MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mentalgear | 2025-11-13 10:01:53+00:00
Very interesting. Also I find these training parameters quite elegant:

- Diversity: This term encourages the model to generate a diverse set of samples, preventing mode collapse. - Fidelity: This term rewards the model for making predictions that are close to the ground-truth

I'm wondering if a continuos next-vector generative approach also increase innate "reasoning" capabilities of the model, since it could potentially capture more of the semantics of the data vs just tokens.
by Yizahi | 2025-11-13 10:02:11+00:00
Heh, when I had to use Whatsapp on Windows for a while for work, it was one of the worst pieces of software I've seen, almost rivaling Skype v7-v8. It was not redesigned for desktop, it was silently crashing minimum twice a day every day, and that's under very light use. You are telling me it got even worse? :)
by jack_tripper | 2025-11-13 10:02:44+00:00
>One statement in there grates: the idea that there never was a big population drop before

Nobody actually thinks there was never a population drop. The issue is there never was an economic, pension and welfare system built on population growth, so that when populations did dip, nobody was affected by the dip.

But on the contrary, in the past of agrarian societies, population declines massively benefited the working class, as they had more bargaining power with the landlords.

This doesn't work in the economies and societies of today when your retirement depends on there being constant economic and population growth.
by InMice | 2025-11-13 10:03:04+00:00
ALmost everyone who shares their positive, any length fasting experience here gets downvoted. I will always upvote them. Ive done two 48 hour fasts and they were so relaxing and felt so natural. It just feels great to occasionally go about your day and not eat anything. Your gut tries to heal itself in between meals. The fact that almost all of HN just cant stand anyone mention they fast with positive benefits (and mounting evidence) is kidna sad. I guess every community has to be exceptionally closed minded about something.
by setnone | 2025-11-13 10:03:44+00:00
A quote from the post you mentioned > I don't want my eyes to burn when I'm browsing HN at night on my phone

Is it just me who feels completely opposite? I struggle to read dark, text-heavy websites for the exact same reason.

Also, if dark mode ends up happening, please put the checkbox on the account page, the UI is busy enough :)
by stavros | 2025-11-13 10:04:02+00:00
> The big thing I want to see in practice is their implementation of foveated rendering. This beautiful hack abuses the fact that human eyes have the most sharpness and fidelity at the exact centre of your field of vision, whereas your peripheral vision is abysmal at it. This means that on average you only have to render about 10% of the frame at maximum quality for it to feel like it's running at full resolution all over the screen.

> This should make the fact that the Frame is using a "weaker" CPU/GPU irrelevant. Games should look fine as long as they render the slice that needs to be in full quality fast enough.

It's not foveated rendering, it's foveated streaming. The CPU/GPU should easily be able to handle decoding video, whether foveated or not.
by skydhash | 2025-11-13 10:05:00+00:00
It’s the extra API and layout rules. A lot of UI toolkit supports some version of xml for declarative UI programming. And they will create a widget tree to match it. But they’re far simpler than the DOM and therefore faster.

Also think all the web subsystem that has been added over they years. Every electron app is bundling those in, even the inspector. It’s shipping a whole VM with your code. Containers have at least the decency to strip things down to the bare minimum, but no one is thinning chromium to only what they need.
by kakacik | 2025-11-13 10:05:06+00:00
Drivers are not an issue for quite some time (but its always good to have latest nvidia ones for example for optimizations focused on given game).

But its trivial to run into some .NET or Visual C++ redistributable hell when you just get a cryptic error during starting and thats it. Just check internet. I have roughly 20 of them installed currently (why the heck?) and earlier versions would happily get installed over already-installed version of same for example as part of game installation process, not a stellar workmanship on MS side. Whats wrong with having latest being backward compatible with all of previous ones, like ie Java achieved 25 years ago?

