MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by QueensGambit | 2025-11-28 16:20:34+00:00
Hi HN,

Ever since "Attention Is All You Need", I've been reading research papers directly instead of waiting for tech news coverage. My information supply chain has evolved from news sites as explainer to following experts on Twitter to ChatGPT these days. I'm experimenting with one more step: what if the papers themselves were memes?

For example, mapping AlexNet's 50-year journey to the Pirates of the Caribbean sinking ship scene [1]. Or using Sheldon's milking stool argument to explain transformer architecture [2]. The absurdity seems to make the concepts more memorable. Each meme has a quiz to dig deeper into the paper.

What do you think? Is humor a legitimate tool for learning about research papers, or does it undermine the seriousness of the work?

[1] https://near.tl/tech/post/CKANRc66UN8majA3prVu

[2] https://near.tl/tech/post/gzibcV5d6RQI6PlukYuM
by Fnoord | 2025-11-28 16:20:37+00:00
The US Constitution. What a beautiful piece of paper, such a nice theory. Yet your current president is circumventing Congress. Your president is bullying states. You don't even have a functional popular vote. Your SCOTUS is dysfunctional. And, this 1st amendment, is that why peaceful protestors got shot by rubber bullets when they were protesting against the war in Iraq? Which, as it turned out, was started for dishonest reasons. You folks also were first with DMCA. Yet we don't have BS like filibuster and gerrymandering.

There's a good reason why on every half-serious index about freedom of speech or freedom of press, the best countries are Scandinavian and Switzerland, followed by West-Europe. And that data is from before the current orangutan is in office.
by kace91 | 2025-11-28 16:21:50+00:00
I'm not sure what you mean as evidence-free here.

Debates for public regulation should not be started by evidence-backed conclusions, but rather they are what pushes research and discussion in the first place.

Perhaps the conclussion to AI's impact on mental health is "hey, multiple high quality studies show that the impact is actually positive, let's allow it and in fact consider it as a potential treatment path". That's perfectly fine.

What is not fine is not considering the topic at all until it's too late for preventive action. We don't need to wait for a building burning before we consider whether we need fire extinguishers there.

My list is not made of complains at all, it's just a few of the ways in which we suspect AI can be disruptive, which are then probably worth examining.
by m101 | 2025-11-28 16:22:12+00:00
There's a big difference between:

"creating goods of actual value"

and

"creating goods of actual value for any price"

I don't think it's controversial that these things are valuable but rather the cost to produce use things is up for discussion, and the real problem here. If the price is too high now, then there will be real losses people experience down the line, and real losses have real consequences.
by imiric | 2025-11-28 16:22:32+00:00
Atuin seemed like an interesting way to sync shell history across machines. That wasn't a problem I personally had, but I could've seen myself giving it a try.

These recent developments with the Desktop tool, and now what seems like a Jupyter-like replacement for... shell scripts(?)... sounds completely alien to me. I'm sure it solves some problem for somebody, but it's far removed from any problem I've ever had. Good luck with the project, as it does look like a lot of work and thought went into it.
by Aurornis | 2025-11-28 16:22:47+00:00
I think limiting the recognition to repos that reach some level of significance would solve a lot of the problems.

It would anger the smaller projects and fresh projects, but it’s the only way to avoid having people create hobby projects or portfolio-filling slop repos and try to claim it as civic service.

This reminds me of a trend a few years ago when I started seeing a lot of applications from people who listed themselves as founders of a charitable foundation on their resume. I felt impressed the first time I saw it but got suspicious after the 3rd or 4th. Then I realized that it doesn’t take much work to incorporate a charitable foundation and list your family and friends as board members. The hard work was actually raising and disbursing money. When I started asking for details about how much the organization did I got wishy-washy answers and a lot of changing the subject. This is why details matter and it’s not as simple as giving everyone who claims an achievement the same reward, however small the reward may be.
by Frieren | 2025-11-28 16:23:32+00:00
This should be just the begging as Social Media companies will not be able to just declare themselves over the law on fraud claims.

