MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by keyringlight | 2025-11-21 10:00:40+00:00
I suppose a lot of people who like to try and predict the next big thing would try and guess what the precursors are. For example where would you be looking now for the equivalent of a camera OS that would end up being Android years later? That was at the tail end of the period where consumer compact cameras were a big thing (before they were bundled into phones), so it could be that there's a path of evolution from smartphones to the next big thing, but I wouldn't want to place bets especially if you're trying to judge whether there's an audience for it.
by buran77 | 2025-11-21 10:02:06+00:00
Manufacturers will look to price the OS support into the product. Customers will see an overpriced phone because it has ten years of support or a cheaper one with five years support and will think "I'd rather buy a new one in five years, I need a battery replacement anyway". I'd be very curious to see how the market responds to this, but I suspect manufacturers will set prices in such a way as to lead the customer towards a predetermined choice.
by Fargren | 2025-11-21 10:02:33+00:00
You are making a big assumption here, which is that LLMs are the main "algorithm" that the human brain uses. The human brain can easily be a Turing machine, that's "running" something that's not an LLM. If that's the case, we can say that the fact that humans can come up with novel concept does not imply that LLMs can do the same.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-11-21 10:04:58+00:00
> I don't even believe that you believe this.

Is your position that when something is intractably easy to screw up we should do it as much as possible?

> If this was easy, don't you think maybe that's what people would be doing?

Which people? The ones with a structural incentive to not do that?

> So if I build a car, screw it up, have to test it 500 times just to pass and be allowed to sell it, that's the governments problem?

It seems like it's still your problem because you want to sell the car and therefore want it to pass.

Whereas if the test is unreasonably expensive then the government has a problem, but the problem is of its own making and it now has the incentive to fix the problem instead of burdening someone else with it.

> If I open a bank and take peoples money, its up to the government to take initiative on making sure I'm not screwing them over?

It is indeed the role of law enforcement to enforce the laws.

> What? So now any test the government mandates is an unfunded mandate? Like food tests?

Is your argument that it isn't an unfunded mandate supposed to be that the test isn't mandated or that the government is actually funding it?
by dragonwriter | 2025-11-21 10:05:34+00:00
> As long as central bank is doing at least a halfway competent job, overall unemployment will stay low and stable.

That’s... not at all a valid generalization. There’s all kinds of things that other actors can do to throw things too out of whack for the the monetary policies tools typically available to central banks to be sufficient to keep things sailing nicely. One big danger here is bad action (or inaction in the face of exogenous crisis) by the main body of the government itself.
by fragmede | 2025-11-21 10:05:52+00:00
Oil companies routinely flared off natural gas that came up with oil because it wasn’t economically worthwhile build the infrastructure to capture it. It was expensive and it was just easier to flare it off and let it go to waste. North Dakota changed the calculus by implementing strict regulations that limited how much gas companies could flare in the state set a target that companies could only flare 10% of a natural gas production and if you exceeded that you would get a fine this regulatory pressure made previously un economical infrastructure investment suddenly worthwhile, and suddenly, they managed to build pipelines.
by temp123789246 | 2025-11-21 10:07:47+00:00
In the same way that people struggle to comprehend exponential growth, they seem to also struggle to comprehend the cost of inaction, compounded over time.

Imagine if the steam engine had not been allowed by regulators during the time of the Industrial Revolution.

If that happened and we were all still working on farms today, I bet half the people would be telling us how much safer the government was making us with all its regulations. In blissful ignorance.
by phatfish | 2025-11-21 10:08:12+00:00
The EU removing roaming is better than the situation in the UK. Although some operators (O2 I know of) give a fixed roaming allowance in the EU that is OK. Not as good as getting your full contract/PAYG allowance though.

eSIMs have made the virtual mobile operators attractive for short term data usage. Switzerland not being in the EU has very high roaming charges, but you can buy data on an eSIM for not terrible prices. Much better than standard network roaming data charges for sure.
by rldjbpin | 2025-11-21 10:08:21+00:00
having used desktop linux before i even started gaming on a pc, things are easier but still not there yet for the general masses. personally, it is still not there either.

