MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wqaatwt | 2025-11-21 06:59:02+00:00
> People have been predicting the immediate collapse of Europe

Have they? I thought most were predicting stagnation and slow decline? Which has been the cast for the past >15 years. Europe is just being left behind..

> trusts official inflation numbers

Because they are unwilling to read and learn what these numbers mean and how they are calculated?

> What was GDP growth? Less than 10%...

Well… reported GDP growth is always adjusted by inflation.
by jimnotgym | 2025-11-21 06:59:30+00:00
I wonder what adding a second hinge in a truck does to it's performance in an accident? When the trailer jack knifes, for instance?

I guess someone who wants to put them on our roads should answer some questions on that. Especially as they are clearly given to absurd claims like, 'it goes from 7 to 120 mpg', as if that happened without any other input.
by gf000 | 2025-11-21 06:59:40+00:00
How can you compare the Cathedral with a bazaar? This is not a technical difference at all.

Apple/Microsoft can do whatever they want, just break compatibility at any point and everyone else wanting to have their programs supported on their platform will adapt.

Meanwhile for Linux network effect has a much bigger role to play, you can't tell anyone else what to do, but protocols can only emerge from working together.

Also, I wouldn't bring up Microsoft's display stack as a positive example at all.
by bsder | 2025-11-21 07:02:53+00:00
> It makes sense that dining out is expensive, but it's weird that premade meals in grocery stores are so expensive, and that there's not a super cheap middle ground where they use economies of scale to have 1 person cook cafeteria slop for 100 and sell it for pennies. Is it a food safety thing?

Most of what currently ails the restaurant sector can be traced to real estate costs. Even if your food and labor are free, real estate kills you as you have to put your restaurant where your customers can get to you.

And the problem is being exacerbated by private equity having piled into commercial real estate. I can point to all manner of restaurant sites that closed up because the rent got jacked up and then were left idle for 5+ years. Standard landlords simply can't eat that level of rent loss. Private equity, however, will take an almost infinite loss in cash flow as long as they can kick the can down the road indefinitely and never have to pay actual cash.
by gf000 | 2025-11-21 07:04:53+00:00
But why would I ever want to have a separate compositor and window manager? Like the display stack benefits from "vertical integration", being modular is a tradeoff, often of performance and significant complexity.

Why not just make a display server (which handles everything rendering related, compositing included), and then add a window manager as a plugin/extension on top? Window managers are not that complicated.
by withinboredom | 2025-11-21 07:04:56+00:00
I’m working on a new type of database. There are parts I can use an LLM to help with, because they are common with other databases or software. Then there are parts it can’t help with, if I try, it just totally fails in subtle ways. I’ve provided it with the algorithm, but it can’t understand that it is a close variation of another algorithm and it shouldn’t implement the other algorithm. A practical example, is a variation of Paxos that only exists in a paper, but it consistently it will implement Paxos instead of this variation, no matter what you tell it.

Even if you point out that it implemented vanilla Paxos, it will just go “oh, you’re right, but the paper is wrong; so I did it like this instead”… the paper isn’t wrong, and instead of discussing the deviation before writing, it just writes the wrong thing.
by milch | 2025-11-21 07:05:54+00:00
Some people are contrarian simply to be contrarian. I'm loving the features that are coming out. I use Translate, Assistant, Universal Summarizer, and (of course) Search multiple times a day. Not everything is going to be for everyone, I'm personally not really interested in News, but it certainly feels like I'm getting value out of my subscription. The only thing I'm actively missing with Assistant is a proper app - the PWA is fine but the keyboard glitches out sometimes, navigation is not as fluid/smooth as it could be on a native app, same with file/photo uploads, and notifications when you leave the app and the reply is done would really tie it together.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-11-21 07:06:05+00:00
I would challenge both of those.

Corporations exist to do whatever their directors or shareholders want them to do. For publicly-traded corporations that's typically to generate profits, but not all corporations are listed on a stock exchange and even the public ones could in principle have their shareholders vote to do something else. If a corporation wants to build electric cars to fight climate change or build housing to reduce housing scarcity, that doesn't make it "bad" -- it's good, and you don't want the government impeding that when somebody wants to do it. Or even when they want to do the same thing to make money, because it can be both things at once.

