MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by throwaway-0001 | 2025-10-13 04:54:09+00:00
I want to try later when I’m at pc.

https://microlandia.tubatuba.net/simulation_details

Quite interesting details.

I wonder if you simulate at individual level or group? Would be cool at individual level each one making decisions individually and see some emerging behavior.

Also how corruption emerges in gov etc

Also if no job maybe they could try uber/food delivery crappy jobs like that or start their own business.

Maybe also less money less likely to have kids? Would be nice to show how poverty helps or not population growth. If too poor might have no education and would make kids, if average citizen and can’t save money will avoid kids. That’s why at individual level simulation could find these emerging patterns. But probably too expensive computationally ?
by tonyhart7 | 2025-10-13 04:54:48+00:00
Yep

"free and open web" isn't even used to be anymore, many are using bots and AI to make things worse and many people especially young people didn't even do "surfing" on the web anymore

like it or not but internet that need verification on personal level is the future, I don't agree with it either but if you see from the progress perspective its always been like that
by jkoff | 2025-10-13 04:54:54+00:00
https://infinitepod.app/

I'm working on a web app that creates easy-to-understand stories and explainers for the sake of language learning. You can listen in your favourite podcast app, or directly on the website with illustrations.

I'm eager to add more languages if anyone is fluent/able to help me evaluate the text-to-speech.
by pasxizeis | 2025-10-13 04:55:10+00:00
As a means to get into WebAssembly, I started writing a WebAssembly binary decoder (i.e. a parser for `.wasm` files) from scratch.

Recently I started executing the upstream spec tests against it, as a means to increase spec conformance. It's non-streaming, which is a non-starter for many use cases, but I'm hoping to provide a streaming API later down the road. Also, the errors interface are still very much WIP.

All that said, it's getting close to a fully-conformant one and it's been a really fun project.

https://github.com/agis/wadec

P.S. I'm new to the language so any feedback is more than welcome.
by eichin | 2025-10-13 04:55:19+00:00
Never heard of pagespeed before (yeah, lucky 10k etc, but also I'm just not a web dev) and this pointed up some huge easy wins on my image heavy homelab site, so thanks for that (setting `Cache-control` at all, and forcing `img loading="lazy"`.) To shortcut some obvious followups: (a) the pagespeed engine is called "lighthouse" and it's on github (Apache licensed)(b) it's also built in to Chrome DevTools (inspect) but for me it was all the way over on the » section of the toolbar. So you can run it locally on a private/staging site. again, thanks!
by edanm | 2025-10-13 04:55:49+00:00
> My mental model is that what is called RAG can either be:

RAG is confusing, because if you look at the words making up the acronym RAG, it seems like it could be either of the things you mentioned. But it originally referred to a specific technique of embeddings + vector search - this was the way it was used in the ML article that defined the term, and this is the way most people in the industry actually use the term.\

It annoys me, because I think it should refer to all techniques of augmenting, but in practice it's often not used that way.

There are reasons that specifically make the "embeddings" idea special - namely, it's a relatively new technique that actually fits LLM very well, because it's a semantic search - meaning, it works on "the same input" as LLMs do, which is a free-text query. (As opposed to a traditional lookups that work on keyword search or similar.)

As for whether RAG is dead - if you mean specifically vector-embeddings and semantic search, it's possible - because you could theoretically use other techniques for augmentation, e.g. an agent that understands a user question about a codebase and uses grep/find/etc to look for the information, or composes a search to search the internet for something. But it's definitely not going to die in that second sense of "we need some way to augment LLMs knowledge before text generation", that will probably always be relevant, as you say.
by akst | 2025-10-13 04:56:07+00:00
But it literally isn't that, as an author in depending on it you reduce your liberty. The software is free, those dependent on are not free.

You could argue well it's free to users, but there's a level of survivorship bias due to the fact this is confined to the software people will publish under this license.

