MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kcplate | 2025-10-14 12:36:18+00:00
Did you also happen to notice the quotes around my use of that word? Apparently not. But now that I have pointed that out to you why do you suppose I did that? That was a sarcastic reference to the original claim.

You also attribute to me an attitude that I did not express on here. My point all along was that the propaganda goes both ways. The government exaggerates their claims and the protesters try to minimize their violence and destructive impact. I stand by that, especially now that you have mischaracterized me several times over the course of this thread. You also describe the Chicago protests as non-violent (and you claim you know about those), but that is simply not true. Just yesterday the Broadview Illinois mayor Katrina Thompson decried the violence of the protesters in her city from Saturday night, So you are contributing to that other side of the propaganda coin by minimizing in the same way the government exaggerates.

“There are too many protesters are raising their fists rather than their voices, creating chaos at the expense of the people who call Broadview home,” Thompson said in a statement. “Broadview residents lack the protestors’ privilege to return to calm, quiet neighborhoods for undisturbed rest.”

https://news.wttw.com/2025/10/13/broadview-mayor-shrinks-des...
by scott_w | 2025-10-14 12:36:52+00:00
> If the machine shop is so tightly constrained and error-phobic, that sounds like there's very little space of tinkering

For plenty of industries, margins dictate that this is the desired outcome. The goal is to optimise output, not react quickly to changes.

There are factories that work to order and can change to adapt to customer needs. These are fewer and further between, and tend to be more expensive as they aren't (by design) able to take advantage of economies of scale.
by gampleman | 2025-10-14 12:37:12+00:00
Hilariously written but also too true.

One start up I worked at we had 2 Kubernetes clusters and a rat's nest of microservices for an internal tool that, had we been actually successful at delivering sufficient value would have been used by at most a 100 employees (and those would unlikely be concurrent). And this was an extremely highly valued company at the time.

Another place I worked at we were paying for 2 dev ops engineers (and those guys don't come cheap) to maintain our deployment cluster for 3 apps which each had a single customer (with a handful of users). This whole operation had like 20 people and an engineering team of 8.
by etiennebausson | 2025-10-14 12:37:19+00:00
Black swan event: an event that comes as a surprise, has a major effect, and is often inappropriately rationalized after the fact with the benefit of hindsight.

Trump is the direction taken by U.S. politics for decades now. I could see it post- 9/11, and I was not the most enlightened teenager. Others probably saw it coming years or decades earlier.
by doubled112 | 2025-10-14 12:37:21+00:00
Yes, the Intel N95 CPU. They're common in sub-$200 mini PCs. We'll see about longevity. It's run over two years 24x7.

I agree about finding old hardware to use. Sometimes it is the way to go.

I ran old Dell laptops from the recycle bin at work as servers for some time. I ran old gaming machines at one point as well.

Those laptops used more power than this thing, put out more heat, and were slower.

I was just saying that people don't always need dual 150W Xeons monsters for homelab.
by nunez | 2025-10-14 12:37:40+00:00
This is very similar to Tesla's FSD adoption in my mind.

For some (me), it's amazing because I use the technology often despite its inaccuracies. Put another way, it's valuable enough to mitigate its flaws.

For many others, it's on a spectrum between "use it sometimes but disengage any time it does something I wouldn't do" and "never use it" depending on how much control they want over their car.

In my case, I'm totally fine handing driving off to AI (more like ML + computer vision) most times but am not okay handing off my brain to AI (LLMs) because it makes too many mistakes and the work I'd need to do to spot-check them is about the same as I'd need to put in to do the thing myself.
by randyrand | 2025-10-14 12:38:14+00:00
> And as far as manuals and customer support, what you're saying is that you can't afford to do cross-platform properly

No. What I'm saying is, when people search "Blender lighting tutorial" or "Capcut editing tutorial" on youtube, they want to watch the most popular tutorial and they want it to behave exactly like their phone. If there are any differences whatsoever, like an OS specific swipe back gesture, they're going to leave negative reviews that their app is not working.

You want a good unified app experience, with as minimal deviation as possible only where necessary.
by DanielHB | 2025-10-14 12:38:25+00:00
I remember hearing about all the support from Intel for "0-cost" virtualization at the hardware level way before I heard about containers. From what I remember it was mostly to speed up virtual machines (VMWare stuff). It was a massive market differentiator for Intel in the server space.

I vaguely remember having to turn on some features in VirtualBox at the time to speed up my VMs, it was a massive uplift in performance if you had a CPU that supported it.
Show HN
by pdg11 | 2025-10-14 12:38:56+00:00
Hey everyone!

