MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by esseph | 2025-11-14 01:16:45+00:00
This is part of my job, dealing with spectrum and Washington.

I communicate with the FCC and NTIA fairly often at this point.

You need to pay attention to Arielle Roth, Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Communications and Information Administrator, National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA).

https://policy.charter.com/2025-ntia-spectrum-policy-symposi...

From the article, about the November event:

"... administration’s investment in unlicensed access in 6 GHz ensures the benefits of the entire spectrum band are delivered directly to American families and businesses in the form of more innovation and faster and more reliable connectivity at home and on the go, which will continue to transform and deliver long-lasting impact for communities of all sizes across the country.

Charter applauds Administrator Roth's leadership, and her recognition of the critical role unlicensed spectrum plays today and in the future, both in the U.S. and across the globe."

---

Now here: https://www.ntia.gov/speech/testimony/2025/remarks-assistant...

"... To identify the remainder, NTIA plans to assess four targeted spectrum bands in the range set by Congress: 7125-7400 MHz; 1680-1695 MHz; 2700-2900 MHz; and 4400-4940 MHz."

"On the topic of on-the-ground realities, let’s also not forget what powers our networks today. While licensed spectrum is critical, the majority of mobile traffic is actually offloaded onto Wi-Fi. Born in America, led by America, Wi-Fi remains an area where we dominate, and we must continue to invest in this important technology. With Wi-Fi, the race has already been won. China knows it cannot compete and for that reason looks for ways to sabotage the very ingenuity that made Wi-Fi a global standard."

Roth is not going to take away 6GHz from current ISM allocation.
by kragen | 2025-11-14 01:17:02+00:00
We've had a couple of other recent discussions on dithering: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45750954 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45698323. I commented specifically about the history of blue-noise dithering at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45728231.

The article points out that, historically, RAM limitations were a major incentive for dithering on computer hardware. (It's the reason Heckbert discussed in his dissertation, too.) Palettizing your framebuffer is clearly one solution to this problem, but I wonder if chroma subsampling hardware might have been a better idea?

The ZX Spectrum did something vaguely like this: the screen was 256×192 pixels, and you could set the pixels independently to foreground and background colors, but the colors were provided by "attribute bytes" which each provided the color pairs for an 8×8 region http://www.breakintoprogram.co.uk/hardware/computers/zx-spec.... This gave you a pretty decent simulation of a 16-color gaming experience while using only 1.125 bits per pixel instead of the 4 you would need on an EGA. So you got a near-EGA-color experience on half the RAM budget of a CGA, and you could move things around the screen much faster than on even the CGA. (The EGA, however, had a customizable palette, so the ZX Spectrum game colors tend to be a lot more garish. The EGA also had 4.6× as many pixels.)

Occasionally in ZX Spectrum game videos like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nx_RJLpWu98 you will see color-bleeding artifacts where two sprites overlap or a sprite crosses a boundary between two background colors. For applications like CAD the problem would have been significantly worse, and for reproducing photos it would have been awful.

The Nintendo did something similar, but I think had four colors per tile instead of two.

So, suppose it was 01987 and your hardware budget permitted 8 bits per pixel. The common approach at the time was to set a palette and dither to it. But suppose that, instead, you statically allocated five of those bits to brightness (a Y channel providing 32 levels of grayscale before dithering) and the other three to a 4:2:0 subsampled chroma (https://www.rtings.com/tv/learn/chroma-subsampling has nice illustrations). Each 2×2 4-pixel block on the display would have one sample of chroma, which could be a 12-bit sample: 6 bits of U and 6 bits of V. Moreover, you can interpolate the U and V values from one 2×2 block to the next. As long as you're careful to avoid drawing text on backgrounds that differ only in chroma (as in the examples in that web page) you'd get full resolution for antialiased text and near-photo-quality images.