Edit: Back to "free software losing" is unsurprising given the above. All the benefit to the user are ultimately irrelevant to the growth of software when doesn't come from users, it comes from people weighing up if they want to forgo this ability to exercise control over software they made. And the portion of users who actually care are negligible to the point it has zero incentive to the software provider. The one exception I would say is, the "Free" softwares model works well for public goods like shared infrastructure like database software and such, but for end user software it is insane licensing model.

> Someone with authoritarian viewpoint is of course going to chafe against principles of liberty, and that is how it should be

Do you even hear yourself. This is the rhetoric why no one takes this seriously. Your suggesting my desire not to be deprived of my own personal liberty and act on my own terms (without causing harm to anyone else) is somehow authoritarian? It's such a narcissistic / manipulative entitled framing, to suggest this embodies anything resembling liberty.
by hilbert42 | 2025-10-13 04:57:09+00:00
"…budgetting 100s of billions into retrofitting/integrating of alternative components with slightly different (potentially inferior) performance characteristics."

For strategic reasons the Military budgets enormous funds on items that may or may not pay off, it's a recognized gamble that all militaries engage in out of deemed necessity.

Why "potentially inferior performance", are you suggesting the US doesn't possess mining and chemistry expertise that are up to Chinese standards?

Just because the US hasn't needed to process REs to certain standards or requirements in the past doesn't mean it's not capable of doing so.
by grues-dinner | 2025-10-13 04:57:28+00:00
> Picture of ploughed fields

We've cleared nature for farms for so long that the fields feel like nature that should be preserved.

Not content with cutting down the forests, now even the hedgerows are in the way.

Compared to what was there before (often forest), a gigantic monocrop industrial field is about as ecologically friendly as a car park. And the car park won't dump fertiliser into the water courses either.
by kragen | 2025-10-13 04:57:49+00:00
That's a cool project!

I feel like the presentation of Lomuto's algorithm on p.110 would be improved by moving the i++ after the swap and making the corresponding adjustments to the accesses to i outside the loop. Also mentioning that it's Lomuto's algorithm.

These comments are probably too broad in scope to be useful this late in the project, so consider them a note to myself. C as the language for presenting the algorithms has the advantage of wide availability, not sweeping performance-relevant issues like GC under the rug, and stability, but it ends up making the implementations overly monomorphic. And some data visualizations as in Sedgewick's book would also be helpful.
by RHSeeger | 2025-10-13 04:58:07+00:00
I just don't bother to shorten it...

- Did we correctly understand and build what the customer asked for

- Did the customer actually ask for what would solve the problem they are trying to solve

The second one is very important to ask early on, and _not_ asking it can cause a lot of wasted time. When I'm in a position to comment on whether I think someone fits the requirements of a senior developer, whether or not they ask that question plays directly into it.
by immibis | 2025-10-13 04:58:17+00:00
It's not so much "before its time" as already had its time cut short, but Microsoft OLE. The premise was that you could insert any document into any other document. Worked with Office programs, mspaint, and some third-party programs. For example at school we had an electricity simulation program called Crocodile Physics, and you could embed a simulation in a PowerPoint slide.

And the similarly named but completely separate OLE Automation, which let you script programs, across process boundaries. This is what let you write in VB(A): Set w = New Word.Application: Set e = new Excel.Application: Set doc = w.Open("foo.doc"); etc... - this was to Office (mostly) what shell scripting is to Linux, and enabled a lot of ad-hoc business process automation.
by fluoridation | 2025-10-13 04:58:58+00:00
>We pay taxes in money because we have a diversified economy

It's all a fiction, though. Ultimately wealth can be translated to very raw things, like energy, space, and time. Using rice as currency is not too different from using Joules as currency, as it's ultimately just captured and stored solar radiation. The issue with using food as money is not that the economy is diverse, as it's ultimately for the most part powered by people eating. The issue is that if you spend money to make a km^2 of land usable for factories that produce, say, semiconductors, that's not exactly translatable to tons of rice.
by memoryleakgame | 2025-10-13 05:00:12+00:00
Everyone is working on such amazing things.

Truly very impressive.

Throwing in mine. I've been working on solo deving godot games in the last year.

