MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gm678 | 2025-11-12 15:37:50+00:00
Another great reference on this: https://3dreference.notion.site/Texture-Types-15aef4826bf04d...

Note that normal maps are still widely used in PBR workflows. The article doesn't mention them, but older renderers tended to use diffuse, specular, normal maps, and modern asset creation typically involves albedo, roughness/smoothness, metalness, and ambient occlusion maps in addition to normal maps for textures.
by cmrdporcupine | 2025-11-12 15:37:56+00:00
Quebec is ahead of the game vs most other places in North America when it comes to anything EV.

Having some of the cheapest and most plentiful electricity in North America, courtesy giant hydroelectric facilities, helps. (Also why it's a major aluminum producer)

As an EV owner, crossing the border into Quebec from Ontario gives me about 5x the charging options. Everything from ski hills to grocery stores are set up with a mixture of charging types it's great. Get a 20 minute DC fast charge while running into the IGA to grab groceries and conveniences blew my mind.
by gruez | 2025-11-12 15:38:16+00:00
>They didn't keep temporary chats

I thought they did? The warning currently says

>This chat won't appear in history, use or update ChatGPT's memory, or be used to train our models. For safety purposes, we may keep a copy of this chat for up to 30 days.

But AFAIK it was this way before the lawsuit as well.
by naikrovek | 2025-11-12 15:38:19+00:00
Plan9 shed the textual terminal baggage we all carry today, and it did so in 1995.

The terminal of plan9 was just a window. By default you got a shell with a textual prompt, but you can launch any graphical application in there or any textual application. you can launch a 2nd window manager with its own windows. you can run doom. you can `ls` and `ssh` all you like. it all just works.

this debuted in Plan9 in 1995 or so. 30 years ago we had the terminal of the future and the entire world ignored it for some reason. I'm still a bit mad about it.
by Tade0 | 2025-11-12 15:38:39+00:00
But you're not actually having this wife and children if they're AI - they're an illusion, a simulation that only superficially resembles the real thing. It's a poor substitute and you out of all people should know that.

> I don't see as an irrational decision

Here's where it's irrational: the mere possibility is not enough to abandon the prospect because if one wanted to be consistent, they'd have to avoid similar risks, so ultimately hardly do anything.

Risks are an inherent part of life and those who avoid them at all costs are universally and consistently miserable.
by dfxm12 | 2025-11-12 15:38:51+00:00
I understand where you're coming from. On the other hand, there's a lesson to learn from the teacher's point of view as well. We always need to take a step back to understand the weakest links in security. A small piece of electrical tape or maybe even a strategically placed VHS cover could solve the issue. Hopefully, this hadn't happened again.

It also comes to: should a teacher "trust" their students not to be intentionally disruptive in interesting ways? Now I wonder if I should similarly trust my users (who are co-workers who are at least getting paid to not cause disruptions)...
by rdtsc | 2025-11-12 15:39:37+00:00
Found a paper on it: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1866175/pdf/pone.00...

> we cautiously suggest that the ability of melanin to capture electromagnetic radiation combined with its remarkable oxidation-reduction properties may confer upon melanotic organisms the ability to harness radiation for metabolic energy. The enhanced growth of melanotic fungi in conditions of radiation fluxes suggests the need for additional investigation to ascertain the mechanism for this effect.
by hollerith | 2025-11-12 15:39:47+00:00
Related: I completely avoid any broth or stock made from chicken bones because it has way too much lead for me.

I claim to be able to feel the effects of the lead in the hours after I eat a meal containing chicken stock. I don't doubt your report about lead in chocolate, but I didn't feel the characteristic signs of my getting too much lead the last time I ate chocolate.
by whizzter | 2025-11-12 15:40:37+00:00
Yeah pdf libraries are a bit of a mess, I work with a product that handles lots of PDF documents and I think we just recently added another PDF library dependency (I'm certain it's at least 3 now, but could be 4 or even 5 libraries loaded at startup).

Moq has the appearance of free software but bundled some spyware stuff (seemingly "benign" "Sponsorlink" for getting donations).

