MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by graemep | 2025-11-16 17:05:05+00:00
Its not that hard to balance, but it takes individual attention. Learning is intrinsically fun and you need to avoid turning it into drudgery.

I home educated by kids from about eight up to sixteen when they had done GCSEs (exams school kids in the UK do at 16). I very rarely had to force them to do anything, but I did have to make an effort to find the right approach to make things interesting.

I think the solution is to let kids do what they choose but intervene if they are not learning at all. This takes judgement and knowing them as individuals.

You could do it in schools if you have a very low student-teacher ratio (I say below 10 to 1 - so in the UK you would need about double the number of teachers in the state system), trusted teachers' judgement over metrics, and had more flexibility about learning to individual needs rather the prescribing exactly what kids need to learn at a particular age.
by hdgvhicv | 2025-11-16 17:05:16+00:00
Depends on over provision then. If lowest demand in the grid is 20GW, average 30GW highest demand is 50GW then you need to be able to generate 50GW, despite nuclear costs only being specced assuming they can always find 20GW of customers.

It’s the same problem as wind has where demand and supply are variable.

Nuclear cant scale up in an affordable cost as the first GW is amortised over 8,760 hours a year, but the top 10GW is only needed 50 hours a year. If it’s £8760 to generate 10GW for a year, that means you have to spend £43,800 to be able to cope with a peak of 50GW, but the average demand of 30GW means the average cost is £14,600 - 65% more than the average “base load”
by cbarrick | 2025-11-16 17:05:23+00:00
Same algorithm in Rust finds 2172315626468283465 in about 3 seconds on my M1 Pro.

$ time cargo run --release Finished `release` profile [optimized] target(s) in 0.02s Running `target/release/p45` 0 1 40755 1533776805 57722156241751 2172315626468283465 cargo run --release 2.95s user 0.04s system 98% cpu 3.029 total

Runs on the Rust Playground too: https://play.rust-lang.org/?version=stable&mode=release&edit...
by aspenmayer | 2025-11-16 17:05:41+00:00
I’ve been watching a lot of interviews with David Lynch lately (RIP), and apparently he was a longtime practitioner of meditation, and he even wrote a book about it. Your words, especially the “paint sprayer for agency” resonated with me and reminded me of the way he would describe expanding consciousness through meditation.

I appreciate your insight.

Here’s an interview where he describes a bit about his meditation practice. The entire video is worth a watch, but for the sake of brevity, I have linked directly to the timestamp referenced.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=FPb-eTI5jZE&t=597s

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catching_the_Big_Fish
by zkmon | 2025-11-16 17:06:24+00:00
>>immense benefits ??

People with dialup telephones never asked for a smartphone connected to internet. They were just as happy back then or even more happy because phone didn't eat off their time or cause posture problems.

Sure, shopping was slower without amazon website, but not less happy experience back then. Infact homes had less junk and people saved more money

Messaging? sure it makes you spend time with 100 whatsapp groups, where 99% of the people don't know you personally.

It helped companies to sell more of the junk more quickly.

It created bloggers and content creators who lived in an imaginary world thinking that someone really consumes their content.

It created karma beggers who begged globally for likes that are worth nothing.

It created more concentration of wealth at some weird internet companies, which don't solve any of the world problems or basic needs of the people.

And finally it created AI that pumps plastic sewage to fill the internet. There it is, your immensely useful internet.

As if the plastic pollution was not enough in the real world, the internet will be filled with plastic content.

What else did internet give that is immensely helpful?
by Cosi1125 | 2025-11-16 17:06:50+00:00
"Socialists"* argue for more regulations; "liberals" claim that there should be financial incentives to not do that.

I'm neither. I believe that we should go back to being "tribes"/communities. At least it's a time-tested way to – maybe not prevent, but somewhat allieviate – the tragedy of the commons.

(I'm aware that this is a very poor and naive theory; I'll happily ditch it for a better idea.)

--

*) For the lack of a better word.
by card_zero | 2025-11-16 17:07:30+00:00
Learning is not a slog. Cramming for exams, that's a slog, but only tenuously relates to learning.

