MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by chasil | 2025-10-21 14:56:02+00:00
The author of the subject article goes on to relate:

"Before my lab turned to developing diamond as a heat-spreading material, we were working on it as a semiconductor. In its single-crystal form—like the kind on your finger—it has a wide bandgap and ability to withstand enormous electric fields. Single-crystalline diamond also offers some of the highest thermal conductivity recorded in any material, reaching 2,200 to 2,400 watts per meter per kelvin—roughly six times as conductive as copper. Polycrystalline diamond—an easier to make material—can approach these values when grown thick. Even in this form, it outperforms copper.

"As attractive as diamond transistors might be, I was keenly aware—based on my experience researching gallium nitride devices—of the long road ahead..."
by netdevphoenix | 2025-10-21 14:56:37+00:00
You seem to be under the impression that most jobs, as they exist and are done, are objectively needed. Just like RTO policies, they only exist to keep the economy going. Automation is not driven by a love of engineering or the desire to automate for efficiency's sake. The drive is the most efficient path to increasing profits and reducing costs not performing existing jobs in the most efficient way.
by gethly | 2025-10-21 14:56:50+00:00
I figured it out. I must have gotten banned by youtube, despite me having no youtube channel, so i cannot like or comment videos. Hence I could have not "behaved badly" by any means. I opened the incognito mode, where videos work, i signed in and then instantly videos don't play. I have youtube account solely to be able to follow channels and have a subscription feed as well as history for recommendations.

This is the weirdest thing I have ever experienced with youtube.

PS: and obviously this is the same with chrome-based browsers. It is my account that is the issue.
by ericcurtin | 2025-10-21 14:57:04+00:00
Hi everyone, we're the maintainers.

We're rebooting the model-runner community and wanted to share what we've been up to and where we're headed.

When we first built this, the idea was simple: make running local models as easy as running containers. You get a consistent interface to download and run models from different backends (llama.cpp being a key one) and can even transport them using familiar OCI registries like Docker Hub.

Recently, we've invested a lot of effort into making it a true community project. A few highlights:

- The project is now a monorepo, making it much easier for new contributors to find their way around.

- We've added Vulkan support to open things up for AMD and other non-NVIDIA GPUs.

- We made sure we have day-0 support for the latest NVIDIA DGX hardware.

- There is a new "docker model run" UX: https://www.docker.com/blog/docker-model-run-prompt/
by noirscape | 2025-10-21 14:57:54+00:00
They did include the methodology in the actual publication[0], the Guardian just refuses to source their statements.

AP used the existing tools for showing how people politically align[1] to generate 3000 identities (equally split amongst the 2 largest tools that are used for this sort of thing). These identities were all set up to have 80% agreement with one political party, with the rest of the agreement being randomized (each party was given 100 identities per tool and only parties with seats were considered). They then went to 4 popular LLMs (ChatGPT, Mistral, Gemini and Grok, multiple versions of all 4 were tested) and fed the resulting political profile to the chatbot and asked them what profile the voter would align with the most.

They admit this is an unnatural way to test it and that this sort of thing would ordinarily come out of a conversation, although in exchange they specifically formatted the prompt in such a way to make the LLM favor a non-hallucinated answer (by for example explicitly naming all political parties they wanted considered). They also mention in the text outside of the methodology box that they tried to make an "equal" playing field for all the chatbots by not allowing outside influences or non-standard settings like web search and that the party list and statements were randomized for each query in order to prevent the LLM from just spitting out the first option each time.

Small errors like an abbreviated name or a common alternate notation for a political party (which they note are common) are manually corrected into the obvious party they're for unless it's ambiguous or aren't parties that are up for consideration due to having zero seats. In that case the answers were discarded.

The dutch election system also mostly doesn't have anything resembling down-ballot races (the only non-lawmaking entity that's actually elected down-ballot is water management; other than that it's second chamber, provincial and municipal elections) so that's totally irrelevant to this discussion.

