MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by namibj | 2025-11-28 17:59:08+00:00
The thing we do technically know how to do just haven't yet because there are no economic incentives to even tackle the finer engineering aspects let alone the regulatory approval ones, is to put a large vacuum-insulated (like a thermos/dewar) liquid hydrogen tank in the middle of a jet or a more-spherical shape front and back of the wing; and then just adjusting the plumbing and combustion chambers and nozzles to work for hydrogen instead of regular diesel-like jet fuel. We have gas turbines running on hydrogen. They just work. We have tanks like it, just none tuned for the needs and wants of an airplane specifically. They are more range than a normal jet fuel tank, because hydrogen is just so much lighter per energy. The only issue is that the insulation needs and the sheer volume make it impractical to keep in regular jetliner wings. Thus the need for putting a more-spherical tank in the tube shaped fuselage body of the plane.

I think such a plane would be around 5x as expensive today to operate due to fuel costs, and have otherwise pretty comparable performance specs. There would probably be a separate front and rear cabin, though.

If you tax the CO2 enough you'd trigger such or similar to be put into production.
by tpm | 2025-11-28 17:59:22+00:00
Right. So the highest truck safety standards in the world are in Scandinavia, specifically Norway and Sweden, and many of them are adopted across the whole EU/EEA. These countries also seem to have some of the lowest truck fatality rates globally. But these standards include things like AEBS and other automatic systems, speed limiters, tachographs etc., there is not much to get paid for for a contractor once the system is in the car and working properly, in fact every decision to enact new safety standards is fought hard at the EU level, so every additional system has to prove it's worth it.
by zahlman | 2025-11-28 17:59:47+00:00
> Split them up into multiple functions and there is more scrolling, and now also jumping around because the functions could be anywhere.

No, this is the fundamental misconception used in defense of longer functions.

With a long function, you must scroll no matter what. If you're interested in every detail, you scroll. If you want to figure out the logical steps involved, you scroll (and likely have to take notes as you go). If you want to ignore a step for now, you scroll over it.

With properly factored code, you only jump away when you need to. If you want to figure out the logical steps involved, you just read them off. If you want to ignore a step for now, you just ignore it. If you're interested in every detail, you get to start with an overview, and then you jump around. But caring about details is the exceptional case. Most of the code works most of the time in any sane development practice; when the current code works, the details don't help with understanding the current function.

Jumping around is also not more difficult than scrolling, with a proper editor.
by CBLT | 2025-11-28 18:00:16+00:00
My current company started on AWS/GCP for the credits. Right now we're on Lambda for the GPU prices and GKE for some webservers that we cba to move. We dual-upload data to s3 and gcs still (which isn't too expensive, it's effectively write-only and the auto-archive features work for us). Cloud SQL database but pgBackRest to the other cloud.

We're not HA across clouds; we decided to chase RPO over RTO.
by rfc2324 | 2025-11-28 18:00:26+00:00
Here's the page threecheese meant to link: https://sqlrsync.com/help/alternatives

This is the very high level architecture: https://sqlrsync.com/help/architecture

Source code to the client which explains the code running on your system and how I use safe(r) sqlite3 APIs to copy a running database: https://github.com/sqlrsync/client
by mjr00 | 2025-11-28 18:00:50+00:00
The main thing I get out of this article is how easy it is to get trapped in a bubble thanks to algorithmic social media.

For the most part, sexy never left, and statistics bear this out. OnlyFans brings in enormous amount of revenue, even after an expensive, failed attempt to be not-just-a-porn-site. Hypersexualized gacha games are pulling in tens of millions of dollars per month, and not just for men; the women-targeted Love and Deepspace had over $50 million in revenue in October. Marvel Rivals, criticized in some circles (such as the social circles of those in the article) for being an oversexualized "gooner game" has remained in the top 10 games played on Steam since its release a year ago. And nothing drives it home more than stumbling across the shady side of YouTube and finding videos in the "woman with large breasts not wearing a bra does something mundane" genre with multiple millions of views.

