunch" issues. Even when the game was suspended an hour earlier. I assume it's just cloud save time sync issues where the cloud save looks newer because it has a timestamp 2 seconds after the local one. Doesn't fill me with confidence, though.
by phil21 | 2025-10-11 15:57:13+00:00
It will be less the age of the actual cable, and more the standards used when cabled. The largest issue is likely to be splitters behind the wall that limit frequencies passed through.

Usually those can be found in the wall boxes behind the plate - but not always!

These used to be a bane on cable modem installs for apartment complexes, but the situation should generally be better 25 years later...
by c-smile | 2025-10-11 15:57:47+00:00
<output type="currency">123456.00</output> formats output using user's settings: https://www.elevenforum.com/attachments/currency_format_cont...

If you want specific country format then you may use lang:

<output type="currency" lang="de-DE">123456.00</output>

Currency conversion is not a subject of a browser.
by NoImmatureAdHom | 2025-10-11 15:57:47+00:00
> In other words, trans people can't use the bathrooms matching their gender identity.

I think trans people who "pass" can do whatever they want, and in practice it won't be an issue. I do support actual sex segregation in any area of life women will have no chance without it (like sports). The bathrooms thing is stupid, I agree.

> In other words, every academic department is susceptible to ideological litmus tests defined by the state. If Trump's white house feels like your Computer Science department has too many Democrats in it, you fix that problem or you lose your funding.

Every academic department already has really strong ideological litmus tests. It got way less intense with Trump's election, but it's still there. It's not subtle. You can be really good at what you do, but if you're religious or conservative you have no hope of getting a job in tons of fields. Sociology, for instance. It has nothing to do with how good you are at what you do, it's overt political testing. It was (in the case of many University of California schools, like Berkeley) actually the first line in hiring decisions.

> In other words, another ideological litmus test, only in this case the consequence is that foreign students can be thrown out at will.

I think this is reasonable if there's an objective standard. "Doesn't support listed terrorist organizations" is a reasonable standard. The standard should be written in.

> In other words, tenured faculty lose their right to free speech. "...in their capacity as university representatives...". So no, nobody loses his or her right to free speech. It's just that when you're acting as the mouthpiece of the University, you shouldn't be political if you want federal $. And I wholeheartedly support this. University presidents being political was a fucking disaster (see Reif at MIT).
by runarberg | 2025-10-11 15:58:22+00:00
Is currency exchange rate even part of the WHATWG standard? You will always need do to do something fraught / potentially nonsensical to convert between different currency, if not on the client, then on the server.

Formatting output values to the user’s locale has nothing to do with currency exchange rate. And JavaScript does the former rather excellently (except when the locale is not supported [ahm, Chromium]).
by array_key_first | 2025-10-11 15:59:19+00:00
I keep as much state as I can in the database, yes. For example - foreign keys. I use constraints in the database to enforce application logic.

I could do this in the backend, yes. But that's needless complexity and it will blow up. Eventually, I'll write something to the database that's inconsistent and then I have to fix it. Because bugs happen.
by seanhunter | 2025-10-11 15:59:49+00:00
There literally is a plugin [1] containing sensible defaults that everyone in the community agrees would be good as default but “backspace” and “incsearch” are the most obvious. “Backspace” allows you to delete with the backspace key beyond the point where you pressed “insert”. I don’t think I’ve ever met someone who thinks the vim default (not allowing this) is ergonomic.

[1] https://github.com/tpope/vim-sensible
by pixl97 | 2025-10-11 16:00:01+00:00
Which is highly concerning in itself. A ban on any steel imports from that country should happen immediately and strict requirements on preprocess detection and post process radiation levels should be put in place.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciudad_Ju%C3%A1rez_cobalt-60_c...

Is the classic example of what happens when you don't do rad checking at the foundry. You can end up with a highly radiated piece that ends up right beside someone for half their life giving them cancer the entire time.
by yawaramin | 2025-10-11 16:00:07+00:00
> Why are you ignoring my previous comment that contradicts this opinion?

