MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ohdeardear | 2025-10-16 10:13:24+00:00
The US is preparing for war and disinformation is a tool in such a war. The Pentagon just wants the same level of control as the other authoritarian regimes.

It kind of shows that "democracy" was never real to begin with.

Certainly with Sora 2 level of technology they can just claim whoever they don't like has blown up a federal building while they were asleep. It's not like you can have an alibi when you sleep and everyone sleeps. In a way, this AI nightmare necessitates protocols for protection against false accusations like only being able to open the door exiting a house when three other witnesses are present. There are cryptographic solutions like verified cameras, but almost nobody has those now, not even news crews publish signed videos.

Journalism in war time has no real meaning, because if it's secret information the journalist basically becomes an adversary and at some point it becomes cheaper to kill them. Those waging wars have historically always been corrupt. So, that leaves repeating whatever the Pentagon wants you to know.

Also, calling the US a democracy is like putting lipstick on a pig and saying it's a hot babe.

Perhaps Switzerland still has a democracy, but most kind of suck in various ways (and most importantly, don't do anything to improve their democracies). In a real democracy, there would be continuous improvement with better checks and balances. At some point you start to wonder whether democracy just exists to give people the illusion that their voice means anything. Also, in a real democracy there would be equal opportunity and advertising budget for all political parties. That's just not the case in many democracies.

So, blatantly obvious autocracies are probably worse than our current "democracies", but let's not pretend democracy is a thing right now.
by JohnKemeny | 2025-10-16 10:14:01+00:00
Three Core Python developers (including Eric Snow and Mark Shannon) from the Faster CPython team were fired from Microsoft in May 2025.

Quote from Mike Droettboom (CPython Core Developer):

It's been a tough couple of days. Microsoft's support for the Faster CPython project was canceled yesterday, and my heart goes out to the majority of the team that was laid off. A hard day for me, but even harder for others.

Related:

Implementation plan for speeding up CPython (Oct, 2020)

245 points, 137 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24837309
by itopaloglu83 | 2025-10-16 10:14:04+00:00
Not every reply is trying to rebuke what you said, some can add context that not everybody knows.

Using the broken BMI as a system everywhere is the problem, numbers don’t mean anything particularly complex and doesn’t lead to good decisions to begin with.

When a metric is overused, it leads to its being abused and that’s what we’re seeing here because people keep submitting complaints that volunteer firefighters are all obese even though these guys/gals can almost lift a car.
by gregsadetsky | 2025-10-16 10:14:07+00:00
Incredibly fun to play around with it, and really incredible mobile web support..! Two finger dragging worked without interfering with the browser’s usual handling of it.

Super cool, congrats! I was just reminiscing about the old school https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poser_(software) software recently, wondering if there were other contenders in the space.

Cheers
by muzani | 2025-10-16 10:14:48+00:00
I love haiku 4.5, but you don't need it. It's like a motorcycle. Feels good, but doesn't do the heavy lifting.

Cursor has an auto mode for exactly your situation - it'll switch to something cost effective enough, fast enough, consistent enough, new enough. Cursor is on the ball most of the time and you're not stuck with degraded performance from OpenAI or Anthropic.
by potato3732842 | 2025-10-16 10:14:52+00:00
> I expect the majority machines that accept cash don't accept them,

Worse. What wound up happening was that the feds encouraged (probably grant funded, IDK) support for it and the only implementers were other governments and the easiest way to check the box was to make all your mass transit ticket machines and the like spit them out as change despite often times not supporting them as payment so a machine would eat your $20, give you a $2 ticket and spit out 18 items about as useful as Chuck E Cheese tokens.

This has mostly gone away as those machines have mostly switched over to cashless.
by TYPE_FASTER | 2025-10-16 10:14:54+00:00
Of course there is one available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/live/video/0a7d56413360489dbf25611edf...

Also: https://www.amazon.com/Kooteyybhyy-Ornithopter-Generation-He...

Which may be re-branded version of this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6nuMDV6n18

https://www.amazon.com/stores/Hanvon/page/426FE09E-17DC-4FBB...

