MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by t1E9mE7JTRjf | 2025-11-03 14:46:34+00:00
> None of that makes it less of a war against the native americans

No that's exactly what it makes it, as their conflicts subtract from those with newer arrivals. Different groups fighting each other, and then other different groups from Europe came, and made allegiances with specific local groups, then collaborated in their conflicts.

It's worth understanding that 'western colonization' wasn't a singular coherent force. There were different foreign groups with different interests - who were fighting with each other in North America.

Similarly there were 'Native Americans' (quotes as this is a colonial term) pursuing their own interests, even going to Europe. I'm not sure it's your perspective but there is a popular historic image of native americans being a defenceless people who foreigners came and wiped out which simply isn't correct, and ironically quite colonial.
by teddyh | 2025-11-03 14:46:52+00:00
> If you are a business, I am not sure why on earth do you want to deal with the world’s worst customer service company: Google.

The answer is extremely simple. People aren’t businesses. You are right, no business should choose Google. But people do, for their own reasons. And businesses can only act through people. And people have their own priorities which override the interest of the business, like “What should I choose to never be blamed if/when it fails?” Google is an extremely safe bet there, like IBM of old.
by mythz | 2025-11-03 14:47:37+00:00
Yeah if they only cared about misuse of their brand they need only enforce their trademark. But they're also arguing the other way and don't want anyone to strip their brand from their forks either:

> bad actors taking our work, stripping the branding, selling it as their own, and giving nothing back.

Contradicting their original BSD License which welcomes anyone freely using, sharing and building on OSS software, even commercial forks. So now its a custom BSD-based license but with the aim of preventing competitive forks.
by Fripplebubby | 2025-11-03 14:47:39+00:00
The post is a clear example of when YAGNI backfires, because you think YAGNI but then, you actually do need it. I had this experience, the author had this experience, you might as well - the things you think you AGN are actually pretty basic expectations and not luxuries: being able to write vectors real-time without having to run other processes out of band to keep the recall from degrading over time, being able to write a query that uses normal SQL filter predicates and similarity in one go for retrieval. These things matter and you won't notice that they actually don't work at scale until later on!
by sgarland | 2025-11-03 14:47:39+00:00
> The problem is that index builds are memory-intensive operations, and Postgres doesn’t have a great way to throttle them.

maintenance_work_mem begs to differ.

> You rebuild the index periodically to fix this, but during the rebuild (which can take hours for large datasets), what do you do with new inserts? Queue them? Write to a separate unindexed table and merge later?

You use REINDEX CONCURRENTLY.

> But updating an HNSW graph isn’t free—you’re traversing the graph to find the right place to insert the new node and updating connections.

How do you think a B+tree gets updated?

This entire post reads like the author didn’t read Postgres’ docs, and is now upset at the poor DX/UX.
by ehnto | 2025-11-03 14:48:44+00:00
I agree with you however I believe weight and safety are in a complex relationship right now, which has nothing to do with performance and handling.

Unfortunately I feel much less safe in a Fiat 500 when a significant portion of cars in the road weigh nearly 3 tonnes and perhaps can't even see me. I suspect most people are in SUVs because they're the pragmatic trade off between safety and convenience, not because they were hoping for excellent performance.
by bhouston | 2025-11-03 14:49:29+00:00
It can be super hard to moderate before an image is generated though. People can write in cryptic language and then say decode this message and generate an image the result, etc. The downside of LLMs is that they are super hard to moderate because they will gladly arbitrarily encode input and output. You need to use an LLM as advanced as the one you are running in production to actually check if they are obscene.
by lazide | 2025-11-03 14:49:35+00:00
Sure, but at 50kw/kg at 99% efficiency is still 500w/kg, which is cray cray. Like ‘glowing red hot shortly’ type of crazy with just passive cooling.

And there is no way this is 99% efficient.

So my question still applies. Even 98% is 1kw/kg, or 1kj/sec. or around 3C rise per second assuming the mass is 100% nice clean copper (it isn’t). Everything else will be worse.