OK, so sometimes a person may get all fired up about a project and slog through reams of - effort - in order to get some stage done, out of a deep desire to see what happens next. And from an external perspective that seems very worthy because it seems deeper than something that's just constantly rewarding. But is it necessary, proper, that any given person be doing such a deep and onerous thing all the time? Or even very often? Is it for the external observer, who knows nothing of the person's internal processes and feelings, to decide these things? Mind your own beeswax.

Crack doesn't count, IMO, because it games the system. Probably now you'll say something to compare Roblox unironically to crack "because dopamine". Did you know, we get dopamine released when doing anything we enjoy? But there's always a lot of people ready to claim that electronic devices are literally addictive, because it's a trendy thing to say, and the pressure of this opinion is like a physical force, a great gaseous mass of idiots. I shouldn't have got involved with this conversation, I have important video games to play.
by antonvs | 2025-11-16 17:07:42+00:00
Presumably this is all referring to Alexander Wang, who's 28 now. The data-labeling company he co-founded, Scale AI, was acquired by Meta at a valuation of nearly $30 billion.

But I suppose the criticism is that he doesn't have deep AI model research credentials. Which raises the age-old question of how much technical expertise is really needed in executive management.
by ACCount37 | 2025-11-16 17:07:49+00:00
Somewhat true.

Ablation in post isn't good enough - it usually does 10% of "expunge the data you want expunged", 70% of "make the data you want expunged less accessible", and 20% of "collateral damage". Training for refusals doesn't damage the capabilities much - it just make them harder to access. If someone has access to model weights, neither holds. GPT-OSS was SOTA at removing unwanted capabilities, and even that didn't hold for long.

Now, dataset curation/filtration does help against select capabilities. But a lot of capabilities are double edged, and can't be deleted without hurting performance at the task you want.

If an AI is good at coming up with novel ways to perform chemical synthesis, it can be reused to come up with pathways for synthesizing illegal drugs or poisons, no way around that. If an AI is good at writing software, it can be reused for writing malware. If an AI is good at autonomously finding vulnerabilities in your own network, it can be reused to do the same in some other dude's network.

AI may have an alignment, but raw capabilities sure don't.
by p-e-w | 2025-11-16 17:08:55+00:00
FWIW, I already used Heretic to decensor gpt-oss-20b [1], and it works just fine. Note that the number of refusals listed on the model card is actually an overestimate because refusal trigger words occur in the CoT, even though the model doesn't actually end up refusing in the end.

[1] https://huggingface.co/p-e-w/gpt-oss-20b-heretic
by rootnod3 | 2025-11-16 17:09:55+00:00
Yes, but I also think that the BSDs are the last bastions you will find any AI usage in. And I for one am grateful for that.

I like it when my system comes with a complete set of manpages and good docs.

But you mentioned Flox, which I didn't even know about. First I thought that's what they renamed the Nix fork to after the schism, but now I see it's a paid product and yuck...just further deepens my believe in going more bare bones manual control, even if sometimes bothersome.
by hdgvhicv | 2025-11-16 17:09:56+00:00
What good is a “base load” when the problem is peak demand. You’re saying nuclear gets to take the easy stuff and another industry can worry about peaker plants.

I suspect you need far ledd in peaker capacity - both GW and GWh - with a 100% wind than 100% nuclear if you spend the same amount on wind and nuclear.
by zackmorris | 2025-11-16 17:10:37+00:00
I'm not a frontend developer, I knew about ::before and ::after, but just learned about adjacent sibling combinator +, general sibling combinator ~ and :has() after reading your comment. Maybe every character in the text could be wrapped in a <span> via Javascript where the class name is the unicode value (in hex, say). Then css could tighten the spacing and simulate kerning for certain character combinations:

text: it html: <span class="69">i</span><span class="74 sarcastic">t</span> css: /* could also use ch or ex instead of em */ .69 + .74::before { margin-left: -0.1em; } .sarcastic { transform: skewX(-10deg); } /* loosen spacing a bit for certain randomness */ .69 + .74.sarcastic::before { margin-left: -0.05em; }

Maybe the type of randomness applied could be set as additional classes on the character, limited only by imagination (I added .sarcastic as an example). Maybe AI could be trained on sample text to tidy up the kerning for a large number of permutations, althought the generated css could get quite large.

