MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lloydatkinson | 2025-11-24 23:11:47+00:00
I posted one of my posts to it to see what it made of it, as it was quite well received when someone posted it to real HN [1]. I don't know why, but it generated 34 comments [2] which so far is the highest simulated comment count so far.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31074861

[2]: https://news.ysimulator.run/item/402
by benzible | 2025-11-24 23:12:17+00:00
Unfortunately, 600K people and counting are no longer in a condition to be restored...

> As of November 5th, it estimated that U.S.A.I.D.’s dismantling has already caused the deaths of six hundred thousand people, two-thirds of them children.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-documentary...
by layer8 | 2025-11-24 23:12:57+00:00
One thing is probably true: You have to train on the individual person, and it’s not transferable to a different person. Similar to how when taking an LLM and training on the fluctuations of its neural network to “read its thoughts”, the training results won’t transfer to interpreting the semantic contents of the network activity of a different LLM.

So you probably can’t build a universal mind-reading device.
by zahlman | 2025-11-24 23:13:21+00:00
For Python ecosystem people:

> Does not default to running post-install scripts (must manually approve each)

To get equivalent protection, use `--only-binary=:all:` when running `pip install` (or `uv pip install`). This prevents installing source distributions entirely, using exclusively pre-built wheels. (Note that this may limit version ability or even make your installation impossible.) Python source packages are built by following instructions provided with the package (specifying a build system which may then in turn be configured in an idiosyncratic way; the default Setuptools is configured using a Python script). As such, they effectively run a post-install script.

(For PAPER, long-term I intend to design a radically different UI, where you can choose a named "source" for each package or use the default; and sources are described in config files that explain the entire strategy for whether to use source packages, which indexes to check etc.)

> Let's you set a min age for new releases before `pnpm install` will pull them in - e.g. 4 days - so publishers have time to cleanup.

Pip does not support this; with uv, use `--exclude-newer`. This appears to require a timestamp; so if you always want things up to X days old you'll have to recalculate.
by fredophile | 2025-11-24 23:14:11+00:00
DOGE "failed" because cutting the budget wasn't their real goal.

Here are a few outcomes they were able to achieve: (1) Cutting funding for agencies and organizations that were investigating companies run by Elon Musk. (2) Cutting funding for organizations, like NOAA, that have high economic returns for every dollar the government spent on them. (3) Copying information from multiple government databases.

(1) had immediate benefits to Musk. (2) leaves openings for someone with enough capital to fill in the gaps left behind and make a profit charging for what used to be a government service. (3) provides numerous long term benefits to Musk and anyone else with access to that data.
by tastyfreeze | 2025-11-24 23:14:13+00:00
I was responding to a comment that said "regulating insulin prices". Regulating and negotiating are not the same. Regulation is the government using its power to dictate the price a seller is allowed to sell a product for (price fixing). Negotiation means the pharmaceutical company can just say no if the government offers a price that is too low.

Or maybe you are thinking that government force is "negotiating". Something along the lines of give us this price or we make it illegal for you to do "x". Or, alternatively, we will allow you to do "x" if you give us this price. While that is technically negotiating it is malignant government behavior known as coercion.
by mullingitover | 2025-11-24 23:14:14+00:00
The fallacy here is assuming Musk actually knows what he's doing (or even where he is) most of the time.

He is objectively, measurably spending the majority of his waking hours tweeting, not learning or performing work of any value. There was a whole project to install a bigass gaming rig in his government office dormitory[1], because the remaining time when he wasn't tweeting he needed to play video games.

[1] https://www.polygon.com/opinion/532455/elon-musk-gaming-pc-d...
by jfengel | 2025-11-24 23:14:16+00:00
The metaphor extension is valid. If they had succeeded in just cutting fat, it might have been merely a mistake -- failing to understand how redundancy works in an organization.