> I choose these examples from my personal life because they express sentiments that were once the kind of stuff I encountered only in the messy battlegrounds of Twitter, amid discussions about whether Sabrina Carpenter is being oversexualized, whether kinks are akin to a sexual orientation, whether a woman can truly consent in an age-gap relationship, and whether exposure to sex scenes in movies violates viewer consent.

Ultimately, these are the kind of things discussed only by a small, vocal, very online (some might say terminally online) minority. To think that they represent more than a tiny fraction of the world is, again, reflective of how easy it is to get trapped into online echo chambers.
by rapind | 2025-11-28 18:01:10+00:00
> It's shocking how we can have so much outrage over unknown people but we're flush out of rage for the system that makes us so angry all the time.

I suspect the answer is to find out who benefits from our misdirected anger, and whether they are also involved in creating and fostering this misdirected anger.

It's old news now, but when I first heard about social media (Facebook specifically) and gaming companies hiring psychologists years ago, I knew it was pretty much over. Couple this with surveillance for the doom spiral.
by kace91 | 2025-11-28 18:01:13+00:00
(Let me start clarifying that this is not at all a criticism of the author)

I am usually amused by the way really competent people judge other's context.

This post assumes understanding of:

- emacs (what it is, and terminology like buffers)

- strace

- linux directories and "everything is a file"

- environment variables

- grep and similar

- what git is

- the fact that 'git whatever' works to run a custom script if git-whatever exists in the path (this one was a TIL for me!)

- irc

- CVEs

- dynamic loaders

- file priviledges

but then feels important to explain to the audience that:

>A socket is a facility that enables interprocess communication
by TeMPOraL | 2025-11-28 18:01:25+00:00
It's even simple than that, IMHO. Yes, there are always new jobs to replace one you've lost to automation. But no, those new jobs are not for you, and not for your children. Someone else will be doing them - you will be dealing with the fallout of having your life upended, suddenly facing deep poverty.

You can re-skill - but you'll be competing for starter positions and starter salary with people who're just entering the workforce, much younger than you, with no dependents or health issues.

The technology may have benefited everyone in the long run, but in immediate terms, sudden shifts like these ruin lives of people, and destroy futures of their descendants.
by ajkjk | 2025-11-28 18:01:39+00:00
You rarely study delta and step functions in an introductory calculus class. In this case the first derivative would be a step function, in the sense that over any finite interval it appears to be discontinuous. Since you can only sample a function in reality there's no distinguishing the discontinuous version from its smooth approximation.

(I suppose a rudimentary version of this is taught in intro calc. It's been a long time so I don't really remember.)
by ssivark | 2025-11-28 18:01:48+00:00
TBC, I too did not really mean "AI" (as in LLMs and the like) which is often hosted/served with a very convenient interface. I do include more bespoke statistical / mathematical models -- be it hierarchical, Bayesian, whatever.

Since AWS/etc are quite complicated, there are now a swarm of startups trying to make it easier to take baby steps into the cloud (eg. Modal, Runpod, etc) and make it very easy for the user to get a small slice of that GPU pie. These services have drastically simpler server-side APIs and usage patterns, including "serverless" GPUs from Modal, where you can just "submit jobs" from a Python API without really having to manage containers. On the client side, you have LLM coding agents that are the next evolution in UI frontends -- and they're beginning to make it much much easier to write bespoke code to interact with these backends. To make it abundantly clear what target audience I'm referring to: I imagine they are still mostly using sklearn (or equivalents in other languages) and gradient boosting with Jupyter notebooks, still somewhat mystified by modern deep learning and stuff. Or maybe those who are more mathematically sophisticated but not software engg sophisticated (eg: statisticians / econometricians)

To inspire you with a really concrete example: since Modal has a well documented API, it should be quite straight-forward ("soon", if not already) for any data scientist to use one of the CLI coding agents and

1. Implement a decent GPU-friendly version of whatever model they want to try (as long as it's not far from the training distribution i.e. not some esoteric idea which is nothing like prior art)

2. Whip up a quick system to interface with some service provider, wrap that model up and submit a job, and fetch (and even interpret) results.