I found this forum: https://www.rcgroups.com/ornithopters-101/

Which led to this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWqBoA5CfPs - really neat to see it climb and glide.
by audunw | 2025-10-16 10:15:17+00:00
Why? There’s nothing in the current process of developing AI that would lead to a AI that would act against humanity of its own choosing. The development process is hyper-optimised to make AIs that do exactly what humans tell it to do. Sure, an LLM AI can role-play as an evil super AI out to kill humans. But it can just as easily role-play as one that defends humanity. So that tells us nothing about what will happen.

We could just as well think that exploding the first nuclear bomb would ignite the atmosphere and kill all of humanity. There was nothing from physics that indicated it was possible but some still thought about it. IMO that kind of thinking is pointless. Same with thinking LHC would create a black hole.

As far as I can tell the fear of super intelligent AI will kill humans all boils down to something utterly magical happens and then somehow super intelligent evil AI appears.
by account42 | 2025-10-16 10:15:36+00:00
Art and culture is extremely valuable. But the kind of art and culture supported by government programs tends to be less so.

What would also be much more valuable than creating art is making that art available to everyone including for the purposes of producing more art. If the art subsidies came with a condition to release the art to the public domain then I would be much more for domain-specific funding.
by lurtbancaster | 2025-10-16 10:16:05+00:00
> Pretty sad to have to install a tool like that to get security on a platform that is used by billions of users.

You click on a banner ad inside an app, and if you have Intent Intercept installed, it won't immediately register as an "impression" and take you to wherever the banner has been programmed to take you to by default. Since Intent Intercept also affects the ad industry(of which Google is a big part), I don't expect Google to build a similar less-nerdy tool into Android by default.

> Installing random tools to hopefully get more security, though is risky also. Hopefully that tool doesn’t get compromised as it is privy to all intent activity.

Intent Intercept is open source(Apache License 2.0 https://github.com/k3b/intent-intercept) and its release binaries are hosted on F-Droid, arguably the most trusted Android "store" for Free and Open Source apps. So I'm not too worried.
by theandrewbailey | 2025-10-16 10:16:48+00:00
Agreed! I replaced XP with Xubuntu (my preferred distro at the time) on my parent's computer about 15 years ago. I told them that "it works like Windows[0]", showed them how to check email, browse the web, play solitare, and shut down. Even the random HP printer + scanner worked great! I expected a call from them to "put it back to what it was", but it never happened. (The closest was Mom wondering why solitare (the gnome-games version) was different, then guided her on how to change the game type to klondike.)

[0] If "it [Xubuntu] works like Windows" offended you, I'd like to point out that normies don't care about how operating system kernels are designed. They care about things like a start menu, and that the X in the corner closes programs.
by CaptainOfCoit | 2025-10-16 10:18:52+00:00
> but that is VC funded

The difference between Ollama and llama.cpp boils down to "venture-backed product company" vs "community OSS project; creator’s separate company has angel/VC-style pre-seed". I hope even you could squint and see the difference :)

Btw, I feel like it's somewhat poor taste to comment about something that is effectively a competitor to you (even though you base your own product on it) and not disclose that you're working full-time at Ollama Inc. At the very least put the info in your profile.
by fingerlocks | 2025-10-16 10:20:09+00:00
I write macOS software (among other things). I always run the earlier betas on another machine for testing. The primary dev box gets the beta a few weeks before release. It’s never been a problem.

This is 100% on electron, they didn’t do their due diligence that every Mac & iOS dev goes through every summer before the next release. It’s been two decades of the same song and dance every year. There’s just no excuse.
by kotaKat | 2025-10-16 10:20:48+00:00
'Cause they're using loopholes.

HR 1923 ("Circulating Collectible Coin Redesign Act of 2020") [0]: "No head and shoulders portrait or bust of any person, living or dead, and no portrait of a living person may be included in the design on the reverse of specified coins"

Well... the reverse certainly isn't a head-and-shoulders portrait or bust...