And just because a government that doesn't prioritize its constituents is bad doesn't mean that the government we have is good, or that every existing regulation is benefiting constituents rather than harming them.

> Everything else is implementation detail

Which is kind of the part that matters.
by AmbroseBierce | 2025-11-21 07:06:56+00:00
The person behind www.pixellab.ai has been trying to make a SaaS out of that idea for about 2 years already and it just isn't there, the examples in the homepage are extremely cherry-picked, I bet most of their paying customers just use it as a starting point and then spend hours manually fix the sprites, which may be more than enough value for $12 a month and that's great but what is shows is that we are not as close as one would like to imagine, the "one leg in front of the other at about the same depth and the same color" is still problematic to this day; if most pants in the world had a different color for each leg I bet most of its animation issues would be solved, unfortunately we don't and most of the training data involves single-color pants/legs.
by 0xDEAFBEAD | 2025-11-21 07:07:30+00:00
>insulin is unaffordable

In large part due to regulation. Reflexively adding more regulations to deal with the negative effects of existing regulations is like "fixing" a bug by adding special-case logic for inputs which trigger the bug, without understanding why the bug actually occurred. Just like code, regulations should ideally be simple and elegant with a minimum of special cases.
by vjerancrnjak | 2025-11-21 07:08:05+00:00
No.

You can go further and ask me if I imply lazy loading is mandatory.

Imagine what happens when lazy loading turns off. You lose encapsulation. How will OOP work now if you have to reason about your whole call stack and know what exactly has to load up front?

Why can lazy loading be turned off? What if I write my code BAU and then realize I need to turn it off?
by BrandoElFollito | 2025-11-21 07:09:11+00:00
And they would need a team to support the hypervisor. Znd its backup. And its performance. And, and, and.

This is fine if you are big. Anything smaller and it is a big problem.

This is also why they do not manage their plumbing and do not run z restaurant in house. Some things are better left to companies that do it at scale
by psychoslave | 2025-11-21 07:10:04+00:00
I never saw any human starting to loop "the" as a reaction to any utterance though.

Personally my concern is more about the narrative that LLM are making "chain of thoughts", can "hallucinante" and that people should become "AI complement". They are definitely making nice inferences most of the time, but they are also totally different thing compared to human thoughts.
by kamaal | 2025-11-21 07:10:12+00:00
>>You're a high performer, one year into the role. A colleague, who's been around longer but struggled, gets promoted not necessarily on merit, but on their ability to manage up.

Its honestly mostly like a queue, you can't see why people who came before should get a early exit. But those people had people before them too, and thought the same. Now that you arrived, you think your specific case be prioritised above them for merits you think count above theirs and not necessarily their place in the queue.

As much as we all think we are special, we mostly aren't, time and queue position plays a huge role in most things in the society.

Its pointless to fight the queue system, most events in life happen in an order, and its pointless to fight cause-effect sequences. Some exceptions to this absolutely exist, but this is the general rule.

>>At year-end reviews, client recognition turned into a liability, not an asset.

Do not outshine the master - 48 laws of power

Remember the system is a part of the game, if you threaten someone you will take their job, its in their interest now to see through the end of you.
by queenkjuul | 2025-11-21 07:10:13+00:00
On my last road trip i saw a Tesla go from 75 to 60 to 110 in the span of about 20 seconds then the driver pulled over and stopped and got out. No idea what the fuck happened there but I'm certainly giving them all a wide berth from now on. This was wide open road with almost no other other traffic in broad daylight.
by charcircuit | 2025-11-21 07:10:30+00:00
>What made the X architecture much more interesting is that it avoided coupling the window manger to the compositor

This is the industry standard, putting the compositor and window manager in separate processes.

Android separates SurfaceFlinger and WindowManagerService.

iOS separates quartz compositor and springboard.