Talking about fully updated windows 10 and say official steam distros of the games.
by bmacho | 2025-11-13 10:05:49+00:00
Indeed, an update can't be more malicious than the permissions allow it to be. You have a calculator app with limited permissions, it is "safe" to set to allow the developer to update it. No danger in that.

But I don't think it is enough, or it is the right model. In other cases, when the app has dangerous permissions already, auto-update should be a no-go.
by ACCount37 | 2025-11-13 10:06:09+00:00
Even the bold take of "LLMs are literally AGI right now" is less of a detour from reality than "LLMs are NEVER going to hit AGI".

We've had LLMs for 5 years now, and billions were put into pushing them to the limits. We are yet to discover any fundamental limitations that would prevent them from going all the way to AGI. And every time someone pops up with "LLMs can never do X", it's followed up by an example of LLMs doing X.

Not that it stops the coping. There is no amount of evidence that can't be countered by increasing the copium intake.
by spwa4 | 2025-11-13 10:06:13+00:00
What's weird is that this is based on melanin, and how fast it happened. Doeswould seem at least likely that this is life digging up an old recipe rather than coming up with something new. Melanin can usefully absorb high-energy gamma rays ... that means there must have been a period, long enough, in earth's history where high energy gamma rays were easy to come by.

That could only have been on land, or in the very top layer of the ocean (because they don't pass through water).

So where in earth's history do we have a period where a large landmass had sufficient wattage in high energy gamma rays? Or at the very least a lot of UV rays, enough to damage/kill normal life. Such a place would otherwise have been very unhealthy for almost all life, as it destroys DNA.
by SwiftyBug | 2025-11-13 10:06:30+00:00
I had the same feeling when I lived in Porto and later visited San Francisco. The two cities have so much in common: similar temperatures, they're both famous for their bridges (Porto actually has several), the fog that rolls in regularly, and even their most iconic bodies of water both have "gold" in the name: the Golden Gate and Rio Douro (which means "golden river"). I think this comes from how the water looks golden at sunset, since both coastlines face west. And of course, both cities are known for their cable cars.
by josephg | 2025-11-13 10:06:37+00:00
The more time passes, the more impressed I am with mIRC. It was an incredibly fully featured chat client - with hundreds of features, and its own scripting language for more advanced use. All that in a 4mb download. It probably still works great, to this day.

As a teenager, I thought we'd get better at making software over time. Not worse.
by akimbostrawman | 2025-11-13 10:06:38+00:00
>And Google's motto was "Don't be evil"

People here like to pretend google wasn't evil from the start.

https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-ci...

But you are right there is always the possibility they turn to shit. The advantage is that compared to other DRMs it is trivial to break even by yourself and all steam games are already freely available cracked so if they do just torrent them.
by fransje26 | 2025-11-13 10:06:42+00:00
> https://jriddell.org/2025/09/14/adios-chicos-25-years-of-kde...

That was.. ..an interesting read. The seemingly perpetual need of defaulting back to greed and authoritarianism never ceases to amaze me.

I was thinking about switching back to KDE. Well, maybe not after all. Cheerio, as they say.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-11-13 10:06:50+00:00
But also do long-term studies; one thing I gathered (anecdotal through the internet so take it with a grain of salt) is that people revert to their old habits when they stop taking it. Not always, of course, and I think using it should always be done with guidance of a dietician etc to make lifestyle adjustments if needs be, but it did imply that long term usage is a factor that needs to be considered.
by theshrike79 | 2025-11-13 10:07:03+00:00
If it can play all games on Steam _today_ at 4k60fps (even with FSR) it means I have about 570 games on my Steam library it can play in perpetuity.

Even if I play 2 hours of each game, it's still a bargain =)

And because this is Valve and I've had a stellar experience with my Steam Deck, I'm pretty confident that future games will run on it too. Most likely gamedevs will add special "Steam Machine" performance profiles like they've done with the deck. And there will be a "Steam Machine certified" checkmark on Steam.
by zdc1 | 2025-11-13 10:07:12+00:00
You blame YAML but I blame helm. I can build a dict in Python and dump it as YAML. I've painlessly templated many k8s resources like this. Why can't we build helm charts in a DSL or more sensible syntax and then dump k8s manifests as YAML? Using Go templating to build YAML is idiocy and the root of the issue here.