Not even counting increasing losses with temperature, it will be a molten puddle pretty quick at that rate without some major active cooling.
by jaggs | 2025-11-03 14:49:57+00:00
I think the problem is that not everyone is a natural writer. Nor is English their first language. These both can be obstacles to a genuine attempt to communicate, so I'm kind of veering towards saying that AI is a benefit in these situations rather than a negative.

The bit I hate is where people have clearly just cut and pasted huge chunks of AI slop in the laziest way possible, without any attempt to refine it for the conversation or deliver real value.
by Edman274 | 2025-11-03 14:50:02+00:00
I am reminded of an episode of SpongeBob SquarePants where he meticulously plans a party with a huge list of scheduled, mandatory activities, and hovers around guests and tries to direct them on how to talk to each other and have fun. No one has fun until he leaves to perform errands and then gets locked out of his house. I wonder how much of that episode's plot was intended as a morality tale for children, and it's funny to consider that children's cartoon animators may have wide discretion to create stories meant to instruct kids on issues the animators have personally experienced. It's funny to imagine someone like Stephen Hillenburg or Derek Drymon or another writer going to a party that wasn't very fun and then saying "we need to let the future generation know that they shouldn't be too authoritarian about their parties", haha.
by markstos | 2025-11-03 14:50:21+00:00
The problem here is not just Google, but huge companies in general that operate at a scale where algorithms are the only viable way to sufficiently keep abuse under control.

Reddit recently shadowbanned me as my account was approaching 20 years old. There was no message about what violation had been committed, and attempts to appeal went unanswered. All posts started getting filtered at some point and all comments throttled.

The Fediverse provides a template for a better way-- smaller connected services with better moderator to user ratios.
by tokai | 2025-11-03 14:50:33+00:00
Both this article and its source are misrepresenting the actual quote. Its seems to be about rumors that rare earth minerals are being sold now.

>Responding to the allegations that 'rare earth elements are sold to the USA', Bayraktar said that there is absolutely no such thing. Bayraktar said, "The agreement we made and signed in America was also a nuclear-related agreement. If we had done it about rare earth elements, be sure, they would have declared it too, we would have declared it," he said.
by jve | 2025-11-03 14:50:40+00:00
I'm also European and don't get these olympic swimming pool or whatever comparisons. I'd have to look up how many m3 of water they contain or what's the length/depth in meters are to make sense of it.

Newspapers in my country don't make these silly comparisons.

But yeah, to be fair, when hearing about Starship I had to look up our TV tower height to identify whether Starship is taller or not. It disappointed me that it's not.

Yeah, height is easier to grasp when correlating in terms of x story apartment buildings.
by bluGill | 2025-11-03 14:50:44+00:00
Good actuarials can pull this off. They just charge enough that they can invest some of your upfront payment and use the interest to pay the staff to support you. We know how often hard drives fail, so you just ensure that you have enough interest to replace them when that happens.

If you are the only one paying upfront this is impossible as your harddrives might fail early, but if there are 1000 people willing to pay upfront we can easially handle that.

Note that I would not be surprised if this was just a Ponzi. That we know how to do this doesn't mean we are.
by danaris | 2025-11-03 14:50:47+00:00
I...think you may be in a bubble if you believe this.

I've never talked to anyone outside of tech circles like this that has any inkling that Google just shutters people's digital lives with no warning or recourse.

In general, with any kind of mainstream large company, you should assume that the overall public perception of them is that they're fine, of course, if they weren't why would they be so big and popular??
by TulioKBR | 2025-11-03 14:51:00+00:00
You're right, and I appreciate your thoughtful response.

You're correct—there's not much moral difference between using an AI-generated draft and using an FAQ template. Both save time. Both can lose context. But I think you also have a valid point here.

The issue isn't AI itself, but rather presence. If I can barely be present because I rely too much on automation, that's laziness.

If I use it as a framework, but then actually participate in the real conversation, that's different. Honestly, I should be more thoughtful here.

