MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by helicone | 2025-10-30 03:02:04+00:00
looking at their wikipedia page they raised $100M decades ago to make that company. it doesn't seem like a good bet to raise money like that just to compete with an already well-known name in the space. maybe you could do it cheaper today, but what's the point? it's probably higher EV to just build something new in a different space and own that market.

i don't think this has to do with trust-busting i think this has to do with there being lower-hanging fruit elsewhere.

but regarding the principle of what you said, especially with tech markets, the government has a vested interest in keeping these companies as monopolistic as possible. a monopoly is always at risk of being taken down by the government, so the government has good leverage over them. with this leverage they can demand all sorts of things from them they otherwise couldn't like warrantless access to user-data and there's nothing the company can do about it. even if the leadership cared about protecting that data. its a much lower administrative cost to abuse one large company that it is to abuse hundreds of more competitive smaller ones.
by lumost | 2025-10-30 03:02:07+00:00
Hiring irrational players, or forcing rational people to act outside of their own self-interest is not a winning strategy either.

There is nothing wrong with building stuff, or career development. There is also nothing wrong with experimentation. You certainly would not want to incentivize the opposite behavior of never building anything unless it had 10 guarantors of revenue and technical soundness.

If you need people to focus, then you need them to be incentivized to focus. Do they see growth potential? Are they compensated such that other employers are undesirable? Do they see the risk of failure?
by ghthor | 2025-10-30 03:02:09+00:00
Nix is a 10x force multiplier for managing Linux systems. The fact that I can write python, go, bash, jq, any tool that is right for the job of managing and configuring the system is amazing. And on top of that I can patch any part of the entire system with just that, a patch from my fork on GitHub or anywhere else.

Top that off with first class programming capabilities and modularization and I can share common configuration and packages across systems. And add that those same customized packages can be directly included in a dev shell making all of the amazing software out there available for tooling and support. Really has changed my outlook and I have so much fun now not EVER dealing with tooling issues except when I have explicitly upgrade my shell and nixpkgs version.

I just rebuilt our CI infrastructure with nix and was a able to configure multiple dockerd isolated daemons per host, calculate the subnet spread for all the networks, write scripts configuring the env so you can run docker1 and hit daemon 1. Now we can saturate our CI machines with more parallel work without them fighting over docker system resources like ports. Never would have attempting doing this without nix, being able to generate the entire system config tree and inspect systemd service configs befor even applying to a host reduced my iteration loop to an all time low in the infrastructure land where 10-15mins lead times of building images to find out I misspelling Kafka and kakfa somewhere and now need to rebuild again for 15mins. Now I get almost instant feedback for most of these types of errors.
by mikeyouse | 2025-10-30 03:02:17+00:00
Nobody's claiming that all coral is going to go extinct.. the reef environment that has existed for the past few thousand years is at great risk though. Water temperatures that we know have been relatively stable for several hundred years are suddenly rapidly warming. Bleaching events due to high temps which infrequently occurred in the past are happening nearly every year now, which gives the reef no time to rejuvenate between them. The evolutionary process which protects species in their niches takes hundreds or thousands of generations to adapt to new selection pressures and the changes are happening over dozens of generations instead, which may be too fast for most species to respond.

Coral and coral reefs will surely exist for the next few hundred million years but e.g. the Great Barrier Reef as an example of a vibrant reef ecosystem might not. We don't know exactly where the tipping point for these extremely complex systems lies, but we know that it's some point in the direction we're heading and we're starting to see examples of the outcomes that scientists predict to see near those tipping points.
by dhosek | 2025-10-30 03:02:40+00:00
I remember at the time there was also going to be the wonderful new kernel that would allow OS/2 and MacOS to coexist on the same machine. As someone who had a Mac and an OS/2 machine side-by-side on his desk, this seemed like it could be a wonderful thing, but alas, it was never to come to be.
by mojomark | 2025-10-30 03:03:05+00:00
Well, that's not great. Gast turbine engines are notoriously inefficient compared to other electric power generation options (1). You use gas turbines when you need a lot of power, but limited volume (jets, warships). A server farm is not that.

