MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by throwaway290 | 2025-11-11 05:35:40+00:00
Apparently this news is just that it's "not allowed" by ToS, but ChatGPT will still give advice so it doesn't really matter. I thought the new model already denied you advice because you said you used an older model, but I guess it was unrelated to this news.

By the way unless you used an anonymous mode I wonder how much the model knew from side channels that could contribute to suggesting correct diagnosis...
by ssl-3 | 2025-11-11 05:35:52+00:00
All OCR is untrustworthy. But sometimes, OCR is useful. (And I've heard it said that all LLM output is a hallucination; the good outputs are just hallucinations that fit.)

A few months ago a warehouse manager sent us a list of serial numbers and the model numbers of some gear they were using -- with both fields being alphanumeric.

This list was hand-written on notebook paper, in pencil. It was photographed with a digital camera under bad lighting, and that photograph was then emailed.

The writing was barely legible. It was hard to parse. It was awful. It made my boss's brain hurt trying to work with it, and then he gave it to me and it made my brain hurt too.

If I had to read this person's writing every day I would have gotten used to it eventually, but in all likelihood I'll never read something this person has written ever again. I didn't want to train myself for that and I didn't have enough of a sampleset to train with, anyway.

And if it were part of a high-school assignment it would have been sent back with a note at the top that said "Unreadable -- try again."

But it wasn't a high school student, and I wasn't their teacher. They were a paying customer and this list was worth real money to us.

I shoved it into ChatGPT and it produced output that was neatly formatted into a table just as I specified with my minimal instruction ("Read this. Make a table.").

The quality was sufficient to allow us to fairly quickly compare the original scribbles to the OCR output, make some manual corrections that we humans knew how to do (like "6" was sometimes transposed with "G"), and get a result that worked for what we needed to accomplish without additional pain.

0/10. I'm glad it worked and I hope I never have to do that again, but will repeat if I must.
by charcircuit | 2025-11-11 05:36:22+00:00
>Computer chips were not fast enough, nor disks large enough, nor compression sophisticated enough to display even 30 minutes of standard-definition motion pictures.

This is not true at all. Being compatible with outdated, film based projectors was much more important for being able to show it in as many theaters as possible. If they wanted to do a digital screening it would have been technologically possible.
by qingcharles | 2025-11-11 05:37:56+00:00
I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted. What you're hinting at is that a lot of original 35mms are now getting scanned and uploaded privately, especially where all the commercial releases on Blu-ray and streaming are based on modified versions of the original movies, or over-restored versions.

These can be especially hard to find as the files are typically enormous, with low compression to keep things like grain. I see them mostly traded on short-lived gdrives and Telegram.
by adventured | 2025-11-11 05:38:46+00:00
They'll sell off / spin-off the smaller businesses (which were held because of sentiment), simplify the business positions, and focus more on Abel's specializations. And Berkshire will lose some of the so-called Buffett premium. Impossible shoes to fill. They'll effectively break Berkshire up. A lot of that cash will go to stock buybacks as the Buffett premium vanishes.
by fsckboy | 2025-11-11 05:39:19+00:00
>I've been called out previously here for having unknowingly introduced some undefined terms to readers, and which they found to be perplexing.

i wasn't criticizing putting in a link; just put it in, it doesn't need layers of boiler plate [in this instance]

like, if i use the word sesquipedalian https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sesquipedalian

[in this instance] the square brackets add nothing but noise
by dwattttt | 2025-11-11 05:39:23+00:00
> It seems obvious that with hardware-level memory safety on the way[1], just gradually modernizing existing C and C++ codebases to take advantage of safer constructs (like smart pointers or checked arithmetic) makes much more sense than rewriting everything in Rust

I read this in the opposite way: if the hardware is going to be stricter about memory accesses being valid, that suggests that software is going to have to meet a higher standard in order to successfully run.

Imagine if you had to satisfy the Rust borrow checker, except you're still writing C and don't have additional tooling during compilation to show how a problem could trigger, you just have more crashes.
by jesse__ | 2025-11-11 05:41:10+00:00
Theoretically, the client/server don't have to be on the same machine, but in practice they mostly are.

