MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by demetris | 2025-11-07 16:44:50+00:00
Author here.

I ran benchmarks comparing PNG, AVIF, HEIF, JPEG XL, and WebP for lossless compression of graphics images. Tested with 14 images.

The results are also available in a TXT file:

https://op111.net/files/2025/10/op111-20251015-png-modern-fo...

...and in a Google Sheets document:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1mwaHeIsDrNhE3NTKtszK...

Cheers!
by sowbug | 2025-11-07 16:44:53+00:00
You think you have a choice to buy local. It's more complicated than that.

"Local stores full of people you know and trust" is what advertising tries to approximate. Instead of forming lasting human bonds with shopkeepers and employees, we are informed by ads who we should patronize. And we pay, indirectly, for that service.

Private equity also takes its pound of flesh. Try hiring a local plumber. They'll always say they're locally owned and operated, which is a partial truth. But when you're charged $400 for 15 minutes of labor, remember that a lot of that revenue goes to private equity, far far away from your hamlet, whether you like it or not.
by D-Machine | 2025-11-07 16:44:56+00:00
> Either you're trusting a large number of individuals and therefore haven't done proper vetting, or you're trusting a small number of individuals and are vulnerable.

I don't think this is right at all.

A corporation (or organization) I know must necessarily put profit (or funding) first, before truth, if it wishes to survive for any duration. Ultimately, I know there is no real possibility for them to ever care about truth first. I can't vet a corporation, because the people controlling it are individuals who remain mysterious and inaccessible, or it is controlled by complex financial ties which are generally inscrutable. However, with how intermeshed things are, I can generally have faith that the financial and political pressures on large organizations will be more homogeneous than those on a collection of individuals not under the thumb of such an organization. Corporations and groups often don't even have a clear "personality" which one can make judgements on. You can notice a blogger going slowly crazy more easily than you can notice a large group being slowly corrupted by hidden influences.

By contrast, weird autists that seem to actually care about the truth can in fact be found blogging or on other forms of social media. They too have their biases, but, collectively, their biases seem to me to be far more diverse than the biases of large groups, and, in many cases, you do have reason to believe these people actually care about the truth.

It is, in my opinion, far, far better to follow a small number of weird autists than to trust a few large news corporations. Also, the wierd autists will tend to talk about what the news corporations are saying often anyway, whereas the reverse is not true.

I think that since a key part of your trust of the NYT involves whistle blowers, that this contradicts your basic position as well.

EDIT: To be clear though, I do think there is still a lot of value in news organizations. This whole dichotomy of "which should I trust more" is silly, since both have their advantages. I do hope news media sticks around and remains something that is somewhat trusted sometimes, and that people do like what I presume you and I do, relying on a mix of news media and particular individuals. Insofar as now that news media is no longer the only game in town, some decline in trust is warranted as the trust re-distributes somewhat, but I definitely hope that trust of the news media doesn't go to zero.
by KPGv2 | 2025-11-07 16:45:15+00:00
I think there's been a micro-boom in prestige periodicals. Until I kind of fell back out of love with tennis, I was a subscriber of Racquet, which is a really high quality print publication about tennis (and occasionally other racquet sports).

https://shop.racquetmag.com/products/issue-no-8?pr_prod_stra... if you're interested in seeing what a very nice tennis magazine looks like (links to shop because it's the best way to show contents)
by debugnik | 2025-11-07 16:45:19+00:00
That makes a lot more sense: The earliest 5.x releases weren't stable at all despite the non-prerelease version numbers. I waited for longer than I wanted to before upgrading from the LTS to 5, but right now it should be ok to switch as long as the few regressions, like the GC pacing issue, don't affect you workload.
by Mabusto | 2025-11-07 16:45:32+00:00
I think we'll start to see AI as any other tool that can atrophy your natural faculties. You can use a wheelchair to get everywhere, but your leg muscles will start to wither, but a wheeled vehicle for going longer distances is a genuinely useful tool.

