MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ivan_gammel | 2025-10-31 10:26:53+00:00
I don't know about China, but in Russia private conversations do not trigger immediate response and they do not control every possible means of communication. They simply do not have capacity to investigate every violation - too many people talk negatively about the government and ongoing events, so use reactive approach. People may get in trouble while being searched on the border crossing or after being reported by someone, but it is hardly different from border searches in USA. Things may change with their new messenger and disruption of WhatsApp and Telegram there (Russia just started blocking SMS verification codes making registration there difficult).
by BoxOfRain | 2025-10-31 10:27:23+00:00
I think that's a little simplistic, I have liberal (in the British English sense) views specifically because I think humanity is fundamentally flawed. If we are all flawed particularly when it comes to wielding power over others, it's self-evident in my opinion that governments should be limited and the total power any individual or institution can amass should have a hard ceiling. I see explicit anti-authoritarianism as a necessary counterweight to our flawed nature, every exercise of political power is potentially harmful but through the ideas developed in the Enlightenment it can at least be contained and controlled.

Humans are inherently flawed and they're inherently kind. We're evolutionarily primed for competition and cooperation. Antisocial behaviour can be both inherent and environmental. I feel you might be setting up a false dichotomy when the motivations for political beliefs are often pretty complex and varied.
by graemep | 2025-10-31 10:27:49+00:00
> Growth has slowed to a crawl (just over 1%)

So like France and Germany?

> “take back control” slogan now sounds hollow when irregular immigration is still higher than ever.

1. Take back control was about a lot more than immigration - it was primarily about regulation. 2. It has stopped EU immigration which was far larger scale than illegal immigration and there was no way of refusing to allow people in or removing them.

> most of the promised benefits haven’t materialized

Nor have the costs. The government predicted an immediate severe recession if we so much as voted for Brexit, let alone implemented it.
by sometimes_all | 2025-10-31 10:28:21+00:00
It's usually down about at least once a day for me anyway. Previously it used to be down during beginning and end of US work times. Now that they've geographically spread out their servers, it's down at random times instead.

TBH I'm not so irritated by this. It keeps me grounded, and saves me from being unconsciously outsourcing all the hard work of thought process to AI.
by thomassmith65 | 2025-10-31 10:29:18+00:00
The assertion was 'if it's colonisation, it's colonisation with about a dozen caveats'. Some of the caveats that come to mind:

- when the colonists began colonizing, there were already a minority of jews in the region

- many of the colonizers believed themselves, with some reason, to be native to the land

- most israelis today, through no fault of their own, were born in israel

- when zionists came to colonize israel, it was already colonized (twice over)

- the initial colonization was carried out 'legally' (though, in hindsight, what that means is questionable)

- many of the colonizers were fleeing persecution and, especially around the holocaust, had no nations willing to accept them as immigrants
by sometimes_all | 2025-10-31 10:30:00+00:00
It's usually down about at least once a day for me anyway. Previously it used to be down during beginning and end of US work times. Now that they've geographically spread out their servers, it's down at random times instead.

TBH I'm not so irritated by this. It keeps me grounded, and saves me from being unconsciously outsourcing all the hard work of thought process to AI.
by lukan | 2025-10-31 10:30:19+00:00
Cheating implies lying and breaking agreements and I did not write that about Tolstoy. I see no cheating, if the agreements were made upfront in a different way. And no promises broken from Tolstoy as far as I know. With even sharing his diary, he seemed to be have been crystal clear and open about everything from the start, or do you have different information?

What promises and agreements he did break?
by antonvs | 2025-10-31 10:30:25+00:00
I’ve had models “redirect the problem to someone who has a greater likelihood of not failing”. Gemini in particular will do this when it runs into trouble.

I don’t find all these claims that models are somehow worse than humans in such areas convincing. Yes, they’re worse in some respects. But when you’re talking about things related to failures and accuracy, they’re mostly superhuman.

For example, how many humans can write hundred of lines of code (in seconds mind you) and regularly not have any syntax errors or bugs?
by raphman | 2025-10-31 10:30:29+00:00
The commit messages (with dozens of semi- and unrelated changes in each commit) suggest so.

https://github.com/davidesantangelo/fastrace/commit/79d92744...