Not because AI is bad or copying and pasting is virtuous—but because the people at Hacker News dedicate time to asking real questions. They deserve someone who is truly present, you know? Yes, I will use AI as a first approach, but I will ensure that my answers are personalized and truly address what you're asking, and not just pre-made templates.

Thank you for alerting me to this.
by phatskat | 2025-11-03 14:51:05+00:00
MDN includes a “Permitted Content” section for elements, eg for button it says

> Phrasing content but there must be no Interactive content. If the <button> is the first child of a customizable select element, then it may also contain zero or one <selectedcontent> element.

“Ok, but what constitutes ‘phrasing content’ or ‘interactive content’?” you might ask. Those terms are links that give a very good overview of their constituent elements.
by jimmydddd | 2025-11-03 14:51:06+00:00
I agree. He's always constantly testing limits, exploring gray areas, bending rules and "breaking" gentlemen's agreements. We should take this opportunity to limit the rights of presidents. Apparently, the president can shut down half of the government departments via executive order. How? Because they were created by executive order. How can he just shut down the department of Education without congress? Because Carter created it by executive order without congress. A variety of presidents have had us invade foreign countries without Congress declaring war. Let's take this opportunity to tighten things up.
by greggh | 2025-11-03 14:51:11+00:00
Deepseek, Qwen, GLM (quite good). All being open and available for local use definitely puts them ahead in that space, which means a lot of the tinkerers and younger people learning to do things like train and fine-tune are getting good with Chinese models and I do think getting in early like that is a great way to gain mindshare in a space. Look at Apple or Microsoft doing everything they could early on to get their machines and software into schools as early as possible.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-11-03 14:51:20+00:00
It's important to keep in mind that many (if not most) people ad-blocking google ads do so because of the fear of malware (usually from youtube).

So to Google, killing accounts of malicious actors is a primary concern, and obviously you can wield a lot of damage to people through google's services if unchecked. And even with checks, every bad actor wears the mask of innocence when appealing.

So this puts Google in a rather intractable position. Without numbers it's hard to say whether they are leaning to hard towards stopping fraud (many false positives), or too hard towards giving accounts freedom (high levels of malware served).
by pjmlp | 2025-11-03 14:51:54+00:00
It is easy to have such hubris, when the competition at the shopping mall where most folks buy hardware is either crimpled Chromebooks and Android tablets, or overpriced Apple laptops, at least in what concerns most tier 2 and 3 countries.

It would be nice to have somethig like Asus or Dell XPS, with Ubuntu LTS fully working laptop hardware at Dixons, FNAC, Publico, Worten, Cool Blue, Saturn, Media Markt,..... but it ain't happening.

However after the netbook phase, that is yet to happen again.
by sodokuwizard | 2025-11-03 14:52:00+00:00
My father had an 84yo boss that he marvelled at because the dude never got sick, only took a handful of vacations because his (ironically) japanese wife insisted, and basically lived in that office - he didn't need the money , he exited for like $10M aaages ago and all his children were executives (besides 1).

My father also remarked, he was the greediest man he had ever seen. Some people are so intertwined with their "hungry ghosts", work becomes the addiction, and stopping work is like telling an hardcore addict to anything to go cold turkey. To quit and retire would be the withdrawal that kills them rather than the work itself.
by fred_is_fred | 2025-11-03 14:52:06+00:00
Agree. In 25ish years I've been part of 3 mergers, 1 divestiture, 1 IPO, and N CEO/senior leadership changes. Each of them has changed my job in some way, usually for the worse. I've been told to relocate or quit, I've had customer-facing travel policy change (told to be on the road 100%), I've been put on-call (even when traveling 100%), and I've had internal culture change the point of hating life. There were some positive ones too, but those stand out because generally it caused me to leave (or get laid-off).
by JCM9 | 2025-11-03 14:52:13+00:00
Does OpenAI have $38 billion to buy this? Does AWS have sufficient free cash flow to pay for this “infrastructure” investment they speak of?

