MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by vouwfietsman | 2025-11-10 19:15:08+00:00
> Book chapter numbers are ordinal numbers

> Book chapters and page numbers are not offsets.

I don't know but I feel like you are making a point out of something arbitrary. When I listen to an audio book, everyone always says: "Chapter 1", not "the first chapter" so why is this important?

I think extreme attention to to arbitrary meaningless details is how we ended up with most rules in language that we are starting to collectively detest.
by swyx | 2025-11-10 19:15:31+00:00
i cant believe i'm about to defend Ryanair but just fwiw it seems quite normal to do a custom app specifically for tickets, for anticheat purposes + the nicety of putting your ticket in Apple Wallet is nice enough that i willingly do it for the airlines i fly.

ok that wasnt really defending Ryanair but just being argumentative for the sake of fairness. obviously Ryanair doesn't have Ticketmaster level tech.
by jhack | 2025-11-10 19:16:32+00:00
"A good friend recently told me that she spent a night with a man, and in the morning suggested they get breakfast together. He took out his phone, opened ChatGPT, and asked for restaurant suggestions. Why get close to someone who outsources decisions, including the fun ones like picking where to eat?"

Same logic applies to using Google, I guess? Or any mapping app? How about Yelp?
by yannyu | 2025-11-10 19:17:03+00:00
> Then why not say "they are just computer programs"?

LLMs are probabilistic or non-deterministic computer programs, plenty of people say this. That is not much different than saying "LLMs are probabilistic next-token prediction based on current context".

> I think the reason people don't say that is because they want to say "I already understand what they are, and I'm not impressed and it's nothing new". But what the comment you are replying to is saying is that the inner workings are the important innovative stuff.

But we already know the inner workings. It's transformers, embeddings, and math at a scale that we couldn't do before 2015. We already had multi-layer perceptrons with backpropagation and recurrent neural networks and markov chains before this, but the hardware to do this kind of contextual next-token prediction simply didn't exist at those times.

I understand that it feels like there's a lot going on with these chatbots, but half of the illusion of chatbots isn't even the LLM, it's the context management that is exceptionally mundane compared to the LLM itself. These things are combined with a carefully crafted UX to deliberately convey the impression that you're talking to a human. But in the end, it is just a program and it's just doing context management and token prediction that happens to align (most of the time) with human expectations because it was designed to do so.

The two of you seem to be implying there's something spooky or mysterious happening with LLMs that goes beyond our comprehension of them, but I'm not seeing the components of your argument for this.
by aerostable_slug | 2025-11-10 19:17:04+00:00
In my home county they've arrested car thieves and recovered vehicles due to real-time Flock hits. It is not simply for forensic purposes.

If it was a bad idea it shouldn't have been installed in the first place. Turning it off now because a few loud people assumed things that weren't true (ICE using the system) is idiotic.
by smsm42 | 2025-11-10 19:17:11+00:00
Yes, it's nothing to do with Apple per se - any major E2E provider would be under the same attack. The problem here is UK government is drunk with power and doesn't want their citizens to have any privacy rights, and UK citizens are largely ok with that, as evidenced by them keeping to elect such governments. Apple is just the most prominent target of the attack - eventually, they will try to attack smaller targets still, and make usage of the strong encryption as hard as possible, maybe outlaw it completely and mandate government key escrow. They already tried it in many countries, and UK seems to be very ripe to try again.
by qball | 2025-11-10 19:17:19+00:00
The bureaucrats are being militarized out of desperation.

The political faction all bureaucrats in the nation belong to can't find enough soldiers. This is because they treat those soldiers with contempt- no young man wants to die for Ottawa. Plus, the volunteer soldiers that come back from Ukraine are not going to be on Ottawa's side if domestic instability ramped up, but will be familiar with the tools of modern warfare.

Ottawa is currently (and perhaps rightfully) paranoid of a domestic uprising just as much as it is of the US invading. The US is strategically wrecking the economy of Canadian citizens only a few hours away and if those citizens violently insist on suing for peace Ottawa might lose its power forever.