As for the interface.. any language that can't speak the C ABI isn't a real language (read: they all can).. but this is besides the point.

Counterpoint; when's the last time you used an editor written in JavaScript and an LSP written in Haskell? I bet never.
by ChadNauseam | 2025-11-11 05:41:14+00:00
The value returned by `getValue b` has type `pickType b`. It cannot be used in a way that depends on its type until you check the value of `b`. If `b = True`, then you know that `pickType b = pickType True = Nat` and that therefore `getValue b` has type `Nat`. There is no option to check the type of a value at runtime. You simply cannot use it in such a way as to create a runtime type error. (This is what it means for the types to be erased. The runtime doesn't know what type it's supposed to be!)
by CGamesPlay | 2025-11-11 05:41:56+00:00
> You understand you can just screenshot the code part that is 80 characters wide? You don't have to screenshot the entire full-screen window?

Why are you telling me, the recipient of the crappy text screenshot, how to do it better?

Line-wrapping is also agitating, I'll give you that. Or worse yet, if the sender doesn't know how to use monospaced fonts in whatever app. I prefer a scrolling text box, which is basically a "pre-pinch-to-zoom'ed" screenshot. But with copy and paste and select. Which is even more useful on the phone, because of its limited symbols, so I can pull the relevant part, modify it, and reply.
by bon-cdp | 2025-11-11 05:44:42+00:00
A little update after thinking about it more, since its dependant on the character table for the cyclic subgroup with k (O(k)) (this is kinda the whole idea - to do so with Frobenius Reciprocity); o(p(n)^3) is kinda inaccurate, as it ends up being that character group operation plus around O(k*p(n)) plus potentially another p(n).
Show HN: Kerns, an AI interface to understand anything, better than NotebookLM
by kanodiaayush | 2025-11-11 05:45:02+00:00
I'm building out Kerns, as an AI environment for research. You can seed a space with a topic and multiple source documents, and complete your research completely in one space. There's interactive mindmaps for exploration, podcast mode, powerful source readers with original plus chapter level summaries that let you zoom into source on demand, a powerful chat agent that lets you control context and cite refs, and AI assisted note taking.

My goal is to have one place to do research on any topic which minimizes manual context engineering, and jumping around between chat/notes/readers.

Please let me know if you try it and have feedback!
by eviks | 2025-11-11 05:45:16+00:00
All of the points are mostly personal and thus should never be forced on anyone else via a screenshot (as a general rule, though depends on the content)

- no line wrapping destroys readability more since you can't toggle it in a screenshot. Imagine that url on the screenshot taking 3 lines instead of 1 and pushing useful text off screen. Also, forcing 80 on a user of a wider monitor is barbaric.

- And if there is no tabular data (and autoformatted code doesn't do tabular code) you've just lost nice proportional text for nothing

- Syntax highlighting as is commonly used (and as is shown in the blog screenshot) is useless, and is anyway unlikely to match reader's convention

> being read on a mobile device or in a narrow column.

So it can't even be read properly, you have to scroll the screenshot left and right... instead of just reading
by nineteen999 | 2025-11-11 05:45:53+00:00
I had a bunch of DEC Alpha's 21164 back in the late 90's I absolutely loved those machines except from the ARC/SRM firmware which was pretty horrible. We also had a Sparc64 board/CPU from Sun Microelectronics which we put in our tower case, added SCSI, video cards etc and ran Solaris. I also worked for a 3rd-party Sun clone maker around that time, we had piles of Sparc/Sparc64 boards sitting round.

UNIX probably won out due to licensing and the fact that it was available on x86-64 so much earlier - mainly Linux and BSD I guess but Solaris was there as well, VMS didn't boot on x86-64 until 2019.
by SilverElfin | 2025-11-11 05:49:36+00:00
Ask the railroad workers of BNSF about Buffet’s “integrity”. He’s responsible for them being rampantly abused. If you’re not familiar look up interviews with actual workers. They are asked to work insane hours and with little scheduling, and are unpaid when they’re waiting around. The (local) monopolization of the rail industry and constant lobbying against regulations by Buffet’s minions have let this continue to this day.