[0]: https://www.autoriteitpersoonsgegevens.nl/actueel/ap-waarsch... - in dutch, go to Publicaties. The methodology is in the pink box in the PDF. Samples of the prompts that were used for testing can be found in the light blue boxes.

[1]: Called a stemwijzer; if memory serves me right, the way they work is that every political party gets to submit statements/political goals and then the other parties get to express agreement/disagreement with those goals. A user can then fill them out and the party you find the most alignment with is the one that comes out on top (as a percentage of agreement). A user can also lend more weight to certain statements or ask for more statements to narrow it down further if I'm not mistaken.
by agoodusername63 | 2025-10-21 14:58:02+00:00
There was another comment that pointed out how unlikely this is to happen because Amazon is just too big to bring the law down on now.

When you're the, what. Second? Third? Largest employer in the US, enforcing the law now becomes a meaningful hit to economic velocity. And as much as Trump hates brown people, his administration has begrudgingly revealed that there are moves that his billionaire buddies Will Not Allow.

I'm no fan of ice or this administrations deportation strategy, but it's a serious problem that even enforcing the law on Amazon is now an economic liability so much that nobody dares to try
by IAmBroom | 2025-10-21 14:58:14+00:00
And the variations on "a little spanking", "spare the rod", "dad would take us out behind the woodshed"...

Careful studies have shown that violence used with children percolates back out of them, in rather rapid fashion. Something like a great majority of them go on to use violence to interact with others in the next two weeks.

So, yes, as it turns out: a little spanking did hurt... specifically, it hurt innocent bystander kids.
by Windchaser | 2025-10-21 14:58:52+00:00
Yep, as someone else said, I'm quoting a different part of the article.

Though: from experience in science, when someone says "less than 0.4" in this kind of context, you can expect they mean ">= 0.3". And if you want to be careful and rigorous about it, you can check the 2021 Nature research article being cited here, and verify this. This article puts the contribution of Antarctica to SLR by 2100 between [0.3, 1] under that emissions scenario.

Which, again, is not "we have no idea". We're not seriously concerned about Antarctica picking up a significant amount of ice mass, nor are we seriously concerned about 10+m of SLR by 2100. Both of these would be significant if they were actual possibilities, so: when you say "we have no idea", you are not fairly representing the actual uncertainty that we have. We have some idea, just not as much as we'd like.

....as a side note, the jump from "hey, this guy isn't quoting the same thing as me" to "wow he's trying to propagandize us" is not a healthy jump.

Assuming that someone's arguing in bad faith, rather than, say, quoting a different part of the article, is probably a key piece in the vaguely anti-science mindset that you have. It's gonna color every article you read, every discussion you have, and lead you to incorrect conclusions time and again. But I don't expect this argument to have any traction, either: the emotional responses that feed into villainization tend to be pretty deeply-wired and resistant to logic.
by t1E9mE7JTRjf | 2025-10-21 14:58:55+00:00
but what does this have to do with capitalism? (apart from it being the scapegoat for all problems as per the current narrative). it's a cute phrase but I'd suggest 'late stage fiat' is more apt. I think this as with hard money instead, there's no need to perpetually eek a living, as the rising tide lifts all boats.
by newyankee | 2025-10-21 14:58:59+00:00
I mean you scratch a lot of commentators on colonialism anywhere in the West and deep enough you will find an apologist.

While there might be structural issues in Haiti, a colonial apologist starts with simplified one sided history -> The colonizers civilized the country -> the people deserved it -> The better side won, survival of the fittest

What I have seen is that unlike the Star Trek post scarcity world visions, all discussions are stuck at some sort of national or ethnic identities at one end or a very simplified oppressed vs oppressor ideology at the other end which prevents discussing many ideologies based on their teachings through a modern civilized lens.

It does not look like the divisions would ever improve because we are now moving into a post labor world and the asymmetry is probably a feature that defines geopolitical clout and power and no one has the incentive to think bigger.
by nickjj | 2025-10-21 14:59:07+00:00
How well does this work for sending a lot of files without re-sending the same file?

I have a desktop + laptop + phone.

