MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rconti | 2025-11-30 19:58:47+00:00
I think it's wild that people spend their own money to surveil themselves every second they're near their car. Maybe I've seen too much lawyering on TV and in movies, but if I'm in a collision with you, I'm definitely asking the cops to pull the SD card from your dashcam.

Whenever I point out I think this self-surveillance is crazy, the response ends up sounding something like "oh, no big, if I think I did something wrong I'll just hide the evidence and lie to the police and say it doesn't work", which sure doesn't sit right with me.
by bakigul | 2025-11-30 19:58:55+00:00
I recently came across this post: https://x.com/immasiddx/status/1992979078220263720

Two photos both generated using Nano Banana or Nano Banana Pro. One of them (left) kind of looks synthetic. The other one (right)? I’d swear it’s a real photo.

It’s scary how good these are getting. Honestly, I don’t want to believe the right one is AI-generated.

But it raises an important question:

How do we detect images like this? What tools, techniques, or even open-source projects can help?

I have no solution this time. But I’m convinced we need open-source AI detectors now more than ever.

If anyone knows any projects, research, or even homegrown heuristics — please share.

This is quickly becoming everyone’s problem.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-11-30 19:59:02+00:00
> So, if you have a LOT of chances to try things that are highly improbable but high upside, your odds are quite good.

But that perfectly highlights why the "startup gamble" is a great bet for VCs but a horrible bet for most employees. Let's say N is, generously, 50 (i.e. 1 in 50 startups are a resounding success, which seems probably a bit over-optimistic but reasonable). VCs can easily spread investment around to 100 startups, but employees get a few swings at bat at most when it comes to where they work.

For most things in life, you often just don't have that many chances. E.g. most people don't date a hundred people before finding their spouse.
by smeej | 2025-11-30 19:59:23+00:00
I found the vehicleprivacyreport.com site awfully misleading. The "Vehicle Privacy Label" only lists what the manufacturer's current policies are, not what applies to my vehicle. It makes it seem like Toyota is somehow remotely collecting and sharings tons of information about my...2007 Prius. But this car came out in 2006, well before people assumed easy internet connectivity everywhere. Shy of having physical access to my vehicle, they can't read anything, but it's not easy to find that explanation on the site.
by nine_k | 2025-11-30 19:59:24+00:00
The very fact that this instantly feels like ironic jest illustrates how impossible it is to seriously limit licenses with broad moral clauses.

One could come up with clauses that could be admissible at court, e.g. "this software is expressly not licensed to be used for anything intended to kill humans". It would not be licensed for military planning software, but would likely be still licensed for a military transport system, or even an anti-drone weapon.

The best actionable clause I could come up with is like so: "your license to use this software for any purpose terminates as soon as a court of [insert jurisdiction] finds that it has been used for [something you are opposed to, but also sufficiently clearly defined, like genocide, or incarceration of peaceful political dissidents], which has resulted from the use of your products and services, and with your prior knowledge of such use". I think I've even saw similar clauses in many commercial licenses, just with not morals-related provisions.
by layer8 | 2025-11-30 20:00:06+00:00
> GitHub seems to encourage a "push model" in which you are notified when a new event occurs in your project(s), but I don't want to work with that model. Instead, I prefer it to work as a "pull model", so I only get updates when I specifically look for them.

I agree with the sentiment, but want to point out that email can be used to turn push into pull, by auto-filtering the respective email notifications into a separate dedicated email folder, which you can choose to only look at when you want.
by awwaiid | 2025-11-30 20:00:09+00:00
Fine... I guess it could be happy ChatGPT day then? Putting a hosted version of it out on the internet and letting people use it is very clearly a very small step, it even surprised OpenAI that it caught so many people's attention. But it did. It is an interesting milestone that shows what happens when you connect people with a new technology, a new concept, and see what they do with it.
by alephnerd | 2025-11-30 20:01:07+00:00
Not in this case.