Instead, they cut without regard to fat content. Many of the organizations were already operating on a shoestring. We didn't have an abundance of park rangers. It wasn't "merely" a mistake. It was the application of ideology, without regard to either the principles of good governance or the law.
by godsinhisheaven | 2025-11-24 23:15:04+00:00
Sounds about right, I'm pretty sure the vast majority of people on Earth are on either 1. some kind of prescription drug meant to address some mental ailment or 2. Drinking alcohol/smoking/doing drugs (sometimes all 3) to address some mental ailment. There is a vanishingly small percentage of humans that do neither. Just a gut feeling, I cite nothing and have no wish to.
by jolt42 | 2025-11-24 23:15:22+00:00
My OO projects were usually in Java with a DB. They all ran afoul of what Martin Fowler calls the Anemic Domain Model. Basically your objects are data-only, so there's no benefit. In addition Spring injection became ubiquitous, and further killed objects with behavior. The only project using a DB and had objects with behavior was an old one that happened to use TopLink as an OR mapping.
by x0x0 | 2025-11-24 23:15:24+00:00
> leaves no path to incrementally update

Sure it does? Or do I not understand? It pushes the work to the application, not the language.

And it works fine on rails. If you want to stay on an EOL rails, you're on your own, or you can buy ongoing security backports from at least 2 (that I know of, maybe more) vendors. LTS lives roughly 2 years and then you either upgrade or deal with eol yourself.
by throwaway2037 | 2025-11-24 23:16:05+00:00
You are implying here that the financial connection/dependence is the problem. How is this any different than (hetero) men who lose their jobs (or suffer significant financial losses) while in a long term relationship? Their chances of divorce / break-up skyrocket in these cases. To be clear, I'm not here to make women look bad. The inverse/reverse is women getting a long-term illness that requires significant care. The man is many times more likely to leave the relationship due to a sharp fall in (emotional and physical) intimacy.

Final hot take: The AI boyfriend is a trillion dollar product waiting to happen. Many women can be happy without physical intimacy, only getting emotional intimacy from a chatbot.
by Mario10 | 2025-11-24 23:16:06+00:00
Hi Hacker News, Hiring the wrong developer can cost a company around 30% of that hire’s annual salary.

With IssuePay, companies can spend just a few less bucks on real open-source issues from their own repositories and get their work done. Contributors get paid while proving their skills, and companies get a signal for who delivers high-quality work.

Most companies already run informal bounty systems, across Discord, forums, GitHub issues, etc. It works, but it’s fragmented and hard to scale.

So what we try to do is centralize that ecosystem, your bounties reach a much wider audience. Developers who don’t know your project yet, but contribute to similar ones, can discover your tasks alongside ones they already care about. That exposure brings in new contributors who might never have found you otherwise.

And here’s the next step, once a contributor has successfully completed tasks, we can match them to open roles at your company. With git history, contributions, and performance already visible, a small open-source contribution can turn into a full hiring, streamlining the process from task to job offer.

In short, IssuePay helps you amplify your existing workflow while creating a more reliable way to find and hire talent.
Ask HN: GitHub vs. self-hosted forges – What's your first impression?
by bitbasher | 2025-11-24 23:16:40+00:00
When hiring or searching for open-source code, you often come across developers who host their projects exclusively on GitHub. Sometimes you may find individuals with a minimal social presence (no GitHub, LinkedIn, etc.) but who self-host their own forge, blog, or projects.

Does your impression of the person change at all? If so, how?
by encomiast | 2025-11-24 23:16:58+00:00
What I saw was that DOGE spent all their time chasing non-existent (or at most minor) problems imagined from the conspiracy theories they heard about in the media (e.g. woke contracts). They drank their own kool-aid and when they were actually given the keys they came up with nada. A total waste of everyone's time.

I would be interested in knowing what specific 'major waste' DOGE found in your agency. I would also be curious, given how much latitude they were given, how your management made sure they could now go any further. What I saw was senior managers escorted from the building by security and put on administrative leave if they offered anything other than complete cooperation.
Show HN: Realtime, expressive AI personas that you can video call
by kraddypatties | 2025-11-24 23:18:02+00:00
Hey HN.