Related:

- "Social media giants liable for financial scams under new EU law " https://www.politico.eu/article/social-media-giants-meta-tik...

- "Meta is earning a fortune on a deluge of fraudulent ads, documents show" https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortu...
by nyrikki | 2025-11-28 16:23:52+00:00
The tooling for that exists today in Linux, and it is fairly easy to use with podman etc.

K8s choices clouds that a little, but for vscode completions as an example, I have a pod, that systemd launches on request that starts it.

I have nginx receive the socket from systemd, and it communicates to llama.cpp through a socket on a shared volume. As nginx inherits the socket from systemd it does have internet access either.

If I need a new model I just download it to a shared volume.

Llama.cpp has now internet access at all, and is usable on an old 7700k + 1080ti.

People thinking that the k8s concept of a pod, with shared UTC, net, and IPC namespaces is all a pod can be confuses the issue.

The same unshare command that runc uses is very similar to how clone() drops the parent’s IPC etc…

I should probably spin up a blog on how to do this as I think it is the way forward even for long lived services.

The information is out there but scattered.

If it is something people would find useful please leave a comment.
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-11-28 16:24:16+00:00
It's the nature of bubbles to overpromise and underdeliver.

So - do Altman and Andreesen really believe that, or is it just a marketing and investment pitch?

A reminder that OpenAI has its own explicit definition of AGI: "Highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work."

The MS/OAI agreement quantifies that as "profits of $100bn/yr."

This seems rather stupid to me. If you can get multiple AGIs all generating profits of $100bn a year - roughly half an Apple, or two thirds of a Meta - you no longer have anything recognisable as a pre-AI economy, because most of the white collar population is out of work and no longer earning anything. And most of the blue collar population that depends on white collar earnings is in the same boat.

So you have to ask "Profits from doing what, and selling to whom?"

The Altman pitch seems to be "Promise it first, collect investor cash, and worry about the rest later."
by crazygringo | 2025-11-28 16:24:46+00:00
If all you need is a bag of named blobs and you just want quick reasonable compression supported across all platforms, why not?

If you don't need any table/relational data and are always happy to rewrite the entire file on every save, ZIP is a perfectly fine choice.

It's easier than e.g. a SQLite file with a bunch of individually gzipped blobs.
by hyperman1 | 2025-11-28 16:25:36+00:00
A father I know took was sitting in the bar of a swimming pool, his daughter swimming. He saw something wrong in the pool, grumbled, and took a picture to request repairs. He now, as a side effect, had a picture of zillions of 12 year old boys and girls in swimsuits. Some mother saw this happen and called him out, then the rumors started, and he ended up critiqued everywhere.

The good news: He still has a job. This took several weeks of negotiating, and he got the biggest possible warning the job could give him. The police is not prosecuting anymore.

Consensus of fathers here is: He's not a pervert, just someone who did not think things trough for a moment. But everyone agreed in him taking an extremely dumb risk. This is Western Europe, BTW.
by Kelteseth | 2025-11-28 16:25:45+00:00
Had the same issue. This is what Claude 4.5 Opus gave me:

This is actually a satirical piece, written as a fake credit rating report. It's mocking how Meta (Facebook's parent company) is using a complex financial structure to keep $27 billion in debt off its official books. Here's what's actually happening in plain English: The basic setup:

Meta is building a massive $28 billion data center in Louisiana Instead of borrowing the money directly (which would show up as debt on Meta's financial statements), they created a convoluted structure with multiple shell companies and a partner called Blue Owl Capital

The trick:

On paper, Blue Owl's company "Beignet" owns 80% of the project and borrows the $27 billion But Meta still guarantees all the rent payments, covers cost overruns, and promises to pay if anything goes wrong So economically, it's Meta's debt—they're on the hook for everything—but legally it's structured so it doesn't appear on Meta's balance sheet

Why the author thinks it's absurd:

Meta controls the project, uses the buildings, guarantees all payments, and bears all the real risk The only reason it's "not Meta's debt" is a technicality in accounting rules The author is essentially saying: "This is obviously Meta borrowing $27 billion with extra steps, and everyone pretends otherwise because the rules allow it"

The whole piece is written as if a rating agency is giving this deal an A+ grade while openly admitting the structure is ridiculous—it's a critique of how financial engineering and accounting rules let big companies hide their true debt levels.
by Qwertious | 2025-11-28 16:25:45+00:00
>And the driver does nothing because they don't want to get in a fight.