Reaching for AI as a _substitute_ for thinking is bad, but reaching for it as a tool to assist thinking is good; you just need to be honest about whether it's your brain in the driver's seat or the chat bot.
by dangus | 2025-11-07 16:45:59+00:00
Some nice resources here: https://modding-openmw.com/

OpenMW is definitely the way to go for a fresh game.

There’s a lot of random advice I could give but here’s my important ones:

- Replace the vanilla leveling system.

- If you are playing a modpack with relatively vanilla mechanics, you want a magic-based character. Being bad at magic is a huge disadvantage in the vanilla game, it’s heavily biased toward glass cannons.

- Make sure you have a teleportation (mark/recall) mod. Many of them are balanced so that they don’t feel like cheating, but the vanilla game makes fast travel and traversal too tedious.
by rurp | 2025-11-07 16:46:00+00:00
I don't know how anyone can use the official reddit mobile app for more than 5 minutes. Between the ads and terrible interface it's an awful experience. But I also hate facebook so I'm clearly not the target audience for this stuff.

RedReader is a much better interface but lately has been having issues for me so I just haven't been using reddit. If and when they kill that client I'll be done with the platform.
by Havoc | 2025-11-07 16:46:01+00:00
Yeah I think it's a valid business strategy that you're entitled to do and to be clear wasn't meaning to imply any sort of ethical concerns.

Maybe this is a personal hangup my side but not a fan of paid services trying to extract additional value via other routes too - whether that's selling your data, taking up attention by bombarding me with marketing, cross-selling, showing me ads...or asking me to do guerilla marketing.

The closer companies stick to "I give you money, you give me service" the better I judge them. Maybe I'm just jaded...
by kulahan | 2025-11-07 16:46:22+00:00
Well that just obviously isn't true. If it were, who'd keep buying the stupid things? If nothing else, natural market forces would simply prop up the farmers who aren't wasting time and money following a completely inaccurate book.

In statistics, two things are simple: predicting the very next step, and predicting what happens in 100,000 steps. It's the part in between that's tough. Weather is a function of statistics, essentially. It's why we can tell what the weather will be like tomorrow, and why we can tell that La Nina is going to affect us this year, but why we can't tell what the weather will be like on a Thursday 4 weeks from now.
by cogman10 | 2025-11-07 16:46:32+00:00
Lots of things have happened that have ultimately harmed these small communities.

A major problem is consolidation. A small town hardware store may have had access to multiple suppliers at one point. Those all merged together and ultimately started raising their prices in a "go away" sense to small time purchasers. That's made it incredibly hard to be a store. A big box store gets a lot more foot traffic and has more leverage against distributers which allows them to ultimately outprice a small time store.

My hometown went through this. As a kid, it had a restaurant, a grocery store, a hardware store, and an automobile repair shop. 1 by 1 those all died. The restaurant died because the community never ate there. It became a thing where you'd literally call the owner the night before so they could prepare you a meal the next day. Otherwise they had no traffic. They were too expensive for my small town so nobody would buy a lunch there. The grocery store and hardware store died from being priced out. At one point, just to keep the shelves stocked the owner literally had to buy products from Walmart to sell at the store. No distributor would sell to them.
by x______________ | 2025-11-07 16:46:47+00:00
..The date is November 2050 and we've reached Windows 21 50H2, the latest version of the guide to unbloating W21 has just surpassed 100 pages and will be updated as folks continue finding ways to remove functionality; yet the arrests from the Co-Pilot-powered surveil-n-silence drones are frequent and high, stay safe out there! /s

Does anyone else find it disgusting at how much effort is required to debloat W11?
by random9749832 | 2025-11-07 16:47:21+00:00
Scams seem like the norm in 2020s. Crypto, Quantum Computing startups, "AI" (LLMs), Amazon delivering fakes, electric vehicles (what happened to all electric by 2030?). Yesterday I saw that the Playstation Store started doing "personalised discounts" where they will now discount the same game at different rates for different people within the same country without explicitly telling people.