That wouldn't liberate you completely from the need for dithering, but I think you could have produced much higher quality images that way than we in fact did with MCGA and VGA GIFs.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-11-14 01:17:21+00:00
It depends on the "power" of the project. I was building ½ Watt Darling hi-fi amps that never had more than about 225 VDC or so running through them.

But by all means, you never touch it when plugged in, you use chopsticks if you need to poke/debug a live circuit (you keep one hand in your pocket, etc.).
by forgetfulness | 2025-11-14 01:18:10+00:00
I don’t think it’s unfair to say that catastrophic conditions like those make you _less_ intelligent, they’re feared and loathed for good reasons.

I also don’t think all that many people would be seriously content to lose their minds and selves this way, but everyone is able to fear it prior to it happening, even if they lose the ability to dread it or choose to believe this is not a big deal.
by voc | 2025-11-14 01:19:06+00:00
I feel like the rollout was a bit rushed. Benchmarks for 5.1 came out a day after the launch. New models weren't immediately available through the API. And then there's 5-Codex-Mini which was deprecated only six days later by 5.1-Codex-Mini. Wondering if Gemini 3 forced their hand here?
by orbital-decay | 2025-11-14 01:19:14+00:00
Here's what pattern suppression actually does on a model that's trained to open its writing with "You're absolutely right.":

You're spot-on. You're bang-on. You're dead right. You're 100% correct. I couldn't agree more. I agree completely. That's exactly right. That's absolutely correct. That's on the nose. You hit the nail on the head. Right you are. Very true. Exactly — well said. Precisely so. No argument from me. I'll second that. I'm with you 100%. You've got it exactly. You've hit the mark. Affirmative — that's right. Unquestionably correct. Without a doubt, you're right.

I'm willing to bet money you can easily tag these openers yourself.

This sampling strategy and the elaborate scheme to bake its behavior into the model during the post-training are terribly misguided, because they don't fix the underlying mode collapse. It's formulated as narrowing down the output distribution, but as with many things in LLMs it manifests itself on a much higher semantical level - during the RL (at least using the current methods) the model narrows the many-to-many mapping of high-level ideas that the pretrained model has down to one-to-one or even many-to-one. If you naively suppress repetitive n-grams that are not semantically aware and manually constructed patterns that don't scale, it will just slip out at the first chance, spamming you with minor non-repetitive variations of the same high-level idea.

You'll never have the actual semantic variety unless you fix mode collapse. Referencing n-grams or manually constructed regexes as a source of semantical diversity automatically makes the method invalid, no matter how elaborate your proxy is. I can't believe that after all this time you persist in this and don't see the obvious issue that's been pointed at multiple times.
by lbeckman314 | 2025-11-14 01:19:24+00:00
So one of those egg council creeps got to you too, huh? [0,1]

[0] https://frinkiac.com/video/S06E12/-1x9jGk4guJdUb76ZrC2FbPyug...

[1] https://youtu.be/AHAFMFFQlkI
by mastazi | 2025-11-14 01:20:41+00:00
AI has existed for several decades before the first LLM was ever created.[1][2][3]

And that's not even considering machine learning and deep learning which also have existed for many years before LLMs.

Even if you consider the current usage of the word AI in popular culture, it includes things that are not an LLM like Stable Diffusion and Suno

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expert_system

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Blue_(chess_computer)

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machine#Historical_contex...
by smj-edison | 2025-11-14 01:20:44+00:00
Let me see if I understand your argument correctly:

1. Before 1900, when someone came up with an idea, it was unlikely that someone else came up with that idea.

2. Because only one person had that idea, patenting protected their idea from being stolen.

3. After 1900, however, multiple people would have the same idea, but only one person could win.

4. Because only one person could win, it became a net loss to all the others, as they could no longer innovate.

4a. One example of this is the wright brothers.

Is that correct? If so:

1/2. I believe that people have been coming up with the same ideas simultaneously for a long time. Leibniz and Newton comes to mind, for example.