Wanted to share a new project I'm working on and hoping to get some beta users for it. We're building a full on AI slackbot that has full control over a project management tool. So as work is happening in Slack you can tag it with something like 'hey @thepm can you create a task for this?" and it will create a task, add relevant detials from the slack conversation and link to it directly in the web app.

we made it because our slack is full of threads with things that need to get done but no one really follows up on them. we want to build a real AI project manager and can create tasks, assign work, make updates, and overall help manage work.

It's still early stages but our slackbot is currently working and creating, updating, and assigning tasks.

So if you work in slack and struggle with task management as much as we do, hit me up and i'll hook you up with a free account in exchange for some feedback!
by gryfft | 2025-10-14 12:38:59+00:00
They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words.

They have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors.

They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.
by nucleardog | 2025-10-14 12:39:55+00:00
> Insane take because we're talking about binding something from /dev/ to a namespace, which is much easier and faster than any VM pass-through even if your CPU has features for that pass-through.

Defining "works better" as quicker, simpler to set up, more intuitive, or similar... I'd still argue passing through a port rather than a device "works better".

E.g., I essentially gave up trying to pass a Google Coral through to a container. When connected, it shows up as one vendor+device ID, then once you push the firmware+model to it it reconnects with a different vendor+device ID.

Saying "anything plugged in (or not plugged in) to this USB port is this VM's problem" is quite easy to set up, handles disconnecting and reconnecting as you would expect, is resilient against whatever weird stuff the device does, upgrading or replacing the device, etc.
by cubefox | 2025-10-14 12:41:36+00:00
Yeah, that's another point: the modern first-person controls you describe were once thought to be counterintuitive compared to the old Wolfenstein style controls.

A similar point holds for third-person games: Before Super Mario 64, all third-person games had Wolfenstein style tank controls where left/right rotates the character in place and up/down makes it move forward/backward. E.g. Tomb Raider or Mega Man Legends. The idea to make character movement relative to the camera viewpoint wasn't obvious.

(Though the Tomb Raider developers tried to work around this to a degree by fixing the camera behind the character, which prevented to most counterintuitive control issues Mega Man Legends had, but also meant free camera rotation was impossible.)
by Veliladon | 2025-10-14 12:41:52+00:00
>But you cannot use this anywhere where the ultrasound would be blocked by other organs.

Yes you can. If you had an array of ultrasonic transducers around the body you could have each of them in phase targeting a single spot. Beamforming is a thing we've been doing for years with RF. It's even more trivial with sound.
by bangaroo | 2025-10-14 12:42:04+00:00
every time i say "the tech seems to be stagnating" or "this model seems worse" based on my observations i get this response. "well, it's better for other use cases." i have even heard people say "this is worse for the things i use it for, but i know it's better for things i don't use it for."

i have yet to hear anyone seriously explain to me a single real-world thing that GPT5 is better at with any sort of evidence (or even anecdote!) i've seen benchmarks! but i cannot point to a single person who seems to think that they are accomplishing real-world tasks with GPT5 better than they were with GPT4.

the few cases i have heard that venture near that ask may be moderately intriguing, but don't seem to justify the overall cost of building and running the model, even if there have been marginal or perhaps even impressive leaps in very narrow use cases. one of the core features of LLMs is they are allegedly general-purpose. i don't know that i really believe a company is worth billions if they take their flagship product that can write sentences, generate a plan, follow instructions and do math and they are constantly making it moderately better at writing sentences, or following instructions, or coming up with a plan and it consequently forgets how to do math, or becomes belligerent, or sycophantic, or what have you.

to me, as a user with a broad range of use cases (internet search, text manipulation, deep research, writing code) i haven't seen many meaningful increases in quality of task execution in a very, very long time. this tracks with my understanding of transformer models, as they don't work in a way that suggests to me that they COULD be good at executing tasks. this is why i'm always so skeptical of people saying "the big breakthrough is coming." transformer models seem self-limiting by merit of how they are designed. there are features of thought they simply lack, and while i accept there's probably nobody who fully understands how they work, i also think at this point we can safely say there is no superintelligence in there to eke out and we're at the margins of their performance.

the entire pitch behind GPT and OpenAI in general is that these are broadly applicable, dare-i-say near-AGI models that can be used by every human as an assistant to solve all their problems and can be prompted with simple, natural language english. if they can only be good at a few things at a time and require extensive prompt engineering to bully into consistent behavior, we've just created a non-deterministic programming language, a thing precisely nobody wants.
by bko | 2025-10-14 12:42:11+00:00
Where does it say that "your access might be revoked because you asked questions"? They're journalists, that's what they do.