So, you do the next best thing- you take the faction with the political power in Canada (in this case, Ottawa bureaucrats) and tell them that if they want to keep their privileges, they must join the reserve.

The fact that if any nation decided to actually attack they'd instantly flee (bureaucrats are not known for their courage under fire; that's why they're bureaucrats!) is a problem for future them. What matters is that, to fuel the jingoism fire long enough to keep the bureaucrat faction in power, they need to be seen to be doing something, and this is that something.
by AaronAPU | 2025-11-10 19:17:28+00:00
LLMs basically act as defense attorneys for all your dumbest ideas. It is very easy to assume their confidence in you is justified, especially if you already lean narcissistic.

You now see threads on X of famous people using Grok to explain how smart their ideas are. But there’s a problem: You can literally get it to do that with every single dumb idea.
by crazydoggers | 2025-11-10 19:18:10+00:00
> THEN, not before. If they could get help, they would. But they can't so they end up there.

This is honestly disgusting and exactly the problem. You don’t know why they couldn’t get help. There are many possible reasons and instead they should be continued to be encouraged to find proper mental health counseling, not feed into a mental health crisis talking about suicide.

And it’s not your place to decide what is suffering or not for them. That is exactly the problem. The fact that you checked on this persons profile and decided based on that he’s continuing to suffer is exactly the issue. You are not a trained mental health provider I’m sure. Encouraging someone in that place to commit suicide is exactly the problem. You are not a soothsayer who can see into this persons future. What if in 10 years that person has a child and finds true joy and meaning, glad that they went through what they did in the previous years. There are many such cases.

It’s also not your job to somehow “ease suffering” for a person on the internet you don’t know, with some kind of self satisfaction and sense of control over another’s life that you took away an individual’s suffering by helping them kill themselves.

Instead the person needs to decide for themselves, by themselves, AND they need to be in a healthy mental state to make that decision. Depression is not a healthy mental state, it’s a period of delusion.

Your comment only proves exactly why sites such as this need massive regulation, and anyone who knows someone who contemplates suicide and came out the other side living a fulfilling life with joy and happiness would understand exactly why.

And I could agree that a site talking about assisted suicide is a net positive, but the burden is on that site to ensure it is not encouraging people in mental health crisis to suicide. In an open, mostly unmoderated forum that is a very high bar indeed, and it's even higher when the company hosting such a site has a profit motive. Trained mental health providers should be available and reviewing discussions in those situations, and such regulation requiring that is in my opinion not a hinderance on free speech.

And for anyone reading these comments and suffering with depression, if you’re unable to find good mental health care, first and the very least read the following book, and know that there are people who can help you find the light on the other side:

https://www.amazon.com/Feeling-Good-New-Mood-Therapy/dp/0380...
by pklausler | 2025-11-10 19:18:13+00:00
LLMs, kind of like Bill Bryson's books, are great at presenting "information" that seems completely plausible, authoritative, and convincing to the reader. But when you actually do know the truth about a subject, you realize how completely full of crap they too often are. And somehow after being given a patently counterfactual response to one query, we just blindly continue to take their responses to other queries as having value.
by ecocentrik | 2025-11-10 19:18:15+00:00
There was a period of time where Wikipedia was more scrutinized than print encyclopedias because people did not understand the power of having 1000s of experts and the occasional non-experts editing an entry for free instead of underpaying one sudo-expert. They couldn't comprehend how an open source encyclopedia would even work or trust that humans could effectively collaborate on the task. They imagined that 1000s of self-interested chaos monkeys would spend all of their energy destroying what 2-3 hard working people has spent hours creating instead of the inverse. Humans are very pessimistic about other humans. In my experience when humans are given the choice to cooperate or fight, most choose to cooperate.

All of that said, I trust Wikipedia more than I trust any LLMs but don't rely on either as a final source for understanding complex topics.
by thewebguyd | 2025-11-10 19:18:37+00:00
I mostly agree with this. LLMs are just another tool, and we've learned how to use and adapted to using many other tools throughout our history just fine.