Windows separates dwm and explore.

MacOS separates WindowServer and Dock.
by deanishe | 2025-11-21 07:10:31+00:00
> I don't think the amount of breakage per se was the problem with Python 3.

The lack of u"" is just another manifestation of the complete breakage they wrought upon Python's string handling, isn't it?

It was closer to a decade (3.7) till they'd put enough of the bits they'd ripped out back in for Py3 to be suitable for the things I used Py2 for.
by hulitu | 2025-11-21 07:13:50+00:00
I get this error: "Your clock is ahead A private connection to www.dosdays.co.uk can't be established because your device's date and time (Friday, November 21, 2025 at 8:10:19 AM) are incorrect. net::ERR_CERT_DATE_INVALID Turn on enhanced protection to get Chrome's highest level of security"

on mobile, with clock syncronized automatically from mobile provider. Programming is hard.
by HumanOstrich | 2025-11-21 07:13:51+00:00
I think you are overcomplicating things and contradicting yourself. Maybe you are unfamiliar with how paths work on *nix.

> I like environment variables, but developers/operating systems have trouble using them well.

So then read `XDG_CONFIG_HOME` to find the "virtual" path where the driver will mount the config "virtual" path that could have just been referenced directly in `XDG_CONFIG_HOME`?

> All paths are virtual, meaning they are provided by something.

As opposed to not being provided by something? That's nonsense and even if it did make sense, if ALL paths are virtual, the distinction is meaningless.

Also, you're taking "everything is a file" too literally.
by kamaal | 2025-11-21 07:15:35+00:00
>>The real cause of our dysfunctional system is the debris of nehruvian socialism (he was a covert communist masking himself as a Fabian socialist).

It has been 50 years since his time. And most of what he did now has largely faded out to nothingness. OTOH, his time wasn't all that bad either. Even till 2000s cities in South India were very liveable, with decent quality of life.

Most of Indias problem come from a brutal zero sum game society, where population is too large, and there isn't enough affluence going around.

Everyone, every community and sub group, down the individual has to do anything in takes to snatch, hoard and then deny as many resources they can. Even if it means wrecking everything that exists to get there.

Nothing good comes out of these things.

To begin with fixing India, you must work towards having affluence of a few decades atleast. A generation or two need to live through this to wash away behaviours of a scarcity game.
by mortos | 2025-11-21 07:15:37+00:00
I can't promise how effective it is but Google Pixel phones have a built in scam detection feature in their dialer app. It uses a local LLM that runs on device and analyzes the phone conversation. Here's their support doc: https://support.google.com/phoneapp/answer/15654065

It likely only works for US English phones, and of course if they get him onto other platforms like whatsapp or signal then it's no help. Sorry to hear you're dealing with that it's a big fear of mine as my parents age.
by arjie | 2025-11-21 07:18:52+00:00
Haha, this works if you already know what a vector space is. But I think pedagogy needs to provide motivating examples. I'll quote one section of a text by Poincaré (translated by an LLM since most here do not speak French).

> We are in a geometry class. The teacher dictates: “A circle is the locus of points in the plane that are at the same distance from an interior point called the center.” The good student writes this sentence in his notebook; the bad student draws little stick figures in it; but neither one has understood. So the teacher takes the chalk and draws a circle on the board. “Ah!” think the students, “why didn’t he say right away: a circle is a round shape — we would have understood.”

> No doubt, it is the teacher who is right. The students’ definition would have been worthless, since it could not have served for any demonstration, and above all because it would not have given them the salutary habit of analyzing their conceptions. But they should be shown that they do not understand what they think they understand, and led to recognize the crudeness of their primitive notion, to desire on their own that it be refined and improved.

The learning comes from making the mistake and being corrected, not from being taught the definition, I think.

Anyway, it's from Science and Method, Book 2 https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Science_et_m%C3%A9thode/Livre...