Norway's SWF has become increasingly politicized [0] due to the death of the center and the rise of the populist left and right, which is a common issue for any SWF in a Western Democracy. The same thing happened with CalPERS, the Alaska Permanent Fund, Australia's Future Fund, and the Ontario Teacher's Fund as well because these funds are not firewalled off from politicians, thus making them ripe for a populist conversion into ideologically activist funds (this is a both sides problems - as can be seen in California [1] and Florida's [2] case).

A major reason why the gold standard of SWFs are funds like Singapore's Temasek, Japan's GPIF, or South Korea's KIC is because they work hard to remain technocratic in nature and single minded about their goal: provide an economic base for self sufficiency for their citizens should adverse economic crises hit, along with the economic cushion to underwrite social security and welfare programs.

At some point for an SWF, too much "democracy" just becomes a hinderance to the underlying mission, which in Norway's case, building a SWF to support Norwegian state pensions in perpetuity once their oil wealth dries up.

Complaining about "woke/ESG investments" (like in Florida) or stunting about "human rights abuses" (like in CalPERS or Norway's case) doesn't actually shift the needle one way or the other because most other institutional investors (public and private) are much more single-minded about their aims, and a number of funds and LPs have begun to reject investments from politicized SWFs because of the headaches associated with a fund that wasn't supported to be an activist fund dealing with an internal conflict over becoming one or not.

SWFs are a fundamental weapon in a government's economic arsenal, and using them in a non-strategic but politically popular manner leads to you only stealing the future from your kids - as can be seen with the woes the Alaska Permanent Fund now faces due to populist promising of constantly raising the Alaska dividend.

[0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-09-04/norway-el...

[1] - https://www.thecentersquare.com/california/article_55faf935-...

[2] - https://www.flgov.com/eog/news/press/2023/governor-ron-desan...
by SilverElfin | 2025-11-30 20:01:18+00:00
I disagree that this is a great step towards anything, and thinking it is strictly just increasing transparency without other downsides feels naive.

The obvious issues: lots of people use VPNs for privacy reasons, even if they’re not in a country with serious risks from governments. Or they use the Internet while traveling and post from other locations. Or they may engage in discussions that affect them even if they don’t live in a particular area. Maybe they lived there previously or are going to move there.

But also, this has opened a whole new way to dismiss people and their ideas based on location. For example, I see lots of comments on X that have become outright racist, against people allegedly posting from China, or Pakistan, or India. People with politics on all sides are using the location info to claim their opponents are falling for foreign propaganda - the left people are posting examples of right accounts that are foreign, and right people are posting examples of left accounts that are foreign. But what’s common is when these posts are made, it encourages and brings out the most vile attacks against people of different ethnicities or countries.

> X’s recent bold decision, led by Head of Product Nikita Bier, to add country labels to accounts reflects an important shift: a recognition that geographic transparency is crucial context to help users understand whether a post is a firsthand account or distant commentary, whether it reflects genuine local sentiment or coordinated foreign messaging.

Nikita is wrong about this. The location is not transparency that is helping people understand whether a post is firsthand or distant. Most things can be discussed well without location playing a hand in what is being discussed. The actual real life usage of this is to perform shallow dismissals and racist attacks. Not to ascertain the veracity of some claim. Besides that, how would location help? Anything can be faked with AI. Even if someone genuinely lives in a particular location, they can fake content, or mislead readers, or spread misinformation.

I’ll also say I am not impressed by Nikita Bier, who is apparently leading X’s product. The way he communicates on social media makes him look like an immature troll rather than someone serious (example: https://xcancel.com/nikitabier/status/1991723005454741995). I guess it is fitting with the image carried by Elon and Twitter/X these days, though.
by jacquesm | 2025-11-30 20:01:19+00:00
> If we're assuming a nuclear war then the US military is comparable to a bunch of other militarys.

What a nonsense. Really, if we're assuming a nuclear war then the remainder of the sentence no longer has any relevance.

Note that even the idiot in the Kremlin has been given reasons enough to consider that one off the table no matter how much he might want it (assuming he still can).

First strike is a non-starter for every sane country, so you better hope that sanity lasts long enough to get to the '.' at the end of your sentences. Because if it does not the best you can hope for is live near ground zero.

