MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by roywiggins | 2025-11-30 15:55:48+00:00
I'm not sure how that matters for this purpose, they used these surveys to measure the shape of the Earth (specifically, the circumference, and later the flattening- ie, plenty precise enough to measure the curvature more or less directly).

Is the idea that land is spherical while the oceans are flat? Do this survey on each continent, including Antarctica, again just constructing big triangles and measuring the deviation from flatness. Eventually your model of the flat earth looks like a bunch of pieces of an eggshell separated by flat water that just happens to assemble into an egg- or rather an ellipsoid- if rearranged, up to and including the expected flattening at the poles.

With sufficient elbow grease you could extend a survey from the far north of the Americas down to the south, measuring the curvature as you went, eventually finding that you must be almost upside-down compared to where you'd started.
by mschuster91 | 2025-11-30 15:56:00+00:00
> How or why does a candy company decide to electronics? That's the mystery I need an answer to.

A few years ago, Haribo was in a serious crisis [1] - they didn't catch up on competition when it comes to new trends such as vegan candy, and a few years prior they had dismissed their marketing face Thomas Gottschank [2]. The closure of the Saxony plant also seriously soured relations with local politicians [3]. Some of all of that is attributed to the death of Hans Riegel in 2013 [4].

I don't have any particular insights into Haribo, but what I do know is that (especially struggling) brands tend to go towards making money off of the brand by licensing out rights... some of such deals tend to go well for everyone involved (see e.g. anything Lego touches), some run okay-ish (e.g. that's how you end with a "CAT" rugged phone made by Bullitt [5] - the things were rugged, but the performance was abysmal), and some end up in a massive clusterfuck like the Haribo batteries.

[1] https://taz.de/Haribo-Werk-im-Osten-vor-Aus/!5755771/

[2] https://www.spiegel.de/panorama/leute/thomas-gottschalk-tren...

[3] https://www.rnd.de/promis/werksschliessung-in-sachsen-thomas...

[4] https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/unternehmen/haribo-chef-ha...

[5] https://www.heise.de/news/Outdoor-Smartphones-Bullitt-Group-...
by CWuestefeld | 2025-11-30 15:56:43+00:00
> It's not based in truth of how the scientific community worked. If there's "mocking and ostracization" then it's in some sort of other social space, not in the evaluation of the vaccine safety studies.

You seem to be doing just what the OP is complaining about. You've set up the scientific establishment as some sort of priesthood, which the great unwashed masses should not question.

That's not how science should work, at least in a functional system. If only insiders have the privilege of asking "why?", then we'll be forever trapped in orthodoxy, or worse, trapped in authoritarianism.

Unfortunately, the insurance policy against that trap - that annoying people will keep asking "why?" - itself has a steep price, sometimes almost turning into a heckler's veto. It's a tough problem.
by gritten | 2025-11-30 15:57:50+00:00
Framework isn't funding any crusade. They made a small contribution to support open source software development.

If you don't agree with that, quietly take your business elsewhere. I cannot fathom the entitlement on display here, for this group to believe they have the moral high ground in demanding a cessation of this funding and a public apology, while trying to organise a boycott.

Nothing you buy doesn't have a fascist and a communist somewhere in the supply chain. Whatever your politics, you are always indirectly funding your political opponents. It bears no relation to the product or service they provide. You need to learn to operate in a society full of diverse opinions rather than having a meltdown when anyone differs in perspective.
by potato3732842 | 2025-11-30 15:57:51+00:00
It comes down to the amortized cost of insurance vs amortized cost of not. Say nothing about how incentives get fucked all to hell by breaking things across many parties (principal agent problem) and the money distorts things.

And this isn't just insurance. Just because someone who work is being made for by law or by rule says that their work output reduces the failure rate from X to Y doesn't mean that the cost of their work when applied to everything isn't a massive loss compared to just not paying for that and cleaning up the mess X times instead of Y times.