[0]: https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/1923
by api | 2025-10-16 10:21:13+00:00
I’d say these celebrate entrepreneurship more than innovation. Nothing wrong with that, but it does bother me that the true innovators often don’t get credit outside academia and enthusiasts well versed in the history.

Apple II was not the first usable by mere mortals PC. There’s a lot of contenders but one of the earliest came from Georgia:

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

Cray was not the first multiprocessor wide vector supercomputer, but it did innovate on it. I’d say Cray broke more fundamental innovation ground than Apple.
by meekins | 2025-10-16 10:21:15+00:00
As someone with years of experience on serverless stuff on AWS I might be a bit biased BUT I'd argue serverless is the sweet spot for most applications. You need to remember however that most applications aren't your typical startups or other software products but simply some rather boring line of business software nobody outside the company owning it knows of.

Concerning how IT departments in most non-software companies are, the minimal operational burden is a massive advantage and the productivity is great once you have a team with enough cloud expertise. Think bespoke e-commerce backends, product information management systems or data platforms with teams of a handful of developers taking responsibility for the whole application lifecycle.

The cloud expertise part is a hard requirement though but luckily on AWS the curriculum is somewhat standardized through developer and solutions architect certifications. That helps if you need to do handovers to maintenance or similar.

That said, even as a serverless fan, I immediately thought of containers when the performance requirements came up in the article. Same with the earlier trending "serverless sucks" about video processing on AWS. Most of the time serverless is great but it's definitely not a silver bullet.
by michaelt | 2025-10-16 10:21:20+00:00
Your audience chooses you over the press releases because you sound like a human, trim out the boring items and more obvious propaganda, place things in context, reduce jargon/simplify things, also report on other things the pentagon doesn't have press releases about, and throw in some jokes.

You choose to keep at it because you think military stuff is pretty neat; you get paid by the view; getting briefings from the pentagon makes you seem important to yourself and others; and you like being a celebrity (albeit a very minor one)
by timschmidt | 2025-10-16 10:21:53+00:00
> there’s no sense in trying to solve for some abstract future set of problems that the vast majority of people are never going to have

> That too requires a substantial investment of time and resources.

The discussion has gotten to be pretty abstract at this point. To get back to concrete examples, the egui RAD builder I've been hacking on worked on day 1, first commit. It's been a joy to put together, and no more difficult than building GUI apps with any other toolkit I've worked with. Which causes me to question your statements about additional complexity. You can dig deep and do dark magic with Rust if you want, but you can also treat it like any high level language and get things done quickly. That's part of what makes it a rare gem to me.

Some folks don't like dealing with strict types, or with the borrow checker, but I find that the errors they illuminate for me would have been similarly serious in other languages which lacked the tooling to highlight them. Which adds to my appreciation of Rust.
by technofiend | 2025-10-16 10:22:14+00:00
It's just anecdotal but when I asked why our Xerox workstations at JSC had dancing Snoopy line art, I was told Charles Schulz himself was a big fan of the space program and he'd drawn art for the program and extended its use to them in perpetuity.

I have been on a team that won a silver Snoopy but was a subcontractor and didn't get one myself; just the Boeing employees I worked with did. Every once in a while I Google them on the off chance I could get one as a piece of memoribilia, but they are thousands of dollars.
by bartread | 2025-10-16 10:22:18+00:00
It’s pretty clear that the commenter you’re responding to is making the point that a treatment effective in mice still has a long way to go before it’s viable for use on humans, assuming it is ever viable to use on humans.

Mice and humans are quite different, and whilst it looks like this treatment actually reverses the effects of dementia in mice, it’s far from clear that it would have the same impact on humans. By the time people start exhibiting Alzheimer’s symptoms, the brain will already have sustained quite a lot of damage - by which I mean death of neurons - so it’s hard to see how this would actually reverse the disease, as opposed to simply slowing or halting its progression, without these neurons being replaced.
by IshKebab | 2025-10-16 10:22:48+00:00
Wow I thought this would take at least another decade, given how difficult driving in London is compared to American cities. I will still be really surprised if they can actually make this work

When I visited San Francisco recently the Waymos were really awesome and worked well, but also there's barely any traffic compared to London. The streets are all really wide and you can pretty much just pull over anywhere. Some even just stopped in the middle of the road and I was amazed to see people waiting patiently behind them! London is entirely different.