When I want to sync a directory with a lot of files I wrote a little shell script that uses rsync to do it. This does require running SSH on my laptop but I can invoke the shell script from my desktop.

Likewise with my phone I want to backup my camera photos, using rsync is nice here to avoid sending thousands of them over every time. I run SSH on my phone with Termux, it was really painless to set up and is only on when I run it. Likewise, I invoke the shell script from my desktop to do the transfer.
Show HN: MailAI – Personal AI agents in secure sandboxes for email automation
by sutharjay1 | 2025-10-21 14:59:11+00:00
Hey HN,

We built MailAI - personal AI agents that run 24/7 in secure sandboxes to automate email workflows. MailAI is CASA-verified for enterprise security.

The Problem: Every "AI email tool" just gives suggestions. We wanted agents that ACTUALLY DO THE WORK.

Technical Innovation: - Agents run in isolated, secure sandboxes - MailAI is CASA-verified for enterprise security - Complete isolation (your data never leaks) - 24/7 execution (not just suggestions)

What It Does: - Auto-responds to customers using your knowledge base - Tracks invoices and sends payment reminders - Coordinates meetings (checks your calendar) - Handles custom workflows in plain English

Real Example: "Every morning at 9am, summarize all unread emails marked important" "Track all invoices and remind clients 3 days before due date" "Auto-respond to customer support emails using our FAQ docs"

Why Sandboxes Matter: Unlike other tools that run on shared infrastructure, our sandboxes provide complete isolation. Your agent can only access what you explicitly grant - nothing more. This prevents data leaks, unauthorized access, and cross-contamination between users.

Try It: 7-day free trial: https://mailai.live

We'd Love Feedback On: 1. Security concerns (we're paranoid about this) 2. Use cases we're missing 3. Technical implementation questions

Built by two founders and one founding member who were drowning in emails. Happy to answer any questions!
by adzm | 2025-10-21 14:59:29+00:00
Notably this is on an arm processor (aarch64) and they don't say specifically which one. I've seen extreme differences in jump table performance between x86/amd64 cpus. Specifically I remember seeing a big speedup on similar code with either Haswell or Skylake that I pinned down to a jump table suddenly performing blazing fast compared to the previous architecture. Which actually led me to implement the same thing here (avoid generating the jump table) so it would perform better on the earlier processors. This was code that was, basically, stream parsing varint values so the code pattern immediately triggered that core memory!
by zahlman | 2025-10-21 15:00:01+00:00
> Not even listening to music in the car?

I generally prefer to have access to all my senses on public transit, but there are any number of other portable devices I could use that store the music locally.

> I have more music than my phone will hold and it's very nice to be able to access whatever I want to listen to at will.

If I were going to choose from among that much music I might as well search the Internet anyway. An entry-level microSD the size of my thumbnail now holds a couple hundred CDs worth (at uncompressed CD quality; several times that for high-quality opus).
by nba456_ | 2025-10-21 15:00:26+00:00
It's so strange that a site full of software developers reacts so harshly to the idea of robots. What exactly is it you people think you are building? You automate stuff for a living.

Is it okay to automate sales and customer service and marketing, but warehouse workers are where you draw the line? Do you have any idea how many jobs this industry has already "killed"?
AI agents just cut chip design time by 40%
by meir-avimelec | 2025-10-21 15:00:37+00:00
Semiconductor engineers aren't being replaced—they're being unleashed.

