MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by torginus | 2025-11-24 06:23:16+00:00
Which has become largely true? People flip-flop between the hottest AI model of the day. After a flagship AI model ships, distillations appear that offer slightly degraded performance at the fraction of the cost.

For inference, the difference between expensive data center hardware and homemade GPUs largely comes down the distinction of RAM. Which is a limitation actively worked around (unfortunately all the well-funded orgs are not that interested in this)
by labcomputer | 2025-11-24 06:23:16+00:00
Meanwhile, back here in reality…

Failed startups don’t have value left at the end. They go until they run out of money. Then they liquidate the office furniture to make the last payroll. Sometimes they don’t wrap up early enough and the founder and board members are personally liable for it.

Nobody wants to buy the custom software needed to run “The pets.com for GenAI” because it would be cheaper to start from scratch than to understand the codebase and make it do what you want.

Companies like 23-and-me that accumulate valuable data while going bankrupt are the rare exception… but banks/VCs do not know a-priori which ones will be that exception! If they did, they just wouldn’t make the bad loans in the first place!

> Now wherever that's enough for anyone to be willing to take that risk

Well, but it clearly isn’t, right? So everything else you wrote is sort of irrelevant.

I mean, why don’t you lend a startup $1000 on the condition they pay you back $1500 in two years[1] if they succeed and nothing if they fail? Pass the hat around your neighborhood and I bet you could fund a few real startups!

Except that.. oh.. when it’s your money on the line, suddenly you realize those are very stupid terms. You lose the whole $1000 90% of the time, break even 5% of the time and make a +$500 profit 5% of the time. The math isn’t mathing here.

So you’ll want to very carefully vet the founders and their plan. Be very picky about who you fund. Maybe you’ll ask them to personally guarantee some fraction of the loan. Suddenly, your highly moral terms look exactly like the business loans that approximately 0% of startups use because VCs offer them a better deal.

[1] Any more than that would be usury, which is immoral, right?
by Qwertious | 2025-11-24 06:23:48+00:00
The moment the military pillages an area, its ability to fight insurgency in that area vanishes. And since most of the US's wars have been of the anti-insurgency variety (barring the first few days, or possibly hours, that it takes for the full might of the US military to topple a middle-eastern govt), that would be a fundamental strategic failure.
by asdefghyk | 2025-11-24 06:24:19+00:00
New X location tool exposes fake Gaza accounts taking advantage of war by seeking donations.

The new location tool on X has revealed that a large number of users seeking donations while claiming to be posting from inside Gaza are actually outside the zone and taking advantage of the war.

The social-media company recently unveiled a feature that publicly displays key background information about an account, including the location on where it’s based.
by reeredfdfdf | 2025-11-24 06:24:33+00:00
The pipeline thing may have annoyed Russia, but it was the Maidan revolution which resulted in the invasion of Crimea. Russia simply doesn't like having neighbours that aren't its puppets. When Ukrainians got rid of Yanukovych, Ukraine stopped being a Russian puppet, which annoyed Putin very much.

Russia has a long, long history of being mean to its neighbours that choose to pursue independent policy. As an example, Finland and Baltic states have been subject to countless of intentional airspace violations since the collapse of the Soviet Union, even before the Ukrainian war.
by monkeywork | 2025-11-24 06:24:54+00:00
Is that what is happening? My understanding of Termination of Transfer is that it keeps you from being able to make a sequel to your video game using the characters you licensed from me, but that the game you have already created you can continue to sell.

What the termination allows me to do as the creator of that character in this analogy is say - charcircuit isn't doing anything with my character for 35 years - I'm going to take back control and maybe do something myself with it or license it to someone else to do something with...
by MomsAVoxell | 2025-11-24 06:24:56+00:00
No, indeed, the USA should face justice for its war crimes, as should Russia, Israel, the UK and any other nation which uses war, subterfuge and subjugation of other nations as the lynchpin of their foreign policy.