There's lots of advice on StackOverflow against building your own JSON strings instead of using a library. But helm wants us to build our own YAML with Go templating. Make it make sense.
by Atomic_Torrfisk | 2025-11-13 10:07:40+00:00
I'm not sure. I know a lot of people who want to have kids, but are not because of the current economic situation. Whether this is real or perceived I am not sure; I have 3 kids, but I am doing alright at the moment.

The simple answer is that our current way of life (in the west at least) does not accommodate kids. We USED to have kids because they were an economic benefit to agrerian cultures, but have since become a burden since our society does not make time or resources for them, least of which is physical space when you consider urban life.

IF we want to increase the birth rate again, we need to shift our lifestyles away from being as career centric as they are today. We could for instance, remove the stigma of working part time or having a stay at home parent. We could encourage people not to grind long hours to climb the corporate ladder. Actually fix the housing problem without bending to NIMBYists and investors and provide affordable/accessible childcare.

Since children are the future tax-base and labor force of a nation, pay parents for raising kids, like its a job. It is kind of gross to view children in this perspective, but if we are talking about economics, well-adjusted children are just as much an input just as much as energy is.

Technologically speaking, we as a species are basically magic at this point, so I reject the notion that strategically recovering the birth rate is impossible, rather there is no will to.
by throwaway2037 | 2025-11-13 10:08:35+00:00
I love this part (no trolling from me):

> We are sorry. We regret that this incident has caused worry for our partners and people. We have begun the process to identify and contact those impacted and are working closely with law enforcement and the relevant regulators. We are fully committed to maintaining your trust.

I know there will by a bunch of cynics who say that an LLM or a PR crisis team wrote this post... but if they did, hats off. It is powerful and moving. This guys really falls on his sword / takes it on the chin.
by tete | 2025-11-13 10:08:45+00:00
I agree. DRM sucks badly. I'd argue that it's a bit of a compliance thing though. Eg publisher lawyers saying DRM is needed, given that there doesn't seem to be much push from Steam for anything "draconian". At least it is for public broadcasters having online archives that also sometimes have DRM even where it isn't actually required (self-produced stuff).

However, there is still a huge difference between buying hardware that literally "jails" you and force feeds you DRM and a system where even in the marketing says you can completely tear away all of that without jailbreaks, etc. and without stuff being super fiddly.
by lexlambda | 2025-11-13 10:09:05+00:00
The donation is more or less virtue signaling rather than actual insight.

The problem can not be helped by research research against cybercrime. Proper practices for protections are well established and known, they just need to be implemented.

The amount donated should've rather be invested into better protections / hiring a person responsible in the company.

(Context: The hack happened on a not properly decomissioned legacy system.)
by monadgonad | 2025-11-13 10:10:07+00:00
> I won't call clickbait on this

But you are going to imply it by bringing it up at all.

> They didn't kill him, they failed to save him.

The post does not say otherwise.

Please give this, of all topics, the respect it deserves, respond to the article as it is actually written, and don't use this, of all things, as an opportunity to get on your high horse about some other article you have problems with.
by jagged-chisel | 2025-11-13 10:11:08+00:00
irjustin is either redefining words to suit their purpose, or isn’t articulating their point well.

To even “know” position, one must measure it. Because electrons are always in motion, if you want to know their speed perfectly, you won’t know their position precisely. You’ll have a probability of where the electron should be, but no definite position.

