MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by alsetmusic | 2025-10-17 23:14:51+00:00
> If you can call it, it's not private

If I can walk on land that says private property, it's not private. I'll remember to use that argument when I get ticketed for trespassing.

There are APIs that are explicitly declared verboten for third-parties to use because they aren't intended for outside use. That doesn't make them magically inaccessible, but it does mean that when their unanticipated use breaks things, that's on the people who ignored the warnings.

I agree that this shouldn't be able to have the huge impact that it does and that Apple ought to have made their OS more resilient, but your logic is weak.

> Even in legal matters, it's already the case that laws that aren't enforced are worthless, cf. driving 5-10 mph over the speed limit being normal.

Just because all but one cop of the force ignore people driving over the speed limit doesn't mean the one who pulls you over is isn't able to write you a speeding ticket. Try that with a judge. It might work, but the law is very much still enforceable. This isn't like failing to protect a trademark.
by jvalencia | 2025-10-17 23:15:13+00:00
Large software projects are an interesting use case because once you get large is precisely when the framework becomes valuable.

A large enterprise project will need security, testing, auth, (AI now too). I'd hate to implement SAML without a library, that would be torture, and likely incompatible with most systems.

While I've often written small self projects from scratch, I wouldn't dream of building a large one that way unless you are sure to have an army of engineers and QA.

As an aside, this is where AI code fails as well. Speed of dev is easy, stability over time and compatibility is hard.
by diath | 2025-10-17 23:15:39+00:00
> A bigger problem for me is not lack of Linux Galaxy client, but that a bunch of developers only release Linux versions on Steam (Larian with BG3 is a recent example).

It's because building for Linux expects specific versions of system libraries like glibc, if you compile your game on newer glibc, it may not run on older version of glibc at all. Steam solves it with Steam Linux Runtime compatibility layer which forces the game to run with specific glibc (and others) shipped with Steam on Linux, other video game stores have no equivalent solutions.
by pcblues | 2025-10-17 23:16:04+00:00
You gain experience getting interactions with other agencies optimised by dealing with them yourself. If the AI you rely on fails, you are dead in the water. And I'm speaking as a fairly resilient 50 year old with plenty of hands-on experience, but concerned for the next generation. I know generational concern has existed since the invention of writing, and the world hasn't fallen apart, so what do I know? :)
by nwah1 | 2025-10-17 23:16:05+00:00
Stross is at the cutoff of being a baby boomer. He thinks like one, and it is abundantly clear from his Malthusian preoccupations and overall cynical anti-establishment views regarding a system that he has personally benefited tremendously from.

Malthusianism was wrong when Malthus developed it, as shown by David Ricardo and countless others. Human ingenuity and decentralized price signalling via the market allows autonomous human actors to make adjustments to changing circumstances and continually do more with less. Virtually every real-life famine can be traced to large scale interference in that process, such as via colonialism, war, etc.

The very agricultural breakthroughs he mentions in this piece are the kinds of things that countless groups around the world are working on, autonomously, to suit their own circumstances. And they have been doing that the whole time. There is nothing new about it.

If you look at US agricultural productivity over time, it is absolutely astounding. And this is why all the Boomer doomers of his generation turned out wrong, and why we should likewise ignore all the other stuff he worries about like the anachronistic concern over peak oil.

He happens to be correct about the astounding reductions in prices of solar PV panels, but of course that itself is just another kind of Moore's Law. Photovoltaics are a semiconductor technology! But he said Moore's Law was dead...

His explanations for the rise of far-right politics is insulting to the reader's intelligence. He seems to think it is reducible to the energy economy rather than the actual behavior of leftists and liberals, and the resulting complexities of multiculturalism that we find ourselves navigating in an age of plummeting birthrates.

If your head is in the sand or you are ensconced comfortably in a boomer mansion, you might not understand what the problem is for working and middle class people quickly finding themselves surrounded by a sea of people with dramatically different cultures, values, and religions, while being chided for common sense manners of speaking and thinking.