3/4. But would any of them have been able to get investments into their projects if they couldn't patent it and then reap the benefits?
by TheRoque | 2025-11-14 01:21:14+00:00
Except an RTS is designed around it

If the game needs to perform grind yourself, without delegating it (think Albion Online, Eve Online, Black Desert Online, Path of Exile etc. basically every MMO with economy), it means it's actively part of the game design, and delegating it to a robot is just cheating (and against the ToS in all of those cases)

So the point of GP's post, which I agree with, is that if that kind of grind is not part of the fun for you, then the game wasn't designed for you (and please don't cheat because you ruin other's fun)
by postalcoder | 2025-11-14 01:21:39+00:00
I just requested access to the database @freediver so hopefully it should be integrated into https://hcker.news soon.

I appreciate Kagi's community-driven approach. The open Small Web list[0] is invaluable. Applying a smallweb filter[1] on HN brings a breath of fresh air to the frontpage.

0: https://github.com/kagisearch/smallweb

1: https://hcker.news/?smallweb=true
by bcrl | 2025-11-14 01:22:04+00:00
MANET is one of the protocols I was involved in implementing for a certain network protocol suite back around 2012. Mesh routing protocols only work for the most limited of use cases. They don't know about the capacity of the underlying wireless network and basically fall apart when things are congested or there are radios with poor reception. QoS is implemented far better in modern cell phone networks, and if the routing protocol doesn't take QoS into account, it's gonna suck.
by nobody9999 | 2025-11-14 01:24:20+00:00
>I'm not sure I understand how this is particularly nefarious. It complies with the law as written, and results in a significantly better product for those choosing to consume it.

Perhaps "nefarious" is too strong a term, but the intent (at least in states that have legal cannabis) AFAICT, is to avoid the regulations around testing for adulterants, potency, etc.

In most states with legalized cannabis, testing for a variety of harmful ingredients and the potency of specific products is required for those taking part in the legalized cannabis trade.

Those growing, packaging and distributing "hemp" products are not subject to such testing regulations.

That may not be nefarious, but avoiding such regulation increases the likelihood of harmful additives (chemical pesticides and other adulterants) and unknown potencies. This would likely increase the chances that unscrupulous vendors will sell (knowingly or unknowingly) harmful/dangerous products.

And given that the products are essentially the same, that gives those who don't have to pay for testing or go through the marketplaces defined by state laws, giving those folks an advantage over those who follow state law.

What's more, folks who avoid extant law through this loophole, are not incentivized to make safe, tested products.

So maybe not "nefarious," but certainly anti-consumer with perverse incentives to create and sell harmful products.
by NoPicklez | 2025-11-14 01:24:34+00:00
> These types of simple jobs represent less than 6% of Upwork’s total gross services volume (GSV) and a fraction of freelance and contingent work more broadly

The jobs involved simple jobs of which represented less than 6% of the work they do, showed a 70% improvement. So it was a small set of curated tasks given where they found that the use of AI was better with a human in the loop.

In my experience one of the challenges has been that when humans are using AI they may complete a task quicker, however in QA I've found the results to often be incorrect or require more QA and I'm not talking about coding jobs. I am assuming that the tasks being marked completed quicker, were also QA'd and marked as completed appropriately.
by dekhn | 2025-11-14 01:24:56+00:00
it is very, very unlikely that a fully cooked egg that sat out overnight would have enough bacterial growth (and toxin production by bacteria) to represent a threat to a normal person with a typical immune system.

If the egg had bacteria already growing in it (which is also unlikely) then it's possible that enough of the bacterial toxins could accumulate and be inside when you eat it.

There are probably a number of extremely rare scenarios which would modify the situation but this article includes a lot of words and facts only to come to the unlikely conclusion.
by samdoesnothing | 2025-11-14 01:26:05+00:00
Except it's not an apples-to-apples comparison. The C++ code has been around a lot longer, and a lot of it was written with older versions of C++ which didn't have modern safety features. I'm sure there is a bunch of new/delete in their codebase still. And I'm sure they're actively looking for memory safety issues in C++, and probably not so hard (if at all) with Rust.
by PaulHoule | 2025-11-14 01:26:12+00:00
Back in the 1980s you got your Mom to buy you a game console and you would have needed a logical naming scheme so she would know an PS 3 was better than a PS 2.

