MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by throwway120385 | 2025-10-20 17:11:50+00:00
But they know that it is coming and we need to plan for it. 40 centimeters is still half a meter. If you filled my office with half a meter of water it would be between my butt and my ankle where I'm sitting. There are a lot of berms that couldn't withstand king tides 40 centimeters higher, especially with storm swell factored in. A lot of seaside infrastructure where I live needs to be relocated even with a lower estimate.
by throwawaysleep | 2025-10-20 17:11:59+00:00
> The fact that the industry collectively shrugs our shoulders and allows increasing amounts of our tech stacks to be single-vendor hostage is crazy.

Well, nobody is going to get blamed for this one except people at Amazon. Socially, this is treated as as a tornado. You have to be certain that you can beat AWS in terms of reliability for doing anything about this to be good for your career.
by ltbarcly3 | 2025-10-20 17:12:13+00:00
I think you might have overlooked the point they were making.

Whether or not the market price is properly pricing in future risk is irrelevant. What OP is implying is that activists are engaged in cognitive dissonance, similar to what you commonly find in religious people. They say they 'believe' in something but you would not find any evidence of that 'belief' revealed in their behavior.

For example: believing that the world will end tomorrow, posting to social media that the world is going to end tomorrow, and then checking your work email at 8pm.

Yes, you can probably make a just-so story where they are buying beachfront property based on a belief they can unload it, or they will die, before it becomes worthless due to being underwater or destroyed by storms. I think the point stands however, and it underlines the importance of looking at revealed beliefs rather than simply stated beliefs.

(To be clear, the point depends on climate activists actually buying beachfront property, which I doubt is very common at all, so I don't actually think it's a good argument at all. However your response still misses the point.)
by jerlam | 2025-10-20 17:12:45+00:00
In a very broad sense, essentials like health care and transportation also dramatically increase GDP. In the US, going to the doctor costs a lot more money and dozens of people get paid for coding, insurance, billing, and payments which all do not directly improve the patient's health. People are required to buy cars, fill them with gas, pay for storage, pay tolls, and pay to fix them are also contributing to economic activity.

But these costs are basically taxes in a different form.

There is a slight truth to the conspiracy theory that "doctors keep people sick because it's good for business", in the same way that building appliances that last forever isn't a good business strategy.
by logannyeMD | 2025-10-20 17:13:06+00:00
I recently went to a poker night during SF tech week and realized I'm not good at Texas Hold 'em. I wanted a way to improve that doesn't require me losing $100-200 every week, so I built this to get better between weekly poker nights. UI/UX is still very early, so any feedback that helps me make it more useful/delightful are appreciated. If you're in SF, hope to see you at one of the (many) weekly poker nights around the bay!
by BizarroLand | 2025-10-20 17:13:27+00:00
majority of voting population

Don't get me wrong, I hold the "eligible but didn't vote" group equally accountable for the current regime, but it was not the majority of the population that voted for him.

"If "Did Not Vote" had been a presidential candidate, they would have beaten Donald Trump by 9.1 million votes, and they would have won 21 states, earning 265 electoral college votes to Trump's 175 and Harris's 98."

https://www.environmentalvoter.org/updates/2024-was-landslid...
by xeonmc | 2025-10-20 17:13:27+00:00
Addendum: a LapDock is essentially a rackmount KVM console packed into a clamshell form factor and marketed to consumers for connecting to phones, but could also be used as an integrated interface for MiniPCs like so:

https://youtu.be/yp81cU1GVwk?si=2etLv9OnjrXyY1D_&t=775
by QuantumNomad_ | 2025-10-20 17:13:44+00:00
I rent a couple of bare-metal servers from Hetzner, and I have physical servers at home.

On my home hardware I keep things like multiple copies of my photos and documents, as well as experimenting a bit with open LLMs etc.

On the rented servers, I host websites, PeerTube, Forgejo, and keep copies of some data I downloaded from elsewhere.