1. https://www.nuclear-power.com/nuclear-engineering/thermodyna...
by kianN | 2025-10-30 03:03:09+00:00
We built our own collapsed Gibbs sampler in C: PyMC/Stan are use HMC which scales only to a few hundred parameters and we are modeling millions.

Above C we built a python wrapper to help construct arbitrary Dirichlet and Pitman-Yor Processes graphs.

From there we have some python wrappers and store it all in a hierarchical DuckDB schema for fast query access.

The site itself is actually just a light wrapper around our API that simplifies this process.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-10-30 03:03:41+00:00
Because even if you do have the talent, it’s a lot easier to get your feature/product out to millions when you have both the weight of Amazon behind you and existing customers.

Besides anyone can build a product. The hard part is obtaining customers. Too many people especially on HN seem to suffer from survivorship bias not realizing that nine out of 10 out right fail and many of the “successful” ones end up having a lot lower returns than someone can make as an entry level developer in a second tier city.

On the other hand, I’ve been on the interviewer side of the table enough times at smaller companies and software developers who have spent their careers in BigTech often don’t have the skillset we need and wouldn’t know what to do with an empty AWS account and new repository.

I did my stint at AWS ProServe from 2020-2023.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-10-30 03:03:42+00:00
How do you figure? Carbon footprint only matters per unit of output.

Americans produce 2-2.5x more output per ton of carbon emitted than the average country. And this despite the fact that the US is (1) the second largest manufacturer in the world, (2) one of the largest agricultural producers in the world, and (3) the largest oil producer in the world.

The US has a surprisingly low per capita carbon footprint given its vast per capita carbon-intensive production.
by clhodapp | 2025-10-30 03:03:43+00:00
What about me, a random person?

As stated in their foundational legal filings, the primary activity of OpenAI is supposed to be described as: OpenAI, Inc. ("OpenAI") is a nonprofit artificial intelligence ("AI") scientific research organization. Its goal is to engage in research activities that advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return. AI technology will help shape the 21st century, and OpenAI wants to help the world build safe AI technology and ensure that AI's benefits are as widely and evenly distributed as possible. To that end, OpenAI hopes to build AI as part of a larger community, and wants to openly share its plans and capabilities along the way.

As a member of humanity as a whole, they are supposed to be operating for my benefit, not primarily for the benefit of their investors. If they wanted to operate primarily for the benefit of their investors, they should have been paying taxes on every dollar they brought in.
by theamk | 2025-10-30 03:04:22+00:00
> The algorithmic problem they need to solve is how to harness Gibbs sampling for large scale ML tasks, but arguably this isn't really a huge leap,

Is it?

The paper is pretty dense, but Figure 1 is Fashion-MNIST which is "28x28 grayscale images" - which does not seem very real-life for me. Can they work on a bigger data? I assume not yet, otherwise they'd put something more impressive for figure 1.

In the same way, it is totally unclear what kind of energy are they talking about, in the absolute terms - if you say "we've saved 0.1J on training jobs" this is simply not impressive enough. And how much overhead is it - Amdahl law is a thing, if you super-optimize the step that takes 1% of the time, the overall improvement would be negligible even if savings for that step are enormous.

I've written a few CS papers myself back in the day, and the general idea was to always put the best results at the front. So they are either bad communicators, or they don't highlight answers to my questions because they don't have many impressive things (yet?). Their website is nifty, so I suspect the latter.
by devsda | 2025-10-30 03:05:22+00:00
> a Chinese propaganda slogan stuck with me: “If you want to get rich, build roads first; have fewer children, plant more trees.”

Why call it propaganda though ? That doesn't sound like a biased, deceptive or misleading policy.