Masstransit went commercial recently, https://masstransit.io/introduction/v9-announcement

Avalonia itself is opensource, but i'd put in in a fremium/shareware category since if you need to add an WebView or Media player you need to buy their commercial Accelarate additions.
by mapt | 2025-11-12 15:40:53+00:00
People were using analogies to the notorious industrial outbreak of "popcorn lung", because lipid pneumonia was so rare in other contexts.

What happened with vaping was that THC-containing liquids were an illegal cottage industry, being brewed up in people's garages to their novel recipes, despite the labels for selling them being fairly standardized on certain absolutely-not-a-brand-name-but-appears-to-be-one. These thousands of amateurs compared notes on dedicated forums online, and their iterative recipes had a quite good safety record... until the summer of 2019.

In the summer of 2019, some experimenter decided that vitamin E acetate ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%91-Tocopheryl_acetate ) was actually a very effective emulsifier/thickener for their liquid, allowing an incremental increase in profitability, and posted about their experiments on one of these forums. Hundreds of fellow independent/amateur manufacturers around the world followed suit and tried it out on their next batch.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaping-associated_pulmonary_in...

Suddenly heavy users started showing up in emergency rooms complaining they couldn't breath. Nobody knew the cause. It took a few weeks to recognize the trend and trace it to vaping, and the cigarette manufacturers immediately weaponized this with propaganda (regulated nicotine vapes / e-cigs retain an incorrect stigma to this day). The press labelled it "vape lung", and eventually doctors settled on EVALI. Rumors of "fake" carts abounded, everybody panicked trying to figure out what was safe and what wasn't. Eventually it was identified as a lipid pneumonia (in some cases postmortem). It took another few weeks for the CDC, some independent labs in quasi-legalized enterprises, and the relatively small niche of cannabis media to put together the pieces and break the story. Once they became aware of the consequences of vitamin E acetate (a lipid which sits inert in the lung blocking airflow), manufacturers immediately stopped using it. But the product already manufactured and sold took a while to work its way through the supply chain, leading to cases showing up all that year.
by CharlesW | 2025-11-12 15:40:59+00:00
Plexamp is what I settled on too, before deciding that I was only going to be happy if I built something better.

Plexamp is quite good as a standalone app, but as close to greatness as it is, it's a React Native app (better than a Flutter app, but still) that doesn't play well with the iOS ecosystem — no widgets, virtually no Siri/App Intents support, no Apple Music integration, etc.

I also decided that it shouldn't matter where my music "lives", and so it supports any local, self-hosted, or cloud-based source. (These are working today: https://imgur.com/szrkeIJ)
by derbOac | 2025-11-12 15:41:16+00:00
I have lots of thoughts about this. I never like to see the price of something increase, and the reasons for the increase in this case are not anything anyone wants. On the other hand, for me personally I feel like chocolate is far too prevalent, at least in the US, and if it led to more variety in desserts and candy I'd be happy.

Carob seems relevant to this? I know the associations from the 70s and 80s but I sort of feel like that was a marketing or framing problem rather than a taste problem. Substitute anything never goes over well.

I also feel like what's happening with cocoa and chocolate is representative of a lot of agricultural products today. Vanilla prices skyrocketed at some point in recent memory for similar reasons and haven't recovered, and there's similar tradeoffs involved there, with companies doing all sorts of things to offer alternatives to expensive pure natural vanilla or inexpensive artificial vanilla.
Why AI code fails differently: What I learned talking to 200 engineering teams
by pomarie | 2025-11-12 15:41:17+00:00
Hey HN, I'm Paul, co-founder of cubic (YC X25). Over the past few months, I've talked to over 200 engineering teams about how they're using AI to ship code.

I kept hearing the same pattern: some teams are shipping 10-15 AI PRs daily without issues. Others tried once, broke production, and gave up entirely.

The difference wasn't what I expected– it wasn't about model choice or prompt engineering.

---

One team shipped an AI-generated PR that took down their checkout flow.