> Does the US military even perform to spec? There is clearly a lot of corruption and I've seen it described on HN as a disguised welfare program.

If you're aware of any American gear that has not performed in the last 12 months then maybe you should report it rather than to resort to 'just asking questions'.

So far all of the recipients seem to be fairly happy with the deliveries and most nations would quake in their boots if the USA set their sights on them with intent to punish, bar none, and to suggest otherwise is seriously ignorant.
by lysace | 2025-11-30 20:01:25+00:00
We've removed/merged most of the unnecessary services. The ones left have operational needs to stay separate.

The current hell is x years of undisciplined (in terms of perf and cost) new ORM code being deployed (SQLAlchemy). We do an insane number of read queries per second relative to our usage.

I honestly think the newish devs we have hired don't understand SQL at all. They seem to think of it as some arcane low level thing people used in the 80s/90s.
by zzo38computer | 2025-11-30 20:01:34+00:00
There are many that are specialized for different uses in games, such as:

- ZZT-OOP

- MegaZeux Robotic

- ZIL

- MESH:Hero

- Free Hero Mesh

- Super ZZ Zero

- OHRRPGCE HamsterSpeak

(There are probably a lot more that I had missed)

All of these are specific to the specific kind of games being made with them, though; different kind of games will require a different kind of logic.

MESH:Hero is specific to a specific kind of puzzle games, and Free Hero Mesh is a FOSS clone of MESH:Hero with a different syntax and more features.
by stoneman24 | 2025-11-30 20:01:40+00:00
I would really like to send this article out to all the developers in my small company (only 120+ people, about 40 dev & test) but the political path has been chosen and the new shiny tech has people entranced.

What we do (physics simulation software) doesn’t need all the complexity (in my option as a long time software developer & tester) and software engineering knowledge that splitting stuff into micro services require.

Only have as much complexity as you absolutely need, the old saying “Keep it simple, stupid” still has a lot of truth.

But the path is set, so I’ll just do my best as an individual contributor for the company and the clients who I work with.
by mylifeandtimes | 2025-11-30 20:02:31+00:00
maybe an age thing? When I was in high school I worked at a gas station where we would pump the gas for customers at the "full service" lane and also check their oil. The game was to upsell people an oil change. Point is, everyone saw people getting their oil checked every time they filled the tank.

And checking tire pressure was a 1x/week thing.
by jcalvinowens | 2025-11-30 20:02:38+00:00
No beef: I just simply don't run out of tree kernel code, I've been burned too many times. Linux ZFS is mostly used by hobbyists and tinkerers, it doesn't get anything close to the amount of real world production testing and follow up bugfixing with linux that a real upstream filesystem like btrfs does today.

If ZFS ever goes upstream, I will certainly enjoy tinkering with it. But until it does, I just don't see the point, I build my own kernels and dealing with the external code isn't worth the trouble. There's already more than enough to tinker with :)

All my FreeBSD machines run ZFS, FWIW.
by jeroenhd | 2025-11-30 20:02:53+00:00
Airbag and crumple zone safety requirements for crashes that aren't head-on are much more recent than the 2000s. Many car makers designed their cars to pass those, but will leave you dead or worse if you get T-boned.

ABS wasn't even a requirement in the EU until 2004, and American cars could be sold without ABS all the way until 2012, when traction control was also made mandatory (which the EU then also followed).

Things like the slightly-angled side pole crash test was only added to the Euro NCAP in 2015 and was updated five years later to make it a bit more realistic, though cars still woefully fail in many real-life scenarios.

I wouldn't really consider a car "safe" unless it passes the ~2015 requirements for car safety well. A well-designed car full of optional safety features from the ~2010s is probably also safe, but I wouldn't count on it unless you've done research into it.