Working on yet another gambling roguelike.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3839000/Golden_Gambit

I have an artist contacted to do my real assets now.

If anyone is practiced in game balance please reach out if you want to help!
by wakawaka28 | 2025-10-13 05:01:04+00:00
>Student loans are a scam because they are not dischargeable even in bankruptcy proceedings; this distorts the true cost of student loans.

That doesn't make them a scam. These loans are highly unnatural and issued to young people with no credit history and no definite plan to ever repay. If you let people go bankrupt on them, they would max the loans out and default almost immediately.

>Meanwhile, with a mortgage, the worst that can happen is Chapter 7 liquidation. You lose the house but are no longer liable.

That is the worst that can happen for a borrower IF they qualify for Chapter 7. These loan defaults are damaging to society as well. Even when the banks get the houses back, they lose at least tens of thousands on each one in the process of selling them.
by test6554 | 2025-10-13 05:01:32+00:00
I'm worried all that cheap easily accessible LLM capacity will be serving us ads if we're lucky and subtly pushing us to use brands that pay money if we're not.

If AI says don't buy a subaru it's not worth the money, then Subaru pays attention and they are willing to pay money to get a better rec. Same for Univerisites. Students who see phrases like "If the degree is from brown flush it down" (ok hyperbole, but still) are going to pick different schools.
by timventura | 2025-10-13 05:02:12+00:00
Quantum communication is already proven: instantaneous quantum communication is considered off-limits due to the No Communication Theorem.

However, Drs Kent Peacock and Tim Maudlin, and quantum theorist Siddhant Das—argue that the NCT is case-specific, and workarounds using different signaling and measurement applications may exist.

Dr. Maudlin is President of the John Bell Foundation, which puts him in an authoritative position to question whether this limitation is universal or may have workarounds.
by asimovDev | 2025-10-13 05:02:59+00:00
Been reversing Sound Blaster Command so that I could control my external DAC/AMP without Windows. So far I can change the LED color and EQ presets, which was the main reason I wanted to do it in the first place. I am currently in the process of writing a GUI for it so that others can use it too (I only tested it with 1 soundcard, G6, though) for their older soundblaster cards that are not supported by Creative's multiplatform solutions. Will use Clay for it. Initially wanted to use Qt but I wrote the implementation in C and now I am too lazy to adapt it to cpp.
by gritzko | 2025-10-13 05:03:07+00:00
I was checking Google Maps recently. In such places as Islamabad or Cyprus, residential solar is big. I also hear, the price of panels is low % of the entire installation.

What excites me is that solar works one level up. Coal is energy, solar is a source of energy. If you sell solar panel manufacturing equipment, you work in the second derivative.

That literally levels up the game.
by immibis | 2025-10-13 05:03:37+00:00
We don't accept this from any other file format - why is HTML different? For example, if I include random blocks of data in a JPEG file, the picture is all broken or the parser gives up (which is often turned into a partial picture by some abstraction layer that ignores the error code) - in both cases the end user treats as completely broken. If I add random bytes into a Word or LibreOffice document I expect it not to load at all.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-10-13 05:03:57+00:00
> consumer know what they buy into

Consumers don't know anything about what's being done to them. Even on Hacker News I get accused of being a paranoid schizophrenic "tinfoil hat" user when I point out the fact we have trillion dollar corporations building digital fiefdoms with users as the serfs. You think non-technologists can grasp this? You have far more optimism and faith in humanity than me if you truly believe that.
by mechanicum | 2025-10-13 05:04:57+00:00
These have been available since mid-2022:

:insert-output Run shell command, inserting output before each selection. :append-output Run shell command, appending output after each selection. :pipe, :| Pipe each selection to the shell command. :pipe-to Pipe each selection to the shell command, ignoring output. :run-shell-command, :sh, :! Run a shell command

The placeholder for the current file is %{buffer_name} (not as bad as it looks, the command line has tab completion for basically everything).
by wakawaka28 | 2025-10-13 05:05:04+00:00
>I suspect though, for better or worse, if we had to pay cash for a home, builders would simply be putting up inexpensive mobile-home style houses on tiny lots. Suburbia would look very different from what it looks like today.