Their tests and CI passed, but AI had "optimized" their payment processing by changing `queueAnalyticsEvent()` to `analytics.track()`. The analytics service has a 2-second timeout so when it's slow, payment processing times out.

In prod, under real load, 95th percentile latency went from 200ms to 8 seconds. Ended up with 3hh of downtime and $50k in lost revenue.

Everyone on that team knew you queue analytics events asynchronously, but that wasn't documented anywhere. It's just something they learned when analytics had an outage years ago.

*The pattern*

Traditional CI/CD catches syntax errors, type mismatches, test failures.

The problem is that AIs don't make these mistakes. (Or at least, tests and lints catch them before they get committed). The problem with AI is that it generates syntactically perfect code that violates your system's unwritten rules.

*The institutional knowledge problem*

Every codebase has landmines that live in engineers' heads, accumulated through incidents.

AIs can't know these, so they fall into the traps. It's then on the code reviewer to spot them.

*What the successful teams do differently*

They write constraints in plain English. Then AI enforces them semantically on every PR. Eg. "All routes in /billing/* must pass requireAuth and include orgId claim"

AI reads your code, understands the call graph, and blocks merges that violate the rules.

*The bottleneck*

When you're shipping 10x more code, validation becomes the constraint; not generation speed.

The teams shipping AI at scale aren't waiting for better models. They're using AI to validate AI-generated code against their institutional knowledge.

The gap between "AI that generates code" and "AI you can trust in production" isn't about model capabilities, it's about bridging the institutional knowledge gap.
by pyrophane | 2025-11-12 15:41:24+00:00
Wondering if anyone here has a good answer to this:

what protection does user data typically have during legal discovery in a civil suit like this where the defendant is a service provider but relevant evidence is likely present in user data?

Does a judge have to weigh a users' expectation of privacy against the request? Do terms of service come into play here (who actually owns the data? what privacy guarantees does the company make?).

I'm assuming in this case that the request itself isn't overly broad and seems like a legitimate use of the discovery process.
by vel0city | 2025-11-12 15:41:42+00:00
Your presumption is probably incorrect for a large number of lights. From what I've seen most streetlights around me in residential areas run off both mains with the neutral disconnected, implying they're running off the full 240V. Bigger lights probably run off even higher voltage runs.

Its a common misconception the US infrastructure is a 120V system. Your home has 240V and likely even has 240V appliances connected. Your individual outlets are only connected to one half of that 240V service.
by pizlonator | 2025-11-12 15:42:13+00:00
Folks like to say that, but that's not what's happening.

The key difference is: what is an instruction set? Is it a Turing-complete thing with branches, calls, etc? Or is it just data flow instructions (math, compares, loads and stores, etc)?

X86 CPUs handle branching in the frontend using speculation. They predict where the branch will go, issue data flow instructions from that branch destination, along with a special "verify that I branched to the right place" instruction, which is basically just the compare portion of the branch. ARM CPUs do the same thing. In both X86 and ARM CPUs, the data flow instructions that the CPU actually executes look different (are lower level, have more registers) than the original instruction set.

This means that there is no need to translate branch destinations. There's never a place in the CPU that has to take a branch destination (an integer address in virtual memory) in your X86 instruction stream and work out what the corresponding branch destination is in the lower-level data flow stream. This is because the data flow stream doesn't branch; it only speculates.

On the other hand, a DBT has to have a story for translating branch destinations, and it does have to target a full instruction set that does have branching.

That said, I don't know what the Transmeta CPUs did. Maybe they had a low-level instruction set that had all sorts of hacks to help the translation layer avoid the problems of branch destination translation.
by colechristensen | 2025-11-12 15:43:00+00:00
>If an event happens and you need to tie your timestamped event logs to the 'greater reality' in some legally binding way there's (AIUI) no way to do that.

TAI (Temps Atomique International), is UTC without leap seconds and is the source of truth for "what time is it"

I'm finding conflicting reports of being able to actually use TAI on linux but there are several claims of at least specialty setups existing. You would absolutely not want smearing or anything like that in your time synchronization software in this case.
by erikerikson | 2025-11-12 15:43:51+00:00
I'm sorry to write that all those were problems before subscriptions too.