(For me, this does not necessarily say anything about code quality. However, if a whole project is AI-generated, the author has no enforceable copyright IMHO, and thus, the 2-clause BSD license is void.)
by topspin | 2025-10-31 10:30:54+00:00
I've been toting around and refining a Result<> implementation from project to project from Java 8 onwards. Sealed classes in 17+ really make it shine.

I wish Oracle et al. had the courage to foist this into the standard library, damn the consequences. Whatever unanticipated problems it would (inevitably) create are greatly outweighed by the benefits.

I've written Pair<> about a dozen times as well.
by giuseony | 2025-10-31 10:32:52+00:00
Long time ventoy user, here. I absolutely love this software, there's always a usb stick with ventoy and a bunch of useful isos in my pocket.

The really intriguing feature is the ability to run vDisk files (as long as there's a linux distro within it) thanks to the VtoyBoot plugin[1]. I'm actually trying to build my own customized arch version with all my software (and potentially keys) installed so I can get rid of having to bring around any hardware. The only problem I'm facing is that it seems that ventoy boot does not work very well with luks containers.

[1] VtoyBoot plugin: https://www.ventoy.net/en/plugin_vtoyboot.html
by alyxya | 2025-10-31 10:33:11+00:00
The key point the paper seems to make is that existing benchmarks have relatively low complexity on reasoning complexity, so they made a new dataset DeepRD with arbitrarily large reasoning complexity and demonstrated that existing models fail at a complex enough problem. Complexity is defined from the complexity of a graph created by modeling the problem as a graph and determining the traversals needed to go from some source node to a target node.

My main critique is that I don't think there's evidence that this issue would persist after continuing to scale models to be larger and doing more RL. With a harness like what coding agents do these days and with sufficient tool use, I bet models could go much further on that reasoning benchmark. Otherwise, if the reasoning problem were entirely done within a single context window, it's expected that a complex enough reasoning problem would be too difficult for the model to solve.
by highwaylights | 2025-10-31 10:33:25+00:00
I sort of agree.

If you look at the UK through the MAGA lens you see that there’s a grain of truth in some of the comments about free speech.

Likewise terminology in the US is sometimes a little turned on its head - in the US “liberalism” means something completely different from actual liberalism (which would be closer to libertarianism).

Also “woke” has been used for so many things that its meaning has been warped from “don’t trust the system” to whatever the right dislikes on a given day, even though they’re ostensibly all about smaller government that stays out of your business.

Politics has always been very subversive but it’s more entangled than ever now.
by skydhash | 2025-10-31 10:33:54+00:00
It would be nice if the computers could be that nice to work. It’s a completely dumb machine that needs everything spelled out. Humans are very flexible. To get flexibility out of a computer require great effort.

The main reason you want a computer is cheap emulation (cad, daw,…) or fast (and reliable) automation. Both requires great deal of specifications to get right.
by jorvi | 2025-10-31 10:34:13+00:00
https://chipsandcheese.com/p/arm-or-x86-isa-doesnt-matter

Basically, x86 uses op caches and micro ops which reduces instruction decoder use, the decoder itself doesn't use significant power, and ARM also uses op caches and micro ops to improve performance. So there is little effective difference. Micro ops and branch prediction is where the big wins are and both ISAs use them extensively.

If the hardware is equal and the designers are equally skilled, yet one ISA consistently pulls ahead, that leads to the likely conclusion that the way the chips get designed must be different for teams using the winning ISA.

For what it's worth, the same is happening in GPU land. Infamously, the M1 Ultra GPU at 120W equals the performance of the RTX 3090 at 320W (!).

That same M1 also smoked an Intel i9.
by jwr | 2025-10-31 10:34:48+00:00
I always wondered why people found it acceptable to just run npm on their systems for anything they do, and have it download anything on any build.

Coming from "make" with repeatable and predictable builds, I was appalled that you run this thing and you have no idea what it will download and what it will produce. Could be something different the next time you run it! Who knows!