I believe Volvo has had a reputation of being ahead of the curve with these kinds of crash safety tests, but even they had to improve over time.
GhidrAssist and GhidrAssistMCP LLM plugins reached v1.0
by jtang613 | 2025-11-30 20:03:08+00:00
After just over a year of steady progress, my Ghidra LLM plugins GhidrAssist and GhidrAssistMCP both recently passed version 1.0. Not only, do these enable LLM helpers for common reverse engineering tasks, but fully automated reverse engineering of complex binaries is now on the table. Demo video: https://youtu.be/WHPDvzepScY Give them a try: https://github.com/jtang613/GhidrAssist https://github.com/jtang613/GhidrAssistMCP (yes, GhidrAssistMCP works with Claude Code, CoPilot, etc.)
by viccis | 2025-11-30 20:03:45+00:00
>there are people (even college-educated people) who genuinely believe the government can just make something appear from nothing

Untrue.

>These kinds of quips are discouraged here.

"Free" has a specific meaning in English, and someone who doesn't speak it fluently might think that it means, for example, "appearing from nothing". Whereas a fluent English speaker of sound mind understands that "free" refers to the price in a transaction. No one thinks that the "free pizza" at an event was created at no cost to anyone in the supply chain that brought it there. They just understand that it means that they won't be charged for consuming it. But for some reason, I never hear people make a big deal about how "I can't believe you'd say free pizza when I know that your organization had to pay for it!" It's always when it comes to reactionary opposition to social services where this simple word immediately becomes so much more nuanced and impossible to comprehend for the layperson.
by SilverElfin | 2025-11-30 20:03:46+00:00
Sure, it doesn’t have to be dictated by anyone. But there is still value in what the GP said. Considering ideas for what they are, and evaluating them on their merits, is a better way to discuss things.

In the least, showing locations (which can be faked), or implying that someone in certain geographies is more legitimate, is incorrect. If someone lives near me and is commenting on some local issue, they can still post fake AI-generated images, or spread misinformation, or mislead with missing context, or whatever. Those problems still exist, and the need to consider the information on its own merits still exists. So what do you really gain?
by intended | 2025-11-30 20:04:00+00:00
Form what its worth, I urge people to pick up Network Propaganda.

Online speech, moderation and regulation are things I am focused on, and this book does a better job of putting all the parts together.

You can often hear someone on HN talk about “I would rather have many voices than let someone decide what is true.”

Thing is, that is standing up at a battle line which has been flanked entirely.

In the simplest sense - the information economy is no longer functional. Its been co-opted by private=government mutations. None of the old hacker culture rhetoric is graded to combat it.

The current shtick is to promote a fringe theory. Have a talking head state the fringe theory on Fox. Then have a government functionary state that the Fox mentioned said theory. Then have Fox state that a government functionary mentioned said theory. If you are someone who has a counter theory, you just don’t get platformed.
by Sanzig | 2025-11-30 20:04:01+00:00
IIRC, Dyson proposed using a thin layer of oil on the surface of the pusher plate that would get vaporized with each shot, but would prevent the plate from ablating away. This effect was discovered by accident during nuclear testing when oil contamination on metal surfaces in close proximity to the explosion would protect them.

Of course, depending on how much oil you consume for each shot, you will degrade your effective specific impulse - I'm not sure by how much though.

The other issue which you can't really get around is thermal, that plate is going to get hot so you'll have to give it time to radiate heat away between shots. This may be less of a concern for an interstellar Orion since the travel times are so long anyway, low average thrust may not matter too much.
by crazygringo | 2025-11-30 20:04:07+00:00
You don't like some features being added to products so you want laws against adding certain features?

I might not like a certain feature, but I'd dislike the government preventing companies from adding features a whole lot more. The thought of that terrifies me.

(To be clear, legitimate regulations around privacy, user data, anti-fraud, etc. are fine. But just because you find AI features to be something you don't... like? That's not a legitimate reason for government intervention.)
by bane | 2025-11-30 20:04:16+00:00
As an American, we grow up almost entirely without this gem of children's literature. I'm so thankful that PBS aired this story when I was a small child. The imagery was so strong that it has forever stuck in my head. When I see other stories like "The Fountain" or Super Mario Galaxy, I immediately think of the Little Prince.