Managers trying to hit targets and ratchet performance metrics, product managers trying to clear queues, the exponential growth of complexity from size (ala mythical man month)... Fundamentally it's a misalignment of incentives and and as yet unsolved problem of scaling social knowing.
by 4ggr0 | 2025-11-12 15:44:01+00:00
why is it surprising that people feel like showing their own politics with stickers when the government they live under currently deports random people, blows up boats based on vague accusations, tries to reform the country with Project2025, ..., do i have to go on?

nice for you that you're able to ignore politics - you should maybe be aware that this is a privilege. lots of people would probably want to ignore politics, but instead they have to fear for their existence, dignity or way of life.

"but not everyone on HN is american", well, other countries also have their fair share of political issues. and if you don't see them as issues, then again, you're just showing your own privilege.

high-wage, male, (often times white) tech-workers wonder why people are upset. "i'm fine, what's the problem?"
by mindslight | 2025-11-12 15:44:11+00:00
> Every centre right libertarian I've encountered also has a "great distrust of power".

While they may be wary of others with power, right "libertarians" are often attracted to wielding the power themselves - falling to the same exact "I will do good" fallacy as wielders of the Ring. Truly being disinterested in concentrated power means acknowledging that larger non- "government" entities are capable of coercing individuals (eg informal force or even just economic stickiness), not definitionally ruling it out to remain ignorant of it.
by capyba | 2025-11-12 15:44:29+00:00
This works really well in mechanical engineering, too. We don’t necessarily use tickets specifically, but planning out work or a design upfront with a small audience saves a lot of time and wasted effort.

On some level this is just basic project planning, which in my view is an underdeveloped skill in most modern engineering teams. In the case of the ‘empty ticket’, it’s project planning but at a lower level. Not every bit of work needs this, but many would benefit, especially when the taskee is at a more junior level.

I wholeheartedly support this approach. Nearly every major project requires a team, not an individual, and coordinating and collaborating are basic functions of getting things done.
by jsnell | 2025-11-12 15:44:34+00:00
Three months is "soon"? What do you think is reasonable?

And like so many posters in this thread, you seem to be under the impression that Google needed this fixed at some specific timeline. In reality the fix timeline, or even a total lack of a fix, makes no impact to them. They almost certainly already disable these kinds of codecs in their build. They reported this for the good of the ecosystem and the millions of users who were vulnerable.
by illuminator83 | 2025-11-12 15:44:55+00:00
About 7 or 8 years ago I worked at a startup which got money from Softbank / Masayoshi Son. Our founder and our CTO went to meet him in LA IIRC to pitch.

They came back telling us he was basically asleep during the pitch meeting which was scheduled for only 10 minutes anyway.

Our business/product really had no chance of succeeding at this point and most knew it. We got some money from Softbank anyway - forgot how much. Our management was basically laughing about how easy it was to get funding from Softbank.

I jumped ship a year later or so and that was good timing.
by BenHavis | 2025-11-12 15:45:35+00:00
Modern LLMs operate with total statelessness, every conversation starts from zero, and that architectural choice leads to misinterpretations, inconsistent guidance, and invisible failure modes at scale.

This piece argues that safety requires lightweight continuity, not more capability. I'm interested in the community’s thoughts on whether long-horizon user models are necessary for reliable behavior, and how they could be implemented without compromising privacy.
by Nair0 | 2025-11-12 15:46:19+00:00
What you are feeling right now is a lack of inspiration, actually extremely common in jobs that require extensive problem-solving, like engineering. Your job sucks so much out of you that there's nothing left for yourself.

You fix this by balancing the output with input: consuming content. Not just digital content, but anything from reading books, listening to other people's ideas and actually even stuff like going out in nature helps. Slowly, you will start noticing ideas you can improve on, or things you would have done better. Your mind starts to wander, you start thinking "what if he used something different there?" or "I bet I can make that more performant". The trick is to stay focused when consuming said content, and be open to improvement, try understanding what you hear or see, not just mindlessly consume. It's a slow process but you will get the hang of it.