I asked AI if there's a way to apply css to specific characters instead of selectors, but unfortunately that doesn't seem to be possible (yet). It feels strange to live in a world where I could have just asked AI to do all of this for me in an online sandbox in less time than it took me to write this comment :-/
by lawrjone | 2025-11-16 17:10:54+00:00
This is my colleague Mike’s write-up about using bloom filters to make our list alerts endpoint much faster for filtering and pagination.

In a past life I’d struggled a lot with a public API that had some really tricky pagination performance problems. It was something we were always fighting, be it awkward edge case data shapes or the Postgres planner having bad statistics, where everything would get difficult past >5TB in the table.

Was really happy to see the team find a solution that feels scalable and can be generically applied to a lot of our endpoints at incident. Quite a great outcome where I think we’ll be safely scalable for the next few years instead of hitting other problems that would crop up had we gone with gin indexes or otherwise.
by abathur | 2025-11-16 17:10:57+00:00
There's quite a lot of pricing data available for the energy market and it might be possible to approximate battery profitability by rerunning normal and long-tail history.

See https://www.ercot.com/mktinfo/prices and https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards and https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards/energystoragere... for example.
Show HN: PolyAgora – A natural-language multi-agent OS built with GPT-5.1
by takeshi_sakamo | 2025-11-16 17:11:27+00:00
During a two-day trip I ended up building a 6-agent conversational OS with GPT-5.1 — using only natural-language instructions, no code.

It’s called PolyAgora.

What it is: - A natural-language multi-agent “OS” with 6 agents - Built around a tri-axis core (Arc–Ann–Saku) + 3 supporting agents - Designed to produce long-form, philosophy-grade conversations - Dynamic objection engine + topic-shift mechanics - Emergent behavior, not pre-scripted roleplay

I’m not an ML engineer. This grew organically out of wanting to have deep small-talk with GPT-5.1 during a short trip — and it evolved into a structured OS.

Repo (docs + long examples): https://github.com/Takeshi-Sakamoto5/PolyAgora

I’d love feedback from HN: - Is this structure useful for multi-agent reasoning research? - Does the emergent conversation quality seem meaningful? - What would you add/change for v1.1.0 (I plan to include a “runaway dialogue” example)?
by p-e-w | 2025-11-16 17:11:37+00:00
Please let me know if you encounter any problems with the 120b! I'm really interested in how well it will work. When presented with the Pareto front at the end, I recommend choosing a configuration with a KL divergence below 1, even if the refusal rate seems high. The gpt-oss models are trained to do an internal monologue about refusing in the CoT, so the actual refusal rate is often substantially lower because Heretic's refusal classifier gets confused by the trigger words.
by eigenspace | 2025-11-16 17:11:48+00:00
Sorry if I was unclear, but what I was saying was that this would be unsustainable because the only way it'd be possible is if Valve was subsidizing each unit in hopes of recouping their losses on Steam game sales.

If that happened, Valve would get bankrupted by companies buying up subsidized Steam Machines with no intention of playing games on them.
by andsoitis | 2025-11-16 17:12:00+00:00
> That's the "I'm not racist, I have a Jewish friend" thing isn't it? Failing that, President Trump is undeniably among the least authentic of us.

Why jump to racism?

I'm just talking about the president participating in a festival celebrated by Hindus, Jains, Sikhs, and Buddhists.

The news media mostly don't paint this kind of picture, or at least, I have not been exposed to it. Have you?

Or maybe you're telling yourself that a raging racist president is lighting Diwali candles in the White House for "show"? I dunno, doesn't compute for me.
by pessimizer | 2025-11-16 17:13:05+00:00
There isn't any educational technology. There are (and have been, for decades, accomplishing nothing) a bunch of companies trying to come up with ways to exploit educational institutions to create revolving income streams and failing. Letting kids access the internet at school is just an admission of complete failure, being bad at blocking bad sites doesn't make that failure any worse.

No phones, no internet at school. If you can't bring enough material into the building within books and teacher's brains to teach, you're terrible and pointless. Leave the screens to their software and programming classes.