Historically, it wasn't even the driver's job - the bus would have 2 employees: the driver and the conductor. The driver would drive, and the conductor would go around collecting fares after everyone gets on the bus. The conductor could have the angry discussion with the fare-evader without interrupting the driver, and if need be, the driver and conductor could 2v1 the fare-evader.

At some point, before computers were on buses, they got rid of conductors. For "efficiency".
by p4bl0 | 2025-11-28 16:25:53+00:00
Relevant excerpts to understand what's at play here:

> (…) this is functionally Meta borrowing $27.30 billion for a campus no one else will touch, packaged in legal formality precise enough to satisfy the letter of consolidation rules and absurd enough to insult the spirit.

> The structure maintains a precarious technical separation that, under current interpretations of accounting guidance, allows Meta to keep roughly $27 billion of assets and debt off its own balance sheet while continuing to provide every meaningful form of economic support.
by 4ggr0 | 2025-11-28 16:26:04+00:00
quite shameful to me that SBB uses so much AWS stuff, considering the amount of IT workers it has. but what are you gonna do, MGMT hears about cloud being cheaper and better and proceeds to change the whole strategy. hope they'll seriously invest into own DCs again or at least use local providers.

considering how relevant SBB is to a functioning Switzerland it really feels like they should be in control of their own Infra.
by tialaramex | 2025-11-28 16:26:24+00:00
I'm not at all convinced I need to be read "charitably". I think it's just straightforwardly true that most people writing C++ with a std::unordered_map do not use this property of std::unordered_map.

In particular the "deleting arbitrary other entries while walking the unordered map" is a weird thing to be doing. It's not necessarily wrong but it's weird to need precisely this (which it so happens the std::unordered_map can do) but not e.g. inserting arbitrary stuff into the map (which might grow and thus invalidate your iterator)

Note that "Delete yourself if you want" is an operation we can afford in the otherwise more optimal containers, so if that is the only deletion you want then you again over-paid by choosing this weird container type with pointer stability.

I do not believe that Stepanov chose this particular hash table because this one had properties he specifically wanted, maybe you have a reference which can prove me wrong? I think this was the type he was most familiar with, and the STL is illustrating generic programming - an important idea - not showing off the most optimal data structures and algorithms.
by alecco | 2025-11-28 16:26:32+00:00
Datalog is much better but sadly its recursion model requires thinking harder so most people bail too early. SQL is easier to understand so it sticks.

SQL was designed with an English-like syntax so it could be used by non-programmers. Before SQL, business people would write in English what they wanted and a programmer had to write a program to execute the pseudo-query.

The pound of flesh: poor composability, ugly recursion (CTE), limited abstractions, and a "nightmare to parse".

-- SQL engine developer
by Aurornis | 2025-11-28 16:26:35+00:00
In a program like this you can’t optimize for the assumption that every participant is acting in good faith and contributing good work even if it’s not accepted.

If a program incentivizes opening PRs even if they’re not accepted, the result will be a lot of maintainer spam from people opening useless PRs. This isn’t a personal hypothetical, it’s what we observe any time programs try to incentivize open source work. See the Hacktoberfest drama of years past where the promise of a T-shirt led to spam PRs across GitHub https://joel.net/how-one-guy-ruined-hacktoberfest2020-drama
by arnsholt | 2025-11-28 16:26:42+00:00
I'm pretty sure the publishers are alleging that a crime has been committed. In that case, private parties can't open a suit (at least if Swedish criminal law is at all similar to Norwegian law), so this asks the police to open a criminal investigation into the matter. What happens next in the Norwegian system at least is that the police will conduct their investigation, and at some point when the police consider their investigations complete the prosecutor's office will decide what to do next. Next steps can be concluding that no crime has occured, to ask the police to investigate further, that a crime has been committed but the evidence are insufficient for a trial, or that someone should be tried.
by pfdietz | 2025-11-28 16:26:46+00:00
> There aren't any "spaces we haven't formalized"

Suppose that space of N points is partitioned into M relevant subsets, for now we assume of the same size. Then random sampling hits each of those subsets in O(M log M) time, even if we don't know what they are.