There are a range of possible responses to this, but arrogant and intellectually lazy boomerposting is not helping.
by RickJWagner | 2025-10-17 23:16:17+00:00
You are being downvoted, but your post is obviously truthful.

I’ve gone to SF several times over the years for tech conferences. It started out as standard tourist excellence. Then it started rotting. The last year I went to Moscone Center, the afternoon walk back to the nearby hotel was horrific. Druggies lounging around, poop on the sidewalk, conference attendees speed marching through the maze, trying not to make eye contact.

Once back at the hotel, it was nonstop sirens after dark.

Compared to a decade back, it was a nightmare.

Update: Just saw this article, SEMICON West skipped SF and went to Phoenix this year. It was a success.

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/10/17/tech-conference-tha...

SF deserves better, much better.
by jlarocco | 2025-10-17 23:16:47+00:00
Those complaints are really orthogonal to the EV vs ICE debate, though.

Somebody could claim driver aids and infotainment EVs are "degrading" in EVs in the exact same way - in fact they're even more integrated in EVs.

And although EVs don't have the same transmissions and exhaust gas systems, they have their own unique complexities and points of failure, like batteries and regenerative braking systems.
by masfoobar | 2025-10-17 23:17:06+00:00
Seems we live in a "cool" or "flashy" era or rewriting everything in Rust.

Dont get me wrong, despite not taking time to learn Rust at this time, I am aware that memory safety is the thing at this time. Yes... some software might do better being rewritten from C to Rust. However, there are other projects that have been worked on for years and years. Sqlite is an example of this. That quote above is 100%

Various GNU tools are being replaced. Dont just expect them to be 100% despite being "memory safe" -- they will have to fo through various tweaks to boost performance. With Rust likely (still) to go through some further changes, I am sure Linus will get frustrated at some points within the Linux Kernel. We shall see.

Point is - some things are just better left with their mature state. Though.. on the flip side, we are have to think about the younger generation. Will SQlite survive if it continues to use C? It's likely to be a language that each new generation will not bother, and focus on Rust, Zig.. or whatever comes out in the future.

I am just waiting for rewrite of Doom or Quake (I am sure they already exist if I can be bothered to search.. in Rust)
by godelski | 2025-10-17 23:17:19+00:00
I disagree with robotresearcher but I think this is also an absurd definition. By that definition there is no human, nor creature, that understands anything. Not just by nature of humans making mistakes, including experts, but I'd say this is even impossible. You need infinite precision and infinite variation here.

It turns "understanding" into a binary condition. Robotresearcher's does too, but I'm sure they would refine by saying that the level of understanding is directly proportional to task performance. But I still don't know how they'll address the issue of coverage, as ensuring tests have complete coverage is far from trivial (even harder when you want to differentiate from the training set, differentiating memorization).

I think you're right in trying to differentiate memorization from generalization, but your way to measure this is not robust enough. A fundamental characteristic of where I disagree from them is that memorization is not the same as understanding.
by dwohnitmok | 2025-10-17 23:17:43+00:00
> after which everything will become increasingly better, increasingly faster

Stross (the author of Accelerando) thinks the world of Accelerando is exactly the opposite. A bleak terrible world full of horrors where the overwhelming majority of humans have been killed or worse. It is only because the book is written from the perspective of the few survivors that "made it" that it seems more cheery.

See https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/05/crib-sh...

Choice quotes from the main article and comments:

> In the background of what looks like a Panglossian techno-optimist novel, horrible things are happening. Most of humanity is wiped out, then arbitrarily resurrected in mutilated form by the Vile Offspring. Cspitalism [sic] eats everything then the logic of competition pushes it so far that merely human entities can no longer compete; we're a fat, slow-moving, tasty resource -- like the dodo. Our narrative perspective, Aineko, is not a talking cat: it's a vastly superintelligent AI, coolly calculating, that has worked out that human beings are more easily manipulated if they think they're dealing with a furry toy. The cat body is a sock puppet wielded by an abusive monster. > > The logic of exponential progress at a tempo rising to a vertical spike is a logic that has no room in it for humanity.