take one of the most popular ea sports title. it does not run:

- on linux via proton, because of anti-cheat

- inside a windows vm (in linux), because of anti-cheat

- via cloud streaming (technically perhaps because of the previous reason)

still got people exploiting and just a horrible experience in competitive mode. so much so that devs refuse to allow a universal marketplace. the console folks disable crossplay to avoid any trouble in competitive modes.

the same publisher went out of their way to support nintendo switch with crossplay, but steam deck does not seem to be big enough to go through with the actual work in making things work right. these titles print money and have the most means to make this possible from their end.

so if you want to play mainstream online experiences, or with simulator accessories, you are mostly on your own or dedicated community efforts. maybe a few more years in the oven?
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-11-21 10:08:49+00:00
This is why open, unencumbered standards are needed (e.g. AV1).

This strikes me as HP and Dell just trying to be extra sneaky about it as they don't publish their reasons behind this (saving a bit of cash and pushing back against licensing the codec) and just leave it to the customer to discover that their new machine is hobbled after they've bought it.

If they had any respect for their customers, they would mention it in their advertising and allow customers the choice of whether they want the hardware encoding enabled or not - presumably that would entail having two different models of the same hardware which I bet would be more expensive than just paying the HEVC licensing in the first place.
by fooker | 2025-11-21 10:09:07+00:00
> Who's paying $30 to run an AI agent to run a single experiment that has a 20% chance of success?

Someone who stands to make or save (significantly) more than 150$ if it's successful.

It doesn't have to be an unemployed contributer or student. Someone deploying it on a data center is the archetype you're looking for.
by 1dom | 2025-11-21 10:09:25+00:00
Given how many paid offerings Google has, and the complexity and nuance to some of those offering (e.g. AdSense) I am pretty surprised that Google don't have a functioning drop in solution for billing across the company.

If they do, it's failing here. The idea of a penny pinching megacorp like Google failing technically even in the penny pinching arena is a surprise to me.
by orlp | 2025-11-21 10:10:00+00:00
> Do you have any particular pieces in mind when you wrote this?

(not me, but...)

Bach - Passacaglia & Fugue in C minor, BWV 582

> But one wonders what he could have made without those constraints.

Bach-Busoni - Chaconne from Partita No. 2 in D minor, BWV 1004
by schnitzelstoat | 2025-11-21 10:10:10+00:00
I mean it's useful for some things, mainly as a complement to Stack Overflow or Google.

But the hallucination problem is pretty bad, I've had it recommend books that don't actually exist etc.

When using it for studying languages I've seen it make silly mistakes and then get stuck in the typical "You´re absolutely right!" loop, the same when I've asked it about how to do something with a particular Python library that turns out not to be possible with that library.

But it seems the LLM is unable to just tell me it's not possible so instead goes round and round in loops generating code that doesn't work.

So yeah, it has some uses but it feels a long way off of the revolutionary panacea they are selling it as, and the issues like hallucinations are so innate to how the LLMs function that it may not be possible to solve them.
by rollcat | 2025-11-21 10:13:05+00:00
Yep, bad law, I'd also say bad intent.

Apple is ahead of the curve[1]. You get a system-level popup asking you for consent to be tracked. Actual, not implied consent - only "yes" means "yes".

So you say "no" and it means "no". Apps are blocked from all basic forms of tracking (like device ID), and the App Store rules state that apps that try to circumvent that will be kicked out. Apple doesn't fuck around - they've kicked Meta and Epic without blinking an eye.

EU's response? Kick Apple, because EU companies can no longer do targeted advertising on Apple's platform. Our regulators are full of shit.

[1]: Well Apple still tracks you in their first-party apps, but that's a different story.
by vlan121 | 2025-11-21 10:14:26+00:00
I was unable to find the paper. I'm still wondering, if it is a cross-over experiment, as:

> The circles were in different positions at each room in the maze, but the bees still learned over varying amounts of time to fly toward the short flash of light associated with the sweet food.