Let’s not forget Buffet also funded BYD significantly and is responsible for their growth, which basically is undermining his own country and European industry as well. Ultimately it’ll be responsible for putting masses of auto industry workers out of a job. I don’t see integrity as much as just basic private equity style capitalism.
by belZaah | 2025-11-11 05:50:28+00:00
It is doable and you can get presets designed to mimic the look of legendary photography film stock like Velvia. But what they did back then was very much an analog process and thus also inherently unstable. Small details start to matter in terms of exposure times, projectors used etc. There’s so many frames and it took so much time, that it’s almost guaranteed there’d be noticeable differences due to process fluctuations.
by sefrost | 2025-11-11 05:50:53+00:00
> There's no easy way out of this. One generation will effectively have to give up their welfare, but nobody wants to do this (understandable). The UK cannot afford to be the welfare state it wants to be.

It can be done over a period of time. Canada moved from a non-funded pension model like the UK currently has, to a partially funded model which currently has over $731 billion in assets.

They began this change in 1999. If they hadn't made that change in direction they'd be in a much worse situation today.

It's possible to change from one system to another, if a government is able to look much further ahead than its own term in government.

With the Canadian model, your payments out at the end are tied to what you put in. Which is not quite the case in the UK, which allows extremely low payments in for just 10 years to get a very high amount out indefinitely.

The British government must take the same path the Canadians took.
by SilverElfin | 2025-11-11 05:50:53+00:00
Seattle was highly functional for a while. When the tech industry grew, the region attracted a huge population of people from California and it destroyed the local and state politics. SF policies came to Seattle and in a worse way. SF has at least swung back a tiny bit but Seattle hasn’t, and it’s why there is rampant crime, trash, and encampments.
by FireBeyond | 2025-11-11 05:51:57+00:00
DEC/digital always made probably the most attractive computers beyond Apple (and I realize that both parts of that are subjective).

Their cases were far more white than beige, and generally fairly understated and subtle. (Although sometimes that backfired, because it was hard finding white peripherals - https://antnik.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/dec_... )

I owned the Digital Celebris in both a desktop and a mini tower configuration.
by Ferret7446 | 2025-11-11 05:52:32+00:00
Humans have indirectly accelerated the rate of evolution (or natural selection if you will), so I doubt it'd take millions of years. Entire ecosystems have changed more in the millennium of modern human activity than many millions of years before that. What makes evolution slow isn't so much evolution itself but the pressures of the environment; drastic, sudden environmental changes spur rapid evolution.
by jojobas | 2025-11-11 05:52:57+00:00
Export cars were made with some special care, for years buying a car destined for export was preferable to a brand new one built for domestic market, even if "scratch and dent".

My father always carried a bunch of membranes for the fuel pump, a spare accessories belt, distributor, fuses and possibly something else. Every item in the list was a result of limping somewhere with a vague hope of finding the part in stock - crap quality compounded with deficit made pretty much every trip a bit of a gamble. Driving schools also taught maintenance and troubleshooting, having a private car was perceived somewhat like a mechanic hobby.

I doubt it was the norm with Western/Japanese cars by the 70s.
by cuuupid | 2025-11-11 05:53:47+00:00
YMMV, my experience with DeepWiki is that it’s decent but the DX of the documentation is horrible and the diagrams are often just incorrect.

Worth mentioning this is a Cognition / Devin on-ramp and has been posted on HN a few times in just a couple months, feels a little sales-y to me.
Show HN: 3D Rubik's Cube Speed Cubing in the Browser
by kuneosu | 2025-11-11 05:55:15+00:00
A web-based 3D Rubik's Cube built with Three.js and React. I just added an English version to share it here on HN!

Features: - QWEASD keyboard shortcuts for fast solving - 16 camera angles - Speed cubing timer with online rankings - Undo/redo

I wanted to bring speed cubing to the web so people could compete online. Built this with Claude Code after learning Three.js. It takes a bit to get used to compared to a physical cube, but feedback welcome!

My best time: 1:14:361 https://rubiks-cube-sandy.vercel.app/
by chasil | 2025-11-11 05:55:18+00:00
I feel sorrow for him. I really do.

To be washed in an addiction, in his case, money, is to give up so much of life.