It hasn't been thought through much which is universally common for some govt policies everywhere, but it results have been positive for the most part ?
by JuniperMesos | 2025-10-30 03:05:40+00:00
Maybe it is, I don't know the rules as they exist in every state - but that's also a problematic aspect of the REAL ID system: because the rules vary somewhat from state to state, authorities in one state who are used to one system for who can be legitimately given a REAL ID might make bad assumptions about someone from another state with different rules. And in any case, California is the most populous state by far, so even if it's an outlier, that still affects a huge percentage of the entire US population.

We really should have one, federally issued ID system, that works uniformally everywhere in the country for demonstrating citizenship and legal permanent residency, and that no other category of person can be able to legitimately obtain.
by ShroudedNight | 2025-10-30 03:06:02+00:00
I hate that curl $SOMETHING | sh has become normalized. One does not _have_ to blindly pipe something to a shell. It's quite possible to pull the script in a manner that allows examination. That Homebrew also endorses this behaviour doesn't make it any less of a risky abdication of administrative agency.

But then I'm a weirdo that takes personal offense at tools hijacking my rc / PATH, and keep things like homebrew at arm's length, explicitly calling shellenv when I need to use it.
by scoopertrooper | 2025-10-30 03:06:28+00:00
They go hand in hand. The authoritarianism of China allows it to undertake generational projects of immense scale with mass popular support through propaganda.

It works well when the government is pursuing welfare maximising initiatives, but limits self-correction when the government goes off track.

A small example of it going wrong, was when Mao convinced peasants to exterminate Sparrows and other ‘pests’ only to severely disrupt the ecosystem and cause a famine.
by notpushkin | 2025-10-30 03:07:54+00:00
> In general, streaming services have to ensure maximum compatibility when playing their contents on all kinds of devices - high end and low end. For which on low end device it could be very resource constraining to render typesetted subtitles. There are other platforms where all video playback have to be managed by the platform system frameworks with limited format support, and streaming services can't do much about it.

Surely if my mid-end phone from 2015 supported everything .ASS has to offer, they could do it either?

In any case... I don’t believe the problem is that Netflix and Crunchyroll have to support low-end devices, it’s that they don’t want to pay $$$ for typesetting. They are big enough now that they don’t have to care, so they don’t – just another example of enshittification.
by bschwindHN | 2025-10-30 03:09:03+00:00
(I help maintain innernet)

We have _some_ NAT traversal logic in place, but it's very basic. Tailscale does a much more thorough job on it. It would be cool to add peer relays to innernet but I imagine it's a fair amount of work.

From what I recall, tailscale has their own Wireguard implementation so they have more control over the socket and how things are routed. innernet is just a wrapper around managing wireguard peer lists, and yeah there's a central coordination server which is unfortunate. If the server goes down, you can still connect to peers so thankfully it doesn't bring down your whole network, but you won't be able to learn about new peers or peer endpoints over time until you re-establish connectivity with the coordination server.
by ble | 2025-10-30 03:09:42+00:00
What kind of constraints can you add?

Could I put a unique constraint on property `id` of all nodes with label X?

Could I put a constraint that edges of kind A must always go from nodes with label X to nodes with label Y?

What kind of indices can you add?

Will SQLite use them when you do a Cypher query?

Will your Cypher query planner take them into account?
by 8note | 2025-10-30 03:10:09+00:00
you could do screenshots, but my preference would be a video with the text instructions as the description, with timestamp links.

text with images is a pain to scroll, and in video form you have one more channel of info - sound.

the visuals are there to tell you where it is you find the different things, or so you dont go hunting for a button that doesnt actually exist on a gui, but also so you can match the confirmation, and get an idea on if its running at about the right speed
by jmspring | 2025-10-30 03:10:59+00:00
In all honesty, Bending Spoons acquiring AOL will probably have better synergy across their portfolio than Salesforce buying Slack. Having worked at SF, even working in dev rel/infra ops, it was mostly "slack who?". That acquisition was more like the Skype/Lync - aka, not really integrated, but tried - as opposed to MS buying GitHub and mostly keeping it independent.
by epistasis | 2025-10-30 03:11:15+00:00
Exactly I jumped onto pipenv, poetry, and pyenv as soon as I heard about them, and though they provided advantages, they all had significant flaws which prevented me being able to give full-throated endorsement as the solutions to Python environments

However, I have zero reservations about uv. I have not encountered bugs, and when features are present they are ready for complete adoption. Plus there's massive speed improvements. There is zero downside to using uv in any application where it can be used and also there are advantages.
by ggm | 2025-10-30 03:11:47+00:00
You can't chose an identity based off the illuminati trilogy and expect people to enter a politically neutral discussion with you surely?