Do not state, if the light suddenly changed in the rooms. If not, other factors might come into place.
by maccard | 2025-11-21 10:14:32+00:00
That’s the “you’re holding it wrong” defense.

Good rules will have their intent followed by bad lawyers. Bad rules will have their letter followed but their intent missed.

Most lawyers aren’t bad, they’re just risk averse. I’ve had very few outright “no” answers from legal, even when pushing the boundaries in the grey areas, but the result of that is the PM doesn’t get a straight yes from legal so they decide to take the most complicit option. In the cookie banners case, that’s show by default especially if you don’t understand.
by spacedcowboy | 2025-11-21 10:14:45+00:00
I don't know enough about supply chains to recognise whether what most of what you're saying is true or not, but "Mediatek has caught up to them on the SoC side of thing" is so laughably false that I seriously doubt the rest of what you say. The best MediaTek CPU is about 3/4 the speed of the best Apple one.

"I personally went back to Android this generation when my iPhone 13 became unusable." - perhaps you're letting your situation affect your bias...
FlagSwift – Feature flags for teams who can't afford other feature flags tools
by ellalawrie | 2025-11-21 10:15:06+00:00
Hey HN!

I built FlagSwift after working at companies that needed feature flags but couldn't justify the prices yearly for other feature flag tools.

What it does: - Gradual rollouts (deploy to 1%, scale to 100%) - Kill switches (toggle off in seconds) - User targeting (test with specific customers) - Simple integration (less than 15 mins, not 3 days)

Built for teams who need power without the complexity.

Tech: React + Node.js + Python SDKs (live), .NET coming soon

I'd love feedback on: - SDK design (too simple? too complex?) - Positioning - What features matter most to you?

Try it: flagswift.com

Happy to answer questions!
by GuB-42 | 2025-11-21 10:15:32+00:00
I am the first to complain about imperial units but this article is mostly metric. As long as metric/SI is there, I have no problem with what they chose to show next to it, including swimming pools, football fields and Hiroshima bombs.

Also feet happen to be the standard measurement of altitude in aviation, which rockets are part of, even in metric countries, I hate it but it's like that. Distances are nautical miles, a not so bad unit (it corresponds to 1 arcminute on earth), which make me hate the use of terrestrial miles in articles partaking to aviation even more. But it is a bit offtopic here because most of the article is metric.
by piskov | 2025-11-21 10:15:46+00:00
But it makes no sense. If you want to test for thinness, they’ve been doing it already with ipads.

Also look at the thinness, weight of iphone 6s and compare it to air. You will be suprised.

The main paint points about foldable is a — duh — folding screen and a hinge. And neither are in air.
by imiric | 2025-11-21 10:16:09+00:00
> If we had a regulatory system that could move fast to experiment with creative new technologies, we’d live in a world where our environment gets cleaned up faster, where awesome new hardware was constantly improving our lives by making things better and cheaper, and where large-scale hardtech innovation happened here at home in the USA, not in China.

This is such a shortsighted, self-serving, and hypocritical mindset.

"Move fast and break things" has been the motto of Big Tech for decades, even though they're slowly distancing themselves from the "break things" part. We know what this approach brings, and it's not something that inherently benefits the general population. It benefits corporations first and foremost, who when faced with little to no regulation as is the case with Big Tech, will take every opportunity they get to lie, cheat, and exploit their way into making themselves and their shareholders rich. The idea that removing the regulatory burden on companies will make "our world" better is a fantasy sold primarily by corporations themselves. It's no wonder the author is a CEO.