I also found it bizarre that even for things that just generate CSS, you are expected to integrate it into your npm thing. I mean, generating CSS from a configuration is a function. It's a make recipe. Why does it need to be an npm library dependency with all the associated mess? I managed to work around it for a number of packages by freezing entire npm setups inside docker containers, which gave me reproducible builds — but it's a losing battle.
by pjc50 | 2025-10-31 10:35:09+00:00
Indeed. I'm a user of Cloudflare free and Oracle(tm) Always Free(sic) services, but for hobby projects where I'm not under the illusion that they owe me anything.

I think the longevity of Gmail, Youtube etc being both (a) absolutely free and (b) personally critical to many people has rather warped expectations in this regard. Take the freebie, be grateful, but don't imagine that giving no money to a corporation is going to incur any obligation from them to you.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-10-31 10:36:42+00:00
I can relate, but artists get treated even worse. It seems to be a thing with creatives. Musicians also get ripped off a lot, as do writers.

Developers seem to have a product that people can actually attach a value to, but art and music; not so much. They seem to be in different Venn circles.

In all of it, we do stuff because of the love of the craft. One of the deeper satisfactions, for me, is when folks appreciate my work (payment is almost irrelevant; except for "keeping score"). It's pretty infuriating, to have someone treat my work as if it is a cheap commodity. There's a famous Star Trek scene, where Scotty and his crew are being disciplined for a bar fight with some Klingons[0], and Scotty throws the first punch. I can relate.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rsZfcz3h1s
by Arch-TK | 2025-10-31 10:37:18+00:00
Red Power was (is... Kind of) an extension not a fork. Although you could call it more an reinterpretation.

But really RP vs Redstone is more like C vs Assembly. I've seen crazy things done in both but I think I find it a bit more impressive when people use pure Redstone to get things done. There are so many dimensions where you both need to understand the mechanics and where there are opportunities for optimization.

The turtle mod you are talking about is ComputerCraft.
by Hendrikto | 2025-10-31 10:38:15+00:00
> I did think about trying to do an ultimatum with that employer to tell them to buy me a computer with Windows or let me install Linux on the Macbook

> I refuse to allow anyone to run Windows in my house

So you don’t care for peoples preferences unless they match your own? I don’t get that. You were in the same position. Why don’t you just let people use what they like?
by delaminator | 2025-10-31 10:38:24+00:00
You should always be investing on abstract problem solving and understanding architectural, engineering and systematic thinking.

Even with agents, you're still better off using structure to describe your system than pure natural language.

I have been coding since I was 11 which was 45 years ago, which I think is an important note.

In theory I can write all of the code that Claude is spitting out for me. In practice I have no desire to write the thousands of lines of axaml markup for a C# Avalonia application (maybe there's a GUI editor for it, I don't know).

I can now create solutions to problems I wrote off. And I can do it on my phone while I watch TV.

But I do have concerns about an imaginary 11 year old me today who is interested in this stuff. What is the pipeline to coding in assembler for him? (although I had the same concern before LLMs as I started out on 8bit home computers where dropping into assembler from BASIC was as easy as typing a [ and then LDA 1 etc.).

Who will write the library code that the LLMs join together?

There still needs to be innovation to drive change. People will still need to understand statistics to know if their results are valid.

So where do I stand? A smaller circle of humans will provide new things and prompt engineers will glue them together to make interesting products. We're on this ride, let's see where it goes.
by josephg | 2025-10-31 10:39:15+00:00
> javascript is only obviously better if you want to use the tradeoffs javascript offers: an implicit and unchangeable async runtime that doesn't offer parallelism and relies on a jit interpreter.

Yes - I certainly wouldn’t use JavaScript to compile and ship binaries to end users. But as an application developer, i think the tradeoffs it makes are pretty great. I want fast iteration (check!). I want all libraries in the ecosystem to just work and interoperate out of the box (check!). And I want to be able to just express my software using futures without worrying I’m holding them wrong.