I'd say it will be a blessing when this debacle is replaced with AI, except the AI will also come from the revolving income stream guys, and will also have children's well-being as an afterthought. It will be the same failure, but with 4x the margin going to 1/100 the previous number of vendors, just like every "tech advance" in the past decade.
by graemep | 2025-11-16 17:13:14+00:00
I agree that an 18 year old is not fully developed, but they have to be able to make sensible decisions by the time they are legally an adult, because you have no means of stopping them any more. At the very least enough sense to know when they need to ask for advice.

Heinlein is right in principle but its a big ask. can do quite a bit of that list, but I have never butchered a hog or conned a ship or planned an invasion. I am pretty sure I could pitch manure but finding out whether you can die gallantly is likely to be the last thing you find out.
by bobnarizes | 2025-11-16 17:13:14+00:00
Hi, thanks for the feedback.

1. A Homebrew option isn’t available yet, but it’s something I’m open to exploring. Homebrew doesn’t currently support payments or license handling for paid apps, so Floxtop doesn’t fit perfectly into their workflow. For now, it’s available via direct download from the website.

2. Multi-language support. Yes — I’m actively working on this. Which languages would be most important for you? That helps me prioritize.

3. Moving files to mounted folders (e.g., Google Drive) Great suggestion. I’ll look into this, as supporting mounted cloud folders could be very helpful for many users.
by Zetaphor | 2025-11-16 17:13:44+00:00
The multipoint spec was added to Bluetooth 4.0 in 2010:

https://www.bluetooth.com/specifications/specs/core-specific...

The Battery Service 1.0 spec was officially adopted in 2011:

https://www.bluetooth.com/specifications/specs/battery-servi...

The first airpods were released in 2016...

Please consider that simping for a trillion dollar company might actually not be in your best personal interests...
by StellarScience | 2025-11-16 17:13:57+00:00
Exactly. Unlike Java where every object inherits from Ojbect, in C++ multiply inheriting from objects with a common base class is rare.

Some older C++ frameworks give all their objects a common base class. If that inheritance isn't virtual, developers may not be able to multiply inherit objects from that framework. That's fine, one can still inherit from classes outside the framework to "mix in" or add capabilities.

I've never understood the diamond pattern fear-mongering. It's just a rarely-encountered issue to keep in mind and handle appropriately.
by II2II | 2025-11-16 17:13:57+00:00
A bit misleading, albeit in an impressive way. I nearly skipped the article thinking that it would be an all FPGA solution. Instead, they interfaced somewhat period correct chips: the V20 was used in XT compatibles of the era, the DAC was authentic (even if it is only a small part of the sound card), and the 1 MB RAM chip is the sort of cost cutting measure they would have used back in the day if it was available (though it would likely have been DRAM rather than SRAM). The rest being on an FPGA is certainly understandable since it was listed as an FPGA based project!
by prabhatsharma | 2025-11-16 17:14:06+00:00
>There are no other open-source solutions offering the same scalability, period.

I love it when people take a hard stand like this, using the words "period"

BTW, Cortex is used as Amazon Managed Prometheus (Probably at a much larger scale) than Mimir by AWS.

OpenObserve too, is already being used at a multi-petabyte scale.
by nozzlegear | 2025-11-16 17:14:10+00:00
> Can't we build a social network with a simple protocol:

> 1: Each user has a private key that they use to sign their messages.

> 2: Each user keeps a list of instances who announced that one of their members follows them. When the user posts something, they broadcast the post to those instances.

> Shouldn't this be enough?

> It could all be url based. One user, one url.

I might be misremembering how it works, but this sounds conceptually similar to how Ghost (the blog platform) works after their recent 6.0 update. They now support federation, posting on Bluesky and Mastodon, etc.
by p-e-w | 2025-11-16 17:14:11+00:00
The alignment has certainly become stronger though. Llama 3.1 is trivial to decensor with abliteration and Heretic's optimizer will rapidly converge to parameters that completely stomp out refusals, while for gpt-oss and Qwen3, most parameter configurations barely have an effect and it takes much longer to reach something that even slightly lowers the refusal rate.
by thewebguyd | 2025-11-16 17:15:18+00:00
When you pair AirPods with a non-Apple bluetooth device, you lose the automatic device switching is all. You can still "enter and exit" the Apple ecosystem with them by just going into Bluetooth settings and tapping on the AirPods and they'll reconnect to Apple-land and start switching again, and vice versa. Once paired with, say, Windows, it'll auto-connect or you can manually trigger it by just tapping them in Bluetooth settings.