This sort of partitioning is long talked about in the testing literature, with the idea you should do it manually.

> what work is being offloaded

The need to write that program for explicitly enumerating the space.
by dymk | 2025-11-28 16:27:09+00:00
This is a weird article. It’s titled “how to use vsock” but 95% is how to set up Bazel, gRPC, and building a C++ project. And then 5% is a link to an off-site Twitter thread of screenshots for setting up a Linux VM image and running that in qemu.

This should have been a VM with a basic server and socat’ing the vsocket. I don’t know why so much space was dedicated to unrelated topics. Also zero qualifications or benchmarks for “fast” compared to tcp/virtio.

Author says “no ssh keys” when ssh is an orthogonal concept. sshd can listen on a vsock interface, it’s not specific to tcp/ip.

From the “Under the hood” section, which should be the part actually about vsock:

> I haven’t delved into the low-level system API for vsocks, as frameworks typically abstract this away.
by ramblenode | 2025-11-28 16:27:50+00:00
Here is my (hot take) proposal for regulation:

1) *All major players open source their unobfuscated training data.*

a) The evidence so far shows that every major AI company engaged in intentional and historically unprecedented copyright violation to obtain their training data.

b) LLMs have now poisoined future data for any new players. This is a massive negative externality, and we shouldn't accept this externality as a moat locking out future players from competition.

2) *Levy a 20% royalty on all future genAI revenue to authors and artists who appear in the dataset and exempt genAI from future copywright violations.*

a) The current copyright model is bad for both authors and AI companies. It's hard for authors to collect from violations, and it's expensive and tedious for AI companies to comply with innumerable individual copyrights. Simplify the regime for everyone, and properly reward the people whose work is the foundation of these models.

b) The specifics can be worked out, but, among other things, the royalty should be proprotional to the token count of a work, not just number of works.
by carlosjobim | 2025-11-28 16:28:12+00:00
Don't even get me started on Linux. No IT project has done more damage to the Internet than Linux, which has wasted billions of dollars worth of time for users and businesses of all kind. All because the allure of "free".

People used to be able to create and publish their own websites using only graphical interface software on their own home computers. Where did that go? Now you have to be a Linux system administrator to do the most basic online publishing, unless you want to be within somebody else's ecosystem.

How I wish that OS X would have won against Linux for servers, and normal people would have better access to express themselves online. But here I am, stuck with administering Linux servers...
by m0llusk | 2025-11-28 16:28:21+00:00
It seems that innovators, researchers, and founders all work at a fast pace, but adoption of new technology, especially LLMs, ends up being done by companies as is convenient. When an open position can go unfilled or a group can scale up without hiring then companies might move forward with a commitment to LLMs.

Even with strong adoption it may take many years for LLMs available now to reach their potential utility in the economy. This should moderate the outlook for future changes, but instead we have a situation where the speculative MIT study that predicted "AI" could perform 12% of the work in the economy is widely considered to not only be accurate, but inevitable in the short term. How much time is needed dramatically changes calculations of potential and what might be considered waste.

Also worth keeping in mind that the Y2K tech bust left behind excess network capacity that ended up being useful later, but the LLM boom can be expected to leave behind poorly considered data centers full of burned out chips which is a very different legacy.
by jjj123 | 2025-11-28 16:28:38+00:00
I cannot tell if the author would agree with this, but here’s my take:

There’s nothing wrong with using the ?? operator, even liberally. But in cases where 1) you don’t think the left side should be undefinable at all or 2) the right side is also an invalid value, you’re better off with an if-statement and handling the invalid case explicitly.