Recent analysis shows AWS is burning through Amazon’s free cash on AI buildouts which is very concerning if the bubble pops, leaving Amazon holding the bag of invested capital not making returns.

Amazon is a bit late to the party on these headlines, and lots of unanswered questions about what’s really going on here.
by s-macke | 2025-11-03 14:52:50+00:00
That’s fast. Buggy, but fast. I’m totally impressed! Especially because I researched the necessary steps to do the same thing 10 years ago based on [0]. The patches required for this hack touch LLVM, libc, Linux kernel, BusyBox, ... and total approximately 15,000 lines of code.

I ran a small performance test with 'bc -lq' and compared with [0]:

scale=1000 4*a(1)

This WASM architecture compilation completely blows away my old emulation setup, which only managed around 200 MIPS. Maybe this approach can be generalized. Running a full Linux distribution at near-native speed right in the browser would be awesome.

[0] https://github.com/s-macke/jor1k
by jcattle | 2025-11-03 14:52:55+00:00
Ah come on. If you want to discuss let's discuss, but I would ask you to put at least some effort into your points.

> It doesn't get more democratic than that.

It does get more democratic than that: You vote for congress. You vote in your state, you vote in local county elections, etc.

If now historically your congress, your state, your county had certain powers which are now being taken by the President, I would argue that everything gets less democratic. Your vote and your voice matters less and less. I'm not arguing against Trump in particular here. I am arguing for democratic principles.

Maybe I am misreading your position, but it seems like you do not see democracy as changing in the US?
by Mindwipe | 2025-11-03 14:53:01+00:00
A fairly poor piece.

It fundamentally doesn't understand tokenisation. It claims that you could have an age verification token that doesn't reveal to the government what you were trying to view, but how would that work? The site receiving the token still has to cryptographically validate it as being genuine, and having not being revoked, so it will still need to ask the government database (giving the government an instant kill switch against sexual minorities it decides it doesn't like into the bargain). There's no anonymisation here (and bluntly the government doesn't want that).

It's defence against a government using it for nefarious purposes is literally just the defeatist argument it decries as a fallacy in the paragraph before. Ultimately the best defence against such a government is that the harm it wants to cause can be made slow, expensive and inefficient, and that is a very good way to discourage governments from doing things en masse. But with a single identifier and digital ID it becomes far more efficient.
by svnt | 2025-11-03 14:53:01+00:00
Completely absent is quantity of jobs. If e.g. ml engineer job postings go +40% from 200 to 280 and writer job postings go -50% (over two years) from 20000 to 10000, then we have a better idea of the impact.

Without those data this report isn’t really quantifying impact on “180M jobs.”
by alanwli | 2025-11-03 14:53:04+00:00
I've seen a decent amount of production use of pgvector HNSW from our customers on GCP, but as the author noted is not without some flaws and are typically in the smallish range (0-10M vectors) for the systems characteristics that he pointed out - i.e. build times, memory use. The tradeoffs to consider are whether you want to ETL data into yet another system and deal with operational overhead, eventual consistency, application-logic to join vector search with the rest of your operational data. Whether the tradeoffs are worth it really depends on your business requirements.

And if one needs the transactional/consistency semantics, hybrid/filtered-search, low latencies, etc - consider a SOTA Postgres system like AlloyDB with AlloyDB ScaNN which has better scaling/performance (1B+ vectors), enhanced query optimization (adaptive pre-/post-/in-filtering), and improved index operations.

Full disclosure: I founded ScaNN in GCP databases and currently lead AlloyDB Semantic Search. And all these opinions are my own.
by 0xEF | 2025-11-03 14:53:12+00:00
What makes you think there's an alternative? Generally speaking, you are locked in the tax bracket you are born into. Sure, you might see a slight upward movement, here and there, but for the most part your wages will never outpace the economy around you unless:

A. You are born into wealth

B. You inherit wealth

Most of us don't fall into either of those two things under an economic system that is designed to extract the most value from the people working in it, the profits of which bubble to the top and never trickle back down.