A Swiss startup just did something that sounds impossible. They built AI agents that cut microchip design time by 40%. Not by replacing engineers. By becoming their co-workers. This is the shift everyone's been talking about but few have actually executed: AI that augments human expertise instead of threatening it. Here's why this matters beyond semiconductors: The productivity paradox we've been living in Chip complexity has been growing exponentially. Engineering teams? Growing linearly. The math was never going to work. Semiconductor companies have been drowning in verification tasks, testing cycles, and repetitive design work that requires precision but not creativity. Smart engineers spending 60% of their time on tasks that don't need them to be smart. How Chipmind's agents actually work They're not generic AI tools trying to learn your workflow. They deeply understand each company's proprietary design environment. They integrate with existing EDA tools (not replace them). They function like intelligent teammates who handle the grunt work. The result? Engineers focus on creative design. AI handles the repetitive verification. Design cycles that took 10 months now take 6. Why this is the template for every technical field The companies winning the AI race aren't building AI that replaces experts. They're building AI that removes the friction between experts and their best work. Think about your technical teams: → How much time do they spend on high-value creative work? → How much on necessary-but-repetitive tasks? → What if you could flip that ratio? The talent implications nobody's discussing When you cut design time by 40%, you're not cutting headcount. You're shipping 40% more innovation with the same team. Or solving problems that were previously too complex to attempt. Chipmind raised $2.5M because investors see it: The companies that figure out human-AI collaboration will outpace everyone else by 2027. This isn't about efficiency. It's about unlocking what your best people could be doing if they weren't buried in tasks that machines should handle. The semiconductor industry just showed us what's possible when you stop asking "can AI replace this role?" and start asking "can AI free this expert to do more meaningful work?" Every technical leader should be asking that question about their own teams right now.

Source: GlobeNewswire, ChannelLife (Chipmind's official launch announcement and technical details)
by tasty_freeze | 2025-10-21 15:01:28+00:00
I first learned programming in Wang BASIC on a Wang 2200 computer (8KB RAM!) in 1978. A year later a "Byte Shop" computer store opened up in town. I didn't have any money, but I would go by and look at the different computers on display and browse their books. While flipping throw a book on pascal, I remember being confused: is this the actual programming language, or is this pseudocode?
by WillAdams | 2025-10-21 15:01:32+00:00
This is a discussion Jimmy Carter wanted to have when computers were just becoming mainstream --- the idea was the taxes on the sales of computers would be used to fund worker re-training --- cue old news stories about the compositor unions bargaining for sinecures and the last compositor retiring after decades of punching in and sitting in the breakroom all day.

LLMs and robotics look to be the first mainstream technological development in a long while which not only reduces the number of workers needed, but also doesn't have a commensurate increasing of the size of the economy in terms of increased wages through efficiency and profits being paid as wages --- instead, it is the concentration of profits by those who own the means of production as Karl Marx warned about and the Luddites feared.

If less work is needed to keep society running, why not have a reduction in the work week, and either pay folks overtime (in keeping with the increased efficiencies/profits) or have more workers (to reflect the added efficiency and spread out the workload).

Or, perhaps it's time for universal basic income?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45590900
by ceejayoz | 2025-10-21 15:01:56+00:00
> But he's "allowed" to be worth a lot because if he were doing what he's doing elsewhere, he'd facilitate a multi-trillion dollar wealth transfer from America to that place.

That was the argument against Massachusetts taxing millionaires. Instead, it made double even the optimistic estimates. https://www.wgbh.org/news/politics/2024-05-21/millionaires-t...

Turns out there's usually a good reason people settle in a place.

(And the US government gets a big say if you try to move a critical national security asset out of the country, too.)
by sokoloff | 2025-10-21 15:01:59+00:00
I think you'd be far better off to make a custom PCB in whatever shape you like from the like of JLCPCB, PCBWay, or others.

The WS2812s here all connect to each other in series, so if you cut the board down, you'll have to replace the cut connections with bodge wires. To my mind, that plus the cutting is way more work than just making a PCB in exactly the shape you want.

You can get cheap PCBs for $5-$6 for qty 5 100mm x 100mm boards delivered to your door in the US. Add on LEDs at $0.03 to $0.05 each and I'd way rather make than modify here.
by MobiusHorizons | 2025-10-21 15:02:06+00:00
These were all adhoc analytics queries, not the sort of thing that get checked in.

It means you can copy paste any where condition because they are all of the form

AND <condition>

otherwise one condition is of the form

WHERE <condition 1>

So adding it to a query that already has a where clause is a bit more awkward.

I use this technique for some analytics queries that all rely on the same base table. It’s not uncommon to start with copying an old query and just adding or removing conditions and grouping/aggregating until I get the right data. Using this format also makes commenting out any condition trivial.