But I’ve used ?? thousands of times in my code in ways unrelated to 1) and 2).

Trivial example:

const numElements = arr?.length ?? 0

IMO this is fine if it’s not an important distinction between an array not existing and the array being empty, and gives you an easier to work with number type.
by permo-w | 2025-11-28 16:28:56+00:00
the power balance isn't relevant. the original commenter said that they find it funny that Europeans get upset about Trump pretending he'd take Greenland. honestly the comment just seems like deliberately triggering 4chan-esque fare with little to no value to it. the power balance is completely irrelevant. it's one territory not happy with another power coveting its territory. how bizarre and unexpected
by ndriscoll | 2025-11-28 16:29:11+00:00
Why not? Make a bash alias for `npm` that runs it with `bwrap` to isolate it to the current directory, and you don't have to think about it again. Distributions could have a package that does this by default. With nix, you don't even need npm in your default profile, and can create a sandboxed nix-shell on the fly so that's the only way for the command to even be available.

Most of your programs are trusted, don't need isolation by default, and are more useful when they have access to your home data. npm is different. It doesn't need your documents, and it runs untrusted code. So add the 1 line you need to your profile to sandbox it.
by randallsquared | 2025-11-28 16:29:31+00:00
As mentioned elsethread, it doesn't actually clean up anything, since it doesn't affect the waste at all, just turns some of the radiation into metabolism in the same way that plants turn solar radiation into metabolism.

Even if it did somehow accelerate the decay, it wouldn't be that useful, since (Chernobyl aside), all the waste from the typical civilian nuclear reactor can fit in a side lot on the site of the reactor complex itself (and often does!). There just isn't that much radioactive waste to clean up!
by f1shy | 2025-11-28 16:29:42+00:00
You make it sound as signing the petition will result directly in a law with exactly that text. It is just a petition, so that some commission on the parliament takes that idea, discuss, process it, and eventually will be integrated in a law, where all that concerns will hopefully be addressed. If you want to be sure this discussion is worked with your ideas and ideology, make sure to vote correctly in the parliamentary elections. But not asking the parliament to initiate a debate, because a term in there is “poorly” defined, seems to me, not the best way of action.
Ask HN: How to Differentiate a General Agent from Manus?
by bingwu1995 | 2025-11-28 16:29:56+00:00
I'm building a General Purpose Agent in the B2C space. The benchmark is Manus (autonomously execute complex, multi-step tasks over time).

I'm currently stuck in a strategic loop:

1. The Clone Trap: If I just build another "Chat + Tools" interface, I have no moat. Minor UI tweaks won't save a startup against a category leader.

2. The Hammer Trap: On the other hand, trying to differentiate often feels like "holding a hammer looking for a nail." I'm terrified of building rigid workflows or "innovative" features that users didn't actually ask for, just to look different.

The Question:

For a General Agent, does differentiation strictly have to come from narrowing the domain (niche vertical)?

Or is there a real opportunity to innovate on the interaction layer (beyond the chat box) without arbitrarily constraining the user?
by LocalH | 2025-11-28 16:30:02+00:00
I want to be able to use glasses with a camera, in situations which warrant it, to prevent people from gaslighting me or others about our conversations. Something like you see in dashcams, where it's always recording to a circular buffer of a few seconds to a minute, and then one can then enable "full" recording which dumps the buffer to storage and then starts saving everything until disabled.

I also live in a US state that only requires one-party consent to record a conversation, meaning it is fully legal in my state to record any conversation I am a participant in, regardless of the consent of the other participants.

How should this be reconciled?
by Aurornis | 2025-11-28 16:30:06+00:00
GitHub stars would be gamed immediately. You can already buy GitHub stars by the hundreds from spam services.

A better solution would be to require a written proposal which gets reviewed by someone who assesses against some criteria such as project age and other factors. Don’t make it too hard, but make it enough to stop the scheming individuals who think they’re going to start their own GitHub repo, set Claude Code loose in it once a week, and call it civil service.