I’ve also previously hosted email on rented servers. Both on rented hardware and on rented VPSes. For the past few years I haven’t bothered with hosting email myself. I use iCloud provided email instead.

Sometimes I upload videos to my PeerTube instance. Sometimes I upload videos to TikTok.

I don’t have some grand vision of self-hosting everything at home. It is impractical, and comes with its own set of drawbacks. Things that only serve myself and my family go on my hardware at home. Things that I want others to be able to reach go on the rented servers. And other times like with email and TikTok I use services where I have no control whatsoever over what the service provider does with my data.

If someone decides that a particular service is neat to host on rented servers I won’t fault them for it. And I consider things that you manage on your own to be self-hosted even if you don’t own the hardware it’s running on.

You decided to rent a $5 VPS for your email? You’ll still learn things from that even if the server is not in your home. And I will perfectly agree that it fits the name self-hosted email. Same goes for anything else you set up and manage, regardless of whether it’s running on bare metal or in a VPS, and regardless of whether the computer it runs on is in your home or rented from someone else.
by fred_is_fred | 2025-10-20 17:14:06+00:00
I've been unable to find it but early in the railroad boom did rail companies undercharge for freight in order to build demand and interest? Given that they were also given land in exchange fro building, it would have been in their interests to do so. They could also amortize rail costs over a long time as rails are useful for longer than GPUs - but I am also curious if there was an unsustainably low entry price for railroads like Ed is implying for AI tools.
by mindcrash | 2025-10-20 17:14:21+00:00
George Carlin said it best way back in 2005:

"[...]THEY’VE GOT YOU BY THE BALLS! They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying, lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else. But I’ll tell you what they don’t want.

They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interest.

That’s right.

They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago.

They don’t want that.

You know what they want?

They want OBEDIENT WORKERS. OBEDIENT WORKERS. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it.[...]"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nyvxt1svxso

https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/comedy/george-carlin-dumb-amer...
by ivape | 2025-10-20 17:14:43+00:00
LLMs help you think about news in an interesting way. News is just filling your context at all times. If you remove certain things from the context window, the LLM literally can't think about it. For example, if you don't want the LLM to think about war, remove it from the context. When it comes to news, most people are operating with a very curated mental context. They don't even think about certain things. To get the right picture from news, you'd need to be willing to hold a lot of context in your head, which means you have to consume any and all news from everywhere whether you like it or not. History enthusiasts already know this and actively try to fill their context with as much history as possible too.

In other words, don't try to curate your mental context if you want the truth.
by OutOfHere | 2025-10-20 17:14:43+00:00
What phenomenon? One background article is https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5817415/. Anyway, there is a reason why doctors say to take ibuprofen only with food, although that is an unreliable and failed approach to avoiding the GI troubles that result from taking it on an empty stomach. I suggested a vastly superior additive approach using PPIs or PCABs. Misoprostol might also help for mucus production but I haven't used it.
by x0x0 | 2025-10-20 17:15:55+00:00
Playing word games labeling inference narrowly as the cost per token rather than the per-X $ going to your llm api provider per customer/user/use/whatever is kinda silly?

The cost of inference -- ie $ that go to your llm api provider -- has increased and certainly appears to continue to increase.

see also https://ethanding.substack.com/p/ai-subscriptions-get-short-...
by jghn | 2025-10-20 17:15:57+00:00
I believe that world ocean level will be catastrophic by 2100. I do not plan on living until anywhere near 2100. In fact, 2050 would be pushing it. If I wanted to have a nice seaside house *now*, why is that cognitive dissonance? Sure, it is likely that I'd have to give it up in 15-20 years, but I might not make it that long myself.
by tredre3 | 2025-10-20 17:15:58+00:00
Their style of intensity and overacting do have some overlap. They've also both demonstrated that, when they care, they can be excellent and nuanced actors.

But Cage's intensity often comes up as kind of funny or endearing. Leto's overacting is often cringy/edgy or downright unpleasant. Which seems to represent both their personalities too.
by teraflop | 2025-10-20 17:16:10+00:00
I'm not sure there is a chunker in this repo. The file you linked certainly doesn't seem to perform any chunking, it just defines a data model for chunks.