There's nowhere that says that a government has to give access to the grounds of a building. Did you feel as strongly when Biden gave no press conferences between November 2023 to July 2024? It's just silly to put your flag into the ground on this particular issue.
by andrewlgood | 2025-10-14 12:42:57+00:00
Buybacks do not necessarily create an increase in stock price. Economically no value has been created. Cash on a balance sheet has simply been exchanged for shares. The people selling their shares in the buyout get the "value" of the company at that moment. The remaining shareholders now own a larger percentage of a smaller company i.e. a company that no longer has the cash used for the buyout.

Markets tend to reward companies that use buybacks as there is a belief the buybacks are a demonstration of discipline by the management team. Conceptually COMPANIES SHOULD BUY BACK STOCK IF THEY DO NOT HAVE BETTER ROI PROJECTS IN THE PIPELINE. This frequently happens in mature industries.

As noted above, buybacks are another means to return cash to investors. Today, in the US, the tax rate on qualified dividends and long-term capital gains are equivalent for most shareholders. This has not always been the case. When tax rates for capital gains are lower than dividends, buybacks are a more efficient means to return capital to investors.

Buybacks also allow for more tax planning. When dividends are issued, the investors have to pay taxes on them at that time. Stock buybacks allow investors to choose when they want to pay taxes. They can sell into the buyback and pay taxes now or hold the stock and pay taxes at a later time.

Buybacks are can be part of normal corporate capitalization decisions - what is the appropriate debt to equity ratio for the company.

Finally, changing dividend levels has its own impact on stock price. If a company increases its dividend, them market expects it to remain increased. In this case the stock price goes up as investors expect more dividends in the future. When a company cuts its dividend (rare event), the stock price drops dramatically as the market punishes company not only for the reduced expectation of future dividends but also because companies only cut dividends when they are having severe problems. Some companines issue a special dividend related to a one-time event such as selling a division. The stock price does not do much in these events.

All of this is to say that stock buybacks are not why corporations reduced basic research investment. I was at GE watching the famous research centers getting cut. The bottom line was the research coming out of the centers was not creating a meaningful ROI. At one point the researchers went to the various GE businesses looking for projects where their expertise could add value - an internal consulting group. They gave up after a year as there was so little success. Corporate research centers are expensive. They need to earn their keep.
Show HN: MCPulse: Open-source analytics and observability for MCP servers
by sirrobot01 | 2025-10-14 12:43:06+00:00
I built MCPulse, an open-source analytics platform for MCP servers.

MCPulse provides:

Real-time tracking of tool calls, performance, and errors Self-hosted with automatic parameter sanitization Built on Go + TimescaleDB SDKs for Python and Go and a proxy for running other's MCP servers
by DrScientist | 2025-10-14 12:43:18+00:00
I think I've added a couple of elements to make it possible to scale your auth service if you need to. Easily swappable implementations and making sure the interfaces advertise that calls may simply fail.

Even so it's still very simple.

To scale your auth service you just write a proxy to a remote implementation and pass that in - any load balancing etc is hidden behind that same interface and none of the rest of the code cares.
by akimbostrawman | 2025-10-14 12:43:35+00:00
Amazing project my only gripes about KDE is that while the customization is great it can feel overwhelming and opaque. For example multiple different ways to get transparency (Kvantum & qt6ct) but nothing built in or large amount of different but seemingly connected config files with confusing syntax in .config

I hope the work on union will help fix some of that
by RcouF1uZ4gsC | 2025-10-14 12:44:27+00:00
I would agree the anti-monopoly action had far more to do with that.

Basically, if you you think you can leverage your R&D into maintaining your monopoly and extending it to other areas it makes sense if for nothing else to keep the smart people who might otherwise disrupt your monopoly connected to you.

But if you are going to get broken up, just take as much short term profits as soon as you can
Show HN: docker/model-runner – an open-source tool for local LLMs
by ericcurtin | 2025-10-14 12:44:55+00:00
Hey Hacker News,

We're the maintainers of docker/model-runner and wanted to share some major updates we're excited about.

Link: https://github.com/docker/model-runner

We are rebooting the community:

https://www.docker.com/blog/rebooting-model-runner-community...

At its core, model-runner is a simple, backend-agnostic tool for downloading and running local large language models. Think of it as a consistent interface to interact with different model backends. One of our main backends is llama.cpp, and we make it a point to contribute any improvements we make back upstream to their project. It also allows people to transport models via OCI registries like Docker Hub. Docker Hub hosts our curated local AI model collection, packaged as OCI Artifacts and ready to run. You can easily download, share, and upload models on Docker Hub, making it a central hub for both containerized applications and the next wave of generative AI.

We've been working hard on a few things recently:

- Vulkan and AMD Support: We've just merged support for Vulkan, which opens up local inference to a much wider range of GPUs, especially from AMD.

- Contributor Experience: We refactored the project into a monorepo. The main goal was to make the architecture clearer and dramatically lower the barrier for new contributors to get involved and understand the codebase.