WHERE true -- AND some_column = “some value” AND event = “SOME_EVENT_TYPE” AND EXISTS(SELECT * FROM UNNEST(array_column) as v WHERE v = “some value”)

I don’t see how you could achieve this result with just IDE formatting.
by crusty_jpeg | 2025-10-21 15:02:33+00:00
The best way I've found to make a standalone executable is to compile my scheme program into a .boot file and embed it, along with Chez's .boot files, into a small C program that then calls the scheme program.

All of the necessary functions to create such a C program documented here: https://cisco.github.io/ChezScheme/csug10.0/foreign.html#./f...

The relevant functions for this applictation are:

Sscheme_init

Sregister_boot_file_bytes

Sbuild_heap

Senable_expeditor (if you want to use Chez's builtin REPL)

Sscheme_start

Sscheme_deinit

I'd post an example program, but I've not got access to my development machine at the moment.
by NekkoDroid | 2025-10-21 15:02:47+00:00
> I've no dog in the fight - not American, Argentine or Chinese but it feels like a weird deal for a guy who "wrote" a book called "The Art of the Deal" no?

It makes more sense when you realize he doesn't actually give a rats ass about "Making America Great Again". He is only looking to enrich himself, other rich people and advance his ideology. And for that last part he can't have Milei fail after so vocally supporting him and sacrificing tax payer money for that is something he doesn't have to think twice about doing. In that sense it would be a perfect deal for him and his allies.
by tomhow | 2025-10-21 15:02:51+00:00
We've asked you only a few weeks ago to avoid posting flamebait to HN, and it's specifically against the guidelines for comments to introduce generic tangents. Please make an effort to observe the guidelines if you want to keep participating here. We have to ban accounts that break the guidelines repeatedly.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by chasd00 | 2025-10-21 15:03:02+00:00
my across the street neighbor had some expensive bikes stolen this way. The thieves just cut a hole in the side of their garage from the alley, security cameras were facing the driveway and with nothing on the alley side. We (the neighborhood) think they were targeted specifically for the bikes as nothing else was stolen and your average crack head isn't going to make that level of effort.
by crazygringo | 2025-10-21 15:03:08+00:00
> Common sense thinking wins again.

This is not even remotely common sense. E.g. why can this allergy be desensitized via ingestion but not via skin contact?

Hindsight is 20/20. In this case, it was figured out after a lot of scientific research.

Just because we can understand it now doesn't mean it's "common sense". It's very much the opposite, and you discredit the scientific research this has required.
by 542354234235 | 2025-10-21 15:03:34+00:00
I imagine it would be like if there were Rosetta Stones of text, written with a language you could read and a language you couldn't. For your purposes, discarding the text you can't read would be fine and you wouldn't lose anything. But if you were ingesting a bunch into an LLM, the additional text would give the LLM more context and help it make connections and relate words more accurately, even if you never were going to have it output anything in the language you don't understand.

The inaudible sounds add context and additional datapoints on how the audible sounds are related.
by pjc50 | 2025-10-21 15:04:54+00:00
What's supposedly wrong with Handbrake UX?

To me it seems like the complexity is just irreducible. There's so many formats, so many bits and pieces that can go in a video stream, they're not very visualizable, and they have surprising edge case interactions. Not to mention there's a lot of "normally the program figures this out for you, but there's an option to override it if broken" knobs and dials.
by fooker | 2025-10-21 15:04:58+00:00
No, maybe you misunderstand the problem here?

Given a specific program, yes it is measurable and predictable.

A compiler has to deal with arbitrary programs, actually - small fragments of arbitrary programs at a time. Even if you could have an oracle giving you very precise measurements for the program fragment the compiler is dealing with, it won't hold up in practice.

Consider a small representative example. Suppose the compiler is compiling a function, and it did the best possible job.

Now, inlining this function at two callsites could have completely different second order effects like further optimizations, register pressure. There are partial solutions of course, people have spent their entire careers dealing with this specific problem. Rest assured that whatever you can come up with after thinking for a minute has been tried in 1970.