The only place I see that actually operates on chunks does so by fetching them from Redis, and AFAICT nothing in the repo actually writes to Redis, so I assume the chunker is elsewhere.

https://github.com/agentset-ai/agentset/blob/main/packages/j...
by TimTheTinker | 2025-10-20 17:17:34+00:00
> they don't give me the feeling of "just a different syntax" but actually changed the way I think.

Not only that, but languages that enable more concise expression of an idea (without losing clarity for readers) reduces the error rates of programs written in them.

It's been proven that when not accounting for constraints imposed by a compiler/interpreter (like the Rust borrow checker), the average error rate per unit size of programs across widely varying languages is constant. So reducing the number of lines/expressions required to express ideas reduces the number of errors by the same factor. Brevity pays when readability isn't sacrificed.
by palmotea | 2025-10-20 17:18:49+00:00
> I'd counter that past a certain scale, certainly the scale of a firm that used to & could run its own datacenter.. it's probably your responsibility to not use those services.

It's actually probably not your responsibility, it's the responsibility of some leader 5 levels up who has his head in the clouds (literally).

It's a hard problem to connect practical experience and perspectives with high-level decision-making past a certain scale.
by 0x01FE | 2025-10-20 17:19:07+00:00
Specifically with the Spotify service, the problem with the Spotify API is that you can only request listening data for the last 100 played songs iirc. You can manually request the data from Spotify, but it will take them a month or two to give you the data and it will be a snapshot of it.

So if you want live updates on statistics about your listening habits you need a service running 24/7 querying the Spotify API and storing the information in a database. Assumedly since most people don't have a computer to run this on 24/7, a server is necessary / preferred.

I've actually written an application doing something similar, it's very annoying that Spotify's API works like this.
by tallanvor | 2025-10-20 17:19:11+00:00
If I self-host at home and my internet connection goes down so I can't access anything remotely, then I'm still SOL until I can get home. And millions of people are stuck with crappy upload speeds that make plenty of services that they may want to self-host nonviable if they care about being able to access it from anywhere.

Yes, words have meaning, but most of us will happily disagree with your definition of self-hosting.
by wcchandler | 2025-10-20 17:19:37+00:00
This is usually something I see on Reddit first, within minutes. I’ve barely seen anything on my front page. While I understand it’s likely the subs I’m subscribed to, that was my only reason for using Reddit. I’ve noticed that for the past year - more and more tech heavy news events don’t bubble up as quickly anymore. I also didn’t see this post for a while for whatever reason. And Digg was hit and miss on availability for me, and I’m just now seeing it load with an item around this.

I think I might be ready to build out a replacement through vibe coding. I don’t like being dependent on user submissions though. I feel like that’s a challenge on its own.
by jedberg | 2025-10-20 17:20:35+00:00
Way back when I worked at eBay, we once had a major outage and needed datacenter access. The datacenter process normally took about 5 minutes per person to verify identity and employment, and then scan past the biometric scanners.

On that day, the VP showed up and told the security staff, "just open all the doors!". So they did. If you knew where the datacenter was, you could just walk-in in mess with eBay servers. But since we were still a small ops team, we pretty much knew everyone who was supposed to be there. So security was basically "does someone else recognize you?".
by sleepybrett | 2025-10-20 17:21:00+00:00
So did a previous company i worked at, all our stuff was in west-2.. then east-1 went down and some global backend services that aws depended on also went down and effected west-2.

I'm not sure a lot of companies are really looking at the costs of multi-region resiliency and hot failovers vs being down for 6 hours every year or so and writing that check.
Show HN: Namefi tokenize domain for trading, DeFi and future internet
by xinbenlv | 2025-10-20 17:21:03+00:00
Hey hacker friends, we are building a domain platform that is "modern". Offering modern features we think a domain platform should provide such as ownership with NFT (or if you dislike NFT as a term, cryptography and interoperability), AI for brand generation etc.