XBOX cultivates a "gamer" who is heavily invested in the identity and is well educated in the various versions of XBOX and how the naming scheme works and since they are an adult buying the console for themselves they don't need to explain it to outsiders.
by macintux | 2025-11-14 01:26:28+00:00
10 years later, any details I could offer would be relatively suspect; my memory is pretty poor. Still, I'll make an attempt. Don't write a book based on anything below.

I can honestly say it's the best job I ever had, working with the smartest collection of people (I've been fortunate to work at multiple startups, and while Ian Murdock put together a solid crew at Progeny, Basho was just chock full of brilliant people).

Riak was designed for rock solid, massive scale data. The problem was that most companies didn't really need that, and by the time someone reached that size, they had a significant investment in databases that were much more developer-friendly.

We attempted to make it easier to work with by introducing CRDTs, so developers wouldn't necessarily have to write as much application logic to handle conflicts.

Still, it's hard to sell a database when you can't demonstrate simple queries, because your choices were primarily "update static views as you add new data so you don't actually have to run queries in real-time" or "write map-reduce logic in Erlang".

And, it was hard to simulate massive scale databases, so while our resilience and operations stories were pretty good, it was challenging to anticipate how, and where, performance might start breaking down.

I miss it dearly, but I was also lucky enough to never be on a support call when someone was trying to rescue a failing cluster that served millions of customers.

I will say that Erlang made that last scenario much more manageable: the ability to connect to a live node and see exactly what was happening, and the ability to hot patch a function on the fly, was incredibly helpful.
by voxl | 2025-11-14 01:28:41+00:00
This is ridiculous. A consumer doesn't want to die. Life saving "medical products" can be too expensive even with completely honest and well intentioned pricing. The whole point of the system is good people want to pool resources to enable purchasing these "medical products" to save lives. Pooling resources is subsidizing others, government or otherwise. Removing that is an impossibility.
by snypher | 2025-11-14 01:28:46+00:00
>The sun in the background was sharpened via a stacked image but the image is 100% real and authentically captured in camera (see the video in the OP reply for real time view). Not a composite!

He just kept shooting the sun after the jumper cleared, and stacked up those shots. I think saying it's a 'composite' devalues the image and just makes it seem like he cut out the jumper and pasted on to the sun.
by kadoban | 2025-11-14 01:29:02+00:00
> If there is a different tree of life right here on Earth and we don't know about it, that would cast doubt on our ability to detect life in worlds light years away.

Hm, I don't think it does. The problem is vastly different. Here, on Earth the problem is: sift through all of life for some that's different than the rest. A _hard_ problem with how little of microscopic life we've cataloged completely and with how much of the volume of Earth we can't see.

The problem looking for life in the stars is more: find evidence of _any_ life, so radio signals or chemicals that can't reasonably come from anything else but biology. Those are hard as hell, but fundamentally different.

> Also, if life had multiple false starts here on Earth, that does also suggest that it is very difficult to take hold even on the original Goldilocks planet.

That would be interesting. I kind of guess it's less likely than some kind of winner-take-all outcompeting thing, but who knows. Life that we see is just very good at spreading, escaping and holding on tight.
by aw1621107 | 2025-11-14 01:29:58+00:00
> Even in its own "memory safety" definition, which is the first result on Google, they criticize C instead of providing a proper definition:

I'm not sure that page is intended to provide a definition of "memory safety" in the first place? It (and the following page) seem more intended to introduce safe/unsafe Rust and the boundaries between the two.

It's also from the Rustinomicon, which states:

> Unlike The Rust Programming Language, we will be assuming considerable prior knowledge. In particular, you should be comfortable with basic systems programming and Rust.

So it's arguably unsurprising that a definition of memory safety would not be found there.

