MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by estimator7292 | 2025-11-26 20:34:02+00:00
Honestly I doubt it. Current government doesn't really have the ability to get their shit together and compete with anyone in any capacity.

As much as usgov would love another reason to clutch pearls and shriek about China, we simply don't have the industry or resources to compete without a federal investment so massive that we wouldn't have any tax money left to give to the already ludicrously wealthy. And we can't have that.

But really american industry has been so thoroughly gutted that we can't compete anymore. Everyone else builds everything better and cheaper than we can. If there's a new space race to be had, we've already lost.
by kristianc | 2025-11-26 20:34:55+00:00
Which is likely why they won't try. Trying to raise that much money from 20 large individual customers would be suicidal. At the scale they're talking about, you need billions of "customers".

Trying to embed themsleves into every enterprise workflow and taking a cut from it seems much more likely than them trying to invent the next killer app. ChatGPT is just the marketing arm which keeps them front of mind.
by jacquesm | 2025-11-26 20:35:12+00:00
I see where people use CF and I actually think that 'lots of websites went down' has the potential these days to in aggregate kill far more people than were killed by the Dali losing control over their helm. The Dali accident could also have been avoided by simply requiring ships with the gross tonnage to do damage to the bridge to have mandatory tugs, and I'm not so sure there is a clean and effective solution for the kind of issues that CF can create.

They're more like 'the shipping industry' than they are like 'a single out of control vessel'. Keep in mind that half of the health care industry or more uses CF to protect their assets.
by switchbak | 2025-11-26 20:35:39+00:00
I don't think so. I wouldn't expect an AI to say " It’s proof that humans will build absurdly long-horizon projects anyway, even when the ROI is almost entirely knowledge and perspective"

"the ROI is almost entirely knowledge and perspective" - this isn't a way I've ever heard an AI talk.

And at a meta-level, accusing someone of being an AI is getting very boring and repetitive (admittedly, I've done it once), and I expect we'll have to get used to that too.
by triclops200 | 2025-11-26 20:36:04+00:00
It's an axiom (the axiom of choice, actually). A valid way of viewing an axiom is not dissimilar to a "modeling requirement" or an "if statement". By that I mean, for example with the axiom of choice: it is just a formal statement version of "assume that you can take an element from a (possibly infinite) collection of sets such that you can create a new set (the new set does not have to be unique)." It makes intuitive sense for most finite sets we deal with physically, and, for infinite sets, it can actually make sense in a way that actually successfully predicts results that do hold in the real world and provides a really convenient way to define a lot of consistent properties of the continuum itself.

However, if you're dealing with a problem where you can't always usefully distinguish between elements across arbitrary set-like objects; then it's not a useful axiom and ZFC is not the formalism you want to use. Most problems we analyze in the real world, that's actually something that we can usefully assume, hence why it's such a successful and common theory, even if it leads to physical paradoxes like Banac-Tarsky, as mentioned.

Mathematicians, in practice, fully understand what you mean with your complaint about "completion," but, the beauty of these formal infinities is the guarantee it gives you that it'll never break down as a predictive theory no matter the length of time or amount of elements you consider or the needed level of precision; the fact that it can't truly complete is precisely the point. Also, within the formal system used, we absolutely can consistently define what the completion would be at "infinity," as long as you treat it correctly and don't break the rules. Again, this is useful because it allows you to bridge multiple real problems that seemingly were unrelated and it pushes "representative errors" to those paradoxes and undefined statements of the theory (thanks, Gödel).

If it helps, the transfinite cardinalities (what you call infinity) you are worried about are more related to rates than counts, even if they have some orderable or count-like properties. In the strictest sense, you can actually drop into archimedian math, which you might find very enjoyable to read about or use, and it, in a very loose sense, kinda pushes the idea of infinity from rates of counts to rates of reaching arbitrary levels of precision.
by nitwit005 | 2025-11-26 20:36:24+00:00
The practical part of space flight is launching satellites, and weapons. Both countries are already doing both.