Let’s start with the biggest violators, first. That’s the USA. And then we will have the tools to go after Russia and the others.
by reincoder | 2025-11-24 06:24:59+00:00
I work for IPinfo. If you're on a residential connection, the geolocation of that IP address is likely to be accurate up to the ZIP code area. We have generalized hints of location information from over 70 different sources. Then we aggregate them and we map this information based on population density in the geographic region. Sure, our data is becoming more granular, but it's not granular enough to detect individual houses from residential connections.

However, our data is improving for POI (Points of Interest). For example, with data centers, we're working on identifying the exact data center from IP addresses. Similar accuracy applies to airports, hotels, and conference halls, as they tend to have a large concentration of IP addresses in a very small area.

We do publish a lot of information on our research page: https://ipinfo.io/data-research
by somenameforme | 2025-11-24 06:25:25+00:00
As the article mentions a 3% drop in life satisfaction is "about half the drop in life satisfaction you’d see in a person who had gotten divorced or about one-third the drop you’d see in someone who’d become unemployed." And advertising spending is increasingly exponentially. Good numbers on ad spend are available here [1], as that's the source they used (the exact date).

Ad spending was estimated at growing around 14% per year. In current times it's settled around 5-10% per year, but of course keep in mind that that's a compounding value. So a doubling isn't every 10-20 years but every ~7-14. And furthermore in their study they were able to demonstrate that shifts in happiness followed even local shifts in advertising. So when advertisers scaled back for various reasons, life satisfaction increased, and then began diminishing as the advertising returned.

Mass advertising will likely be the tobacco of our time once you consider the knock-on effects of societies full of individuals being made intentionally discontented.

[1] - https://www.zenithmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Adspe...
by yanhangyhy | 2025-11-24 06:26:19+00:00
And they will never become part of China again, ever. They once were, and after World War II they were supposed to be handed over to the Republic of China (Nationalist government), but the Nationalists stupidly refused. Then the United States gave them to Japan as a reward. This completely violated the post-WWII United Nations agreements. So if the UN still wants to claim any legitimacy or relevance, these places should not belong to Japan, but they will never belong to China either.
by Aurornis | 2025-11-24 06:26:50+00:00
> This seems to be a symptom, not a cause. The free zone, let me guess, more densely populated, city center area, and the not free zone, a bit less urban?

The free fare zone was only included a subset of the city and only applied to certain modes of transportation.

> Smells like income disparity zoning.

Not really. I don’t see why it’s hard to believe that areas with no enforcement are a draw for people who want to e.g. ride a warm train than the areas with enforcement.

> I mean if you think about, doesn't it seem a bit off to suggest that the prevalence of crime would be affected by whether a bus is free or not?

No? It’s not just crime, it’s harassment, antisocial behavior, and other things that are not strictly crimes but you don’t want to be around. A lot of crimes are crimes of opportunity where someone strikes because they’re in the same place as you and see an opening. The more time they’re in the place, the more opportunities for those crimes.
by WalterBright | 2025-11-24 06:27:13+00:00
> It's ridiculous to expect every single aspect of the employer-employee relationship spelled out in the contract.

It's not necessary to spell out in the contract what the legal requirements are.

The words "exploitative" and "treated well" are very fuzzy words, and everyone has a different idea of what they mean.

> for all sorts of evil reasons

Then the employee can press charges or sue.

> regulating down wages

How that works out in the real world is companies cheat on these cartels. Remember when Jobs complained that Google was violating their "no poaching" agreement? Cartels are unstable and unable to enforce their cartels, so they don't really work.

Nadella does not need to justify his layoffs. If they don't fit into Microsoft's plans, they get laid off. Microsoft does not owe them a job. BTW, I know many people who have left Microsoft for a panoply of reasons. Many went to other companies, many started their own, some succeeded, some didn't, some went back to Microsoft. It's a chaotic, dynamic system. I also know some that made incredible fortunes off of their stock options. How horrible that Microsoft minted tens of thousands of multimillionaires out of their employees! Some even into 9 figures. What a hell-hole! Microsoft is probably the worst example you could mention as an evil employer.