With the caveat of for our field in particular, it's one of the few that require continuous learning and adaptation, so tech workers in a way are better predisposed to this line of thinking and tool adoption without some of the potential harmful side effects.

To pick on spell check, it has been showing that we can develop a dependency on it and thereby losing our own ability to spell and reason about language. But, is that a bad thing? I don't know.

What I do know is humans have been outsourcing our thinking for a long time. LLMs are another evolution in that process, just another way to push off cognitive load onto a tool like we've done with stone tablets, books, paper notes, digital notes, google, etc.
by rkj93 | 2025-11-10 19:18:41+00:00
I’m developing https://Vizbull.com, a simple collage maker that makes it effortless to design beautiful image collages on a canvas. With this intuitive canvas collage maker, users can combine multiple photos into creative layouts, custom shapes, and artistic patterns — from shape collages to photo collages from photos or freeform arrangements. Vizbull is built for simplicity and creativity, empowering anyone to turn their favorite pictures into eye-catching collages in just a few clicks, without needing any design skills.
by aerostable_slug | 2025-11-10 19:19:00+00:00
It and other ALPR systems real-time alert on things like stolen cars. In my home county they have arrested and convicted criminals due to this. That is fighting crime, by definition.

If it was such a bad idea, they shouldn't have installed them in Redmond. Turning them off now because some people assumed things that weren't true is idiocy and sets a bad precedent.
by martinald | 2025-11-10 19:19:46+00:00
You're misunderstanding what is being proposed.

It's not saying 6GHz shouldn't be used for WiFi. It's saying that 6-6.4GHz (approx) is reserved for WiFi and 6.4-7GHz should be used for cellular networks.

My point isn't that we shouldn't have no WiFi on 6GHz, but 1GHz extra for WiFi is limited utility compared to cellular networks.

You can still fit an entire 320MHz channel width in the lower 6GHz and if it doesn't overlap like you say why bother with 3x that?
by toomuchtodo | 2025-11-10 19:20:01+00:00
The State of Illinois forced Flock to tighten its data sharing controls after this was reported by 404media, as Flock was violating state law. If your state is not heavily regulating ALPRs, consider calling your state reps and secretary of state.

https://www.ilsos.gov/content/dam/news/2025/august/250825d1....

https://www.sj-r.com/story/news/state/2025/06/12/texas-law-e...

Flock's PR response was, and continues to be as of this comment, factually inaccurate based on reporting that has been done, as mentioned in this piece by the EFF.

https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/statement-network-sharing-u...

It would be great if Gary Tan, as YC's primary partner for Flock, could reach out to have Flock's PR misinformation corrected.

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/flock-safety
by 9rx | 2025-11-10 19:20:11+00:00
> Microservices was originally envisioned to literally create the smallest possible service you could

"Micro web services" was coined at one time, back when Netflix was still in the DVD business, to refer to what you seem to be speaking about — multiple HTTP servers with narrow functional scope speaking REST (or similar) that coordinate to build something bigger in a Unix-style fashion.

"Microservices" emerged when a bunch of people at a tech conference discovered that they were all working in similar ways. Due to Conway's Law that does also mean converging on similar technical approaches, sure, but because of Conway's Law we know that team dynamics comes first. "Microservices" wasn't envisioned — it was a label given to an observation.
by mrguyorama | 2025-11-10 19:20:18+00:00
Even Putin did not fire nukes when Ukraine launched a fairly successful invasion of their soil.

US did not fire nukes during Korea or Vietnam despite several high up people wanting to repeatedly.

USSR did not fire nukes the several times they thought the US had launched. USSR did not fire the nukes during the Cuban Missile Crisis even though Fidel was adamant that they be allowed to sacrifice themselves to destroy the US.

Somehow, that generation was able to maintain a sober view of nuclear weapons. Even as Nixon himself drunkenly insisted we nuke most of the world, he was ignored.