and

>> [Reader question] I didn't read it that way at all. Are insects extinct? Bacteria? Or even Horseshoe crabs? > > Yup, pretty much. By chapter 8 of "Accelerando", Earth has been destroyed -- broken up to make computronium or other stuff of interest to the Vile Offspring. Those humans who didn't get off the planet or upload their minds ("Accelerando" takes a rather naively can-do approach to uploading) are dead. Ditto the biosphere.
by clmnt | 2025-10-17 23:17:53+00:00
Hugging Face just released HuggingChat Omni, that selects the best model for every prompt automatically amongst 115 open-source models including gpt-oss, deepseek, qwen, kimi, smolLM, gemma, aya and many more already!

Omni uses a policy-based approach to model selection thanks to a model router called Arch-Router from Katanemo.
by master_crab | 2025-10-17 23:18:31+00:00
Yeah loan covenants lock you in like that. But banks don’t want to manage or sell big commercial properties. If it gets dicey for property owners, they’ll work out a deal with their bank.

Remember Getty:

If you owe the bank $100, that's your problem.

If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem.
by cipehr | 2025-10-17 23:19:16+00:00
What database were you using? For example with SQL server, by default it clusters data on disk by primary key. Random (non-sequential) PKs like uuidv4 require random cluster shuffling to insert a row “in the middle” of a cluster, increasing io load and causing performance issues.

Postgres on the other hand doesn’t do clustered indexing on the PK… if I recall correctly.
by benjiro | 2025-10-17 23:20:15+00:00
DB lookups + extra index are way more expensive then hardware assisted decoding.

If your UUIDv4 is cached, your still suffering from extra storage and index. Not a issue on a million row system but imagine a billion, 10 billion.

And what if its not cached. Great, now your hitting the disk.

Computers do not suffering from lacking CPU performance, especially when you can deploy CPU instruction sets. Hell, you do not even need encryption. How about making a simple bit shift where you include a simple lookup identifier. Black box sure, and not great if leaked but you have other things to worry about if your actual shift pattern is leaked. Use extra byte or two for iding the pattern.

Obfuscating your IDs is easy. No need for full encryption.
by mercurialsolo | 2025-10-17 23:20:17+00:00
Skills again seem more like making MCPs more accessible for everyday users. It will again need to see evolution - things that are missing - containers for skills (you will need beyond a folder for sharing a toolchain with skills) - the orchestration and picking up of the skill is left to the LLM (the synthesis is done via the context shared in the skill - this feels a very sub-optimal pattern at the moment - low control)

Few others like versioning, access control for tools which are missing.

Real world skills come not just from practice but are opionated workflows built with specific toolchains too.

IMO, this is half-ass engineered at the moment
by mfrye0 | 2025-10-17 23:20:47+00:00
I can confirm on the performance benefits. I wanted to start with uuidv7 for a new DB earlier this year, so I put together a function to use in the meantime. Once the function is available natively, we'll just migrate to use it instead.

For anyone interested:

CREATE FUNCTION uuidv7() RETURNS uuid AS $$ -- Get base random UUID and overlay timestamp select encode( set_bit( set_bit( overlay(uuid_send(gen_random_uuid()) placing substring(int8send((extract(epoch from clock_timestamp())*1000)::bigint) from 3) from 1 for 6), 52, 1), -- Set version bits to 0111 53, 1), 'hex')::uuid; $$ LANGUAGE sql volatile;
by westurner | 2025-10-17 23:21:08+00:00
"Near-Field Optical Nanopatterning of Graphene" (2025) https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/smsc.202500184 :

> Abstract: [...] By finely tuning experimental parameters such as laser exposure time, the nanopatterning feature size ranging from 1–30 nm, and the resulting shapes from nanoscale elevated structures (nanoblister shape) to punched holes can be precisely modulated. This nanopatterning strategy achieves feature sizes at the sub-10 nm scale and represents an advancement toward fabricating all-2D material devices, setting new benchmark in nanoscale manufacturing for quantum and photonic technologies.
by yencabulator | 2025-10-17 23:21:50+00:00
One of my previous struggles has been profilers blaming whatever code is the first bit of code to force some memory into cache.