Even in systems software I don’t know if I want to be picking my own future executor. It’s like, the string type in basically every language is part of the standard library because it makes interoperability easy. I wish future executors in rust were in std for the same reason - so we could stop arguing about it and just get back to writing code.
by Harmonic_Logos | 2025-10-31 10:39:29+00:00
Resonant Learner (Community Edition) introduces a new approach to training stabilization — Resonant Convergence Analysis (RCA) — which replaces traditional “patience + min_delta” early-stopping with a dynamic, frequency-based feedback loop.

Instead of watching loss values alone, RCA measures the β-amplitude and ω-frequency of validation oscillations to detect when learning transitions from “searching” to “settling”. The result: models converge faster with fewer epochs while maintaining (or improving) accuracy.

Highlights

Up to 2× faster training across CIFAR-10, MNIST, and BERT SST-2

Plug-and-play PyTorch callback (no framework changes)

Runs on Windows, Linux, and RunPod GPU (CUDA 12.4+)

Open-source under MIT license

Repo: https://github.com/Freeky7819/resonant-learner
by Harmonic_Logos | 2025-10-31 10:39:59+00:00
Thanks for checking this out! Here are a few quick details for anyone who wants to reproduce the results:

Setup

git clone https://github.com/Freeky7819/resonant-learner cd resonant-learner pip install -U pip setuptools wheel pip install -e . python verify_installation.py

Run examples

# CIFAR-10 baseline python examples/cifar10_rca.py --baseline

# CIFAR-10 with RCA python examples/cifar10_rca.py --use-rca 1

# BERT SST-2 baseline python examples/hf_bert_glue.py --task sst2 --baseline

# BERT SST-2 with RCA python examples/hf_bert_glue.py --task sst2 --use-rca 1

Typical results (Community Edition)

Dataset Baseline Epochs RCA Epochs Δ Compute Accuracy CIFAR-10 60 33 −45 % +0.6 % BERT SST-2 10 6 −40 % +0.4 % MNIST 20 12 −40 % ≈ same

The RCA module is open-core (MIT). SmartTeach + AutoCoach + Stillness are part of the upcoming Pro edition (meta-learning and damping layers).

Happy to answer questions, benchmark requests, or implementation details.
by trashb | 2025-10-31 10:40:23+00:00
I think at the time of writing payphones where still so common that it was hard to imagine a world without them. The payphones are also quite fundamental to hacking culture due to the roots in "phone phreaking" which is used in the story. So perhaps it was included due to association with those elements as it will give the reader some context of at that time the current day in this futuristic world and ground them in the fictional universe.
by rogermungo | 2025-10-31 10:40:34+00:00
Good question.. Maybe Costa Rica https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries...

Yes stasi is an intentional exaggeration of the fact that police are turning up at people's homes about their social media posts and many have been jailed for social media posts but not all who have made comparable posts, so it seems inconsistent (targeted)
by p_l | 2025-10-31 10:40:45+00:00
Oh Nano Server, that's a blast from the past.

I worked on porting certain Software Defined Networking product to Windows platform, for use with Hyper-V. Nano Server was new and we tried to target it as one of the options, especially since it was implied to be recommended way to deploy Hyper-V hosts. And yes, IIRC it took less than 500MB, but it couldn't run most windows applications (for example, GUI was missing).

So much was stripped out that at one point I ended up with reverse-engineered Windows Update packaging (unfortunately lost my notes) because the oldest form of Windows Installer, the one used with INF files for drivers, could not be used fully - specifically, we could not run any kind of action in our own DLL when initializing the drivers. And messing with the right registry keys was fraught with peril.

Do not recall all issues, but essentially we were trying to create a package that could be applied with DISM.EXE onto Nano Server image.
by frm88 | 2025-10-31 10:41:12+00:00
What stopped the pandemic was omicron that was so explosively contagious that 98+% of the world got it at the time. After that everyone had natural immunity that caused decreasing symptoms every subsequent time you got infected with a new variant.

Source?

There was a study in 2024 that researched what exactly lead to the sudden decline in Covid deaths [0]:

...suggest that a phase transition in the molecular structure of the COVID-19 spike protein made the virus less likely to cause severe infections.