Once paired, AirPods just work like any other bluetooth headphones.
by oofbey | 2025-11-16 17:16:04+00:00
Sounds like you have a flaky / damaged device or bad cables. If there really was some kind of conspiratorial timer requiring you to use 1P cables it would certainly be documented. Can’t hide that stuff. Loads of people use Apple devices with 3P cables all the time and they work just fine, as long as the cables aren’t junk. There really are quality and capability differences in USB C cables. Just because it looks right and physically connects doesn’t mean it can electrically do all the things.
by bsamarji | 2025-11-16 17:16:21+00:00
Thanks for the feedback, I hope you check out the app! Yes I know it is similar, I actually went through several different names. I started with PassMaster and then PassMan. PassMan was already taken on PyPI, and PassMaster was also quite long to use for a cli command. I liked Keepr as it is short to type out and I like the connotations it has to keys, secrets and security!
by necovek | 2025-11-16 17:16:49+00:00
Unicode is an attempt to encode the world's languages: there is not much to like or dislike about it, it only represents the reality. Sure, it has a number of weird details, butnif anything, it's due to the desire to simplify it (like Han unification or normal forms).

Any language runtime wanting to provide date/time and string parsing functions needs access to the Unicode database (or something of comparable complexity and size).

Saying "I don't like Unicode" is like saying "I don't like the linguistic diversity in the world": I mean sure, OK, but it's still there and it exists.

Though note that date-time, currency, number, street etc. formatting is not "Unicode" even if provided by ICU: this is similarly defined by POSIX as "locales", anf GNU libc probably has the richest collection of locales outside of ICU.

There are also many non-Unicode collation tables (think phonebook ordering that's different for each country and language): so no good sort() without those either.
by graemep | 2025-11-16 17:17:33+00:00
I very much agree that learning is not a slog, and its sad that people are educated in ways that leaves them believing that learning has to be a slog.

Where I disagree with you is that I do think it is true that some things are addictive and are designed to be addictive (social media is), but its the things people do on devices that are addictive, not the devices themselves.

I agree "dopamine release" is not a bad thing per se, but when businesses hire psychologists to figure out how to get people to spend more time on their app people are being manipulated in a disturbing way.

Edit - inserted missing "not"
by SoftTalker | 2025-11-16 17:17:41+00:00
Which is a bit strange because at NeXT, Jobs initially focused only on institutional (mostly .edu) customers and not end users. They included services like NetInfo for centralized configuration management.

I guess because NeXT ultimately failed as a business, he didn't repeat that approach upon returning to Apple?

Apple was also quite dominant in K-12 sales in the pre-internet era.
by nekusar | 2025-11-16 17:17:56+00:00
> Whenever you try to remove religion the void fills up with something, and that something is demonic.

I've heard that exact type of comparison before, and it's from those fundamentalist christians. You find out quickly, that "everything is the devil or demonic" that wasn't written down in a bronze-age book and interpreted and translated the snot out of, over a game of telephone played over 2000 years. Most of which was done by illiterates.

Better yet, lets look at what the opposite of this demonic is - judeo-christian values.

1 Samuel 15:3 "Now go, attack Amalek, and proscribe [kill and dedicate to YHWH] all that belongs to him. Spare no one, but kill alike men and women, infants and sucklings, oxen and sheep, camels and asses!"

That god sounds like a petty tribal warlord. Really? Genocide? Even kill the infants and animals?!? And this is what's being accepted as good and holy? And when Saul (king) spared the Amalekite king and some animals, even that benevolence was rewarded with destroying Saul.

Petty. Tribal. Warlord.

And yeah, I've actually read the Torah and New Testament and Koran. I know what I disagree in, and I see how our culture are still afflicted by all this historical religious baggage.
by antonvs | 2025-11-16 17:18:01+00:00
Kubernetes can be a godsend at larger orgs.

We have six dev teams and are just about done with migrating to k8s. It's an immense improvement over what we had before.

It's a version of Greenspun's tenth rule: "Any sufficiently complicated distributed system contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Kubernetes."