This is why things like overtime are such an easy sell. If the company can afford to pay overtime, then there's no reason they can't afford to raise their workers hourly wages so they make the same money at 40 hours or less that they would working 50/60 hours. I'm here to tell you first hand that there's no increase in productive output of the company as a whole when everyone is working overtime versus when everyone is on 40 hours. That's a myth that needs to be quashed, especially with production being increasingly automated. As someone who visits our automtive and aerospace factories across the US frequently, the amount of guys I see standing around looking at smartphones is astounding, but so long as the company can post higher valuations by making it look like they're flush with both work and cash by offering copious overtime, they're happy. Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime and all that.

Sorry, I forgot to address your part about investments. Those are another bit of snake oil sold to the middle class to sooth their financial woes. Fact is, unless you have a considerable amount of upfront capital, all you're doing is lending money for various fund managers to gamble with. They profit more than you do, even when you do see the marginal increases you might see.
by rkomorn | 2025-11-03 14:53:20+00:00
Oh, that part.

(political opinion disclaimer) IMO, that part's basically just "cost-saving" misdirection/smoke screen (eg it's not "public spending" but we're all spending it). I think that lines up with your question about "why both taxes and having to have private on top".

But in general, "people going untreated" is not much of a concern even if, for example, they don't work and don't private insurance.
by myaccountonhn | 2025-11-03 14:53:22+00:00
This is a bad argument. Even if a machine replaced my job, I'm still going to eat, run the aircon, charge my phone etc. and maybe do another job. So the energy used to do the job decreased, but the total energy usage is higher because I'm still using the same amount of energy, but now the machine is also using some amount energy that wasn't being used before.

Efficiencies lead to less resources being used if your demand is constant, but if demand is elastic, it often leads to the total resource consumption increasing.

See also: Jevons Paradox (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox).
Show HN: Free tool to explore daily AI research semantically
by JonasWiebe | 2025-11-03 14:53:24+00:00
Since August I’ve been running a scoring system that tracks and ranks every new AI-related paper published on arXiv. The goal is to detect genuine research events, things that move the field forward and filter out the usual noise and unsubstantiated uploads.

Each paper gets evaluated through a scoring algorithm. The system then stores embeddings with structured fields like problem, approach, solution, and result for later retrieval.

Search runs on a hybrid model: it combines semantic embeddings with metadata like title, topic, author, and extracted keywords. Queries return the most relevant and technically meaningful papers for a given concept.

So far, the data (since August) looks stable and the scoring aligns surprisingly well with expert-curated lists. All of this is available through a free web interface and API.

Is this useful for everyday
by pmkary | 2025-11-03 14:53:26+00:00
It's not the same. As I said I'm okay with buying the next version every now and then—which makes the same price mostly—what I am not happy about is that my "tools" are becoming "services". There is a different feeling of buying a hammer, and going to a shop and paying them to use their hammer each time. The pricing is the same, but I can no longer just open up my offline Affinity and do what I want to, now it has to connect to the internet and take many seconds each time to "verify my license". The feeling ruins it. This knowledge that everything is a service and anyone can flip the switch and ruin your whole workflow like a pizza shop is not good, one has to be able to make their own pizza even if the shops felt like closing. A creative tool must not be a service, it has to be like your kitchen, your own.
by tripplyons | 2025-11-03 14:54:04+00:00
I once discovered and reported a vulnerability in Nextcloud's web client that was due to them including an outdated version of a JavaScript-based PDF viewer. I always wondered why they couldn't just use the browser's PDF viewer. I made $100, which was a large amount to me as a 16 year old at the time.

Here is a blog post I wrote at the time about the vulnerability (CVE-2020-8155): https://tripplyons.com/blog/nextcloud-bug-bounty
by edot | 2025-11-03 14:54:09+00:00
“Among my clients, absolutely zero refuse [to give DNA], because for them, it’s an admission of guilt,” said Mr. Poitevin.

What an absolute load of garbage. America has problems but at least we still believe in the right to say “f—— off, I’m not helping you convict me” when self-incrimination is asked of the accused.