The entry premise for wikipedia is that "it's a discussion" is a valid meta state for an article. Do you think that entry state is a valid condition for a machine generated encyclopedia where its guiding principle is "to adjust for systematic left bias in the world view" ? (my words)

clearly, one engages with the world as it aligns to ones world view. To be continually at odds with reality as you perceive it is both tiring and ultimately unsatisfying. Grok users seek a truth grounded in confidence grok is right, and it's founder is right, and the people who seek truth elsewhere are wrong and ungrokly and stupid and dull.

Fnord!
by Tadpole9181 | 2025-10-30 03:12:15+00:00
The US introduced China to western manufacturing markets. So if they would otherwise be poor and non-industrialized, the US is responsible for it all.

We can't claim we rose them from poverty while also denying culpability for the consequences thereof...

Though I think everyone is just saying Chinese emissions should be counted, proportionally, against the people they're making products for. And the US is one of their biggest customers.
by BurningFrog | 2025-10-30 03:12:20+00:00
"Have fewer children" implies that people are a burden, which can be true in a dysfunctional society, like perhaps China under Mao.

But in a well functioning system, more people get more things done and make society wealthier.

The old idea was that the planet can only produce enough food for a certain number of people. But it turned out that people produce the food, not the planet!
by picture | 2025-10-30 03:12:37+00:00
I see your point but, they're really not selling much more than golf carts and drones. If they go all-out with selling their actual military hardware (which they have a large stockpile and production capacity of), it would be get much more difficult for Ukraine to keep up the balance without increasing support from the west.

It's really quite interesting to see China being labelled as imperialist mean while the western powers have been colonizing and meddling in all kinds of affairs for generations... (see Operation Northwoods as one example)
by stargrazer | 2025-10-30 03:12:37+00:00
The title has nothing to do with the link. Correct link?

Probably meant this: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-29/wall-stre...

'The trade, dubbed a “box spread,” carried a kind of mystique. By combining two opposing options positions — one bullish, one bearish — Yang built a strategy that mimics a fixed-rate loan: upfront cash now, repayment at a set date, and a locked-in cost in between.'
by yanhangyhy | 2025-10-30 03:12:50+00:00
I’ve actually thought a lot about this issue. My conclusion is that it’s not feasible. China has never been good at integrating other ethnicities and races. Even managing the 56 recognized ethnic groups within mainland China hasn’t gone very well; it has copied many mistakes from the Soviet Union, which has now led to a certain degree of backlash.

So I’ve always felt that China’s ambition extends only to Taiwan, and Taiwan is the endpoint. After all, the people on Taiwan are Chinese too, sharing the same culture and ethnicity. Another point that people might overlook is that China’s approach to incorporating outsiders is based on cultural identity rather than racial identity, which is the opposite of the U.S. In the U.S., you can come in, bring your own culture, help reshape American culture, and still become an American. In China, you can only be considered Chinese if you adopt Chinese culture.

Of course, sometimes we discuss online hypotheticals like whether it would be good for China to annex Mongolia or Myanmar. From a purely military perspective, it would be very easy for China. But almost no one supports it, because our way of thinking dictates that it would require an enormous cost to transform those populations into Chinese culture, and that cost is simply not worth it. Trade and cooperation are the best approach.
by jahsome | 2025-10-30 03:13:31+00:00
As someone who doesn't watch anime, this article reminds me of when a coworker sends a screenshot with zero context and says something like "is this supposed to be like this?" Maybe it's a spectrum thing, but I find it beyond lazy and insulting.