I'm sure regulations are a major pain in the ass for companies. I experience similar frustrations as a citizen, and I can only imagine what large companies whose main product is innovative technology have to go through. I'm also sure that the regulatory system can be made more efficient, as most government systems can. But the answer isn't to allow companies to "move fast". Moving slow is precisely the correct approach for introducing new technology, regardless of how benevolent their CEO makes it sound to be. Governments need time to understand the impact of the technology, and plan accordingly. Companies need time to address any potential issues. Society needs time to adapt to it. All of these are good things. The only reason we would need to "move fast" is so that executives can get richer quicker. There are very few cases when moving faster is paramount, such as when there's a pandemic and people's lives are in immediate risk, but in all other situations it is the wrong approach.

The claimed political tech race where nations must ensure that innovation happens within their borders is also a red herring. Companies have been offloading manufacturing to China for decades so that they can sell us cheaply made garbage while they skim off the margins, and now when the politics are shifting, they're all about keeping innovation home? Give me a break.
by TylerE | 2025-11-21 10:16:46+00:00
Read more in depth into this catastrophe. There were for all intents and purposes NO honest players. In some towns 90%+ of buildings collapsed, when code compliant ones would not have - it wasn’t even that strong an earthquake.

FTA: “ According to numbers published by the environment and urbanisation ministry in 2018, more than half of the buildings in Turkey – equivalent to almost 13m buildings – violate construction and safety regulations.”
by ryandv | 2025-11-21 10:16:59+00:00
Here is what would appear to be the paper: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41218757/

To clarify, the CNN article asserts that this is the "first [discovered] evidence" that bees possess this capability, not that bees are the first insect to have ever developed this capacity, as the headline may suggest.
by sitkack | 2025-11-21 10:17:56+00:00
We are learning so many wonderful things about Bees!

They can count https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21222227

Bees play https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33369572 https://www.science.org/content/article/are-these-bumble-bee...

All of this reinforces my belief that nearly everything is conscious and aware, we differ in a capabilities and resolution but we are all more similar than we are different.

Spider Cognition: How Tiny Brains Do Mighty Things https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46003146
by SanjayMehta | 2025-11-21 10:18:42+00:00
Believe whatever you wish. We live with this reality. At least you can move from CA to TX. We can't, it's the same clown show everywhere.

The fact is that for every policy the government introduces, the entrenched clerks find ways to sabotage it.

If you think you can handle it I invite you to come and apply for any government scheme of your choice.

True story: we once sent an NDA to a government ministry for review and it came back with one objection after 11 months. The objection was that the year was wrong in the document.

After that we no longer bid for any government work.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-11-21 10:20:00+00:00
That's not what the Dimensity 9500 benchmarks are saying. This SoC is in every way comparable to the A19 Pro. Apple used to have chips twice as effective as the competition. That's simply not the case anymore.

I think Apple users are in denial regarding the current state of the market. Your comment is the second one apparently unaware of where Mediatek and Qualcomm currently stand compared to Apple.
by pdubroy | 2025-11-21 10:20:01+00:00
Edit: changed slightly to provide a more useful answer.

No, it doesn't — not this version of the book at least. We only cover WebAssembly 1.0.

That said, as my co-author says below, there's really not much to tail calls. Once you've worked through the book, you'd be able to grok tail calls pretty quickly.

As an aside — 2.0 was announced just a few weeks after we launched the book, and 3.0 a few months ago. And with 3.0 (which added tail calls), the spec has more than doubled in size vs 1.0, so it would be hard to cover everything.

We've talked about doing a new chapter to cover some of the interesting parts of 2.0 (e.g. SIMD), but covering everything in 3.0 (garbage collection, typed reference, exception handling, tail calls…) feels almost like an entire 2nd book!
by omnicognate | 2025-11-21 10:20:14+00:00
It's trivial to provide motivating examples for vector spaces, and there's no reason you can't do so while explaining what they actually are, which is also very simple for anyone who understands the basic concepts of set, function, associativity and commutativity. The notion of a basis falls out very quickly and allows you to talk about lists of numbers as much as you like without ever implying any particular basis is special.

I hesitate to call anything pedagogically "wrong" as people think and learn in different ways, but I think the coyness some teachers display about the vector space concept hampers and delays a lot of students' understanding.

