MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by PaulRobinson | 2025-11-28 17:20:35+00:00
Not read the whole thing as there is paywall involved, but I have a broad take on what I have read.

I say this as somebody with a hobby obsession with trading on sports betting exchanges, which I've been doing on and off for 20+ years.

In high school onwards, most of us were taught a great deal about calculus, and not a great deal about probability. That's because for many decades working out ballistics was a more useful skill to teach young engineers than understanding how to interpret the statistics of a pandemic, for example.

The rising interest in probabilities in recent years has sat at a weird intersection: real World events that surprise us as being "unlikely"; people questioning the validity of scientific trials using illogical arguments on social media; the legalisation of sports betting markets in the US; and the prevalence of probabilistic and stochastic methods in modern technologies from RL to LLMs.

But, here's the thing: most people are awful at it. And most people are going into prediction markets (and sports betting markets), thinking they know something others don't, with all the logical and calculated thought of an anti-vaxxer who does not understand terms like "sensitivity" and "specificity".

Signal is not noise. Noise is not signal. Yes, the guy on CNN is wrong, just as wrong as the guy on Fox News, but it doesn't mean expertise is dead and gut instinct by amateurs is winning by showing superiority of the Wisdom of the Crowds.

Look, for example, at the last US Presidential election. The markets didn't agree with the polls by a long way, everyone assumed the players were corrupt (moving the line helps move the conversation in the media), or idiots.

Turned out, it was a guy with a smart idea to figure out things experts refused to figure out: shy Trump voters. He commissioned polls that rather than asking people who they would vote for, asked them who they thought most of their neighbours would vote for. Turns out, that's a way more accurate technique. He did some maths, pulled up some spreadsheets or notebooks, throw some Bayesian analysis at it, and realised the main polls and prediction markets were out, so throw some money at it. And then his government (the French), said he couldn't have the money, but that's another story.

The point I think I want to make is that this is an interesting and fascinating area to dive into, but almost everything I've read about it online is shallow, nonsensical, illogical and often wrong. From the intro I'm not sure this is any different. YMMV. But yeah, dive in, it's fun playing with this probability stuff in real World scenarios.
by lysace | 2025-11-28 17:20:59+00:00
In the 90s I used to sort of tease/banter our sysadmin guy at a small, developer-centric company in Europe (SunOS/Linux/etc-focused) in a friendly way with something like:

"It seems to me like all the things you're doing can and should be automated at a larger scale."

Ten years ago when I recalled this I felt sort of good about the prediction. What I predicted pretty much happened.

That sysadmin guy has become some sort of CIO and seems to be doing well.

I did not anticipate the loss of data sovereignty.

.... and now I'm doing like 50% SRE/devops. Who's the sysadmin now, but without physical control of our data?
by CGMthrowaway | 2025-11-28 17:21:12+00:00
The old distinction between “signal” (valuable content) and “noise” has collapsed. Today the noise is the product, because noise keeps the algorithm running - it helps a platform compute our own individual feed-bubbles.

Platforms don’t actually curate content, they curate engagement rate. Therefore the optimal strategy for a platform is to produce as much noise as possible and sort it in real time.

We experience this as “I can’t find the good stuff anymore” while the platform continues to profit as long as we keep looking for the good stuff.
by bagacrap | 2025-11-28 17:21:43+00:00
Agreed, except s/know/think. It's possible that there are some false positives in my detection algorithm, that I tune out just because someone's prose style has that undercurrent of blandness characteristic of LLMs. But I suppose if we're talking about "art" and not, for example, technical documentation, that's no great loss --- bland writing isn't worth recreationally reading.

It does seem that LLMs could avoid this detection with some superficial tweaks such as injecting poor grammar and reducing peppiness. I hope it doesn't get to the point that I have to become suspicious of all text.
by anonymousiam | 2025-11-28 17:21:46+00:00
Thanks for the excellent reply/comment. Having supported the US IC for the majority of my career, I'm quite aware of the threats to/from, and the behaviors of nation states.