One more trick I can give you that worked wonders for me: write down an idea each day. Have something like your phone Notes app, and force yourself to write an idea for an app or something every single day. It can be stupid, it can be something already done 100 times or something no one would ever use. But it's your idea. At some point, you will realize one of those is actually something that you would like to work on and be even potentially profitable.

You're gonna find something, don't focus on the money, focus on the journey. It's gonna work out. Good luck!
by dlcarrier | 2025-11-12 15:46:19+00:00
They probably would have worked well as server processor, because they were pretty energy efficient, but they were slow the first time a program was run, but sped up after caching the translation. Most servers run the same software over and over again, so they could have been competitive.

It would have been an extremely difficult time to enter the market though, because at the time Intel was successfully paying server manufacturers to not offer superior competing products.
by linguae | 2025-11-12 15:47:23+00:00
We can have stable user-friendly software. We had a nice sweet spot in the early 2000s with Windows XP and Mac OS X: stable operating systems built on workstation-quality kernels (NT and Mach/BSD, respectively), and a userland that respected the user by providing distraction-free experiences and not trying to upsell the user. Users of workstations already experienced this in the 1990s (NeXT, Sun, SGI, HP, and PCs running IBM OS/2 Windows NT), but it wasn’t until the 2000s when workstation-grade operating systems became readily available to home users, with both Windows XP and Mac OS X 10.0 being released in 2001.
by Wowfunhappy | 2025-11-12 15:47:34+00:00
I don’t understand how it helps the community to publicly release instructions for attacking people, unless you’re trying to incentivize a company to fix their crap. In this case, there is no company to incentivize, so just report it privately.

You can say publicly that “there is an ABC class vulnerability in XYZ component” so that users are aware of the risk.
by mothballed | 2025-11-12 15:47:36+00:00
It comes to personal risk appetite, and risk benefit analysis. My claim in any case is it's better to have an AI spouse and child than being relegated to a mere bank account for an ex spouse that hates you. Maybe in that case it's still worth it so you can produce a child you don't see with someone that hates you, so I'll concede that might be a point of contention. In any case, I make no claim that those are the only possibilities, I merely compare the two.

I haven't presupposed I can make the decision for any particular person.
by fragmede | 2025-11-12 15:47:42+00:00
Yet it still continually comes up. You ever wonder why? It's because "Almost no one who actually uses one" is incredibly dismissive of the people who do have a problem with it. It's like being disabled, like blind people or wheelchair users, or foreign language support. In this case, it's neurodivergent people. It's "you're holding it wrong", it's Apple shuffling things under the bed and pretending they don't exist, just buy their shiny new thing and your problems go away. And consumers supporting them in that while Tim Cook laughs all the way to the bank.

Yeah, no one you know has that problem. For the people for whom it's a problem, it's a problem! You can dismiss them and say well they shouldn't be like that, or that they're being crazy, but at the end of the day, even after you've called them crazy and don't care about them, they're still them, and they still have to deal with a mouse that doesn't work for them. They still have to deal with the problem. Severe untreated ADHD means poor time management, low executive function, and zero impulse control. This means waiting until right when the project is due to start working on it, this means emotionally the user is panicking, so having to sit still and let it charge is physically painful.

Yes, neurotypicals don't have this issue. Good for them! Apple isn't the problem user's therapist, that user can't access healthcare anyway, and it's their problem, not yours.

The charging point on the bottom of the mouse is fine.
by vel0city | 2025-11-12 15:47:59+00:00
Those ONroutes in Ontario seemed pretty nice in terms of EV charging infrastructure planning as well. My road trip through Canada was in an ICE so I didn't actually get a real feel for the charging infrastructure, but seeing those definitely felt like the future of long shot highway travel. Looking at maps like plugshare though definitely made it feel like those were the oasis of good charging experiences with things getting more sparse as you continued to travel off the highway.

There were a number of good EV charging ideas I saw on my road trip through Canada.