I hope that his end is free of regret, and that his passing is memory of the wonderful things that he was able to build for so many people that he didn't even know he touched.

I'm sure that the way will be found to do this, as it will be for us all.
by dclowd9901 | 2025-11-11 05:55:33+00:00
How can we get away from this mindset as a society, where craft and art are sacrificed at the altar of "it's not monetarily worth it."

There's a fucking lot of things that are not worth it monetarily, but worth it for the sake of itself. Because it's a nice gesture. Or because it just makes people happy. Not to sound like some hippie idealist, but it's just so frustrating that everything has to be commoditized.
by optymizer | 2025-11-11 05:57:46+00:00
We had a Lada Samara. It was considered a good car in the 90s. I have "fond" memories of helping my dad push the car to the nearest gas station whenever we ran out of gas - which was a few times a week, because we usually didn't have enough money to fill up the tank. Sometimes he'd drive me most of the way to school, the car would run out of gas, and then I'd walk the rest of the way. He'd then figure out a way to get just enough gas to drive the car back home.

My uncle had a Lada 2101 ("Kopeyka", i.e. "1 cent") and that was a rust bucket, but he also drove it on unpaved country hills for decades. He was growing watermelons and he used his Lada to transport the watermelons to the farmer's market. You would be amazed to see how many watermelons fit in that small car.

Both of these were better than my grandfather's Moskvich. I actually liked the rugged feel of the Moskvich, but it had a known design fault with the handbrake causing it to malfunction, so for uphill parking purposes, we always had to carry a brick or two in the trunk.
by Grom_PE | 2025-11-11 05:59:52+00:00
On my Linux system, I hooked up xfce4-screenshooter's "custom action" to a shell script (ocr.sh %f) with tesseract like so:

#!/bin/sh set -o pipefail lang=${2:-eng} if tesseract "$1" - -l $lang | xclip -selection clipboard ; then notify-send "Text copied" else notify-send "Could not copy text" fi

It works great most of the time along with the xfce4-screenshooter's ability to select a rectangle.

When the text is especially difficult for tesseract, I can use Gemma3-4B via llama.cpp's llama-mtmd-cli, but that takes a minute.
by codezero | 2025-11-11 06:00:02+00:00
I was the procurement guy for many years, and we had no HVAC guy - we were in a state university, and there was nothing special about the DVDs we bought, they were from Newegg and other retail places, we did buy the most expensive ones because our grants allowed us to, so maybe that's a factor.

I have no doubts (hence my anecdata statement) that there could be bad DVDs in there, or that maybe over a longer time horizon that the media would be cooked.
by intended | 2025-11-11 06:00:53+00:00
Ooh my kind of paper.

Also an older paper that I was introduced to, that exposed me to the concept of cascades sizes.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1517441113

And they went into it too:

> xtending the analysis to 50,220 fact-checking posts from dedicated debunking pages, Zollo et al. [288] find that corrective information remains almost entirely confined to the scientific echo chamber: approximately two-thirds of likes on debunk-ing posts come from science-oriented users, and only a small fraction of conspiracy-oriented users engage with such content. Sentiment analysis of comments, based on a supervised clas- sification model, reveals that responses to debunking posts are predominantly negative, regardless of the commenter’s orienta-tion. Strikingly, the rare conspiracy users who do interact with debunking tend to increase their subsequent activity within the conspiracy echo chamber, suggesting that exposure to dissent-ing information can reinforce rather than attenuate prior beliefs. Otherwise stated, results indicate that the spread of misinfor-mation online is less a problem of information scarcity than of entrenched structural and cognitive segregation, where homo-geneity and polarization govern the dynamics of both the diffu-sion of false narratives and the reception of their correction.

Use this the next time someone promises that online conversations naturally tend towards insight.
by catlifeonmars | 2025-11-11 06:01:14+00:00
I suppose that’s a more charitable assessment. I will say I’m salty because whenever I’ve seen it used, it’s to avoid doing research and avoid understanding a problem. Anecdata, but in my day job, I see people accepting the first plausible answer to a problem and walking away with at most a surface level understanding. Curiosity would be digging deeper and looking at the problem from multiple angles.
by Earw0rm | 2025-11-11 06:01:46+00:00
I share your surprise regarding LLM, is it fair to say that it's because language - especially formalised, written language - is a self-describing system.