- It's Fully Open Source: We know that a project from Docker might raise questions about its openness. To be clear, this is a 100% open-source, Apache 2.0 licensed project. We want to build a community around it and welcome all contributions, from documentation fixes to new model backends.

- DGX Spark day-0 support, we've got it!

Our goal is to grow the community. We'll be here all day to answer any questions you have. We'd love for you to check it out, give us a star if you like it, and let us know what you think.

Thanks!
by FrustratedMonky | 2025-10-14 12:44:55+00:00
I don't buy that it isn't in the US's strategic interest to diversify away from fossil fuels.

We know the shale oil boom wont last, that larger reserves are in other countries. The Us should be diversifying now, before it runs out. To be prepared. Eventually we'll just be back to beholding to some other country for oil.

It's like we were granted some breathing room and just squandering it, when we could be leaping ahead by developing other sources of energy.
Show HN: Color – first smart AI aggregator
by chadlad101 | 2025-10-14 12:46:19+00:00
Color.ag detects your question’s category and intent, matches it to the most relevant benchmark, and routes it to the top-performing AI models to ensure you get the best answer to your question. The AI models answers are then combined into a consensus summary for the smartest, most balanced response. No need to keep up with the latest models all the time! See the top 3 AI answers for your question and get consensus on them.
by api | 2025-10-14 12:46:40+00:00
I've always wondered if optical transistors and optical processors might be able to kick the crap out of conventional electronic ones even if they're fabricated at a much larger "process node" if the switching could be orders of magnitude faster.

Electronics has topped out in the gigahertz range. We keep cramming more cores and more ALU units and wider vectors onto a chip by making it smaller and we keep making it more energy efficient, but it's not getting faster in terms of linear compute and hasn't for a while. We've started hitting physical limits there.

Optics could, AFAIK, run in the terahertz range. That's thousands of gigahertz. So wouldn't that be like thousands of electronic cores, but it would accelerate all code including non-parallelizable code?

I've wondered if this might not be a bigger deal for general purpose compute than quantum computing.

Or is my understanding way off?
by thristian | 2025-10-14 12:46:55+00:00
APL and K are still pretty daunting, but I've recently been dabbling in Lil[1], which is something like a cross between K and Lua. I can fall back on regular procedural code when I need to, but I appreciate being able to do things like:

127 * sin (range sample_rate)*2*pi*freq_hz/sample_rate

This produces one second audio-clip of a "freq_hz" sine-wave, at the given sample-rate. The "range sample_rate" produces a list of integers from 0 to sample_rate, and all the other multiplications and divisions vectorise to apply to every item in the list. Even the "sin" operator transparently works on a list.

It also took me a little while to get used to the operator precedence (always right-to-left, no matter what), but it does indeed make expressions (and the compiler) simpler. The other thing that impresses me is being able to say:

maximum:if x > y x else y end

...without grouping symbols around the condition or the statements. Well, I guess "end" is kind of a grouping symbol, but the language feels very clean and concise and fluent.

[1]: https://beyondloom.com/decker/lil.html
by vidarh | 2025-10-14 12:47:25+00:00
My point is that these are not minor successes, and not occasional. Not every attempt is equally successful, but a significant majority of my attempts are. Otherwise I wouldn't be letting it run for longer and longer without intervention.

For me this isn't one project where I've "twiddled around with the file and added random sentences". It's an increasingly systematic approach to giving it an approach to making changes, giving it regression tests, and making it make small, testable changes.

I do that because I can predict with a high rate of success that it will achieve progress for me at this point.

There are failures, but they are few, and they're usually fixed simply by starting it over again from after the last succesful change when it takes too long without passing more tests. Occasionally it requires me to turn off --dangerously-skip-permissions and guide it through a tricky part. But that is getting rarer and rarer.

No, I haven't formally documented it, so it's reasonable to be skeptical (I have however started packaging up the hooks and agents and instructions that consistently work for me on multiple projects. For now, just for a specific client, but I might do a writeup of it at some point) but at the same time, it's equally warranted to wonder whether the vast difference in reported results is down to what you suggest, or down to something you're doing differently with respect to how you're using these tools.
by fidotron | 2025-10-14 12:47:32+00:00
I'm somewhere in the middle, young enough that almost everything I've seen new is disposable crap (including the tools), old enough that I have had an interest in things from before and noticed that they really were built much better, or at least heavier, back then.

I've made the comment on here before that I believe it's short term energy optimisation, in that it used to be seen as reasonable to much heavier objects around. We've made everything so light we've lost the infrastructure for moving heavy stuff around when we might need to.

Kids today have no concept of how heavy workstations, TVs or monitors used to be, and they think it's exaggeration. Let alone tools, cars, appliances etc.