It's easy to justify snooping. The issue (for me) is when the snooping unjustifiably infringes on my personal privacy. Governments will argue that they don't know that I'm not a threat, so they must surveil me. Unfortunately, those who are doing the surveilling can also be a threat to the people, even when the people are behaving completely in compliance with the law. You need only look at some of the recent revelations in the US press for examples.

Knowledge is power, and power corrupts.
by johannes1234321 | 2025-11-28 17:22:01+00:00
gzip and tar+gzip aren't good options for application data compared to zip.

zip is used for Java jar files, OpenOffice documents and other cases.

The benefit is that individual files in the archive can be acces individually. A tgz file is a stream which can (without extra trickery) only be extracted from begin to end with no seeking to a specific record and no way to easily replace a single file without rewriting everything.

tgz is good enough for distributing packages which are supposed to be extracted at once (a software distribution)
by rzerowan | 2025-11-28 17:22:03+00:00
For one reasono another im not seeing any of the currently OSS solutions like LibreOffice/OpenOffice.orgwould not gain much traction and will remain niche even as the MS/Goog options remain entrenched.

The path taken by Blender(propreiety initially to open source) to reach industry lead would to me seem the most viable to make a dent.

In that i think best cost effective options like WPSOffice or Corel Suite , would be a good option.They have the professional usability in the interface and functionality.

Corel is basically leaving the market wide , by mostly collecting rent from lawfirms as they are well taken care of there.Considering they used to have viable Linux options , seems a lack of vision theer to pick up marketshare.
by exasperaited | 2025-11-28 17:22:34+00:00
Nye Bevan was not a populist, and the NHS was not a populist development.

In the context of its time it was a fairly pragmatic, top-down central-government post-war-socialism project. It appears more radical in retrospect, but viewed in the light of decisions in the war effort and the post-war effort, and in a country that still had mandatory rationing for example, the NHS was a solid decision that was actually pretty evidence-based.

There are few people alive now who can tell you what the foundation of the NHS was like in terms of their professional career, but my dad did tell me about that.

In no way would that have been considered "populist"; the UK was severely negative about populists at that time, for one thing. It actually made solid logical/technocratic sense. It definitely came as a huge relief, but in many ways it formalised the resource-sharing schemes in place in various regions, especially London.

I am not sure you understand what populism is, along with not understanding that securing a number of seats is not something that logically follows from projections of numbers of seats, particularly in the context of an entirely new party with divisive leadership. We don't have PR, so aggregate data like that is not easily interpreted, and council election data is not that strongly indicative.

Also pretty interesting to hear someone who is so pro-Reform so confidently talking up the NHS, considering the long-standing positions of many UKIP/Brexit Party/Reform people that it should be privatised. Free at the point of use healthcare is under threat from Reform in a way that no other political party in the UK would risk, as a consequence of that. Presumably you think we should still have an NHS but the state shouldn't own it. Given the international figures who gather around Reform and the hard right in this country, there is no way the NHS would survive Reform intact.
by elzbardico | 2025-11-28 17:23:54+00:00
Fossil Fuel and Nuclear Plants are extremely reliable, surpassed only for coal. You're doing a rhetorical sleight of hand by deliberately confusing scheduled downtime with reliability.

You keep on citing dubious numbers from the Big Green lobby, but the reality is. There's not a single place on this planet where after a certain threshold of penetration solar and wind haven't made supply less reliable, haven't caused economic sustainability issues to generators and haven't made power absurdly more expensive to customers.

Not to mention the frequently forgotten issues of toxic waste in production and decommissioning, the toxic fire hazard of giant battery banks and the pathetic short useful life of intermittent power infrastructure. Not to mention the environment impact of such big land gobblers, cynically overlooked by the same folks that decided to destroy nuclear with mountains of bureaucratic red tape deliberately created to suffocate it by ignorant green politicians.