We devs could take turns and claim to have improved our own code by a huge margin simply by rearranging the order of calls so ours was not first. Then pass the baton; global performance utterly unchanged, everyone gets to "optimize" their own code.

Something like https://github.com/plasma-umass/coz might be the way forward.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-TLSBdHe1A
by potato3732842 | 2025-10-17 23:22:01+00:00
>legal place

You know you can just break the rules when it comes to petty stuff like that, right? If you're not being unreasonable or thumbing your nose at them they typically don't come after you.

>and every lease I’ve signed has prohibited me from repairing my cars on apartment grounds.

This is a direct result of the clean water act and knock on laws.

The clean water act mandates stormwater management. The solution needs to be maintained in perpetuity. The HOA is the entity saddled with this. There's various engineering calculations that go into pollutant load which impacts the size of the stormwater bullshit engineered ponds you need. In order to make the solution they are forced to build cheaper, the developer puts "no wrenching" (and a bunch of other things) in the initial HOA covenant.

The city ordinances are mostly the same. They're putting that shit in their so that the engineering numbers are better and their stormwater stuff can be cheaper.

That's not to say the snooty jerks don't like those rules for their own sake.
by eikenberry | 2025-10-17 23:22:58+00:00
Is the "tech boom" in this context only related to the ability of the corps to resell computers to everyone every few years? That's the only direct impact I can see on Moore's law ending and the tech boom being over. Otherwise I don't see the tech boom being over now or even anytime in the foreseeable future. Technology is still in its infancy.
by themafia | 2025-10-17 23:23:43+00:00
> AGI is either more scale

So you plan to scale without increasing power usage. How's that?

> They can always optimize for power consumption after AGI has been reached

If you don't optimize power consumption you're going to increase surface area required to build it. There are hard physical limits having to do with signal propagation times.

You're ignoring the engineering entirely. The software is not hardly interesting or even evolving.
by Random09 | 2025-10-17 23:23:54+00:00
An alternative is to go a library, rent a book, scan it and read on a reader. You are getting the book for free without supporting greedy drm shops.

Btw, in Poland where I live, every ebook shop sells drm free books. Every single one. Why? Amazon don't sell polish books, yet kindles for the long time were the only readers available, so people had to use a cable to transfer the books. And kindle can't read any other drm than their own. So shops had no choice and it stayed that way.

So maybe a third option (not really but maybe?) is to buy polish version and use Ai to translate it?
by westurner | 2025-10-17 23:24:16+00:00
"Subwavelength phase engineering deep inside silicon" (2025) https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/2515-7647/adf7ef/... :

> Abstract: [...] We design and numerically demonstrate a volumetric metaoptic monolithically embedded within the bulk, achieving full 2π phase control at telecommunication wavelengths, with simulated transmission efficiencies reaching 90%. The architecture is guided by a semi-analytical Fabry–Pérot model and validated through full-wave simulations. Arrays of 250 nm-wide metaatoms spaced at 300–410 nm pitch yield a focusing efficiency of 70%. With the wafer surface left pristine, this platform can potentially enable co-integration with electronics, MEMS/NEMS, and conventional metasurfaces. Moreover, the method is directly transferable to other transparent dielectrics compatible with ultrafast laser writing. These results establish a CMOS-compatible blueprint for three-dimensional nanophotonics and multi-level integration within the wafer.
by hunterpayne | 2025-10-17 23:24:27+00:00
Any absolutist position on any topic is almost certainly wrong. This includes absolutist free speech. The bar in the US is if the speech has some benefit to wider society to allow. And we are very lenient on what we call benefit in these cases. Anyone that tells you the US has absolutely free speech is either lying or just wrong. And in the real world, you can't run society with any absolutist policies including absolutist free speech policies.