Someone recently even tried to attempt scamming me when buying a burger by telling me if I want certain toppings without telling me it will cost more. Apparently now have to play mind games when buying a burger.
by hkpatel3 | 2025-11-07 16:47:35+00:00
Your credentials can be easily stolen through prompt injection in Comet and ChatGPT Atlas. Auth-Agent, in simple words, is sign in with google but for ai agents (OIDC Provider + OAuth 2.1).

It allows agents like browser use, browserbase, ChatGPT Atlas, Comet, easily authenticate across websites. Essentially, made for web agents and computer using agents. Feel free to comment here or raise an issue in the Github repo.
by HeinzStuckeIt | 2025-11-07 16:47:35+00:00
HN is definitely founded by a creepy VC firm and some of the posts get comments by startup-culture hustlers. But most posts don't. Instead you find the same broad population of people looking for news for nerds that used to be on Slashdot etc.

HN's interface, and showing just a username in a tiny font, honestly gives me less of that tiring feeling of people around me hustling a personal brand, than even the fediverse which is supposedly "healthy social media".
by tmerc | 2025-11-07 16:47:45+00:00
"IP theft" is a contradiction.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/intellectual_property https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/theft

Between these two pages, you should be able to understand why "ip theft" is a bogus term. It's specifically called out in the intellectual property article.

"Unlike other forms of property, intellectual property can be used by infinitely many people without depriving the original owner of the use of their property."

Whereas theft has this definition: "Theft is the taking of another person’s personal property with the intent of depriving that person of the use of their property."

My not-a-lawyer understanding is that we use a common law system in the USA. This means that the definitions for things are based on history, previous cases, and the statutes that have been codified into law. This is a good thing because redefining words can make previously legal actions become illegal. Allowing that to happen at the pace slang develops in the modern era means we will hold people to different standards based on how "hip" they are.
by mandevil | 2025-11-07 16:47:57+00:00
I spent a dozen years as a US defense contractor across a broad spectrum of places (from R&D for the future to working with E3's today), and worked at internet scale and start-up B2B stuff in the other dozen years of my working career.

I think that the major difference about deployed military technologies- in contrast to both military R&D and the entire commercial side- is that they are, by and large, incredibly rock solid and reliable. If they aren't, they don't actually get used. It takes a lot of effort to get them that way. I remember once at a testing ground for our robot tanks of the far future, right next door was an outdoor test-track. And they were testing a kitchen trailer (a kitchen for ~200 men that can be towed by a Humvee). And they drove it around the track continuously for three weeks, stopping only long enough to change drivers/vehicles, and the four times a day they would halt and make 200 people meals, and then pack up and get back to driving. This was one of several reliability tests that the kitchen trailer had to get through before it was accepted for service.

Our R&D stuff couldn't handle that (it needed 3-4 engineers to carefully monitor it at all times), but the stuff that needed to be in the hands of some random 18 year old with a two week training course had to be rock solid to use, do regular maintenance on, and fix, even when they were only getting four hours of sleep a night. If it wasn't up to that level, then the troops ended up ignoring it, leaving it behind when they went out to do their job. And by and large, from what I could tell, most of the stuff they had was that reliable. There were some cool things that we were doing in the R&D space, but we were a long way from that level.
by retrac | 2025-11-07 16:48:32+00:00
> with no support for updating fields

While it's not yet standard nearly all Standard ML implementations support what has become known as "Successor ML" [0]. A large subset of Successor ML is common to SML/NJ, MLton, Poly/ML, MLKit and other implementations.

That includes record update syntax, binary literals, and more expressive patterns among other deficiencies in Standard ML.

For me the two big remaining issues are:

1) There's only limited Unicode support in both the core language and the standard library. This is a big issue for many real-world programs including these days the compilers for which SML is otherwise a wonderful language.

2) The module system is a "shadow language" [0] which mirrors parts of SML but which has less expressiveness where modules cannot be treated as first-class values in the program. Also if you define infix operators in a module their fixity isn't exported along with the function type. (Little annoyance that gets me every time I am inclined to write Haskell-style code with lots of operators. Though maybe that's just another hint from the universe that I shouldn't write code like that.) Of course, the fix to that would be a fundamentally different language; not a revised SML.