Edit: Actually, I think the "start with 'concrete' lists of numbers and move to 'abstract' vector spaces" approach is misguided as it is based on the idea that the vector space is an abstraction of the lists of numbers, which I think is wrong.

The vector space and the lists of numbers are two equivalent, related abstractions of some underlying thing, eg. movements in Euclidean space, investment portfolios, pixel colours, etc. The difference is that one of the abstractions is more useful for performing numerical calculations and one better expresses the mathematical structure and properties of the entities under consideration. They're not different levels of abstraction but different abstractions with different uses.

I'd be inclined to introduce the one best suited to understanding first, or at least alongside the one used for computations. Otherwise students are just memorising algorithms without understanding, which isn't what maths education should be about, IMO. (The properties of those algorithms can of course be proved without the vector space concept, but such proofs are opaque and magical, often using determinants which are introduced with no better justification than that they allow these things to be proved.)
by defmacr0 | 2025-11-21 10:20:30+00:00
Fwiw, my favourite textbook in communication theory (Lapidoth, A Foundation in Digital Communication) explicitly calls out this issue of working with equivalence classes of signals and chooses to derive most theorems using the tools available when working in ℒ_2 (square-integrable functions) and ℒ_1 space
by jacquesm | 2025-11-21 10:21:13+00:00
Those pictures of that torn up part are pretty hefty, that's a clean break, no stretching as far as I can see it just tore the material in half, you can see the grain. There does not seem to be any torsion either so most likely that was the first part to go, if the problem had been in the engine then I would expect this part to be mangled, not pulled apart. What stress damage there is occurred shortly after that first break. A valid question would be whether or not that crack was there before take-off or not.

I'm very curious what the metallurgic analysis of the mirror part on the other wing will come up with, especially whether there are any signs of stress fractures in there. If there are that will have substantial consequences for the rest of the still flying MD11's, about 50 or so are still in service.
by delis-thumbs-7e | 2025-11-21 10:21:16+00:00
I don’t think it is ironic. When people quit social media, they usually do not mean quitting to other people via electronic media. Allegorically you could say that same way when people quit drinking, they rarely mean water.

What they mean is quit predatory electronic platforms that only exist to make you addicted so they can use your life and data as a money cow. HN is a dinosaur from the age when forums were just bunch of nerds and geeks talking about computers and stuff.
by b00ty4breakfast | 2025-11-21 10:22:37+00:00
I think if a certain contexts encourages a certain behavior, that's not something essential to humanity. if a group of fur trappers has to resort to eating Jean-Luc because they're trapped in a mountain pass during a blizzard and starving, I wouldn't say that cannibalism is "human nature". I similarly, wouldn't say that the behavior engendered by modern social media is so essential as to be labeled part of our nature ( maybe we could say the adaptability of human behavior to environment and circumstance is inherent, but that's a different kettle of fish).
by wkat4242 | 2025-11-21 10:23:22+00:00
> A computer software generally unreliable and unable to accomplish basic tasks

Yeah specifically to your quote: it's very easy to create some images and video. It's very hard to create exactly what you need if you have specific needs.

It's almost as if content creation is hard! Well that's because it is. You need to know the client, understand their needs, make the content in line with their other visual language etc.

What AI makes easier if for things to look professional. But a real professional doesn't just make it look good but also makes it what you need.

Where AI comes in is as a helper, and for those situations where "good enough" suffices. And there are many of those situations. Many of which would not have had the budget for a real pro to do it anyway.
by dmpk2k | 2025-11-21 10:23:31+00:00
Both can be true: over-regulation and bad regulation. And the West (especially the EU) is arguably suffering from both to various degrees.

At some point a regulation is no longer worth the weight in the overhead it imposes. Even if all regulation was effective, at some point the collective burden would be too high.

Sadly, this also means that some bad behaviour is inescapable at the margins. There are always a few people looking for an angle to make a quick buck in a certain way, yet not enough for a regulation to be supported.