In the article, there's zero explanation of what the actual issue is, at least in the first few paragraphs. It just seems to say the subtitles are bad with some examples and puts the burden on the reader to determine why.

Is the issue the subtitle's location on the screen ? Contrast or font? Quality of translations? Again, it's probably a spectrum thing, but without any context I find it overwhelming and overstimulating.
by notpushkin | 2025-10-30 03:14:05+00:00
They could borrow a trick from Netflix mentioned elsewhere in this thread: https://netflixsubs.app/docs/netflix/features/imgsub

I’m pretty sure it’s not too hard to implement an ASS → PNG renderer (especially considering vibe coding is now a thing). Then, just need to split out subs that can be actual text somehow from the ones that have to be overlays.

Apart from that... surely they could at least keep ASS subs for the players that support it, and serve “fallback” subs for low-end devices?
by gorwell | 2025-10-30 03:15:00+00:00
Per capita isn't the useful metric in this regard for the reason Palau illustrates. The climate cares about volume.

Per capita emissions is a way to assign relative sin by those who feel guilty about living large.

Bill Gates today, "This is a chance to refocus on the metric that should count even more than emissions and temperature change: improving lives. Our chief goal should be to prevent suffering, particularly for those in the toughest conditions who live in the world’s poorest countries. The biggest problems are poverty and disease, just as they always have been. Understanding this will let us focus our limited resources on interventions that will have the greatest impact for the most vulnerable people.”
by helicone | 2025-10-30 03:15:45+00:00
the government doesn't do much except wage war, arrest people, spy on them, and push paper around. everything else is done by contractors, and they're outsourcing an increasing amount of those things they actually do. why would this bottom-bidder contractor or work grant open source developer do a better job than twillio or stripe?

there are many things that can be done to help the public flourish, but the most expedient and obvious one is to stop wasting government money on poorly-managed nonsense created by committee and allow people to regain that lost value in the form of tax decreases.

if your solution to a problem involves increasing taxes for any reason, it's a bad solution.

edit: they maintain national parks. that's pretty cool, but thats like a drop in the bucket for their budget
by ggm | 2025-10-30 03:16:54+00:00
A point I think many people are overlooking. Furthermore, to the extent Burevestnik or the seaborne device can deliver nuclear warheads, very little in bomb physics has changed since the last tests were run.

It was my understanding the US bombs production and management facilities ran tests until simulations were good analogues of what they saw in the real test, at which point it's both cheaper and faster to run simulations.

The only possible reason to run real tests, is for a political communication, although who is receiving it and what it says to them, isn't clear.
by BobbyTables2 | 2025-10-30 03:17:07+00:00
To me server/networking hardware companies have a wet dream of manipulating workloads on physical servers the way one manipulates VMs in cloud computing.

Except the dream is to not do it just within a blade enclosure, but across blades in multiple racks, with network based storage in a multi-tennant environment. Maybe even across datacenters.

At some point, dealing (in an automated manner) with discovery, abstraction, and routing across different networking topologies, blade enclosures, rack switches, etc. becomes insane.

Of course a sysadmin with a few shell scripts could practically do the same for meaningful use cases without the general solution’s decade-long engineering effort and vendor lock-in…
by jmspring | 2025-10-30 03:18:50+00:00
The outage was really weird. For me, parts of the portal worked, other parts didn't. I had access to a couple of resource groups, but no resources visible in those groups. Azure Devops Pipelines that needed do download from packages.microsoft.com didn't work.

The Microsoft status page mostly referenced the portal outage, but it was more than that.
by ggm | 2025-10-30 03:18:51+00:00
I think "technically" is doing a lot of heavy lifting when the nuclear component is an engine. It's like classic geek ratholing.

if a nuclear submarine launches a tomahawk with a non-nuclear warhead is the entire weapons system "a nuclear weapon" in your eyes? Is that a breach of the arms treaties, and breaches "no first strike" posture and invites second strike response with nuclear warheads?