Still, props for trying. Will be very interesting to watch what happens!
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-10-16 10:22:52+00:00
> That's a "having different rules for different ways of making money" thing.

That's the thing which is a consequence of the existing complexity, which in turn is a consequence of trying to do brackets by income.

A flat rate tax is you collect VAT on everything no exceptions, send everyone a check in a fixed amount as the credit to make it progressive no exceptions, and you're done.

Different marginal rates is oops, if you use VAT then rich people have poor people go to the store for them so you have to use income tax and track everybody's income. But some people get income from investments and then it's not realized until they cash out, which allows a bunch of fancy tax dodges, but trying to tax unrealized gains has a bunch of other serious problems like liquidity and valuation. Also, you didn't really mean to tax everyone's retirement savings, so now you need a bunch of stuff like 401(k) to undo the thing you didn't really mean to do, and now you have some more complexity. And it continues like this until you turn around and doctors are paying higher taxes than billionaires because billionaires have more resources to navigate all the complexity.
by smugglerFlynn | 2025-10-16 10:23:17+00:00
When it comes to tech topics this is an insiders discussion. When it comes to political topics, 99% of people in HN threads have close to zero insights, and circle around publicly known information. Big difference.

It is very dangerous to expect deep insights on every aspect of human life from a HN thread, regardless of how well educated and well meaning average HN commenters are.
by georgehopkin | 2025-10-16 10:23:46+00:00
Researchers at Aalto University have connected a time crystal to an external system for the first time, opening potential applications in quantum computing and ultra-precise sensing technologies.

The team, led by Academy Research Fellow Jere Mäkinen, demonstrated that time crystals can interface with optomechanical systems whilst maintaining their unique quantum properties. The breakthrough could enable memory systems for quantum computers that last significantly longer than current technologies.
by bombcar | 2025-10-16 10:23:57+00:00
Banks usually have some dollar coins and if you ask they can get them.

But cash register drawers usually do not have a space for them, they’re relatively heavy, and people don’t use them because they don’t use them.

Vending machines famously went ham trying to use them which annoyed people.

It didn’t help that the old Susan B dollar coins were almost a quarter shape and size if you weren’t paying attention.

The dollar coin SHOULD be small, a bit bigger than a dime, imo.

Or just skip the dollar coin and go right to a three dollar coin.
by kelas | 2025-10-16 10:24:00+00:00
> That is wildly disingenuous.

assuming you're referring to numpy as to have anything to do with python spec, i totally agree with you. only it doesn't. so don't pytorch and pandas (and good so, poor python doesn't need any extra help to be completely f).

> you get an nxn identity matrix by...

no, man, that's how you get it. really advanced technique, kudos!

i get it by:

id:{...} /there are many ways to implement identity in k, and it's fun! id 3 +1.00 +0.00 +0.00 +0.00 +1.00 +0.00 +0.00 +0.00 +1.00

but if you can keep a secret, more recently we've gotten so lazy and disingenuous in k land, and because we need them bloody matrices so often now, we just do it like so:

&3 +1.00 +1.00 +1.00 +1.00 +1.00 +1.00 +1.00 +1.00 +1.00 =3 +1.00 +0.00 +0.00 +0.00 +1.00 +0.00 +0.00 +0.00 +1.00

(but of course before we do that we first install python4, numpy, pytorch, pandas and polars - not because we need them, just to feel like seasoned professionals who know what they're doing)
by OneMorePerson | 2025-10-16 10:24:14+00:00
At the risk of making it more complicated than it's worth, you really need multiple indexes. Population and GDP are possible metrics, but they still don't capture everything. If we take universities as an example there's an absolute rank, but then there's also a rank within sub-colleges to tell us that while Harvard is a high ranking university, it's comparatively much more renowned for law than for computer science.
by lrvick | 2025-10-16 10:24:34+00:00
I ultimately thought out what would be easier, a decade political fight to make massive changes to nix, or a fork of it written solo to improve auditability and security, or starting over from the top with a design that checks every dream box I wanted from a linux distro.