Over the last few months, we've (me and @parthradia) homebrewed some very fast, very cheap, and pretty expressive talking head models. Our latest enabled us to finally get a live-streaming API together, which you can try at the playground link above.

We actually fell down this rabbit hole because we were spending a significant amount of time building yet another language learning app. We came to the conclusion that the barrier for learning wasn’t the course content, but real, conversational practice. We tried prototyping with standard speech-to-speech models (OpenAI Realtime, Gemini Flash, etc.), but found that we weren’t really triggering our “fight or flight” response.

What did trigger it was talking to a person, face to face. We looked for existing realtime avatar APIs to bridge that gap, but they didn’t fit the constraints: they either didn’t cross the uncanny valley, were too slow (<15 fps), or were way too expensive. So we decided to make our own :-)

The model itself runs at less than a cent per minute and at >30fps on commodity hardware (4090s!), which is pretty cool.

But more importantly, we’ve actually found ourselves using it as a speaking partner for learning Spanish, which is a pretty remarkable feeling at times. This has inspired us to look beyond language learning; we are exploring other use cases (e.g., telehealth, mock interviews, refining elevator pitches) where face-to-face interaction measurably elevates the experience (and we’d love to hear from you here!).

With respect to our tech, there’s still low-hanging fruit to pick:

1. It takes roughly 6s to get a response end-to-end (the video gen is fast, but the chain of ASR -> LLM -> TTS adds up)

2. The resolution could be higher

3. The model feels expressive and natural during its speech, but less so during user turn (early prototypes of the model reacting in realtime to what you’re saying show promise)

While we build out consumer-facing application(s) powered by our model, we’re opening up an API early to see what other developers might build with it. We’d love for you to try it in our playground. Leave a comment below or shoot us a line if you want early access (access@keyframelabs.com)!
by supernetworks_ | 2025-11-24 23:18:12+00:00
Ah now I see what the question was as it seemed like a non sequitur. I misunderstood the comment by foxboron to be concerns about any backdoors not that P256 is backdoored, I hold no such view of that, surely bitcoin should be good evidence.

Instead I was stating that weaknesses in cryptography have been historically put there with some NSA involvement at times.

For DB: The brain pool curves do have a worse leak, but as stated in the dragon blood paper “we believe that these sidechannels are inherent to Dragonfly”. The first attack submission did hit P-256 setups before the minimal iteration count was increased and afterward was more applicable to same-system cache/ micro architectural bugs. These attacks were more generally correctly mitigated when H2C deterministic algorithms rolled out. There’s many bad choices that were selected of course to make the PAKE more exploitable, putting the client MAC in the pre commits, having that downgrade, including brain pool curves. but to my point on committees— cryptographers warned strongly when standardizing that this could be an attack and no course correction was taken.
by ulrashida | 2025-11-24 23:19:14+00:00
The average age for scientific contributors was 29. https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/L...

Did the DOGE 20-somethings also have the benefits of supervision from PhDs in various specialties? It's not the age alone, but the age in combination with other factors that make it concerning.
by d3Xt3r | 2025-11-24 23:19:32+00:00
In my case, I already have PC, a laptop and a gaming handheld, all running Linux, but I still want to buy a Steam Machine just to support Valve, and also to increase the market share statistics - even if it's just by one count. We need to buy these to show the world that there is a market for Linux gaming devices, and who knows, maybe some day the market will grow big enough for publishers like Epic to admit they can no longer ignore Linux.
by throwaway2037 | 2025-11-24 23:20:28+00:00
This is an interesting point. Personally, I am neutral on it. I'm not sure why it has received so many downvotes.

You raise a good point about a forum with real people that can radicalise someone. I would offer a dark alternative: It is only a matter of time when forums are essentially replaced by an AI-generated product that is finely tuned to each participant. Something a bit like Ready Player One.