[0] http://mlton.org/SuccessorML

[1] https://gbracha.blogspot.com/2014/09/a-domain-of-shadows.htm...
by 9rx | 2025-11-07 16:48:33+00:00
Yes. That concession is what gets one with limited means into an F-150. If it was sold at its true market value, absent of all value diminishing systems like tracking, they wouldn't be able to afford that either.

Same goes for roads. You most definitely can build roads that don't have traffic, but only the rich will be able to afford to use them. Traffic is what enables those of lesser means to also participate.

It's a pretty good tradeoff for those who are poor. And the rich can buy whatever they want anyway.
by r3tr0 | 2025-11-07 16:48:58+00:00
OTel's real bottleneck isn't the spec. It's the fact that it requires you to instrument the app itself. That couples your performance to the maturity of the least stable SDK you depend on.

eBPF solves this by reversing the model: instrument the system, not the application. Turn it on / off dynamically, zero redeploys, minimal overhead.

The missing piece is accessibility. Kernel-level observability exists; "normal engineers can use it" and good DX does not.
by lm28469 | 2025-11-07 16:49:13+00:00
> it leaves people less susceptible to manipulation

less ?

We went from a few selected and hand crafted local propaganda sources to world wide fully automated propaganda machines...

If I had to choose I'd chose the former personally. Information is always opinionated but i'd rather have my local flavor of propaganda over 3 channels and 2 newspapers rather than having foreign propaganda from all around the world drilling in the heads of my neighbours and family members 24/7.
by input_sh | 2025-11-07 16:49:24+00:00
Meta doesn't know anything, the last successful "product" that they built (as opposed to buying) was splitting off Messenger into a separate app.

Since then, they invested heavily in providing free internet that failed (Free Basics), wasted a bunch of money on some sort of a global cryptocurrency that never even launched (Libra/Diem), tried to invent a whole new market with VR and it went nowhere, and now they're going all in on "AI" but the only thing they have to show for it are some sort of celebrity-impersonating Instagram bot accounts and some glasses whose selling point is that they're branded as Ray-Bans.
by Telaneo | 2025-11-07 16:49:26+00:00
A pretty big part of theft is the victim no longer having whatever is stolen. When I steal your car, phone, bike or milk, you no longer have it, and no longer enjoy the benefit of it. I'm fairly certain that's the part of theft most people have a problem with. If I zap your car and produce a perfect duplicate, and drive that duplicate away, leaving your car as if nothing had ever happened, other than minutiae like the VINs and licence plates being identical, I cannot imagine anyone having a problem with that. Nobody is going to call that theft. If you still believe that's theft, then I cannot understand where you're coming from.

This does not hold true for copyright infringement. When I copy Die Hard 3: The Expendables' Return of the Jedi, the original owner/copyright holder still has it. As they still have it, I have not deprived them of their work or good, and calling it theft makes about as much sense as me making a copy of the milk in your fridge and taking that copy.
by scott_w | 2025-11-07 16:49:58+00:00
> Meta desperately wants to avoid being regulated. One way they can avoid it is to help make the out-of-band justice system (much) more efficient such that they avoid messy moderation policies and don't need to be regulated anymore.

I might have bought that but a delayed flight spent reading Careless People swiftly disabused me of any such notions.

> In any event, I think reforming the US justice system is way overdue; it is far too expensive and time-consuming for most matters, and that means we live in a place with de facto lack of courts. And I don't like that.

Most countries have regulators that come with teeth, such that the only times they need to go to court are to confirm they have the teeth they're using. After that, companies fall in line. From the outside, it seems the USA does not have this system and has no desire to develop such a system.
by jfengel | 2025-11-07 16:50:01+00:00
Some of that is the coding standards rather than the framework. I think Dan Abramov did a hang-up job on React, but his naming conventions and file structure are deranged.