I had many RFCs that would have followed this rejected one if there was any change tolerance... so my fastest path to prove out my ideas for a distro with decentralized trust was to start one with that explicit goal.

If I wanted to make things maximally auditable and portable to different build engines, a published dead simple spec with multiple competing implementations that most software engineers already know how to write would be ideal. People could review an engine they use, or ensure all existing implementations on any operating system get identical results and are thus trusted that way. If it natively supports a ton of features to make deterministic builds wildly simpler, major bonus.

OCI/Containerfile was a check on all fronts, and some early maintainers and I riffed on design patterns and realized the OCI ecosystem already had specified multi party signing and verification, artifact integrity, smart layer by layer caching etc etc. This fit our dev experience and threat model perfectly and we could just skip implementing the package build and distribution layer and just start writing packages, like that day. None of us needed to learn or invent a new language or ask auditors to do so or fork nix ecosystem to have proper signing support and write a sane spec... that could be years of wheel spinning.

The time saved by choosing an existing widely used and implemented spec meant we were able to put all energy into full source bootstrapping, universal multi party hardware signing on every build, change, review, and reproduction. Just full source bootstrapped linux from scratch in containerfiles with OCI native multi party signing if all parties independently get the same oci hashes from local builds. Oh and we are going LLVM native like Chimera next week. Big sweeping changes like that are easy with our ultralight setup.

I would note that the features we need for deterministic builds in docker, the most popular OCI implementation, only landed a couple of months before we started stagex, and the full source bootstrapping work by the bootstrappable builds team only got a complete bootstrap for the first time a few months before that and Guix shortly after. Tons of reference material.

If stagex had started before 2022 I imagine we might have used a heavily trimmed down nix clone or tried to convince guix to adopt our threat model, which is much further along in supply chain security than nix but scheme would have been a very isolating choice. I think stagex got lucky starting at exactly the right time when two huge pieces of the puzzle were done for us.
by epolanski | 2025-10-16 10:24:59+00:00
1. I have 90 % on my m1 pro, bought in 2020 [1]

2. Batteries age faster in the beginning and then their ageing rate plateaus. It's the same for electric cars. E.g. a Tesla can lose 5% efficiency in the first 30k miles, but will lose the next 5% over 60k+.

https://i.imgur.com/ohRFtoO.png
by timschmidt | 2025-10-16 10:25:39+00:00
Where it's mattered for me has been in supporting family like my Grandmother. She's passed now, but ran Linux on her desktop for web and email for about a decade. I set it up for her after her Windows install got a nasty virus. I appreciated that she didn't have to learn that "Safari" meant "the internet" and so on. She didn't even have to know she was using Linux. Just how to get to the web. And Linux desktops made that a little easier for her, and less work for me.
by Nursie | 2025-10-16 10:25:53+00:00
In the UK, for example, if you are a simple case (PAYE employee, no other sources of income) they just do it, you never interact with HMRC at all in the ordinary procession of things. You may get a yearly summary form (P60) but that's about it.

Here in Australia everyone must fill in an annual return, but it’s a fairly well automated online system and they’re probably already already have most of the fields filled in, you just need to add anything more complicated or any deductions you think you’re owed.

In both systems you can have an accountant file for you, or use other software, but you don't need to and most British people will never file a single return in their lives.
by corford | 2025-10-16 10:26:19+00:00
In our case, instant on-boarding of devs with no host setup needed. It's a large, complicated repo with a lot of unusual system dependencies. We build a multi-arch base image for all this and then the devcontainer is built on-top. Devcontainer hooks then let us do all the env setup in a consistent, version controlled way. It's been a god send for us and we'll never go back.