You can appeal to emotion all you want but it's a very simple calculation. Heck, health insurance (in the US) serves a pretty obvious counterpoint.
by zahlman | 2025-11-30 15:58:17+00:00
No parts of it are relevant to this submission, because (as others explained to you elsewhere in the thread) the submission is about Norway objecting to Microsoft doing business with Saudi Arabia, whereas GP is about attacking Microsoft's ties to Israel.

(For some reason, doing business with Saudi Arabia is not counted as evidence against the "Zionist", "genocide" etc. etc. narrative.)
by albertnahas | 2025-11-30 15:58:49+00:00
Meet *Aissist* — my personal AI assistant CLI that actually remembers things.

It’s local-first, fast, and built for engineers who want an AI that works like their second brain, not just a chat window. Your goals, notes, tasks, meetings, learnings — all stored as Markdown + embedded into a Chroma vector store for semantic recall. Runs entirely on your machine, plugs into Claude/other LLMs, and is fully extensible.

*What it does:* - Stores your goals, tasks, and history in clean Markdown files - Lets you search your life semantically (“what did I plan last week about X?”) - Links context automatically so the AI always knows your world - Provides a clean, minimal CLI with a growing plugin ecosystem - Works offline (except model calls)
by dwoldrich | 2025-11-30 15:59:04+00:00
I know the mocking, wicked tone is why a response on this comment was flagged and dead.

> Your head is so far up your --- you can see daylight. They were mocked for being wrong, not for questioning orthodoxy. There is a well understood epistemology for these things, and you need basic competence to apply it.

So, I have trouble anyone is so cocksure about vaccines and the shot rollout and the general response to covid like lockdowns, etc. I hope this is some consensus shaping bot, but in the case it is not and a real human wrote that, I just want to respond.

Your loud, semi-religious devotion to a consumer product is disgusting. Your outrage fuels my resolve.

There are different safety profiles for any drug, not all are equal. The covid vaxxes all have an atrocious safety profile, at least one was pulled in the states after wide distribution, all were experimental in nature and were generally rushed out to market. There needs to be jail time for the scoundrels that ignored safety signals. And on top of that the damn things didn't work and didn't stop the spread.

Beyond that, the vaxxes were publicly funded corporate welfare, there was broad public-private collusion to force people to get it (no jab, no job), there were 1st amendment violations by businesses forcing employees to disclose medical statuses.

You will not listen to reason, there are a million other sus things you all ignore about 2020-2022. I just hope everyone rebukes you and whatever neo-paganism has a death grip on your mind.
Show HN: Cognitive AI architecture prototype with identity, memory, initiative
by nDot_io | 2025-11-30 15:59:42+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m working on a “hacker science” experiment called Ai_home. It’s a cognitive architecture prototype that I designed to explore the current limits of LLMs in terms of persistent identity, long-term memory, and autonomy.

The system is not just a simple chatbot loop, but a multi-threaded architecture:

1. Worker: Handles user interactions and tool use. 2. Monologue: A background “subconscious” thread that analyzes context and logs intuitions/tips for the Worker. 3. Memory: Manages vector-based long-term memory (Postgres + pgvector) with emotional weighting. 4. Mind: This layer is responsible for deeper interpretation of messages and for exploring creative alternatives.

Because of this, it’s not a synchronous question–answer chatbot. The model and the user (the Helper) can communicate in parallel, and the Worker processes this asynchronously.

Technical details:

- Hybrid Multi-LLM: I combine multiple models (Gemini, GPT-4, Groq). I use different models for creative idea generation (“creative”) and for logical processing (“interpreter”).

- Modes: I don’t use a single context window. Depending on the operating mode (General, Developer, Analyst), I partition messages into separate contexts. I’ve introduced a transition process between mode switches to ensure that the essential information is preserved across contexts.

- Dynamic Prompt: Based on memories and accumulated experience, I dynamically modify the prompt on every API call so that each conversation can gain a fresh contextual interpretation.

- Incubator: The system has an experimental environment where it can attempt to refactor its own code. The results are mixed so far, but it’s fascinating to watch a model interpret its own code.