We love to get your feedback
by colonCapitalDee | 2025-10-20 17:21:20+00:00
It's harder then it first seems. The root problem is that for text like "hallo", correcting to "hello" may be fixing an error or introducing an error. In general, the more aggressive your error correction, the more errors you inadvertently introduce. You can try and make a judgement based on context ("hallo, how are you?"), which certainly helps, but it's only a mitigation. Light error correction is common and effective, but you can't push it to a full solution. The only way to fully solve this problem is to look at the entire document at once so you have maximum context available, and this is what non-traditional OCR attempts to do.
by ineedasername | 2025-10-20 17:21:54+00:00
So, AWS's redundant availability goes something like "Don't worry, if nothing is working in us-east-1, it will trigger failover to another regions" ... "Okay, where's that trigger located?" ... "In the us-east-1 region also" ... "Doens't that seem a problem to you?" ... "You'd think it might be! But our logs say it's never been used."
by mediaman | 2025-10-20 17:22:43+00:00
The point about synthetic query generation is good. We found users had very poor queries, so we initially had the LLM generate synthetic queries. But then we found that the results could vary widely based on the specific synthetic query it generated, so we had it create three variants (all in one LLM call, so that you can prompt it to generate a wide variety, instead of getting three very similar ones back), do parallel search, and then use reciprocal rank fusion to combine the list into a set of broadly strong performers. For the searches we use hybrid dense + sparse bm25, since dense doesn't work well for technical words.

This, combined with a subsequent reranker, basically eliminated any of our issues on search.
by simpaticoder | 2025-10-20 17:23:29+00:00
Given the title "Space Elevator" I was expecting some more information on a hypothetical space elevator cable. Assuming humans can manufacture defect-free nanotubes at any length and can combine them into thicker cables, you could specify at every height a) the cumulative mass of the cable, b) the thickness of the cable at that point, and c) the stress experienced by the cable at that point. You could further break c down into the gravitational vs centripetal forces on the cable at that point.
by Bender | 2025-10-20 17:23:36+00:00
Try 140.4.0 ESR as a work around to give them time to figure out what they broke unless you depend on a feature in 144. [1] Works for me on Linux and Windows. Or try starting 144 in safe mode to disable all addons as a test.

[1] - https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/140.4.0esr/
by steveBK123 | 2025-10-20 17:24:24+00:00
In 20+ years in the industry, all my biggest outages have been AWS... and they seem to be happening annually.

Most of my on-prem days, you had more frequent but smaller failures of a database, caching service, task runner, storage, message bus, DNS, whatever.. but not all at once. Depending on how entrenched your organization is, some of these AWS outages are like having a full datacenter power down.

Might as well just log off for the day and hope for better in the morning. That assumes you could login, which some of my ex-US colleagues could not for half the day, despite our desktops being on-prem. Someone forgot about the AWS 2FA dependency..
by ltbarcly3 | 2025-10-20 17:24:47+00:00
This is true, but I think a rational person would rent in this scenario?

The key thing is whether their belief that this property will be under water in 50 years is their actual belief, or if it's performative, or if they are experiencing cognitive dissonance where they 'believe' it in one context (what they say) but don't believe it in other contexts (like managing their finances). Again this is extremely common, people 'believe' that prayer works but also only rely on it when they lack practical solutions like taking Motrin, and the few people who really believe in the power of prayer are treated like they are mentally ill (for example when they refuse medical treatment for their children) by the very people who claim to 100% believe in the effectiveness of prayer.
by igouy | 2025-10-20 17:24:47+00:00
> You can do anything you want in it, it's super flexible, the tooling is great, but almost everything requires you to just write quite a bit more code than you would in Perl, Python, Ruby, JS, etc.

Given that Smalltalk precedes JS by many years: if it is true, then it was not always true.

Given that Smalltalk was early to the GUI WIMP party: if it is true, then it was not always true for GUI WIMP use.
by kmacdough | 2025-10-20 17:24:48+00:00
Super fun!