There are other kinds of loans and different terms too.

>It also seems likely that if the 30-Year Fixed went away, only the truly wealthy would be able to buy homes … to rent to the rest of us of course.

The cheap credit drives up home prices. It's not actually an obvious aid to poor people. It discourages saving up for a house. Higher interest rates would drive prices down and make down payments easier to save up.
by somenameforme | 2025-10-13 05:05:04+00:00
The Turing Test has not been meaningfully passed. Instead we redefined the test to make it passable. In Turing's original concept the competent investigator and participants were all actively expected to collude against the machine. The entire point is that even with collusion, the machine would be able to do the same, and to pass. Instead modern takes have paired incompetent investigators alongside participants colluding with the machine, probably in an effort to be part 'of something historic'.

In "both" (probably more, referencing the two most high profile - Eugene and the LLMs) successes, the interrogators consistently asked pointless questions that had no meaningful chance of providing compelling information - 'How's your day? Do you like psychology? etc' and the participants not only made no effort to make their humanity clear, but often were actively adversarial obviously intentionally answering illogically, inappropriately, or 'computery' to such simple questions. For instance here is dialog from a human in one of the tests:

----

[16:31:08] Judge: don't you thing the imitation game was more interesting before Turing got to it?

[16:32:03] Entity: I don't know. That was a long time ago.

[16:33:32] Judge: so you need to guess if I am male or female

[16:34:21] Entity: you have to be male or female

[16:34:34] Judge: or computer

----

And the tests are typically time constrained by woefully poor typing skills (is this the new normal in the smartphone gen?) to the point that you tend to get anywhere from 1-5 interactions of just several words each. The above snip was a complete interaction, so you get 2 responses from a human trying to trick the judge into deciding he's a computer. And obviously a judge determining that the above was probably a computer says absolutely nothing about the quality of responses from the computer - instead it's some weird anti-Turing Test where humans successfully act like a [bad] computer, ruining the entire point of the test.

The problem with any metric for something is that it often ends up being gamed to be beaten, and this is a perfect example of that. I suspect in a true run of the Turing Test we're still nowhere even remotely close to passing it.
by adventured | 2025-10-13 05:05:07+00:00
You do understand the US, much like Europe, is highly bifurcated.

Show me the gap between the top and the bottom in Europe and the EU.

In Western Russia poverty looks like people earning $100-$200 per month. They exist in third world conditions. That's part of Europe.

Germany is an elite outcome for Europe for example. Population 83 million. Show me what the top 83 million in the US look like by comparison (roughly the top 25% of the US). Hint: it's not even close.
by kragen | 2025-10-13 05:07:11+00:00
Your van is probably better than mine, but when I was vanlifing with my wife, I really regretted spending so many long hours on the road. If I did it over again, I'd try to limit driving to a max of two hours per day and five hours per week. We spent far too much money on repairs and not nearly enough time writing code or exploring the places I drove through. Or past.

Are you reviewing code by voice, like a blind programmer? Have you tried Emacspeak? I know that's not normally hands-free.
by adventured | 2025-10-13 05:08:30+00:00
Yes, this thead is filled with propaganda.

The US is by a dramatic margin the world's #2 producer of solar.

The US is by a very dramatic margin the world's #2 producer of wind.

None of which takes anything away from China's remarkable production.

In solar the US = #3 + #4 + #5 combined.

In wind the US = #3 + #4 + #5 + #6 combined.
by userbinator | 2025-10-13 05:09:20+00:00
how a fabrication-time attacker can leverage analog circuits to create a hardware attack that is small (i.e., requires as little as one gate) and stealthy (i.e., requires an unlikely trigger sequence before effecting a chip’s functionality).

Surprisingly no mention of the Z80 "trap gates" in that section, as it's extremely relevant: https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/11143/in-...
by matheusmoreira | 2025-10-13 05:09:43+00:00
It's got nothing to do with protecting users. It's got everything to do with protecting the corporation from the users. Especially the corporation's bottom line.