That’s all Heisenberg has to say. It doesn’t talk about your observations changing the thing you observed, it doesn’t “cause” anything to happen, it is not dependent on the consciousness of the observer and doesn’t make effects itself.
by Cynddl | 2025-11-13 10:12:13+00:00
Looks like a new model trained to be warmer and friendlier to users. Time to reshare our work: https://arxiv.org/html/2507.21919

> Artificial intelligence (AI) developers are increasingly building language models with warm and empathetic personas that millions of people now use for advice, therapy, and companionship. Here, we show how this creates a significant trade-off: optimizing language models for warmth undermines their reliability, especially when users express vulnerability. We conducted controlled experiments on five language models of varying sizes and architectures, training them to produce warmer, more empathetic responses, then evaluating them on safety-critical tasks. Warm models showed substantially higher error rates (+10 to +30 percentage points) than their original counterparts, promoting conspiracy theories, providing incorrect factual information, and offering problematic medical advice. They were also significantly more likely to validate incorrect user beliefs, particularly when user messages expressed sadness. Importantly, these effects were consistent across different model architectures, and occurred despite preserved performance on standard benchmarks, revealing systematic risks that current evaluation practices may fail to detect. As human-like AI systems are deployed at an unprecedented scale, our findings indicate a need to rethink how we develop and oversee these systems that are reshaping human relationships and social interaction.
by jack_tripper | 2025-11-13 10:12:57+00:00
> Microsoft provided APIs are a disaster that keeps getting rewritten every half decade

What a wrong and misleading statement.

Not they aren't. Otherwise Winamp 2.95 from 2003 wouldn't flawlessly work on my Windows 11 install 23 years later. Same with my Unreal Tournament 99 installation that I just copied over via a CD left from my Windows 98 PC.

As long as you haven't used any undocumented APIs or made your app hack its way into the OS via hooks like some games did back then for performance optimizations or some anti-piracy SW did, then most Windows apps from over 20+ years ago will still work today and it's also why WINE works so well to get Windows app working on Linux, is precisely because Microsoft HASN'T changed the APIs.
by plastic-enjoyer | 2025-11-13 10:13:57+00:00
> My feeling is that birth rate could be solved in properly authoritarian country. With policies that won't fit to most "western" schemes.

Nazi-Germany had a pretty illiberal and authoritarian family policy which basically reduced women to their role as housewives and mothers by banning married women from the job market and incentivizing having multiple children. They didn't achieve their goal of increasing the birth rate in any significant means. Their family policy also backfired hard during the war. Because women were not supposed to work and received financial support in the absence of their husbands, women refused to go to work during the hot phase of the war. Note that this was in a time where access to birth control was practically non-existent and access to abortion difficult.
Show HN: Page Report – Conversational agents for landing page CRO
by hamzaawan | 2025-11-13 10:14:16+00:00
I have been building SaaS for sometime now and I always stumbled across this problem when your landing page doesn't convert. You always think that you have built the best landing page for your SaaS in the world but when you get another set of eyes on there they simply say "I dont get what are you trying to sell here" or "I don't whats the way through it" and many other things.

So on this quest to solve this problem and making everyone able to get second set of eyes on there landing page and get actionable feedback, I have created pagereport.app Which provides access to purpose built agents to analyse your landing page visually to provide you actionable feedback, like a second set of eyes.

On top of that it has the ability to do full blown CRO of your landing pages at fraction of the cost then those expensive consultants. And good thing is you can do it your self.

Its like you asking chatgpt "how does my landing page looks?" or "Can you do 5 second blind test of my page to see whats it seems to be selling?" but chatgpt is unable to do that, because it cant see your landing page and analyze the components in there, it simply doesnt have to tools for it. But I have added all of those tools in pagereport.app so it can analyze the page visually and its dom to provide you proper feedback, which can you rely on.