- Identity and Laws: For building identity, the system has a “constitution” (fundamental laws) and tools for modifying them. The content and structure of this are still an active area of experimentation.

Disclaimer: This is an architectural experiment to investigate whether functional patterns of consciousness (global workspace, recurrence) can be mimicked with LLMs in order to create more reliable agents.

I explicitly do not claim that the system is sentient, nor that this is a formal academic research project (We don’t have the personnel or infrastructure for that).

I’m looking for collaborators not only for coding, but also to help define a development methodology for this open, collaborative experimental project.

All feedback is very welcome!
by MisterTea | 2025-11-30 15:59:42+00:00
I've been building and running various home servers for years. Currently I have a n eBay special FreeBSD quad xeon (based on the desktop socket) with 64GB ECC and a cheap SAS/SATA card running two ZFS arrays.

On a side note: I hate web GUI's. I used to think they were the best thing since sliced bread but the constant churn combined with endless menus and config options with zero hints or direct help links led me to hate them. The best part is the documentation is always a version or two behind and doesn't match the latest and greatest furniture arrangement. Maybe that has improved but I'd rather understand the tools themselves.
by swed420 | 2025-11-30 15:59:58+00:00
Both Repubs & Dems have lots of blood on their hands for their intentional mishandling of COVID (continued to this day, since the pandemic is not over) in service to our archaic consumption-first economy:

https://www.thegauntlet.news/p/how-the-press-manufactured-co...

https://web.archive.org/web/20240802024326/https://docs.hous...

Capital interests own and control both parties, so it's no surprise we are getting results where it's okay to set the meat grinder to high.
by nothrabannosir | 2025-11-30 16:00:21+00:00
I don’t know any such rankings which measure envy, I’m afraid. It’s all based on numbers of papers published, etc.

Do you think people in other countries envy the us college system based on rankings? If so I strongly recommend a trip abroad and striking up a few conversations with prospective or enrolled students. In my experience the topic of cost and non dischargeable student loans comes up often. Rankings very rarely.
Coding is the purest form of art
by learningstud | 2025-11-30 16:00:38+00:00
As I was watching a YouTube video on Michelangelo's "Pieta", I was reminded of Milton's "Paradise Lost". Though the latter takes a lot more patience to appreciate. Then, I thought of Knuth's "The Art of Computer Programming"; only then did I realize how aptly titled was the book. It struck me that coding could possibly be the purest form of art. It is art constructed of pure thought if only we have a capable enough language to write beautiful prose in it. Lean 4 and Agda come to mind which are more term-based than tactic-based as in Rocq (formally, Coq). Not only could Knuth's book be made an epic in homotopy type theory, it can be the most practical piece of art at the same time. What do you think?
by wtallis | 2025-11-30 16:00:57+00:00
A full scan would take hours. With just the default choice of channel width (250 kHz), spreading factor and coding rate, in the US you'd have to listen to 104 different frequencies, and you'd need to listen for more than a minute to get any idea of whether each frequency is in use. The newest LoRa chips that support simultaneously monitoring multiple spreading factors aren't yet supported by Meshtastic or available in cheap devices. The base station chips that also support listening to eight frequencies at a time are way more expensive.

Even with the latest radios available but not yet used by Meshtastic, it would be very hard to implement any kind of frequency-hopping scheme or variable bandwidth, without requiring mesh nodes to burn a lot more power sending and receiving+acknowledging across multiple modem settings to maintain reliability. LoRa as implemented by the chips used in affordable Meshtastic devices is really more suited to operating many small disjoint mesh networks on separate channels, not one large mesh network spanning multiple frequencies/bandwidths/etc. (Dropping the ad-hoc mesh aspect in favor of centralized coordination is pretty much the only way to scale up to large networks.)
by xandrius | 2025-11-30 16:01:03+00:00
Sure, if you're going to reuse something which would be thrown away or left to dust otherwise (foolish but I'd imagine someone does that).