I've yet to revisit it as an adult, but I think maybe it's time?
by LaurensBER | 2025-11-30 20:04:25+00:00
> What I want is a lightweight infrastructure for macro-services. I want something to handle the user and machine-to-machine authentication (and maybe authorization).

> I don't WANT the usual K8s virtual network for that, just an easy-to-use module inside the service itself.

K8s makes sense if you have a dedicated team (or atleast engineer) and if you really need need the advanced stuff (blue/green deployments, scaling, etc). Once it's properly setup it's actually a very pleasant platform.

If you don't need that Docker (or preferable Podman) is indeed the way to go. You can actually go quite far with a VPS or a dedicated server these day. By the time you outgrow the most expensive server you can (reasonable) buy you can probably afford the staff to roll out a "big boy" infrastructure.
by adrian_b | 2025-11-30 20:05:11+00:00
I do not see which is the relationship between Ozaki algorithms and algorithms that are supposedly "matrix free".

The Ozaki scheme and its variants improves the precision of matrix-matrix multiplications, allowing a matrix-matrix multiplication done with operations having lower-precision to approach the precision of the same multiplication done with operations with higher precision.

So it is an improvement for matrix-matrix operations, which are better done in matrix units. It is not any kind of "matrix free" algorithm.

The Ozaki scheme is not good enough for emulating FP64 in a GPU with poor FP64 throughput, but good FP32 throughput. The reason is that not only the greater precision of FP64 is important, but also its much greater dynamic range in comparison with FP32. In computations with FP64, overflows and underflows are extremely rare events and easy to avoid. On the other hand, in complex physical simulations it is impossible to avoid overflows and underflows in FP32, unless one uses extremely cumbersome frequent rescalings, which eliminate all the advantages of using floating-point numbers instead of fixed-point numbers.

I do not know to which kind of "matrix free" algorithms for FEA you are referring .

Nevertheless, the problem of any "matrix free" algorithm is exactly its poor scaling, because any "matrix free" algorithm must do similar amounts of computational operations and memory transfers. This limits the performance to that of the memory, which prevents scaling.

The advantage of the algorithms based on matrices is exactly the better scaling, because only such algorithms can do more computational operations than memory transfers, so their scaling is no longer limited by the memory interface.

For implementing matrix-matrix operations, the matrix units introduced initially by NVIDIA and then by AMD, Apple, Intel and since next year also by Arm, are preferable, because they reduce even more the number of memory transfers that prevent scaling, in comparison with implementing the same matrix-matrix operations in vector units.
by Webstir | 2025-11-30 20:05:35+00:00
I’m looking for work and can’t feed my family.

I think the next three years will bring more people out of work and looking for food to feed their families.

I think in the next three years it will bring greater concentration of wealth to the elite, together with greater surveillance capabilities for the rest of us.

I think it will squander untold natural resources and continue exacerbating climate change for, at best, marginal returns.

Yeah, happy day.
by bigyabai | 2025-11-30 20:05:37+00:00
Happy nothing day. I don't celebrate brand anniversaries.

In the grand scheme of things, I think ChatGPT is unsustainable product slop anyways. OpenAI's innovation is sporadic and shallow, and the few cutting-edge things they make aren't open whatsoever. Their benefit to humanity is marginal, their value proposition is ridiculous and the potential to disrupt them is already playing out. Qwen's free tier is so good that I haven't used ChatGPT since 4o launched.
by sofixa | 2025-11-30 20:05:53+00:00
> A Renault Captur is still classified as a SUV, which is what I was talking about

It can be classified as a fighter jet, it's still a moderately sized vehicle and it's barely bigger than the Renault Clio it's based on. It's a compact SUV. Almost none of the negative points of Americans style massive SUVs or trucks apply to it - it has good visibility, doesn't have a flat front to mow down pedestrians, doesn't weigh double what it should, doesn't consume absurd amounts of fuel.

So my original points, that the average cars in Europe are drastically smaller than their American counterparts, even when they're SUVs, still stands and is even confirmed by your source.

And the fact that Volvo decided to only do SUVs, while having a sister brand for EVs (Polestar), is pretty irrelevant.