I am open to any sort of feedback on it, even if its brutal.
by sigmoid10 | 2025-11-13 10:14:32+00:00
I'll never not think of that South Park scene where they mocked BP's "We're so sorry" statement whenever I see one of those. I don't care if you're sorry or if you realize how much you betrayed your customers. Tell me how you investigated the root causes of the incident and how the results will prevent this scenario from ever happening again. Like, how many other deprecated third party systems were identified handling a significant portion of your customer data after this hack? Who declined to allocate the necessary budget to keep systems updated? That's the only way I will even consider giving some trust back. If you really want to apologise, start handing out cash or whatever to the people you betrayed. But mere words like these are absolutely meaningless in today's world. People are right to dismiss them.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-11-13 10:14:35+00:00
> So, to answer your question, Microsoft got blamed for viruses and made fun of but there wasn't a better way in the mainstream. There is one now.

I don't think App Store is a better way.

From my point of view, people keep mistaking the actual progress - generalised sandboxing and reduced API surface - with the major regression - controlled distribution. At the beginning of the App Store, when the sandboxing and APIs were poor, they were frequent security issues.

Apple marketing magic is somehow convincing people that it's their questionable veting which made things secure and not the very real security innovations.
by tete | 2025-11-13 10:14:37+00:00
Android isn't "just Linux". It's a heavily modified kernel, it's often an even closed source bootloader in many cases and it's completely untrue for userspace, where it incorporates stuff from other OSs (BSDs, etc.). There are huge amounts of blobs.

Yes, there technically is a Linux kernel, but if it's "just Linux" then macOS is "just FreeBSD", because grep -V tells you so, because it has dtrace, because you run (ran?) Docker with effectively FreeBSD's bhyve, etc.

If you wanna spin it even further neither are Safari and Chrome or any other Webkit browsers just Konqueror because they took the layout engine code from KDE (KHTML).

And you can totally install Debian and even OpenBSD, etc. on a Steam Deck and at least the advertisement seems to indicate it won't be all that different for the VR headset.
by yakkers | 2025-11-13 10:14:57+00:00
Nix is sort of that third option, though I really wish there was a well-documented way to use it on macOS as purely a binary/source package manager. A lot of stuff I read online goes into setting up nix-darwin to manage desktop settings and etc. and I just don't need or want that.

That being said, if you haven't used MacPorts in years, I'd say it's worth the jump. I recall moving from MacPorts in the first place because Homebrew was faster and allowed for customising packages.

When I switched back to MacPorts again, it was because Homebrew had become slow and no longer allowed package customisation. Now, MacPorts is much faster and has the variants system for package customisation.
by latexr | 2025-11-13 10:15:52+00:00
> someone who makes politics your religion.

How ironic, considering I’ve made a neutral comment to answer why someone is viewed as controversial, and I’m getting downvotes and people figuratively foaming at the mouth to defend someone who openly despises people different from him. If you want to see people who make politics their religion, look at the ones literally trying to ban non Christians from their country.
by mikemcquaid | 2025-11-13 10:16:08+00:00
There's a misunderstanding here what the issue tracker is for in Homebrew. In some projects, it's for free-for-all discussion. That's great if those projects want to use it that way.

In this issue's case, you have someone in leadership (p-linnane) communicating that work needs to be done, a maintainer (carlocab) communicating what needs to be done to make this change. xtqqczze's attempt to get us to move backwards on an already made decision doesn't help anyone. We have a discussions forum (and, well, the rest of the internet) for discussion of the pros and cons of decisions made. There's no point maintaining the illusion that we're soliciting feedback or discussion on the issues tracker when we are not.

As to me being a dick: I've been maintaining Homebrew for 16 years. It's used by millions of people. My full-time job has never been doing so and I've never been paid a market rate for my work on it (not that I expect or perhaps even deserve so). My primary concern with Homebrew is keeping the project actually running. This primarily requires the time, energy and work of maintainers doing so in their free time. It also requires contributors who submit pull requests.

Go read through some merged pull requests some time and you will see moderately to very positive responses from me. That's because that's the work that keeps the project alive. It has almost died several times in the past and I've kept it going. You may think it hyperbolic but drive-by negativity by non-code-contributor users is the biggest existential risk to projects like Homebrew.