I do always have to object to comments like "space elevators are possible," "scientists have studied" and "would save money".

It's a fun thought experiment, nothing more (for now). You can do some calculus to estimate the necessary strength-to-weight ratio based on centripetal and gravitational forces. Single carbon fibers seem to meet this optimistic criteria.

But there are many forces left out. Many practicalitites left unconsidered. Why? Because there is no scientific community that believes it's vaguely achievable with near-future technology. It's simply not worth investing the outrageous resources required to do a vaguely useful viability analysis.
by Arathorn | 2025-10-20 17:24:59+00:00
Your best bet for that is almost certainly beeper.com, which isn't FOSS, but specialises in combining messaging channels and is built on Matrix. Otherwise, you do have to run your own bridges and hope for the best, and moreover the bridges re-encrypt Signal and so miss the point of its end-to-end encryption. On the Element side, we're not focusing on bridging currently.
by hopelite | 2025-10-20 17:25:01+00:00
I have something called eyes and they come preinstalled and included with my system. I carry them with me everywhere. They are multifunctional for many other applications too. They do not have a subscription model either. They even come with a built in, extremely efficient power plant that produces energy for them endlessly for around 80-something years by simple input of quality biomatter.
by graypegg | 2025-10-20 17:25:44+00:00
Fair point! I think it just feels a little more… mean?

Slang is a value judgement on the word, but no one is a “slanger”. So at least that works fine for talking about language without setting some cultural standard that people using slang are “bad”, just that slang is “bad” and the connection is left up to the gullible reader.

“Brain rot” is a funny over exaggeration, but it’s also talking about the person. Someone/some generation HAS brain rot, which is much more explicit. The tone feels off for a field studying language.

I think all things considered, Gen Alpha is dealing with the nihilism thrown their way alright, laughing through it all is all you can do sometimes
by everfrustrated | 2025-10-20 17:26:05+00:00
The unreliability claim is driven by two factors.

1. When aws deploys changes they run through a pipeline which pushes change to regions one at a time. Most services start with us-east-1 first.

2. us-east-1 is MASSIVE and considerably larger than the next largest region. There's no public numbers but I wouldn't be surprised if it was 50% of their global capacity. An outage in any other region never hits the news.
by ekjhgkejhgk | 2025-10-20 17:26:53+00:00
I think people don't know what they want, but they like fiddling with computers. So, they imagine future scenarios where they would have problems (which they don't) and imagine solutions for those problems they don't have, and spend time implementing those solutions.

For example. Whenever RSS comes up, I say that newsboat is the best thing. People don't like it because it doesn't synchronize devices. Really? Why not have a device for reading, and read there? I have newsboat on my laptop and I A) don't have to read on my phone, B) can't read on my phone, and C) don't have to spend my free time doing unpaid maintenance for a job which I created for myself. Win-win-win.
by n_u | 2025-10-20 17:26:55+00:00
> Reranking: the highest value 5 lines of code you'll add. The chunk ranking shifted a lot. More than you'd expect. Reranking can many times make up for a bad setup if you pass in enough chunks. We found the ideal reranker set-up to be 50 chunk input -> 15 output.

What is re-ranking in the context of RAG? Why not just show the code if it’s only 5 lines?
by CrossVR | 2025-10-20 17:27:36+00:00
> I'm curious what sort of CRT produced the meme image.

The article mentions later that it's a PVM-20L2MD [1]. This is a professional CRT monitor for medical devices. It uses the same signals as a consumer TV, but comes with a higher quality tube that has a sharper picture.

[1] https://crtdatabase.com/crts/sony/sony-pvm-20l2md
by goleary | 2025-10-20 17:28:15+00:00
Here's an interesting read on the evolution beyond RAG: https://www.nicolasbustamante.com/p/the-rag-obituary-killed-...

One of the key features in Claude Code is "Agentic Search" aka using (rip)grep/ls to search a codebase without any of the overhead of RAG.

Sounds like even RAG approaches use a similar approach (Query Generation).