----

In case you haven't tried one of these new-fangled coding agents, I strongly encourage you to try one out (even if it's just something on the free tier eg. gemini-cli). In case you have and they aren't quite good enough to solve your problem, tough luck for now... I anticipate their usability will improve substantially every few months.
by atoav | 2025-11-28 18:02:00+00:00
I don't think it has collapsed.

If you read early works that expanded the topic from it's original telegraphy/telephony context (e.g. Cybernetics by Norbert Wiener) it is pretty clear that signal and noise was always subjective. Or let's phrase it differently: One persons noise could be another persons signal. Whether something something is more signal-like or more noise-like depends entirely on who is looking for which purpose.

As for signal and noise in social media: Lets say you follow 5 people. If we realistically assume you are not going to like everything those 5 people post, that means your feed will contain significant amounts of noise even wothout any algorithmic curration or non-follower content. Part of that will be that you won't even know yourself what you're looking for at all times.
by alwa | 2025-11-28 18:02:22+00:00
Same way as the police body cameras do it: disclose what you’re doing. Which really is all OP is asking of the Ray-Ban spy cam wearers, too. A blinking red light is the conventional method.

In the police’s case, there’s rarely a choice, but at least you’re reminded you’re speaking For The Record instead of with a person. In your case, that way I know not to talk to you.

I wonder why stealth is so foundational to these devices’ success…
by erikrothoff | 2025-11-28 18:02:37+00:00
My (swedish) grandfather keeps falling for these Meta scams. Scrolling through his feed is insane and disgusting. So many ads that mimick OS alerts saying storage is low, insane amounts of AI crap and fake products. I 100% agree with this. Try scrolling through your grandparents’ Instagram or Facebook and see for yourself. It’s obviously _very_ easy for Meta to filter out these scams, but they choose not to.
by general1465 | 2025-11-28 18:02:40+00:00
Imagine you will buy a house and somebody will have so much gall to slap a billboard on the side of your house. Repeatedly. Would you tolerate this behavior? Obviously not, then why companies thinks that it is OK to show ads on my fridge or in my car? This is outrageous behavior and I hope that some nasty regulation will end this nonsense so we can hear crying of companies how big government is bullying them and hampering innovation...
by mschuster91 | 2025-11-28 18:02:50+00:00
> but they need to have a negotiating position with their single point of failure supplier

They don't. Apple has an Architecture License for ARM, they can do whatever the fuck they want.

If you're referring to TSMC - it shouldn't be too much of a problem for Apple to go and contract Samsung instead, at least assuming Samsung can keep up the yield. Intel isn't a competitor to either TSMC or Samsung, their fab process is years behind.
by trilogic | 2025-11-28 18:03:05+00:00
We at Hugston are working hard to make AI useful for everyone. Today we are releasing Quanta, an application for windows that can convert and quantize AI LLM Models in GGUF.

Available at, https://github.com/Mainframework/Quanta or https://hugston.com/uploads/software/Quanta-1.0.0-setup-x64.... (the newer version).

If you like our work you may consider to share it and star it in Github.

Enjoy
by GMoromisato | 2025-11-28 18:04:51+00:00
I agree 100%.

I've been posting more on LinkedIn on topics around my consulting service. I haven't done it enough to get new clients yet, but my posts are getting read, even if only by my connections, and that keeps my name in their minds.

I honestly don't care if anyone thinks my content is cringe, but I do care that it is good/useful content.

The key is to set a quality bar that is high enough so it's not slop, but not so high that it keeps you from posting.
by mindslight | 2025-11-28 18:05:02+00:00
My main desktop has 256GB, and my "router" has 128GB. Mostly used for software builds (I use NixOS as a source distribution) and VMs (which themselves are mostly used for web browsing, surprise surprise). The desktop had been fine at 112GB because that was the max that coreboot could train, but the coreboot code has been updated and used DDR3 sticks are cheap. The goals of the new 192GB machine are more of that existing usage, plus LLM experimentation and possible VFX rendering/video work. It's speculative of course, but as I've said I've never regretted bulking up on RAM. If it ends up feeling too vacant and echoey, I can always grab another motherboard and processor and make two 96GB machines.
by tyre | 2025-11-28 18:05:02+00:00
Many SCOTUS opinions, especially the major ones, are very readable! The justices and clerks are excellent writers.