Solar may have a bigger place, in countries with plenty of sun like Brasil, the Middle East or North Africa where residential and commercial consumption peaks with air conditioning usage during peak solar production, and with long days, but even then, absent some magical storage technology that doesn't exist yet, with limits.
by technothrasher | 2025-11-28 17:24:05+00:00
You're joking, right? The systems are locked up tight. I did manage to hack into my Porsche Macan's system so that I could turn Apple CarPlay on (it's disabled in the Macan, but supported by the system because the unit is shared with the VW Atlas which has CarPlay), but it involved a pretty complicated jailbreak.
by firefoxd | 2025-11-28 17:24:07+00:00
I remember many years ago thinking, "if they can have a add a SIM card on a phone, why not add one in your car? Imagine an Internet connected car?"

What I didn't think about was this would be an opportunity for ads and subscriptions. And everyday you'll own less and less of your car. I'm shopping for a car right now, I may have to just put a fresh coat of paint on my old one.
by randycupertino | 2025-11-28 17:24:18+00:00
Meta's accounting games are entirely reminiscent of Enron, who famously named their off-balance sheet debt-hiding special purpose vehicles after Star Wars "Jedi 1, Jedi 2," Jurassic Park, "Raptors 1 through 7," and the crooked CFO's kids "LJM" etc.
by kazinator | 2025-11-28 17:25:02+00:00
> We do not yet know what a computer can't do.

What is ths author talking about?

For instance, we know that a Turing computer cannot calculate whether all such computers will terminate.

It cannot calculate whether two such computers are equivalent (performing an equivalent calculation).

And what exactly "artificial computation", as a class? In contrast to what, and what is the difference?

There is something called the Chuch-Turing Thesis; it is an unproven conjecture which says that any function that can be computed by an 'effective method' can also be computed by a Turing machine. No counterexample has been found.
by strken | 2025-11-28 17:25:38+00:00
Low level waste is an expensive pain in the buttocks. I toured a local medical and research reactor back in highschool, and they were running out of space to store their discarded PPE and other minimally contaminated waste. You could probably empty most of the barrels on the floor and roll in the contents without any noticeable effect, and yet they still needed to be treated like real waste, just in case.

Not to disagree with you, just to say that even though it's a minor nuisance it nevertheless occupies a lot of mental space because of how annoying it is.
by adamzwasserman | 2025-11-28 17:25:48+00:00
I have been writing for professionally since I published my book in 2017 (with human editors): https://a.co/d/6ZFFb2z

If you want to read my unedited writing most of the articles on Hacker Noon prior to this year are "raw" https://hackernoon.com/u/azw

Most (all except the last two) of these are "raw": https://emusings.substack.com/

I never garnered a large readership. When I was the CTO at a large NGO, they literally called me "big yoda" because they considered my pronouncements so inscrutable. <shrug>
by namibj | 2025-11-28 17:26:15+00:00
"take a while"? A quarter to a third of a conventional European long haul truck is fuel. And what unrealistic truck are you looking at? European long haul battery trucks currently have around 600 kWh of LFP; that's just around 3 tons; how is adding a fuel cell negative 1 ton of weight? No, the cable to the charging port is light enough to carry by one human, even if it's not negligible, that's still more than an order of magnitude below so won't change anything here.

Note that the trucks are already allowed 2 tons extra road weight, so it's actually not unusual to have basically the same load capacity (within +-500kg). It does matter if you have a rotating crew driving express long haul, because then you don't have a mandatory 45 minutes of lunch break during which you can plug in to a 300~400 kW charger (and e.g. take a walk or visit a bathroom or actually have lunch) to get a shift limit of range out of such a "small" battery.

They probably took a battery truck with (in a worker-and-road-safety oriented market like Europe) excessively much no-recharge range to match their fuel cell setup. But you do that because it's fairly tame to add the marginal range of a full shift limit to a fuel cell truck; it's not economic to size a long haul battery to suffice without recharging for anywhere near the weight limit.

Green hydrogen is substantially more expensive than diesel per energy; and electric trucks can already beat diesel's in TCO depending on the kind of usage (e.g. notably express long haul is not competitive, but most highway single-driver operations are).
by flail | 2025-11-28 17:26:24+00:00
> do Altman and Andreesen really believe that, or is it just a marketing and investment pitch?