If we're discussing manned missions to the moon or Mars, as an American I'd prefer China spent all the money and the US didn't bother. It'd be cool to see it happen, but no one can identify practical benefits, aside from a political win.
by dpark | 2025-11-26 20:36:32+00:00
> That's ok, but then you should bow out of the conversation, which is between people that do understand why anyone should want this.

I was not making a statement that I am ignorant. I was saying I believe the proposal to model general software engineering after avionics is misguided and inviting you to clarify your position.

It is certainly valid to ask what CloudFlare or anyone else for that matter could learn from avionics engineering or from NASA or from civil engineering focused on large scale projects or anywhere else that good engineering practices might come from. However, there is a persistent undercurrent in discussions around software reliability and general software engineering that ignore the fact that there are major trade-offs made for different engineering efforts.

“Oh, look how reliable avionics are. We should just copy that.”

Cool, except I would bet avionics cost 100 times as much to build per line of code as anything CloudFlare has ever shipped. The design constraints are just fundamentally different. Avionics are built for a specific purpose in an effectively unchanging environment. If Cloudflare built their offerings in the same way, they would never ship new features, the quality of their request filtering would plummet as adversaries adjusted faster than CloudFlare could react, and realistically they would be overtaken by a competitor within a few years at most. They aren’t building avionics, so they shouldn’t engineer as if they are. Their engineering practices should reflect the reality of the environment in which they are building a product.

This is no different than people who ask, “Why don’t we build software the way we build bridges?” Because we’re not building bridges. Most bridges look exactly like some other bridge that was built 10 miles away. That’s nothing like building new software. That’s far more like deploying a new instance of existing software with slightly different config. And this is not to say that there is nothing for software engineers to learn from bridge building, but reductive “just do it like them” thinking is not useful.

> Boeing managed to kill a bunch of people with shitty business practices, not with shitty software, the software did what it was built to do.

The software was poorly designed. No doubt it was implemented the spec. Does that change the fact that the sum total of the engineering yielded a deadly result? There is no papering over the fact that “building to avionics standards” led direct to the deaths of 346 people in this case.
by xnorswap | 2025-11-26 20:37:08+00:00
Or indeed, ask them who won the space race, because by most measures, that was the Soviets too.

Soviets achieved:

- First artificial Orbit ( Sputnik ) - First animal to orbit ( Laika ) - First Man to orbit ( Yuri Gagarin ) - First Woman to orbit (Valentina Tereshkova ) - First EVA ( Alexei Leonov ) - First moon landing ( Luna 9 ) - First landing on another planet ( Venera 8 )

Many of these years before the USA achieved the equivalent. The first female US astronaut wasn't until the mid 1980's.

The Americans were at one point beat so bad that they invented their own game that only they were playing.

Yes, that spurred their entire economy and the boosted scientific investment paved the way for the decades of dominance since, and that should be rightly celebrated, but the idea that the USA "Won the space race" because of the moon landing is Hollywood nonsense.
by nrhrjrjrjtntbt | 2025-11-26 20:37:11+00:00
Simple.

1. Is it worth 20k to anyone? Well depends on the advantage but maybe yes. People are dropping 200-1000 a month already as ordinary devs.

2. Is there competition? Yes lots. To get to 20k one model provider needs a real killer edge that no one else can keep up. Or alternatively constraints push prices up (like memory!) but then that is not margin anymore.
Ask HN: Anyone else feel a storybook calm in the English countryside?
by jerawaj740 | 2025-11-26 20:37:53+00:00
When I watch videos of the English countryside, the scenery feels almost ‘storybook’ or cartoon-like to me, the homes, the colors, the calm atmosphere.

It makes me wonder why some places trigger this feeling of peace or nostalgia even if we've never lived there. Is it cultural exposure, childhood media, or something else? Has anyone else felt this way about a place they’ve never been?
by forgotpwd16 | 2025-11-26 20:38:16+00:00
Thanks! In such serial articles usually there's link to the end pointing to the next one so, since there wasn't any, thought next one hadn't been written. This one indeed addresses the thesis. The TL;DR, taken directly from the article,

>The core problems I see with Python as a language for data science are call-by-reference semantics, lack of built-in concepts of missing values, lack of built-in vectorization, and lack of non-standard evaluation.
by drdeca | 2025-11-26 20:38:32+00:00
I don't think this is a good description of mathematicians using infinite objects. It typically doesn't involving something being given the label "infinity". That's used in like, taking limits and such, but there it is just a notation.