As that generation has aged out, it seems like that respect may be going away. Trump wants to start detonating nukes again. There may be a genuine reason, like maybe we have lost confidence in our simulations and models to build new nukes and desperately need to build the next generation of deterrence, but maybe he's just a dumbass. China is going back to building a shitload of nukes, even though they had plenty. Geopolitical conflict is back on the menu the world over, and everyone is itching to claim some century old grievance to go beat up a neighbor. The Ukraine invasion and muffled response proves to everyone that if you don't have nukes, you are not going to be protected, while North Korea proves that if you do have nukes, you can do almost anything you want.

I think a nuke will be used this century in anger. I think the world will be too gunshy to respond adequately, or too split along some axis, and there will be geopolitical bickering about who is the bad guy for using N+1 nukes in a conflict.

We will have some great new video footage though.
by kstrauser | 2025-11-10 19:21:33+00:00
That's very scale-dependent. I can imagine why a FAANG might need 10 languages, between Python APIs and Java services and Rust and Go things and a Node system and a smattering of Perl and some ETL in Scala and BI in C#, etc. A startup with less than 50 employees almost certainly does not.

Maybe I'd compromise on no more than, say, 2-3 language per department. If you're small enough that "engineering" is 1 department, then there you go: choose wisely. If you have a whole department for frontend, and one for backend, and one for ops, and one for analytics, etc., then you can somewhat treat those as encapsulation boundaries and have more flexibility.
by smsm42 | 2025-11-10 19:21:36+00:00
The right way to respond to this reality would be to stop UK government from being insane by electing a more sane government. Stopping using iphones is going to help only for a short term - once encryption is de-legalized, they will come for everybody who they deem worth coming for, sooner or later. If it'll require introducing licenses to run encryption software and mandating key escrow, they'd do that. Yes, you still would be able to sneak in encrypting software on USB drive hidden in your... let's say, pocket. But the mere fact of using it would make you a criminal then. That's the natural progression of where it is going, unfortunately.
by graypegg | 2025-11-10 19:21:46+00:00
What a neat idea! I see this as a sort of... clothing gridfinity. [0] Basically a few interfaces to implement and anything unspec'd is fair game to be creative with for your own use/small scale production, and everything still mostly clicks. It's neat to imagine a "more serious" version of this, where we have an "ikea for fashion" or something, but that might be difficult; the patchy-look is going to limit things to a particular style and it won't have mass-appeal, but that can also be a positive! Ex:

> P6 was particularly excited about using the system’s constraints to explore visual patterns such as patchwork and cutout.

Would be cool if people could jump into making their own clothes with out requiring the up front expensive of needles/thread/sewing machine. Just buy the material you need and go!

[0] https://gridfinity.xyz/catalog/
by CharlesW | 2025-11-10 19:21:56+00:00
There are a lot of alternatives for music servers in the world. Can I ask if you've explored Plex alternatives (Jellyfin, Emby, Lyrion, Navidrome, various Subsonic/OpenSubsonic-compatible servers, etc.), and if so, what you need that they don't do?

I ask because I'm working on a new music app for iOS which has pluggable sources, and so my bias is that most of the issues preventing me from easily enjoying my music library are actually on the client side.
by BobaFloutist | 2025-11-10 19:22:21+00:00
I don't know the most polite way to tell you that you're demonstrating an almost textbook example of survivorship bias. There are 300 million people in the United States and 8 billion in the world, it's trivial to find individual examples of people making a solid living in almost any career you could conceivably imagine, and in many you couldn't.

You're going on the "Writers getting paid" website and sorting by most paid. That's like looking at the top 10 NBA salaries and saying "Basketball players seem to be making money, and if they're good at the game they seem to be wildly successful"

And, notably, a wildly successful writer makes $120,000 a year. So, you know, the same as any employed coder with more than like a year or two of experience. And that's the very highest echelons of a famously incredibly competitive, rapidly shrinking field, with fewer real jobs than probably anything else not also considered an "art" of some sort.
by x0x0 | 2025-11-10 19:22:46+00:00
People should deal with the world as it is, not as they wish it were.