Your last paragraph: What is the meaning of "Alpha and Beta"? I only know it from the context of Red Pill dating advice.
by ben_w | 2025-11-24 23:20:34+00:00
Synthetic 20-somethings that cost a few bucks per megatoken may technically be different from flesh 20-somethings working for free for the exposure or whatever it was, but it's not an important distinction.

Much as I find LLMs useful, even today I'd only rate their competence in any given domain like a 21 or 22 year old in that domain. The Penguin Island* tariffs comes to mind as an example of probably-AI; I can think of a few mistakes of this level before the days of AI, the only one I'd like to mention is having had to explain to a real human that someone saying they're in "London" doesn't automatically mean they're in the UK.

And that's if I'm being generous and assuming Musk's statements on this topic were based in reality — given Musk also asserted that savings of 1-2 trillion dollars were possible when this was not only beyond the powers of the executive, but obviously so with minimal research, I don't trust his word.

* Heard and McDonald Islands, IIRC
by int_19h | 2025-11-24 23:21:12+00:00
The initial expectation was for Ukraine to fall in weeks. The convoys that were headed for Kyiv had Rosgvardia in them - that's basically riot police, not military troops, and they were equipped as such. So no, they were absolutely going for the whole Ukraine (as a puppet state in the west and probably annexations in the east) and instead got stuck in the worst meat grinder Russia has seen since WW2.
by mistrial9 | 2025-11-24 23:21:31+00:00
I think this misses a point.. hiring adolescent hacks with after-midnight chops and thrill-trophies on the walls IS part of the selling point of the DOGE raids. It was a raiding party. That is as old as pre-history, in itself. But the playing fields are terminals and web browsers. Age is a "partial maybe just a little bit proxy for experience" no it is judgement and some healthy understanding of the weight of historic events, and the financial weight of some of the systems.

All that said there is another side of the coin. That is that there were under-the-radar payment systems and not quite audited channels of money in those systems. Built with care, you bet. Essentially diagramming the tech stacks, documenting admin systems, getting and using root and root equivalent at all times possible.. those were the scalps taken, and the targets were actually rotten in some ways in some places. /rant
by ZguideZ | 2025-11-24 23:21:42+00:00
I found this a really funny thread of answers to read. Maybe Japan should start making historical claims like China does. Japan could claim much of Asia, create a new historical narrative that the atrocities were manufactured fake news and that the oppressed peoples of Taiwan, Korea, Nanjing, South East Asia, and Oceania were illegally forced to leave the Japanese Empire due to propaganda and illegal militantism where the victors then created a fake narrative of Japanese war crimes. Maybe Japan should tear up the peacenik constitution that was forced on it by Nuclear USA and written by a woman from Kansas and turn the SDF back into the Japanese War Machine - revive industries, begin to reclaim territories for essential resources, and once again move towards the creation of a glorious co-prosperity sphere. The US seems to be reviving the NAZI war machine and is only steps away from adopting swastika as a positive symbol, so why not Japan bring back the old flag and mentality too? - I know this is ridiculous. So are most of these comments.
by gus_massa | 2025-11-24 23:22:22+00:00
95/1005 :)

It shoulb be always solvable in 26×5=130.

Feature requests:

Important! Save the state in a cockie, in case the user refresh the page. (Don't ask.)

Perhaps make the header always visible.

Perhaps make the new word always visible.

Perhaps show a star moving across the screen for every word that is solved.
by itake | 2025-11-24 23:23:21+00:00
That is not what I heard from my cousin at TSMC. The OT gives the workers a “living wage”. Most of his coworkers charge OT every week of the year.

He admitted, even with their OT and bonuses, he probably makes more than them w2 salaries.

But my point still remains: if they want US (or TW) folks to work more hours, they need to pay for those hours.
by gertlex | 2025-11-24 23:23:56+00:00
That's certifiably not fun :(

Not that one ever should have to do such for medical equipment, but wonder if someone could grind down the firmer stuff on the first new mold, assuming it was kept...