When mathematicians are working with infinite objects, it is not by plugging in "infinity" somewhere a number should go, in order to imagine that the rule that would construct an object if that were a number, constructs an object. No. Rather, (in a ZF-like foundations) the axiom of infinity assumes that there is a set whose elements are exactly the finite ordinals. (Or, assumes something equivalent to that.) From this, various sets are constructed such that the set is e.g. in bijection with a proper subset of itself (there are a handful of different definitions of a set being "infinite", which under the axiom of choice, are equivalent, but without AoC there are a few different senses of a set being "infinite", which is why I say "e.g.").

In various contexts in mathematics, there are properties relevant to that specific context which correspond to this notion, and which are therefore also given the name "infinite". For example, in the context of von Neumann algebras, a projection is called a "finite projection" if there is no strict subprojection that is Morray-von Neumann equivalent to it. Or, in the context of ordered fields, an element may be called "infinite" if it is greater than every natural number.

Usually, the thing that is said is that some object is "infinite", with "infinite" an adjective, not saying that some object "is infinity" with "infinity" a noun. One exception I can think of is in the context of the Surreal Numbers, in which the Gap between finite Surreal Numbers and (positive) infinite Surreal Numbers, is given the name "infinity". But usually objects are not given the name "infinity", except as like, a label for an index, but this is just a label.

I suppose that in the Riemann sphere, and other one-point compactifications, one calls the added point "the point at infinity". But, this kind of construction isn't more "make believe" than other things; one can do the same "add in a point at infinity" for finite fields, as in, one can take the projective line for a finite field, which adds a point that is doing the same thing as the "point at infinity" in the complex projective line (i.e. the Riemann sphere).
by gjm11 | 2025-11-26 20:38:43+00:00
Nah, look at their posting history. In the last hour they've posted a whole slew of comments with the same sort of tone and the same AI-ish stylistic quirks, all in quite surprisingly quick succession if the author is actually reading the things they're commenting on and thinking about them before posting. (And their comments before this posting spree are quite different in style.) I won't say it's impossible for this to be human work, but it sure doesn't look like it.
by ffsm8 | 2025-11-26 20:38:44+00:00
Do people really still upgrade so often? I mean it made sense pre 2015 for desktops, and pre 2020 for laptops... But since... Not much has changed from a performance standpoint.

Even gpus hardly advanced since 2022 (4090) and the next generation is at least 1++ years off. Likely 2-3... And it's unclear wherever it will actually be an upgrade or more of the AI shenanigans they released with the 50 generation.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-11-26 20:39:41+00:00
"Perhaps soon we'll need to keep lists of per-site white-listed user agents..."

Been doing this for many years now. It's a short list, small enough to be contained in the local fwd proxy config

# economist.com http-request set-header user-agent "Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 14) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/127.0.6533.103 Mobile Safari/537.36 Lamarr" if { hdr(host) -m end economist.com }

I don't use curl, wget, browser extensions/add-ons, etc. except in HN examples. I don't have to worry about command line arguments ilke "-A" or "-U". Proxy controls HTTP headers
by SilverElfin | 2025-11-26 20:39:42+00:00
The response from the Boring Company executive feels like gaslighting.

> Buss later clarified that he does not believe The Boring Company has a “common” practice of missing payments to vendors, but rather missed payments happen sometimes during “the normal course of business.”

I’m sure this small business owner spent a lot of time and effort trying to get this corrected, but got no cooperation from Boring Company. If Vice President Buss or others want to look trustworthy, they need to explain in a public post-mortem what happened, and how they’ll avoid it going forward, and how they’re making this company whole including for their lost time.