But don't do this just so you can upgrade your current pc.

I'd vouch more for old laptops, which are generally not upgradeable, come with built-in UPS, if you remove the screen is as thin as a notebook and can handle low usage. Then you can connect either directly or via other interfaces a bunch of disks and you're golden.
by DennisP | 2025-11-30 16:01:11+00:00
I think a prerequisite to doing any really big stuff in space would be fully and rapidly reusable launch rockets, which could get costs down by a couple orders of magnitude.

And geostationary isn't necessary for this. You could go a bit higher or lower and still have 24/7 sunlight. Relay your communications through Starlink or something and you have full connectivity.

That said, I think orbital data centers still don't make sense, for all the reasons described in the article.
by plqbfbv | 2025-11-30 16:01:15+00:00
> I repurposed an old gaming PC with a Ryzen 1600x, 24GB of RAM, and an old GTX 1060 for my NAS since I had most of the parts already

> I wish people would understand that waste is waste

I think the point is that the configuration from the post can easily run as low as maybe 30-40W on idle, but as high as a couple hundred depending on utilization. An off-the-shelf NAS probably spikes at most in the ~35W range, with idle/spindle-off utilization in the 10W range (I'm using my 4-bay Synology DS920+ as a reference). Normally the biggest contributor to NAS energy usage is the number of HDDs, so the more you add, the more it consumes, but in this configuration the CPU, the RAM, and the GPU are all "oversized" for the NAS purpose.

While reusing parts for longer helps a lot for carbon footprint of the material itself, running that machine 24/7/365 is definitely more CO2-heavy w.r.t. electricity usage than an off-the-shelf NAS. And additional entropy in the environment in the form of heat is still additional entropy, whether it comes from coal or solar panels.
by froh | 2025-11-30 16:01:16+00:00
I think it's rather a kind-of- schooling-and-education thing.

for schools in a "humanistic" tradition I dare to bet it's canon.

it's a very beautiful read and when you have time, go and grab a sweet illustrated full text paper copy in your language of choice, it has been translated in all languages of the world, and there are wonderful editions of the book. I treasure a large pop up one.

At first glance it looks and feels like a childrens book, but really, is it? Antoine de Saint-Exupéry offers a very unique and poetic look at humankind and a truly timeless masterpiece, touching not so children topic's like different types of vanity, several perspectives on the rat race, addiction, love of course, both "caritas" and "amor" and at an idealistic level also "eros", responsibility for nature, it even touches on assisted suicide, but all of these little essays which are woven into a story arc are told with deep love and tenderness and clarity.

fine dining, if you wish, a gourmet story, really.

you can tell I like it :-D
by shagie | 2025-11-30 16:01:20+00:00
We have them. The RAD750 for example (on the JWST and Curiosity rovers https://www.theregister.com/2012/08/08/mars_probe_cpu/ ) costs about $350k, has the architecture of a PowerPC 750 (the blue and white PowerMac G3), and runs at up to 200 MHz.
by epistasis | 2025-11-30 16:01:50+00:00
> You've set up the scientific establishment as some sort of priesthood, which the great unwashed masses should not question.

No, I absolutely have not. I'm representing what actually happened, in practice.

The vaccines studies were heavily examined and critiqued inside the scientific community, and scientists found that they established safety.

Trying to come back and say "that's too perfect, you're trying to establish them as a priesthood" is exactly the opposite of what I'm trying to do.

All the critique is out there in the open, available to look for anybody who wants to. However, people prefer to be spoonfed stuff in YouTube videos, prefer to imagine a conspiracy oppressing them.