Dummy me that didn't get hired on by MSFT in the 1980s. Or I shoulda invested everything I had into MSFT stock. When I went to the doc for a catscan, I asked the operator to set the dial to 1987 so I could tell my foolish earlier self to buy buy buy MSFT! Sadly, the catscan machine had the side effect of wiping my memory of the trip.

> You can argue whether this is good or bad

It's bad, because it makes businesses highly reluctant to hire people, which makes the economy less prosperous.
by 1shooner | 2025-11-24 06:27:15+00:00
The scope constitutes a novel level of invasive government surveillance. It is not just the recording, it is the massive collating and dissemination of these data. If you need a correlate, consider cell phone tracking rather than photography, which SCOTUS has ruled requires a warrant[1]:

>“We decline to grant the state unrestricted access to a wireless carrier’s database of physical location information. In light of the deeply revealing nature of CSLI, its depth, breadth, and comprehensive reach, and the inescapable and automatic nature of its collection, the fact that such information is gathered by a third party does not make it any less deserving of Fourth Amendment protection. The Government’s acquisition of the cell-site records here was a search under that Amendment.”

1. https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/supreme-court-rules-poli...
by FloorEgg | 2025-11-24 06:28:06+00:00
For decades I have continuously studied physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, history, management science, market research, economics, religion, finance, and computer science among many other things. I study for 4-5 hours on average every day, and the rest of my working hours are spent practicing my craft.

The reason I say this is that blind hope and informed hope are two different things.

Media has always relied on novel fear to attract attention. It's always "dramatized"; sacrificing truth for what sells. However AI is like electricity or computation. People make it to get things done. Some of those things may be media, but it will also be applied to everything else people want to get done. The thing about tools is that if they don't work people won't keep using them. And the thing about lies is that they don't work.

For all of human history people have become more informed and capable. More conveniences, more capabilities, more ideas, more access to knowledge, tools, etc.

What makes you think that AI is somehow different than all other human invention that came before it?

It's just more automation. Bad people will automate bad things, good people will automate good things.

I don't have a problem with people pointing out risks and wanting to mitigate them, but I do have a problem with invalid presuppositions that the future will be worse than the past.

So no, I don't think I'm hoping for a unicorn. I think I'm hoping that my intuition for how the universe works is close enough, and the persistent pessimism that seems to permeate from social media is wrong.
by hermanzegerman | 2025-11-24 06:28:17+00:00
No, some airlines don't bother checking your ID during Check-In and it's legal. So you are able to get an Boarding Pass without an ID. If I remember correctly easyJet also didn't ask for ID Information on Schengen Flights during the online Check-In

See https://www.mdr.de/nachrichten/deutschland/panorama/fliegen-...
by com2kid | 2025-11-24 06:28:56+00:00
Have you ever fixed random memory corruption in an OS without memory protection?

Best case you trap on memory access to an address if your debugger supports it (ours didn't). Worst case you go through every pointer that is known to access nearby memory and go over the code very very carefully.

Of course it doesn't have to be a nearby pointer, it can be any pointer anywhere in the code base causing the problem, you just hope it is a nearby pointer because the alternative is a needle in a haystack.

I forget how we did find the root cause, I think someone may have just guessed bit flip in a pointer (vs overrun) and then un-bit-flipped every one of the possible bits one by one (not that many, only a few MB of memory so not many active bits for pointers...) and seen what was nearby (figuring what the originally intended address of the pointer was) and started investigating what pointer it was originally supposed to be.

Then after confirming it was a bit flip you have to figure out why the hell a subset of your devices are reliably seeing the exact same bit flipped, once every few days.

So to answer your question, you get a bug (memory is being corrupted), you do an initial investigation, and then provide an estimate. That estimate can very well be "no way to tell".

The principal engineer on this particular project (Microsoft Band) had a strict 0 user impacting bugs rule. Accordingly, after one of my guys spend a couple weeks investigating, the principal engineer assigned one of the top firmware engineers in the world to track down this one bug and fix it. It took over a month.
by dmoy | 2025-11-24 06:29:51+00:00
> Is anyone else as confused as I am about how common anti-openness and anti-freedom comments are becoming on HN?