> The final straw that caused Shane to pull his crew from the site was when multiple employees reported that a representative of The Boring Company was soliciting them to bail on Shane and work directly for TBC on Monday.

And this is just deeply unethical. They’re basically holding a fraudulent business relationship with the purpose of poaching employees, it seems like.
by Fire-Dragon-DoL | 2025-11-26 20:40:52+00:00
May I remind you that:

You don't need marriage to have kids,you don't need marriage to love another person, you don't need marriage to live with a partner and you don't need marriage to have a fulfilling social life.

The purpose of marriage is economic, so it's not necessary to achieve anything social. It is useful when you want protect your partner and kids from sudden death or disability, which should come AFTER the love/social part.

I am not married, I have 2 kids, been with my "wife" (partner?) for 15 years.

In Canada we are considered like married though, economically speaking.
by DocTomoe | 2025-11-26 20:40:55+00:00
Well, considering using YouTube is something you do out of your own, free will ... isn't it a bit like going to McDonalds, deliberately not ordering the water and the salad, and then taking legal action because they made you fat?

If you know a platform is not good for you, AND you are negatively affected by it ... the right move is not to use it.
by fragmede | 2025-11-26 20:41:05+00:00
> I don't know anybody with a Microsoft 365 subscription

I don’t either, but the lesson to be learned is that you live in a bubble. Microsoft makes many millions of dollars a year off of those subscriptions. Just because the bubble of people you interact with doesn’t mean that those people don’t exist.

OK no that was a lie. I know one person that has a Microsoft 365 subscription. I hate it when he sends me word or outlook document links or whatever the hell. Just use Google docs, dude.
Show HN: Fabric – personal context from Instagram/YouTube/Google to AI agents
by maxalbarello | 2025-11-26 20:41:13+00:00
Hey HN! We’re Eeshita and Massimo. We’re building [Fabric](http://onfabric.io) a portable, personal context layer that lets users bring their own data from consumer apps (Instagram, YouTube, Google, etc.) into MCP clients like Claude, ChatGPT, and other AI agents.

Agents today are largely blind to the user. Even when they add memory, they usually start from zero instead of using the rich context already locked up in consumer platforms. The result is agents with big gaps in their understanding of the user, generic experiences, lots of repetitive input, and still poor engagement.

We’re trying to solve this by focusing on *portable, user-controlled personal context*. **

With Fabric, an agent doesn’t just recall what happened inside that one app. It can start from a richer baseline that evolves as the user interacts across their existing apps, using memories created from tens of thousands of real interactions, such as:

- Travel posts and restaurant stories from Instagram - Videos watched on YouTube and TikTok - Years of Google search, shopping, and navigation behavior

What we’ve built so far

- Official connectors for Instagram (global), Google (EEA, UK) and YouTube (EEA, UK) for beta users. First company globally to build DMA style integrations with all Big Tech platforms. - An MCP server so users can bring their context into MCP clients - Under the hood, Fabric: - Ingests raw interactions that look very different (e.g. Google searches vs Instagram stories) - Normalises them into an ActivityStreams-style schema - Builds a personal knowledge graph on top - Exposes higher-level “memories” that agents can retrieve via our MCP server - A user portal where users can connect data sources and manage their context

We have a few strong opinions:

- The profile belongs to the person, not to any one app. Fabric is designed as a neutral “personal context vault” that multiple AI apps can plug into (with user approval), rather than a proprietary profile owned by a single product. - User control is first-class. Users can: - Choose which data sources to connect - See which apps/agents have access - Revoke access and delete their context from Fabric - We’re explicitly building on top of GDPR data portability and EU/UK “smart data” initiatives, rather than shadow integrations.

We would love to hear what you think.

And if this is interesting, you can sign up to our waitlist or join our beta at onfabric.io.
by decimalenough | 2025-11-26 20:41:29+00:00
At least in my neck of the woods, road cyclists skew heavily male, I'd guesstimate 90%. Probably even higher for occupations like UberEats/Doordash, which spend all day biking and are thus more at risk of ending up in the hospital.