There's more to the section that talks about the subject. I just find this particular paragraph amusingly germane.
by BoorishBears | 2025-11-21 07:19:36+00:00
At the risk of sounding unfairly stubborn about something I'm not that familiar with, if they've been at it for 2 years I'm imagining a very different (much more difficult) pipeline than fine-tuning an image model with an LLM backbone

The jump in understanding that having a full sized LLM behind the generations enables here is massive: https://ghost.oxen.ai/fine-tuned-qwen-image-edit-vs-nano-ban...
by roughly | 2025-11-21 07:20:20+00:00
> But I've witnessed multiple solar eclipses in my lifetime and while they were "cool", I had no "hauntingly humbling experience" whatsoever. It's something that happens and that we have a good scientific understanding of as to why and how it happens. End of story.

The fact that a giant celestial body blocking out the source of the energy that powers all life on this planet inspired no awe in you - that an object a quarter the diameter of our planet a couple hundred thousand miles away from us slid in front of the only real source of light and energy our planet has and temporarily cast us into night, with no ability for us to do anything at all to influence affairs whatsoever except to wait for the event to pass, that that inspired no awe or reflection in you about our place in the universe, our limitations as people, the degree to which we're subject to forces we have no impact over at all - I don't really think that's a testament to your superior apprehension of what you were looking at compared to the people who treated it as something worthy of reflection and introspection.
by pdubroy | 2025-11-21 07:20:57+00:00
Hi HN! Co-author of the book here, happy to answer any questions you have.

Beyond the sample chapters which are linked from the landing page, we also have a couple blog posts which may be interesting:

- A WebAssembly Interpreter: https://wasmgroundup.com/blog/wasm-vm-part-1/

- An older blog post, "A WebAssembly compiler that fits in a tweet" (https://wasmgroundup.com/blog/wasm-compiler-in-a-tweet), was also on HN earlier this year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42814948
by hhh | 2025-11-21 07:21:18+00:00
I had an experiment with vmware to build our next iteration of kubernetes platform, and they were asking why we used rancher and things like that, they got very frustrated when I was trying to do anything with their product and needed to sign up or sign in to a billion things, which I got frustrated and said ‘this! this id why we went with rancher, because there was no friction!’

too bad SUSE is doing the rancher prime stuff now as well.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-11-21 07:21:28+00:00
> Citation needed. Specially referring to TFA.

Explain the legitimate purpose of requiring a device that runs on batteries to be tested for emissions, not just once but for every subspecies of truck you want to use it with.

> You know what there is a lot of? Organizations trying to push onto the public hazardous and subpar products. Those are the ones mostly affected by regulation, because that's precisely what regulation is designed to shield society from.

You're confusing the nominal intention of the regulations with their actual effect. The map is not the territory.
by hexbin010 | 2025-11-21 07:22:07+00:00
Indeed! Also:

- The outlets have shutters preventing access to the contacts, until the longer earth pin is inserted

- The live pins are on the bottom, making contact harder if it's partially pulled out. And the live pins have sleeved sections so even less live metal is exposed.

- The cable drop is at 90 degrees, typically causing less pull on the plug
by rexpop | 2025-11-21 07:22:13+00:00
Insofar as "All ambiguity is resolved by practitioners at the sharp end of the system", a tool that resolves ambiguity higher up the org chart is going to be less impressive to those of us who resolve ambiguity day in and day out. What I mean to say, is that we know our way around the tools and this is why we're not impressed when somebody else uses AI to find their way around the tools.
by Nursie | 2025-11-21 07:22:45+00:00
> Google Maps has heavily censored their Street View in Germany to scrub any personal info

I remember when this first launched in the UK, automated face-scrubbing was in place. It was about 90% accurate on scrubbing faces from pictures. One of its best screwups was showing people's faces as they were standing outside a branch of KFC but blurring out the Colonel.
by beeflet | 2025-11-21 07:24:37+00:00
Remove the legal requirements for license plates or tinted windows.

We gimp the ability of the public to obfuscate their vehicle by forcing us to have license plates in the first place, when we already prove our license to drive with VIN and registration.