As for Andreessen, I don't think he even cares. As the author writes:

"for the venture capitalists that have driven so much of field, scaling, even if it fails, has been a great run: it’s been a way to take their 2% management fee investing someone else’s money on plausible-ish sounding bets that were truly massive, which makes them rich no matter how things turn out"

VCs win every time. Even if it's a bubble and it bursts, they still win. In fact, they are the only party that wins.

Heck, the bigger the bubble, the more money is poured into it, and the bigger the commissions. So VCs have an interest in pumping it up.
by Noe2097 | 2025-11-28 17:26:36+00:00
Another take on the matter is: interruptions are inevitable, so reducing the "recovery penalty" is key, and can be learned.

That's something that you learn to do when you have a kid: suddenly, your periods of 4 hours of focus free time (for coding, exploring tech, whatever) during the weekend just _disappear_. You only get max 30 minutes of free time in a day; this is extremely frustrating initially; there is no boss to complain to, no meetings to blame, no solution but to deal with it. Progressively, you learn to switch tasks much more efficiently, by making regular check points, so that you can get interrupted any time and get back to deep work _quickly_.
by amiga386 | 2025-11-28 17:26:38+00:00
I suspect he means the choices of putting the central directory headers at the end of the file, as well as having local file headers as you read through the file, which allows for ambiguity.

Alternatively, he could mean that, for the purposes of archiving, ZIP is very far behind the state of the art (no solid compression, old algorithms, small windows, file size limits without the ZIP64 extensions, and so on, most of which are not relevant to using ZIP as a container format)
by verdverm | 2025-11-28 17:26:40+00:00
interesting, I've put pub/sub into my custom agent setup (for other reasons) (also have the websockets, rest, and SSE...)

but yeah, it definitely helps with this issue, so agents can keep doing work with no clients attached, and can share their progress when they do connect, but not at the point OP is talking about, which would be a nice addition!
by cmckn | 2025-11-28 17:26:43+00:00
Sort of. AWS operates the China regions more or less like any other region, with oversight by the Chinese holding companies.

The EUSC will be more restricted, similar to GovCloud. Only EU citizens can access/operate it.

Specific example: an alarm fires for your service. If it’s in China, anyone on the team can go look at the logs. If it’s in GovCloud, only teammates who are American can look at the logs. In the EUSC, only Europeans can.
by bagacrap | 2025-11-28 17:27:04+00:00
I think there are likely a lot of people for whom their voice is not unique or an asset. Those people need to hire someone who is better at writing (assuming they're managing a business's social media). Or those people can save money and use an LLM. Whether that's a good business decision or not, I don't think human vs LLM is an apples to apples comparison, because you'd have to compare LLMs to whoever is willing to write marketing copy pro bono.
by Bender | 2025-11-28 17:28:17+00:00
You're joking, right?

Only 3.1415% joking. I predict people will eventually get credits for saying things like, "Brought to you by Carl's Jr." in their car, bonus if the kids also repeat it. But seriously I figured someone would have found Easter-eggs by now that allowed some form of super-duper-root similar to windows god-mode.

I am honestly surprised that car manufacturers have not been sued into oblivion for adding distractions.
by abdullahkhalids | 2025-11-28 17:29:21+00:00
How much is the typical dutch university paying MS/Google? Maybe 10k students x 200EUR/year = 2 million EUR/year.

Twenty universities come together to move to make Collabora+NextCloud work for them. That's 40 million EUR/year. How much do they need to actually spend on developers + infrastructure to make it happen?
by TeMPOraL | 2025-11-28 17:29:49+00:00
Not to mention, most arguments about costs of AI inference are plain inane.