As it is, open job reqs get hammered. A hiring manager needs to rapidly discard 95% or more of resumes to get down to a manageable number to directly review. The last time I had an open job req I closed it at 500 applications that came in between Thursday afternoon when I opened it and Tuesday morning when I closed it.
by ssalmon74 | 2025-11-10 19:23:18+00:00
This is 100% the dot-com bubble playbook. Right now, we're in the "frenzy" Gates mentioned, and everything is overpriced.

The strategy: Sit on the sidelines.

When this pops, "everyone gets wet," including the healthy giants (MSFT, NVDA, etc.). That's the moment to buy the survivors at a massive discount after all the "me-too" companies are wiped out.
by mindcrash | 2025-11-10 19:23:27+00:00
You can already do that on most desktop GPU's (even going as far as prev gen Nv 1050/1060/1070 for example).

You'll need a model able to work with tools, like llama 3.2 (https://huggingface.co/meta-llama), serve it, hook up MCPs, include a STT interface, and you're cooking.
by infinet | 2025-11-10 19:24:06+00:00
First impression from this list is that Russia has a lot of mathematicians!

From the list, I have only read What is Mathematics? by Courant, which is a well-known and excellent book. I’d add Princeton Companion to Mathematics as a more advanced version, and Mathematical Methods in the Physical Sciences by Mary Boas as a more detailed alternative to What is Mathematics, to the list. Other titles on the list, such as those on probability or linear algebra, are perhaps less well-known.
Show HN: Static Home Page
by leonard-somero | 2025-11-10 19:24:20+00:00
I figured I needed a persistent site for my works, where my marketing efforts and long-form musings aren't washed away by social media doomscrolls or group chats.

By declaring it's all hand-written HTML files without JS (+1 global CSS file), I have achieved an affordable and super-fast read-only website, which I hope sets an example.
by dpoloncsak | 2025-11-10 19:24:21+00:00
>how do Disney and other streaming providers benefit from blocking 4K streaming in browsers once the 4K version is readily available to torrent, often at higher Blu-ray bitrates? Is this part of some backroom deal with TV and streaming device vendors?

Im pretty sure torrenting/piracy is a VERY small subset of people. I think it's been growing again, but everyone still thinks I'm doing things 'old school' when I mention illegally downloading movies for my Plex server

Edit: Google Search Trends for "torrent" suggest it is NOT on it's way back
by bob1029 | 2025-11-10 19:24:29+00:00
I find the biggest crime with LLMs to be the size of the problems we feed them.

Every time I start getting lazy and asking ChatGPT things like "write me a singleton that tracks progression for XYZ in a unity project", I wind up with a big hole where some deeper understanding of my problem should be. A better approach is to prompt it like "Show me a few ways to persist progression-like data in a unity project. Compare and contrast them".

Having an LLM development policy where you ~blindly accept a solution simply because it works is like an HOV lane to hell. It is very tempting to do this when you are tired or in a rush. I do it all the time.
by pan69 | 2025-11-10 19:24:30+00:00
In your post you say:

> "Hey, the federal portal says we owe $60,000 in penalties for not filing a tax return."

That doesn't sound like they're asking you to pay tax on your $0 income business. It sounds like you need to pay a fine for not filing a tax return.

What's a "normal" fine anyway? The point of having a fine being a large sum of money is to create incentive so you to do the thing they want you doing, which you didn't do.
by Marshferm | 2025-11-10 19:24:39+00:00
It’s format based. The basis for explanations are folk science: stories. They aren’t any more accurate than when they began except they incorporate science. But that does not in itself make them scientific. Same with economics, which is not a science but it includes aspects of it. Now look at code, which is neither tethered to engineering or science, but exists wholly separate operating behavior, operating folk science and science yet in conflation winds up being folk science.

The news is folk science. Explanations (a dispute over money ends in murder) are substituted for correlations (not every dispute over money ends up violent). The news reinforces big techs reliance on exploitative explanation addiction rather than the widespread adoption of post folk science correlations.