A machine can infer the right (or expected) answer based on data, I'm not sure that the same is true for how living things navigate the physical world - the "right" answer, such as one exists for your squirrel, is arguably Darwinian: "whatever keeps the little guy alive today".
by tdb7893 | 2025-11-11 06:01:50+00:00
I'm flexible and I'll have a wide variety of marketable skills so I'm sure I'll figure something out eventually.

I think I come across as a lot less anxious than people expect because I've just accepted these challenges as a cost I'm going to have to pay. Trying to change careers so far has already really sucked in many ways (though in more ways it's been a real joy) but I actually handle this sort of stress okay. Turns out what I handle much worse is not really believing in my job.
by codezero | 2025-11-11 06:02:23+00:00
Yep, quality is definitely a factor here, as much as it can be. We had NSF funding pre-2008, so there was plenty of budget for quality media. We spared no expense, and while I stayed in a $60/night hostel in SF for conferences, our rewritable DVDs were the best money could buy at the time lol.
by resonious | 2025-11-11 06:03:34+00:00
Rust on CF Workers is horrible. >10x performance hit (compared to JS) for a non-trivial web app, and it's not only a 10x performance hit but 10x the cost since they charge for CPU time, and that's where the extra time is going.

Realistically for a low traffic app it's fine, but it really makes you question how badly you want to be writing Rust.

As far as I can tell, the problem stems from the fact that CF Workers is still V8 - it's just a web browser as a server. A Rust app in this environment has to compile the whole stdlib and include it in the payload, whereas a JS app is just the JS you wrote (and the libs you pulled in). Then the JS gets to use V8's data structures and JSON parsing which is faster than the wasm-compiled Rust equivalents.

At least this is what I ran into when I tried a serious project on CF Workers with Rust. I tried going full Cloudflare but eventually migrated to AWS Lambda where the Rust code boots fast and runs natively.
by bawolff | 2025-11-11 06:05:31+00:00
At the same time i dont think luck is something prople really want to hear about. It makes a terrible story.

You can't emulate luck, you can't control luck, you can't explain luck.

I suspect luck has less to do with Buffet's fortune than most billionaires since he's in investments, so he gets compared to other hedge funds with similar starting resources. He seems to have made it work over the long term and not just had one lucky break.
by kmoser | 2025-11-11 06:06:35+00:00
Last year I purchased a ticket to a Broadway show in NYC. I refused to use their digital ticketing nonsense, and when I showed up at the box office just before showtime and said my phone wasn't working (for my own definition of "working") they just handed me paper tickets. So I have to believe every one of these companies must have a way of issuing tickets when people's phones "don't work."
by catlifeonmars | 2025-11-11 06:08:08+00:00
I agree the best effort approach seems sane. Storage cost is typically dwarfed by compute and network I/O anyway. Overall AWS has very few guardrails and it would be useful to ask the user if they want to opt in to guardrails when they open an account. I’m thinking there are a handful of use cases that would have different defaults:

- student, learning how to use AWS: set a maximum spend limit and hard cutoff

- small business, running a website: ddos protection and compute limits, pause compute and alert user if spend goes over, giving them the option to raise the limit and/or resume

Etc etc
by WheelsAtLarge | 2025-11-11 06:10:02+00:00
I think we’ll adapt to whatever AI throws our way. Think about it when Excel came along, it took away a lot of the boring, repetitive stuff in accounting. The accountants who learned to use it didn’t lose out they actually did better. That’s just how technology works.

In IT, change has always been part of the job. You have to keep learning and adjusting. That’s nothing new. I don’t think that’s going to change anytime soon. Five years from now, the people who stay curious and flexible will still be the ones getting the best jobs. It’s always been that way, and it probably always will be.

One of the issues with the current crop of CS graduates is that they were sold on the idea that they could get a job once they graduate. But they never got the idea that IT changes fast. So part of the job is to always be learning new stuff to keep a job and get the next job. It's a hard career that way. So we'll see lots of CS graduates that could not keep up and are jobless or moved on to other fields.