If you have a free computer, you can make it save a copy of the film the corporation is streaming to you. It's your computer, you are in control.

If you have a corporate owned computer, it will not let you do that. They own the computer, they are in control. If you manage to subvert their control, it will be detected and they will not stream the movie to you.

Substitute corporation with government, and streaming with cryptography. Now consider the fact Europe is trying hard to enact laws that force client-side scanning of our end-to-end encrypted messages.

That is the war we are fighting. The fact we are losing hurts me deeply. It is hard to put into words my disillusionment.
by mindslight | 2025-10-13 05:10:04+00:00
Why are you putting so much faith in an idea that more attorneys will necessarily prevail? This seems in the neighborhood of the just world fallacy.

This article references an earlier event where a $500k house was destroyed - one and a half orders of magnitude larger - with the same legal outcome.

Is it that hard to believe that the state has excepted itself (and its agents) from legal liability?
by nradov | 2025-10-13 05:11:07+00:00
What's the hypothesis there? Were they just shitting out the extra starch without digesting it? Due to conservation of energy the calories can't just vanish.

It doesn't seem physically possible for most adult men to consume 13 pounds of potatoes a day. I'm a large man and I think I'd burst or vomit before choking down that much, regardless of how hard I'd been working. Most likely that number is just wrong.
by miselin | 2025-10-13 05:11:13+00:00
I've been working on my own programming language, Haven - https://github.com/miselin/haven

Lately, I've been hacking on improving its linear algebra support (as that's one of the key focuses I want - native matrix/vector types and easy math with them), which has also helped flush out a bunch of codegen bugs. When that gets tedious, I've also been working on general syntax ergonomics and fixing correctness bugs, with a view to self-hosting in the future.
by grues-dinner | 2025-10-13 05:13:25+00:00
The figures are, if anything, an underestimate.

An acre of solar is about 350-450,000 kWh/year. An F-150 Lightning does 2 miles per kWh. So that's about right.

One acre of corn makes about 400 gallons of bioethanol. Even the newest F-150s do an atrocious 18 mpg in real usage, so you need nearly 1500 gallons to go 25,000 miles. So this figure is presumably ignoring the non-ethanol content of the fuel, which is most of it.
by jroesner | 2025-10-13 05:14:54+00:00
Currently working on an advanced analytics tool for 0DTE trade data, which allows to scan through massive amounts of data in the least amount of time, find seasonal patterns created by institutional investors, blast credit chains for profitable trades and simulate / backtest arbitrary trades in conjunction to create portfolios. So far the software yielded several successful trading strategies, which outperform standard approaches ever since the new administration in the US came to power. Currently in closed beta but planning to release around Xmas eventually.
by southernplaces7 | 2025-10-13 05:15:13+00:00
"I find something similar in my own life. I long ago stopped questioning a calculator, then stopped questioning Google, and now find that most answers from current AIs are pretty reliable. The AIs are becoming the arbiters of truth."

It's a shame so many people have trusted his other advice to such a degree if he's openly claiming himself to be this blithely stupid.

This entire article is a monstrosity of terrible notions painted as something that's just fine.
by 999900000999 | 2025-10-13 05:15:53+00:00
Vibe coding games in Godot.

Open sourcing them of course, I find that I can sketch out a basic idea with Co Pilot and it'll get 80% of the way there.

Godot is simply a joy , as long as you understand what it can do and what it can't.

It will never ever happen in my wildest dreams, but I want to make open source games full time.

I want the entire game industry to have to compete with high quality open source games and frameworks.

Assuming I ever have a chance to retire, I'll be a old man writing code for sport.
by accrual | 2025-10-13 05:16:39+00:00
Very high quality app, thank you! It's simple, looks nice, and does everything it needs to. I love that it automatically allows playing in the background and appears on the lock screen, etc.

The only thing I noticed was there's another app also called Ambi that generates background sound which I mistakenly downloaded first. It popped up a message to buy premium, then I knew I had the wrong app. ;)

For fun, play train + airplane at the same time. Train in the sky.