You are spreading an image of the scientific community that is simply untrue and easy to disprove just by looking at what actually happened.
by losvedir | 2025-11-30 16:02:19+00:00
Depends how you look at it. Some of my colleagues rave about Claude Code, so I was thinking about trying it out on these puzzles. In that sense it is "going to the gym", just for a different thing. Since I do AoC every year, I feel like it'll give me a good feel for Claude Code compared to my baseline. And it's not just "prompting", but figuring out a workflow with tests and brainstorming and iteration and all that. I guess if the LLM can just one-shot every puzzle that's less interesting, but I suppose it would be good to know it can do that...
by kkfx | 2025-11-30 16:02:49+00:00
This is the result of a society that has evolved to serve the commercial interests of a few rather than the technical needs of many; indeed, most people are Lebonian cattle (cf. Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Crowds), not homo oeconomicus.

Digital identity should be a physical smart card, as has been the case for decades with mobile phone SIM cards, bank cards, etc every ID document and each of these, where issued by the public sector, should form part of a federated system of public administration ID that provides authentication services to citizens.

Digital signatures should be a key stored on the smart card, not a third-party guarantor using SMS OTP, scanned signatures, or other absurd analogues.

Yet this is not the case because most IT professionals know nothing and attempt to reconstruct with IT what they only understand through paper, thereby creating opportunities for a few to profit greatly from their ignorance, and nothing more.
by conception | 2025-11-30 16:03:00+00:00
You don’t think it’s more one party spending 40 years undermining Institutions to be able to gut them starting with Reagan’s “The Most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help’”? partially caused by the business elite working to gain influence over government since the Powell memo and partially caused by irrational fear of communism via socialism and partially by conservatives never wanting another Nixon and starting their own mouthpiece with Fox News, etc etc?

Seems more like a well concentrated effort to me.
by firesteelrain | 2025-11-30 16:03:31+00:00
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/corporate-responsibility/rep...

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/corporate-responsibility/hum...

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/corporate-responsibility/rep...

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/corporate-responsibility/rep...

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/corporate-responsibility/gov...
by walterbell | 2025-11-30 16:04:23+00:00
In the Apple ecosystem, iPad Mini + LTE + VOIP for voice/SMS is a mobile backup device that can double as 2nd monitor for laptop, or dock with an external monitor and keyboard via USB-c. It does require avoiding sevices that mandate non-VOIP SMS 2FA. iPad cost is balanced by use or resale after several years.

Sadly, there is no Google Pixel Tablet Mini (or even Pixel Tablet 2). Hopefully the upcoming OEM release of a GrapheneOS-compatible phone will be successful.
by ben_w | 2025-11-30 16:04:34+00:00
> Maybe pointless, but I for one disagree with such rulings.

That's a fair position: laws are for the nation (and in a democracy, that's supposed to mean the people), and the laws we make are not divine or perfect.

But until the laws change, it is what it is.

> To retroactively grant propriety AI training rights on all copyrighted material on the basis that it's no different from humans learning is, I think, misguided.

I would say it's not retroactive, it's the default consequence of what already is. Changing the law so this kind of thing is no longer allowed in the future is one thing, but it would be retro-active to say it had always been illegal.
by locknitpicker | 2025-11-30 16:04:51+00:00
> There's nothing holding you back implementing the QUERY method right now - HTTP methods are standardized, but not limited to the standard.

I think this comment is terribly naive. Technically you can write your own service to support verbs like LOL or FUBAR, but in practice your service is not only expected to be broken when passing requests through other participants you do not control but also it requires far more development work to integrate with existing standards. Take for example CORS. If a HTTP method is not deemed safe then client requests need to go through the unsafe flow with preflight requests and the like. Forget support for caching too, and good luck having your requests pass through proxies.

So what exactly did you achieved by using non-standard verbs?

If you chose to go the ignorant backwards incompatible way, you are better off not using HTTP at all and just go with some random messaging/RPC protocol.
by master_crab | 2025-11-30 16:04:51+00:00
Another way to put it - My home lab has production and non-production environments.

Non-production is my kubernetes cluster running all the various websites, AI workflows, and other cool tools i love playing with.

Production is everything in between my wife typing in google.com and google; or between my kids and their favorite shows on Jellyfin.

You can guess which one has the managed solutions, and which one has my admittedly-reliable-but-still-requires-technical-expertise-to-fix-when-down unmanaged solutions.