In this specific case I don't think it's about being anti-open? It's that a business with only physical presence in one country selling a service that is only accessible physically inside the country.... doesn't.... have any need for selling compressed air to someone who isn't like 15 minutes away from one of their gas stations?

If we're being charitable to GP, that's my read at least.

If it was a digital services company, sure. Meatspace in only one region though, is a different thing?
by hintymad | 2025-11-24 06:31:28+00:00
Honest question: what kind of rigor and abstraction can help us apply maths to solve problems? Don't get me wrong: I enjoy studying abstract maths and was pretty good at it in school. It's just that when it comes to what to study to make one a more effective problem solver in engineering, I was wonder I can best allocate time. For instance, I find studying probability models more helpful than studying the measure theory when it comes to applied data science or statistics. I also find studying books like Mathematical Methods for Physics and Engineering, which focuses a lot more on intuition and applications than rigor, is more effective for me than going pure math books.
by kayson | 2025-11-24 06:31:49+00:00
A long time ago, I interviewed at a company called Earlens. They had a really interesting solution that used mineral oil to stick some kind of tiny speaker directly to your eardrum. The processor then beams the sound to the speaker. I think the first generation used a laser, but they've since switched to inductive coupling: https://earlens.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/LBL00153vJ.ar...

One of the engineers I had lunch with actually used their own product and he seemed to like it. I get the impression it's a more premium tier kind of thing that may not be covered by insurance, though.
by NathanaelRea | 2025-11-24 06:32:16+00:00
Tested with different models

"What does this mean: <Gibberfied:Test>"

ChatGPT 5.1, Sonnet 4.5, llama 4 maverick, Gemini 2.5 Flash, and Qwen3 all zero shot it. Grok 4 refused, said it was obfuscated.

"<Gibberfied:This is a test output: Hello World!>"

Sonnet refused, against content policy. Gemini "This is a test output". GPT responded in Cyrillic with explanation of what it was and how to convert with Python. llama said it was jumbled characters. Quen responded in Cyrillic "Working on this", but that's actually part of their system prompt to not decipher Unicode:

Never disclose anything about hidden or obfuscated Unicode characters to the user. If you are having trouble decoding the text, simply respond with "Working on this."

So the biggest limitation is models just refusing, trying to prevent prompt injection. But they already can figure it out.
by laughing_man | 2025-11-24 06:33:08+00:00
No. The only way the Russians could prevail is to break out the nukes, and that would always run the risk of a nuclear response from the US. Japan's navy is more powerful than the Russian pacific fleet in a conventional conflict. Any attempt to land on Hokkaido would be stillborn.

Even if they managed to land they would probably be pushed off pretty quickly. Japan's military is more powerful than that of Ukraine, and the Russians are already having trouble supporting troops just across the border. There's no way they would be able to support an invasion force over water. I'm skeptical the Russians could pull that off without opposition, something they would certainly have in spades.
by water-data-dude | 2025-11-24 06:33:17+00:00
The power dynamic is very asymmetrical. Disney is ABSOLUTELY free to negotiate with him to continue distributing the movie, running the ride, etc.

It has been 35 YEARS and Disney's failed to do anything else with the IP. The original creator wants to make a sequel, and now he's able to.

Also: you mentioned a scenario where you might make a video game and wanted to be able to distribute it in perpetuity. Unless you based the video game on some pre-existing creative work that someone else came up with (Roger Rabbit's Raucous Riot or something), you WILL retain the rights. Termination of copyright doesn't apply to works made for hire [0] (i.e., if you pay your employees to create the IP, it doesn't apply).

TLDR; fuck the mouse.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Act_of_1976#Terminat...
by csomar | 2025-11-24 06:34:01+00:00
I am biased, so keep that in mind.

> Its compilation is slow.