Update: looked up some stats/surveys, apparently cycling skews 75-80% male.
by SilverElfin | 2025-11-26 20:41:29+00:00
The original title of this article as I saw it was “Millennials are richer than their boomer parents. Here's why they love to complain anyway.” This line now appears as the subtitle.

I was curious what HN readers think of the idea or evidence that millennials are actually richer than boomers, since everything I hear in casual conversations is about how boomers hoarded everything and millennials are worse off, due to boomers and the subprime crisis.
by rcxdude | 2025-11-26 20:42:31+00:00
You're lacking imagination and understanding of how these systems form. Symmetry is very commonplace in nature, for very unsurprising reasons, because what's random is how the processes that create those forms change over time, not the entirety of those processes themselves. And yes, there is a huge amount of study of how life could form in the kinds of environments we think existed on earth near the start of life. ATM it's not so much 'how could this happen at all' and more 'what looks like the most likely way that it happened'.
Show HN: Humonos – Real-time cognitive load detection
by jaskirat1216 | 2025-11-26 20:42:48+00:00
Building an affective computing system for cognitive load monitoring.

Problem: Most knowledge workers push through mental exhaustion without realizing it. No real-time feedback on cognitive state.

Solution: Multimodal sensing (eye tracking, physiological signals, behavioral patterns) to measure mental load.

Early testing: https://humonos.com/survey

Launching January 2026. Would love feedback from HN community— what would make you actually use something like this?
by visioninmyblood | 2025-11-26 20:42:57+00:00
The 3d viewer is slow, and might take time to load, thank you for your patience.

Modi: https://chat.vlm.run/c/bdbaf1dc-b3c2-4b8a-ad17-6e26d87475fd

Musk: https://chat.vlm.run/c/894f44ce-c366-4c93-b348-de6eebfb9f03

Ronaldo: https://chat.vlm.run/c/db5eff27-8c52-4e0b-8e4e-157df6bef278

Gomez: https://chat.vlm.run/c/02b92f23-a6fd-4380-b7a9-52ae7463c9c1

Jackie chan: https://chat.vlm.run/c/62ca5502-2066-4d5f-b994-c8845b2e72c9

Messi: https://chat.vlm.run/c/5bfda3c2-a2bf-4ca2-a874-78f1ce66edf1

Taylor swift: https://chat.vlm.run/c/d411c16a-e2b1-490c-85cc-9f86f2564a59

Obama: https://chat.vlm.run/c/c55fe1d6-853b-4113-bdaf-d828bee0da53

Trump: https://chat.vlm.run/c/84b57509-ed38-454a-9b17-85c03a247993

Kohli: https://chat.vlm.run/c/da8ffe8a-0818-4820-bdeb-b82d965ae3a4

Lamar: https://chat.vlm.run/c/ef6488c3-b0f0-4651-944e-7d0c4f98bdd1

Mrbeast: https://chat.vlm.run/c/c24d1cac-feb0-4a53-b1a2-2bbb62a7b7fb
by terabytest | 2025-11-26 20:44:12+00:00
I really struggle to wrap my head around how this engine works. I haven’t used it, but I have experience with Source 1 and its systems and I imagine Source 2 is an extrapolation of that. But I really can’t wrap my head around how they’ve turned it into a scene-based game engine when Source 2 is map-based, how they’ve managed to build a completely different editor that still leverages Hammer maps somehow, and all the other stuff.
by lousken | 2025-11-26 20:44:42+00:00
It would be critical if I were to move any non-IT employees from windows to linux.

As said in one of my comments - this could very well mean that the next version of Debian will have KDE Wayland only which would already mean <5years of support today. I am not saying wayland is not catching up, I am saying enterprise apps are the issue.
by kuizu | 2025-11-26 20:44:50+00:00
Something does not line up here. The description at NIST in the CVE is about a local privilege escalation.

It contains these two links

- https://packetstorm.news/files/id/189989

- https://gist.github.com/R-Security/1c707a08f9c7f9a91d9d84b50...

The first is also about the LPE, the second is apparently by the same author, names the same CVE-ID but is about a remote code execution?