Unfortunately there isn't any one preferred alternative convention. But if you ignore his and roll your own it will almost certainly be better. Not great for reading other people's code but you can make your own files pretty clear.
by embedding-shape | 2025-11-07 16:50:16+00:00
It's a different way of doing quantization (https://huggingface.co/docs/transformers/en/quantization/mxf...) but I think the most important thing is that OpenAI delivered their own quantization (the MXFP4 from OpenAI/GPT-OSS on HuggingFace, guaranteed correct) whereas all the Q8 and other quantizations you see floating around are community efforts, with somewhat uneven results depending on who done it.

Concretely from my testing, both 20B and 120B has a lot higher refusal rate with Q8 compared to MXFP4, and lower quality responses overall. But don't take my word for it, the 20B weights are tiny and relatively effortless to try both versions and compare yourself.
by jitl | 2025-11-07 16:50:23+00:00
It's private code in our monorepo

EDIT: we actually have two. The one we use for Node, the author plans to open source it eventually. That one is drop in replacement for Span and Trace classes and Just Works with upstream Otel. Main blocker is that we have some patch-package to fix other performance issues with upstream, and need to make our stuff work with non-patched upstream.

The one we use for Workers is more janky and doesn’t make sense to open source. It’s like 100 total LoC but doesn’t have compatibility with existing Otel libraries.
by bensonn | 2025-11-07 16:50:38+00:00
I wonder how much of Meta the corporation is a scam waiting to crumble. Hundreds of billions of dollars can make people do questionable things. -their revenue is 99% ads with more than 80% coming from FB and IG -they can only sell ads if they have a large and active user base -DAP (daily active people) is reported publicly but calculated internally -ad spending, views, and engagement are calculated by Meta's own platform

Anecdote (why I think it is a scam)- I had a FB account, I needed it for a previous job but didn't want it. I set up a random email address at a host I had never used, had a made-up FB name, and used a password generator for both the email address and FB accounts. My FB account had almost no activity besides viewing company posts. FB was only used from a single desktop computer. Passwords were stored in my (local only desktop) password manager.

After a couple years, FB emailed me and claimed my account was hacked. The "hacker" changed my profile picture (was a blank avatar icon) to an AI photo of a random guy. Facebook says it is hacked but they keep it visible, my two friends are still friends with the old account (they know it was hacked). FYI - I didn't care enough to send them a copy of my ID, nor did my ID match my user name, so I couldn't reclaim my account.

How would a hacker combine a random username, with a random email (has not been pwnd) only used for FB, guess a ~20 character random password, etc? And why, to steal an account with no followers and to do nothing with the account? That is a lot of work and criminal charges for nothing.

I am fine with FB saying the account was hacked and closing it. It has been years and the account is still live. Is it "active" and counted towards their users? They have a HUGE financial incentive to keep and count all accounts, and they have no oversite to verify accounts since it is all calculated internally with opaque algorithms.
by hrimfaxi | 2025-11-07 16:50:44+00:00
They settled out of court, that doesn't mean that they were found to be in breach of the terms.

These were some of the notable elements (worth noting that none mention breaching terms of service):

> Damages: Judgment in the amount of $500,000 is entered against hiQ, with all other monetary relief waived.

> CFAA liability: hiQ stipulates that LinkedIn experienced losses sufficient to, and “may establish liability” under a CFAA civil claim “based on hiQ’s data collection practices and based on hiQ’s direct access to password-protected pages on LinkedIn’s platforms using fake accounts.”

> California “CFAA”: hiQ stipulates that LinkedIn “may establish civil liability” under California’s state-law counterpart to the CFAA based on hiQ’s data collection practices, use of fake accounts and other means to evade detection by LinkedIn, hiQ’s direct access to password-protected pages on LinkedIn’s platforms using fake accounts, and hiQ’s unauthorized commercial use of data.

> Trespass: hiQ stipulates that LinkedIn has established judgment as to liability under California law for the common law torts of trespass to chattels and misappropriation.

> Irreparable harm: hiQ stipulates that LinkedIn has established that it has suffered an irreparable injury and that LinkedIn satisfied the remaining factors and is entitled to a permanent injunction.

https://natlawreview.com/article/hiq-and-linkedin-reach-prop...