Because it doesn't contradict it, it just disagrees with it. Because what actual argument did you have that people using an old version of the software can't keep using it? The one about things constantly breaking? On the web, the platform that's famously stable and backward-compatible? Sorry, I just don't find that believable for projects like htmx and Datastar which are very self-contained and use basic features of the web platform, not crazy things like WebSQL for example.

> When Redis changed licenses to SSPL/RSAL, users were also free to continue using the BSD-licensed version. Was that not a rug pull?

Firstly, there are tons of people on old versions of Redis who didn't even upgrade through all that and weren't even impacted. Secondly, Redis forks sprang up almost immediately, which is exactly what you yourself said was a viable path forward in an earlier comment–someone new could take over maintaining it. That's effectively what happened with Valkey.

> My argument was beyond any legal licensing terms.

And my argument is that there is no 'beyond' legal licensing terms, the terms are quite clear and you agree to them when you start using the software. In your opinion should it be standard practice for people to weasel their way out of agreed license terms after the fact?

> Any public deed builds a brand and reputation, which in turn can lead to financial opportunities.

Notice that you're missing quite a lot of steps there, and even then you can only end with 'can lead' to financial opportunities. Why? Because there's no guarantee that anyone will be able to monetize exposure. No serious person would claim that that uncertain outcome constitutes any kind of 'contract'. Anyone who does should be rightly called out.

> It's about building meaningful relationships between people in ways that we can all collectivelly build a better future for everyone.

Then by your own logic shouldn't everyone contribute to that effort? Why is it that only the one guy who creates the project must bear the burden of maintaining all of it in perpetuity?

> Seeing OSS as a plain transaction

Isn't that what you are doing by claiming that OSS is about providing software in exchange for exposure?

> Yeah, fuck that guy.

The guy who didn't even explain what exactly he lost by not being able to use the new paywalled features? The guy who likely was not impacted at all, and was just ranting on his blog because he didn't like someone monetizing their own project? You want us to take that guy seriously?

> everyone who disagrees is "piling on".

Everyone who disagrees? Yeah. Anyone who provides a coherent argument about exactly what they are missing out on by not being able to afford the paid version? I would take them seriously. I haven't seen anyone like that here.
by testing22321 | 2025-10-11 16:00:25+00:00
I’ve driven to 65 countries on 5 continents. Everywhere I’ve ever been has electricity of some form (even if it’s one solar panel on a mud hut).

I have never seen a hydrogen filling station.

The amount of infrastructure required to build out a hydrogen filling network is astronomical, and it has absolutely no chance of working. They’re just saying random stuff so you don’t buy an EV today.
by evanjrowley | 2025-10-11 16:01:18+00:00
Seems like the main reasons why I use Macs at work are not covered by this article, so here they are:

1. At trade shows, the superior battery life and screen quality make our 1:1 demos stand out. It impresses a lot of PC-focused prospects. I can't go one day at a trade show without someone basically saying "ooh, wow, a Mac!"

2. Using a Mac with an iPhone means I can send/receive texts messages with customers/coworkers from both devices. Also, they like to see the blue bubble in Messages.

3. When used together with any Apple device, AirPods save a small but VALUABLE amount of time when a headset is desirable for meetings/calls. Seriously, AirPods are the least fiddly of any headset I've ever had to use with a computer.

4. Microphone, noise cancelling, and camera quality are quite good on Mac/iPhone. The experience has been better than any PC I've used and it's the general consensus at the company.

The benefits are so good that I would avoid working for another employer who didn't offer Mac as an option.

Also, screw Apple for their ridiculous prices, lawbreaking, gaslighting of their users, their stance on repairability, the lack of "Alt+Tab" in macOS, the lack of "Right-Click > New > Text Document" etc. in Finder, and other intentional choices made by Apple to limit functionality of their devices.