(Not really useful anecdote:) I remember circa 25 years ago, my audiologist had a benchtop grinding/buffing wheel that she'd take the earmolds to a few times when modifications were needed. Even at that young age, it was clear that grinding soft materials didn't work very well.
by throwaway2037 | 2025-11-24 23:25:33+00:00
> This isn’t very big news.

The opening paragraph feels a bit pearl clutching to me.

> the company had to scrap thousands of wafers that were in production for clients at the site which include Apple, Nvidia, and AMD.

Eh. So what? I am sure scrap thousands of wafers for all kinds of other reasons. I would be better to know the cost per hour of a total plant shutdown. (Of course, I'm sure the author doesn't have this information.)

> After all, the TSMC logo features failing parts!

Final hat tip here. I never knew that.
by int_19h | 2025-11-24 23:27:49+00:00
Ukraine has a severe manpower problem, while Russia hasn't even implemented full mobilization yet. They can keep grinding down the existing defenses until there are simply not enough Ukrainians in uniform left to hold the tide, and then things would break down pretty quickly in the absence of external support.

They would still have to contend with an insurgency on occupied territory, but that is something Russia has considerable experience with, including Ukraine in the past (mopping up the remaining nationalist resistance after WW2).
by codebje | 2025-11-24 23:29:15+00:00
Using ChatGPT to numb social isolation is akin to using alcohol to numb anxiety.

ChatGPT isn't a social connection: LLMs don't connect with you. There is no relationship growth, just an echo chamber with one occupant.

Maybe it's a little healthier for society overall if people become withdrawn to the point of suicide by spiralling deeper into loneliness with an AI chat instead of being radicalised to mass murder by forum bots and propagandists, but those are not the only two options out there.

Join a club. It doesn't really matter what it's for, so long as you like the general gist of it (and, you know, it's not "plot terrorism"). Sit in the corner and do the club thing, and social connections will form whether you want them to or not. Be a choir nerd, be a bonsai nut, do macrame, do crossfit, find a niche thing you like that you can do in a group setting, and loneliness will fade.

Numbing it will just make it hurt worse when the feeling returns, and it'll seem like the only answer is more numbing.
by Lerc | 2025-11-24 23:29:43+00:00
I guess you have a couple of options.

You could trust the expert analysis of people in that field. You can hit personal ideologies or outliers, but asking several people seems to find a degree of consensus.

You could try varying tasks that perform complex things that result in easy to test things.

When I started trying chatbots for coding, one of my test prompts was

Create a JavaScript function edgeDetect(image) that takes an ImageData object and returns a new ImageData object with all direction Sobel edge detection.

That was about the level where some models would succeed and some will fail.

Recently I found

Can you create a webgl glow blur shader that takes a 2d canvas as a texture and renders it onscreen with webgl boosting the brightness so that #ffffff is extremely bright white and glowing,

Produced a nice demo with slider for parameters, a few refinements (hierarchical scaling version) and I got it to produce the same interface as a module that I had written myself and it worked as a drop in replacement.

These things are fairly easy to check because if it is performant and visually correct then it's about good enough to go.

It's also worth noting that as they attempt more and more ambitious tasks, they are quite probably testing around the limit of capability. There is both marketing and science in this area. When they say they can do X, it might not mean it can do it every time, but it has done it at least once.
by iwontberude | 2025-11-24 23:30:27+00:00
Yeah, quite unfortunate. But maybe there is hope. Apparently k3s uses Kine which is an etcd translation layer for relational databases and there is another project called Netsy which persists into s3 https://nadrama.com/netsy. Some interesting ideas. Hopefully native postgres support gets added since its so ubiquitous and performant.
by brokenmachine | 2025-11-24 23:30:54+00:00
Nothing to do with the actual story which was very interesting, but I just find it so absurd that in 2025 we're still splitting posts into paragraphs because of some weird historical character limit on tweets.

And some of those posts are way longer than tweets used to be, but we're still splitting them for no real reason than to make them tweets instead of blog posts?