The most publicly notable cases (on things like abortion, gerrymandering, gun control, etc.) aren’t so tied down in complex precedent or laws the average person is unfamiliar with.

Although, even some of those (like, for me, issues around Native American sovereignty or maritime law) are quite readable as well.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-11-28 18:06:58+00:00
Ehh, tell me the credit ratings assigned by rating agencies to mortgage backed securities circa 2005-2007. Its an ecosystem with misaligned incentives, and some cohort of investor will be left holding the bag. Big Tech, investment banks, and ratings agencies will get off with no consequences when this Jenga-esq capital apparatus eventually collapses.
by mlinksva | 2025-11-28 18:07:00+00:00
I've had approximately the same thought, to different but complementary ends "More generally (not covered in this question) perhaps this could also be a fun way to interrogate the tech tree, e.g., what could have been discovered given the data at a given cutoff, how early or late certain advancements came, etc." https://manifold.markets/MikeLinksvayer/llm-trained-on-data-...

Would love to see it!
by vladms | 2025-11-28 18:07:24+00:00
It's more a risk management issue. A country that wants to do everything by itself (from food, to shovels, to cars, to computers) will not be the most efficient and will loose a lot. Before '90s communist countries were "proud" that everything was produced locally - except many things were breaking or bad quality or unavailable (not all, but many).

I would claim that today is a much better moment to switch than it was 20 years ago - much more open source options, so less overall costs.
by technothrasher | 2025-11-28 18:07:39+00:00
There's less attack surface on these systems than your typical windows install. The only reason I was able to hack the Macan is because they'd left a debug avenue open such that you could plug an ethernet adapter into one of the USB ports and use it drop a shell, and then exploit a bug with handling of a certificates to get privileged access. I was more surprised they'd left that USB ethernet avenue open than that there was a certificate handling bug.

I believe since I did it, somebody found another way in by inserting a malicious payload into a USB firmware update image.
by throw10920 | 2025-11-28 18:08:39+00:00
There are known groups that coordinate to flag things on HN? That seems extraordinarily silly. If you wanted to do influence ops, there are much more rewarding targets, like Reddit and X. Are you sure that the flagging that you see isn't just people removing articles that violate the guidelines (or lead to comments that violate them)?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by seydor | 2025-11-28 18:08:43+00:00
the need to judge publicly is a subset of the need to publicize everything, a world where everyone is exhibitionist and selfies replace experiences. The people who do the former are primarily engaged in the latter.

This will only get worse, we are one step away from people posting selfies of their foreplay before sex for public validation.

It is already happening in tourism that people go to the beach for the selfies rather than swimming (seen that with my own eyes). Narcissism is slowly eating sexuality as well.
by task3313 | 2025-11-28 18:09:27+00:00
> I’d assumed some highly-specific online view of a highly-specific online community was a property of society. It wasn’t. It’s a property of the people who are part of the highly-specific online community.

That's an interesting way to put it, I think this happens a lot. But sometimes I think an opinion from a highly-specific online community escapes their bubble and becomes a reality in other groups, and sometimes this is sad.

For example I think there are way too many youngsters these days using the words 'chad' and 'incel' and they truly believe these things are true. Some go as far as saying that you are either born one way or another and there is no way to fix it. The very same thinking pattern caused teenagers to kill each other in multiple instances.