My guess is that if you want a more precise definition you'd want to look at the Rust Reference (e.g., [0]) or in related areas.

[0]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/reference/unsafety.html
by keeda | 2025-11-14 01:30:34+00:00
Oh I'm totally an armchair lawyer, so my ruminations were not grounded in laws or legal precedence :-) I do have some background on the patent side of things, where independent reinvention is also not a defence for infringement, but not so much in copyright, so this was educational.

However, has there been any case where the infringment was not only unintentional, but also unexpected?

That is, if you look at cases of uintentional infringement, these are typically cases where some the act of reproduction of content was intentional, but there was a lack of awareness or confusion about the copyright protections of that content. (This paper was useful for background: https://www.law.uci.edu/faculty/full-time/reese/reese_innoce...)

But I could not find a case where the act of copying itself was non-intentional.

In this case, looking at how LLM training works and what LLMs do, it is surprising that it could reproduce the training content verbatim. The fact that it reproduced those outputs is undeniable, but how does existing law and jurisprudence apply to an unprecedented case like this where the reproduction was through some magic black box that nobody can decipher?
by madhu2025 | 2025-11-14 01:33:10+00:00
Built something cool with vibe coding + AI/Agentic AI! AI gives your product the perfect voice for every stakeholder. It solves product communication nightmare using smart prompting with public LLMs. Live on Product Hunt now! No signup required and is free - just open and use. https://www.producthunt.com/products/product-voice-ai
by hysan | 2025-11-14 01:33:16+00:00
Not surprised. Our one experience using Sonder was horrible. Toilet didn’t work and was constantly flushing water. Took forever to get connected to someone. Then they said that they didn’t have maintenance to send until the next day. Asked to be moved. Next room was much worse (other broken stuff, visibly poor condition) but at least the toilet worked? They didn’t have other rooms to change us to. At that point it had been several hours on the phone, so we said fuck it. We need to eat and sleep after our day of travel. Not get hot potatoed around between clueless customer support. The only other two people I know who tried Sonder had similarly shitty experiences that swore them off too.
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-11-14 01:34:56+00:00
> What is the roadblock preventing these models from being able to make the common-sense conclusion here?

Conclusions are the result of reasoning verses LLM's being statistical token generators. Any "guardrails" are constructs added to a service, possibly also altering the models they use, but are not intrinsic to the models themselves.

That is the roadblock.
by giancarlostoro | 2025-11-14 01:35:02+00:00
My favorite bug was Claude Code kept editing some template file. Zed kept auto-formatting the file, which was BREAKING the template itself. It took me like 30 minutes of watching Claude implode, and literally using "ed" to edit the line, before I realized, then I started asking Claude how to turn off the Zed formatters to which it was like AH THAT MAKES MORE SENSE, which I thought was hilarious after it tried everything from editorconfig onwards.
by nobody9999 | 2025-11-14 01:35:04+00:00
>The GOP hasn't been a party of small government since W. Bush. And it hasn't really claimed to be as much since Trump 1.

That's not even close to being true. The "Two Santas" strategy[0] has been in place since at least Reagan's first term.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jude_Wanniski#The_Two_Santa_Cl...
by firebot | 2025-11-14 01:35:10+00:00
We really don't anymore.

Back in the late 90s maybe. Gifs and other paletted image formats were popular.

I even experimented with them. I designed various formats for The Palace. The most popular was 20-bit (6,6,6,2:RGBA, also 5,5,5,5; but the lack of color was intense, 15 bits versus 18 is quite a difference). This allowed fairly high color with anti-aliasing -edges that were semi transparent.
by itopaloglu83 | 2025-11-14 01:35:58+00:00
When the entire Europe is in ruins, you can sell pretty much anything from textiles to crops to machinery, anything.

Another strange thing I learned recently is that in 1930s there was another tariff frenzy as well that lasted until the WW2.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoot%E2%80%93Hawley_Tariff_Ac...