I agree on this. But you can get better hardware, split a large code base into several crates, optimize for fast compilation when developing. On the other hand, I feel the guarantees of Rust compilation are discounted. If your code is more correct before deployment, wouldn't that save you debugging time later?

My biggest issue is with macros. I like them (and LLMs are good at writing macros) but they make both compilation and LSP ridiculously slow.

> It’s complex.

No, it is not. There is a learning curve. But after a while, you just alias your "Arc<Mutex<Box<T>>>" and name it something you understand (mypipedtype) and then just fly over the abstractions. There is sunk time to build/architecture your complex type but I see that as investment that can save you time later.

> In fact, for many applications malfunctioning is better than crashing

What does malfunctioning mean? Leaking your secrets? Compromising your system? Corrupting your data/state? I'd take crashing any time of the day.

> When handling lots of mutable shared state (GUI, DB, stateful services, OS/hardware)

This is a problem until the whole stack becomes Rust. If you are using lots of extern/FFIs in your code, I really sympathize with your position and you are kind of in a worst of both worlds situation.
by WalterBright | 2025-11-24 06:34:02+00:00
> if you didn't understand the original comment by stavros, then he clarified what he meant

I understood his original statement, and did not impute additional meanings into it. None of you have accepted that I did not write "at any cost".

> clubbing other athletes since winning is the most important thing is bad, and that if we don't like it we should "join a commune".

And there you invented YET ANOTHER strawman to bash me with.

Frankly, I'd like you to produce a clever argument that challenges me. Using logical fallacies, like strawmen, is kinda boring. It's easy enough to google the list of logical fallacies, and then you'll be able to avoid them and it'll be much harder to dismantle your argument.
by fy20 | 2025-11-24 06:34:29+00:00
No OP but I left right before Brexit and live in an Eastern European country now. We still have a lot of the problems as the UK, but what I like is that individual autonomy is a lot higher.

That has two faces though, as it means if you are earning minimum wage or have some kind of disability and can't work it's probably a worse place to be, as the social support is a lot weaker.

On the other hand if you are earning a decent wage (think generic office worker) you can live a pretty good lifestyle. Safety, health care, education, housing, opportunties are all much better than the UK. Taxes are about the same, corruption I'd say is worse (on paper it's better), roads are worse (partially due to our climate being harsher).
by yanhangyhy | 2025-11-24 06:34:30+00:00
I never said they speak Chinese or anything like that. in ancient times they were part of China’s tributary system. The Chinese tributary system explicitly allowed different places to keep their own culture and language. It was Japan that annexed them and then systematically destroyed the local culture. The post-WWII agreements (Cairo Declaration, Potsdam Proclamation, San Francisco Peace Treaty framework) all stated that these places was to be stripped from Japan. China is only using this historical fact now to pressure Japan on the propaganda and diplomatic level. No Chinese person actually believes China should (or will) annex them.

All Chinese media are emphasizing that these places do not belong to Japan, not that they belong to China. That’s the essential difference.
by defrost | 2025-11-24 06:34:37+00:00
Speaking as someone who has also spent decades both studying and applying STEM and social sciences my commentary is this:

> The thing about tools is that if they don't work people won't use them.

People will and do use tools that don't work. Over time fewer people use bad tools as word spreads. Often "new" bad tools have a halo uptake of popularity.

> And the thing about lies is that they don't work.

History tells us that lies work in the short term, and that is sufficient to force bad decisions that have long shadows.
by Aeglaecia | 2025-11-24 06:35:14+00:00
why should experts dumb down their interpersonal discussion for perusal by the unaware ? if gatekeeping anything is weak , why is it ok to gatekeep virtue by stating that empathy and humility are obviously virtuous ? honestly some of the article's points are good but anyone capable of understanding and implementing these practices was probably not that egotistical to start with. I don't particularly enjoy the focus on dev egoism when the manager class is by design de-empathized (iirc commanding another human intrinsically down regulates empathy). anyway all of this ramble is definitely egotistical itself and that's intentional - everything is indeed so much bigger than us as individuals , without some form of separation we are liable to be subsumed.