AI search being 10x more expensive than Google query? That's just a silly, meaningless number - especially considering that a good AI response easily stops the user from making 5+ search queries to get the same results, and AI query itself can easily issue the equivalent of 10-20 search queries + spends compute analyzing their results.
by thesumofall | 2025-11-28 17:29:54+00:00
They show two different surveys that are supposed to show the same underlying truth but differ by a factor of 3x? For the Ramp survey: why the sudden jump from 30% to 50% in March? For the Census one: How could it possibly be that only 12% of companies with more than 250 people „adopted“ (whatever that means) AI? It would be interesting if it were true but these charts don’t make any sense at all to me
by wafflesfreak | 2025-11-28 17:30:41+00:00
Netlist.io is a web app that ingests your KiCad/Altium netlist and relevant datasheets so an LLM can reason about the actual circuit. It’s built to catch schematic mistakes that traditional ERC tools often miss, and it can even help debug already-fabbed boards by letting you describe the failure symptoms.

I built this because I was tired of shipping boards with avoidable mistakes — hopefully it saves you from a re-spin too!
by micimize | 2025-11-28 17:30:51+00:00
Interesting/impressive project, and would be doubly interested in the workflow used to develop it. Could stand to have more human-voiced docs though. Aside from all the usual reasons I'd avoid using a <1mo dependency over something like Yjs, the bog-standard claude copy on differentiators/reasons to migrate is fairly off-putting to me.

Also maybe bias, but there are still ennough obvious agent artifacts/byproducts in the code base that it makes me doubt that the details were thoroughly attended to, and that's where the devils are.
by thijson | 2025-11-28 17:30:53+00:00
My sister corrupted my favorite game. She pressed fast forward on the tape deck while it was playing (and loading). I think that stretched the tape, because after that the game wouldn't load anymore, it would error out.

This happened to me in the early 80's with the family's Tandy Color Computer 1. We didn't have a disk drive, just loaded things using tape drive.

As an aside, I think the modulation used was a simple frequency shift keying, with likely no error correction.
by ben_w | 2025-11-28 17:32:55+00:00
I can't speak to your driving level, but everything I see about Tesla's FSD has unfortunately been giving me "this seems sus" vibes even back when I was extremely optimistic about them in particular and self driving cars more generally (so, last decade).

Unfortunately, the only stats about Tesla's FSD that I can find are crowd-sourced, and what they show is that despite recent improvements, they're still not particularly good.

Also unfortunately, the limited geo-fencing of the areas in which the robo-taxi service operates, and that they initially* launched the service without the permits to avoid needing a human safety monitor, strongly suggests that it hasn't generalised to enough domains yet.

Lack of generality means that it's possible for you to be 100% right about Tesla's FSD on the roads you normally use, and yet if you took them a little bit outside that area you might find the AI shocking you by reliably disengaging for no human-apparent reason while at speed and leaving you upside down in a field.

* I'm not sure what has or hasn't changed since launch: all the news reporting on this was from sites with more space dedicated to ads than to copy, so IMO slop news irregardless of if it was written by an AI or not
by Yuma_JPVan | 2025-11-28 17:33:04+00:00
Hi HN,

I've been working on a small AI tool to help people figure out which home-service platform to use (cleaning, repairs, childcare, pet care, etc.).

The idea came from my own frustration: whenever I needed a cleaner or a handyman, I opened multiple platforms (TaskRabbit, Handy, Care.com, etc.) and ended up guessing which one was the best fit. It always felt slow and repetitive.

So I built something simple:

- you type what you need - the AI asks a quick question - it recommends the platform that best fits the request - it generates a summary you can paste into the booking form

Tech stack: - Next.js - Supabase + Prisma for event logging - GPT-4o-mini / GPT-4o for reasoning and classification - Tailwind + shadcn for UI

This is still an early version, but I'd love feedback from the HN community — both on the idea and the execution.

Thanks for checking it out!
by captainkrtek | 2025-11-28 17:34:29+00:00
This is excellent and aligns with my own experience.

During my day I try to minimize interruptions by batching them. I will largely ignore Slack, and as notifications come in I glance and determine quickly if it really is urgent or if it can wait. If it can wait, I will punt all of those messages to a "remind me later" of a few hours, and get back to my task. I think this keeps my "recovery time" small as I'm not looking too close at these messages. It's not perfect, but definitely helps over pausing my "real work" to fully dive into each notification or ask.