[0] https://www.springer.com/gp/about-springer/media/research-ne... click on the link directly to the study. It's a .pdf.
by alabhyajindal | 2025-10-31 10:41:18+00:00
> What kind of code snippets could you suggest?

Anything really! Some websites that do this currently: https://ziglang.org, https://crystal-lang.org and https://www.ruby-lang.org/en

> I have a comparison table mentioning features

Yes - I did see this in the README. Maybe worth adding it, or something similar to the website.
by SwiftyBug | 2025-10-31 10:41:23+00:00
I'm a native Portuguese speaker. Here, when people are first starting to learn programming, it's very common for them to write code in Portuguese. For example, they would write this simple age verification algorithm:

int verifica_idade(int idade) { if (idade < 18) { return -1; } return 1; } int main() { int idade; scanf("%d", &idade); int verificacao = verifica_idade(idade); if (verificacao < 0) { printf("Acesso negado\n"); } else { printf("Acesso liberado\n"); } return 0; }

Do French (or other languages) speakers also do this?
by hacb | 2025-10-31 10:42:13+00:00
Unfortunately, the current way of how things work is, like you said, "deeply flawed". You will not change it in a few months, not even in a few years too.

What you can do, however, is to adapt to current threats, the same way adversaries adapt to countermeasures. Fully secure setups do not exist, and even if one existed, it would probably become obsolete very quickly. Like James Mickens said, whatever you do, you still can be "Mossad'ed upon". Should we give up implementing security measures then?

Thinking about security in a binary fashion and gatekeeping it ("this is not enough, this is will not protect you against X and Y") is, _in my opinion_, very detrimental.
by raphman | 2025-10-31 10:42:13+00:00
Honest question: why would this code clamp the reported round-trip time? By default, min = 0.05 ms and max = 800 ms [1].

if (rtt < config.min_rtt) rtt = config.min_rtt; else if (rtt > config.max_rtt) rtt = config.max_rtt;

Wouldn't this hide bugs in the code or network anomalies? Replies from localhost seem to typically arrive in less than 50 µs.

Comments in an earlier version [2] make no sense to me:

/* Use standard timersub for more accurate results */ if (rtt < 0) rtt = 0; /* Cap at reasonable maximum to handle outliers */ if (rtt > 1000) rtt = 1000;

[1] https://github.com/davidesantangelo/fastrace/blob/5b843a197b...

[2] https://github.com/davidesantangelo/fastrace/commit/79d92744...
by keiferski | 2025-10-31 10:42:20+00:00
The primary alternative to monthly subscription plans is a usage-based pricing plan. In other words, your customers are still paying more than once, but when is based on how much they use it, rather than per month/year.

You could also copy many WordPress plugins, which charge a fee for the first year (which includes support and updates) but then expires afterward. So they can continue using the plugin but won’t get any new updates/support.
by koolba | 2025-10-31 10:42:22+00:00
This is the mental distinction of what something represents vs what is its value. The former should never change regardless of mutability (for any sane program…), and the latter would never change for a const declaration.

The value (pun intended) of the latter is that once you’ve arrived at a concrete result, you do not have to think about it again.

You’re not defining a “variable”, you’re naming an intermediate result.
by mathgeek | 2025-10-31 10:42:34+00:00
This comment perfectly illustrates the mindset folks are talking about. "I'll give when it doesn't hurt me so much" is another form of "I'll give when I have more." It doesn't make the person "bad" or any such thing for not giving, but you won't convince folks to not give by saying "but what about you, don't you want nicer food/clothes/etc."
by thomassmith65 | 2025-10-31 10:42:36+00:00
The comment to which I replied was "was there anything good that ever came from that Apartheid genocidal state?"

The objection I have with that is that it's reductive.

"It's not *so* bad" is different than "it's not *entirely* bad", and my objection stands, whether or not "someone else could achieve good results"
by BSDobelix | 2025-10-31 10:42:51+00:00
>It's because European socialist heritage, Stasi, from East Germany, had 2% of its citizens as spies to "read and listen to everybody."

Have you ever heard of the Red Scare "McCarthyism" or the Patriot Act? The EU is the opposite of East Germany, nothing was inherited; they were robbed and left behind.