Also, remove the intellectual property protections associated with the appearance of vehicles, thus creating a market of clones that can easily fit in with each other.
by kace91 | 2025-11-21 07:25:27+00:00
In studying actual science along with the fake stuff, mostly. Nowadays they have anatomy, physical therapy classes, etc.

Some of their techniques are also proven to be useful-ish for short term pain management (not for the reasons they claim, it’s similar to acupuncture). So someone who actually tells the patient that the treatment is exclusively for physical therapy and only short time benefits might be useful.

Few are that honest, but for some people that kind of short term help is vital.

It might be what gets you through the wait for a long term procedure, or what lets you rest and sleep to improve actual recovery, for example. Pain management is a need for some people.
by vrighter | 2025-11-21 07:25:40+00:00
Building a static table of seen inputs is just one way of building a state transition table for a markov chain. It is just an implementation detail of a function (in the mathematical sense of the word. no side effects) that takes in some input and outputs a probability distribution.

You could make the table bigger and fill in the rest yourself. Or you could use machine learning to do it. But then the table would be too huge to actually store due to combinatorial explosion. So we find a way to reduce that memory cost. How about we don't precompute the whole table and lazily evaluate individual cells as/when they are needed? You achieve that by passing it through the machine-learned function (a trained network is a fixed function with no side effects.) You might say but that's not the same thing!!! But remember that the learned network will always output the same distribution if given the same input, because it is a function. Let's say you have a context size of 1000 and have 10 possible tokens. There are 10^1000 possible inputs. A huge number, but most importantly, a finite number. So you could in theory feed them all in one at a time and record the result in a table. While we can't really do this in practice, because the resulting table would be huge. It is, for all mathematical purposes, equivalent and you could, in theory, freely transform one into the other.

Et voila! You have built a markov chain anyway. Previous input goes in, magic happens inside (whichever implementation you used to implement the function doesn't matter), and a probability distribution comes out. It's a markov chain. It doesn't quack and walk like a duck. It IS an actual duck.
by pdubroy | 2025-11-21 07:26:50+00:00
Yes, it can all be found here: https://github.com/wasmgroundup/code

Over the course of the book, we also build up a small library for creating Wasm modules and emitting bytecode; that's available as an NPM package (https://www.npmjs.com/package/@wasmgroundup/emit) and the code is here: https://github.com/wasmgroundup/emit
by mihaaly | 2025-11-21 07:27:49+00:00
The tech sector is for people, and not people for the tech sector!

If they cannot do without exploiting people for their organizational benefits, then they can go to China and USA, they do not care about living standards over there! That is the place for ruthless, greedy, lazy fast paced groups to stomp on people! As they already do.

The EU is not the strongest and who cares?! It is strong enough, and that's what counts! Fullfills the needs. Good. Not everything is a race to infinite numbers in quarterly reports! Less inflated pushy tech idiots racing each other to oblivivion? GOOD!
by friendzis | 2025-11-21 07:29:50+00:00
> A person shall not sell at retail, or offer for sale at retail, to the general public any tire intended for use on a motor vehicle if the tire:

The law you cite literally applies only to general public sales, i.e. where the the intention is to use on public roads. I cannot see where this regulation would apply to solely used tires in the first place and if we slip down the slope you have put in this thread, this regulation would forbid sales of track-only tires altogether.

Which is just not the case. I am 99% certain one can sell tires, new or used, to any registered motorsport organization, for track-only use. That's the case in first world countries anyway.
by nazgul17 | 2025-11-21 07:30:01+00:00
To add to this, the system offering text generation, i.e. the loop that builds the response one token at a time generated by a LLM (and at the same time feeds the LLM the text generated so far) is a Markov Model, where the transition matrix is replaced by the LLM, and the state space is the space of all texts.
by beeflet | 2025-11-21 07:30:15+00:00
>Making observations at scale is categorically different than manual observations.

No it isn't. It's evidenced by the fact that you will need to decide some exact scale at which surveillance becomes illegal and under which it is legal

>When there's a dispute about what's illegal, you have it resolved by the courts like every other law.

Okay, but what ought they resolve to? That is what we are debating.