That being said, the UK government can pound sand and should be embarrassed by its behavior. UK isn't a serious country anymore. If you want to know why Americans don't really care what others think, this is a really good example as to why. Total clown show...
by gavin-1 | 2025-10-17 23:24:43+00:00
Elon may describe himself as a "free speech absolutist", but his actions betray his insincerity in saying that. The man isn't even mildly pro free speech. He is only "absolute" about defending the speech that he likes and agrees with. With that in mind, it really says something about his beliefs when he defends and even boosts actual nazis.
by washadjeffmad | 2025-10-17 23:24:44+00:00
You know, I realized the same thing after seeing a guy in one of our 3D print communities consistently printing life-sized models scaled with LuBan for his students. He had a garage full of Bambus, a bunch of photos of his models in an apparently high-trust community elementary school, and it just clicked when he said "rural Kansas".

We operate one of the largest print farms in the nation, and I can count the number of human-scale or larger sculptures we've put out in the past decade on one hand.
by brightball | 2025-10-17 23:25:39+00:00
I can’t speak for the rest, but I believe in 2023 Tesla’s all moved from HW3 to HW4.

I went from a 2020 Model 3 to a 2025 and the self driving experience is dramatically better. I’m one of those “I will never use FSD” people and I honestly love driving…but it’s so good I find myself using it constantly and just being awestruck.
by mediaman | 2025-10-17 23:26:39+00:00
RL works great on verifiable domains like math, and to some significant extent coding.

Coding is an interesting example because as we change levels of abstraction from the syntax of a specific function to, say, the architecture of a software system, the ability to measure verifiable correctness declines. As a result, RL-tuned LLMs are better at creating syntactically correct functions but struggle as the abstraction layer increases.

In other fields, it is very difficult to verify correctness. What is good art? Here, LLMs and their ilk can still produce good output, but it becomes hard to produce "superhuman" output, because in nonverifiable domains their capability is dependent on mimicry; it is RL that gives the AI the ability to perform at superhuman levels. With RL, rather than merely fitting its parameters to a set of extant data it can follow the scent of a ground truth signal of excellence. No scent, no outperformance.
by chneu | 2025-10-17 23:26:56+00:00
Americans finance things to keep up imagery.

This country is insanely ego and pride focused or fixated.

Capitalism exploits this in advertising.

Americans throw money at everything and then wonder why they're broke.

Or in the case of cars, people finance a new car and throw money at repairs instead of doing what folks like you and I do. Buy a reliable older car that's cheap to work on. But that takes "learning" and most Americans are convinced that learning is a waste of time, just throw money at the problem.
by JCM9 | 2025-10-17 23:27:19+00:00
Getting downvoted. I’m not thrilled by the idea of deploying the national guard, but folks have had a long time to fix the mess in SF and have failed, badly. It’s not crazy to try something new.

To those saying we never use the military for public security that’s simply false. NYC has had heavily armed national guard deployed as added security at transit hubs since 9/11 and they’re there to this day.

If leaders of cities don’t want others to step in, don’t give people a reason to step in.
by DonHopkins | 2025-10-17 23:27:53+00:00
Nice Molly Ivans reference.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/mar/18/molly-ivins-rai...

>After Pat Buchanan delivered an infamous speech at the 1992 Republican convention, couching the struggle with Democrats in terms of a “cultural war”, columnist Molly Ivins wrote that it “probably sounded better in the original German”. She did not live to cover a Donald Trump rally.
by ants_everywhere | 2025-10-17 23:28:09+00:00
While I think terrorists should care who is using them and why, that wasn't my point.

My point was that the parent comment's examples weren't of a difficult to defeat determined population. They were warlords helping imperialists establish nuclear bases so the Soviets could project power. Everything else is just a fairy tale.

They tell all sorts of fairy tales to get soldiers to march into certain death and have throughout history.
by MengerSponge | 2025-10-17 23:28:50+00:00
> were perfectly in sync

They couldn't stay synced. There's a measurable frequency shift from a few cm of height difference after all. Making a pair of clocks that are always perfectly in sync with each other is a major step towards Le Guin's ansible!

For other readers' info, clock stability is crucial for long-term precision measurements, with a "goodness" measured by a system's Allan variance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_variance