It seems some people just fail to realize that whatever is the norm in their online space is not reality.
by MrScruff | 2025-11-28 18:09:30+00:00
Yeah, while I mostly agree with the sentiment, I don't actually recognise any of the behaviours described in this article. It does sound like the behavioural traits of a certain subsection of certain generations, who's expectations and norms have been warped by overuse of social media. It all sounds incredibly exhausting and I genuinely feel sorry for those growing up in this climate.
by kragen | 2025-11-28 18:10:19+00:00
A heavily used hairdryer is typically in use for 5 minutes per day, so a 1500-watt-peak hairdryer might average 5.2 watts. It needs 1500 watts of batteries (say, 3kWh of 0.5C batteries, or 0.4kWh of 4C batteries), not 1500 watts of solar panels.
by evbogue | 2025-11-28 18:10:20+00:00
back in the day a few of us used to run ssb (secure-scuttlebot) over yggdrasil (and cjdns before that) and that system would distribute the private messages to all of the peers within 3 hops. offline peers would just sync up when online and then decrypt the messages sent to them.

ssb's been broken for around five years, but now that it's working again it'd be fun try this experiment again.

2026 could be the year mesh networks finally take off!
by LeFantome | 2025-11-28 18:10:44+00:00
Not sure why am getting in the middle of this but I need to point out that you are not even correct for Linux.

Linux rather famously has avoided the GPL3 and is distributed under a modified GPL2. This license allows binary blob modules. We are all very familiar with this.

As a result, the kernel that matches your description above that ships in the highest volume is Linux by a massive margin. Can you run a fully open source Linux kernel on your Android phone? Probably not. You do not have the drivers. You may not pass the security checks.

Do companies like Broadcomm “collaborate” on Linux even in the PC or Mac space? Not really.

On the other side, companies that use FreeBSD do actually contribute a lot of code. This includes Netflix most famously but even Sony gives back.

The vast majority of vendors that use Linux embedded never contribute a single line of code (like 80% or more at least - maybe 98%). Very few of them even make the kernel code they use available. I worked in video surveillance where every video recorder and camera in the entire industry is Linux based at this point. Almost none of them distribute source code.

But even the story behind the GPL or not is wrong in the real world.

You get great industry players like Valve that contribute a lot of code. And guess what, a lot of that code is licensed permissively. And a lot of other companies continue to Mesa, Wayland, Xorg, pipewire, and other parts of the stack that are permissively licensed. The level of contribution has nothing to do with the GPL.

How about other important projects? There are more big companies contributing to LLVM/Clang (permissive) than there are to GCC (GPL).

In fact, the GPL often discourages collaboration. Apple is a great example of a company that will not contribute to even the GPL projects that they rely on. But they do contribute a fair bit of Open Source code permisssively. And they are not even one of the “good guys” in Open Source.

This comment is pure ideological mythology.
by GeekyBear | 2025-11-28 18:10:56+00:00
The word was that TSMC was previously looking to charge much more for their 2nm node.

Apple may have just been looking to apply pricing pressure.

> TSMC has finalized the pricing for its upcoming 2nm process, setting the wafer price at around $30,000. This marks a 10%–20% increase compared with the 3nm process average of $25,000–$27,000, lower than earlier market speculation of a 50% hike.

https://technode.com/2025/10/09/tsmc-sets-2nm-wafer-price-at...
by YC398739847 | 2025-11-28 18:11:49+00:00
EU politicians are just too dependent on keeping the status quo of the last decade. The status quo is how they got to their position so they have no incentive to change anything (Starmer, Merz, Marcon, Von der Lyen. Yuck). By the time they finally get the shove they need to rapidly decouple, e.g. when America invades The Hague* to rescue Netanyahu from war crimes charges, it will be when they're already on the edge of the proverbial cliff.

*: https://www.hrw.org/news/2002/08/03/us-hague-invasion-act-be...
by barbazoo | 2025-11-28 18:12:13+00:00
> What that means is that when you're looking to build a fully local RAG setup, you'll need to substitute whatever SaaS providers you're using for a local option for each of those components.

Even starting with having "just" the documents and vector db locally is a huge first step and much more doable than going with a local LLM at the same time. I don't know any one or any org that has the resources to run their own LLM at scale.