MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nickpp | 2025-11-25 11:39:21+00:00
> a system designed not for human flourishing but pure profit

But please, don't be coy: tell us about that other system that is designed for "human flourishing" - we're dying to learn about it.

Because I grew up under communism and I lived its miserable failures: the non-profit system didn't even manage to feed, cloth or warm/cool us.

> new human-focused modes of living and organizing society

Oh, these sounds sooo promising. Please do tell us: would you by any chance be willing to use force to "convince" the laggards of the benefits of switching? What if some refuse to believe your gospel? Will you turn to draconic laws and regulations?
by mrtksn | 2025-11-25 11:40:05+00:00
IIRC Andrej Karpathy in a recent talk made a point that reading a book isn't like memorizing the book, it's more like prompting the brain with the book.

So maybe this concept of being ready to go at birth isn't about the animals ability to start doing things but just a way of upbringing regardless of how ready the animal is to function. Maybe pigs just start prompting early. AFAIK human babies can swim right out of the womb. In other words, maybe the distinction between precocial and non-precocial(I don't know if there's a word for that) animals isn't that clear?
by genezeta | 2025-11-25 11:40:35+00:00
Your post is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/shownew?next=46038606&n=61 third page of /shownew, at number 79 right now.

If you were expecting it to show up in the front page or in /show those get ranked on various "interest" factors. Your post has just a single point (the default submission point), which means people didn't find it sufficiently interesting and so it won't show up there. Sorry.
by iso1631 | 2025-11-25 11:40:52+00:00
Unlikely in Europe given that fuel prices across the continent are roughly the same (if anything the UK is cheaper)

Fuel taxes raise £25b a year (there's also a "sales tax" on top of that which raises another c. £10b a year)

Car taxes (VED - an annual tax to have your vehicle on the road legally) raise £8b

This revenue goes to the national budget. The national budget spends about £5b a year on maintaining and building major new roads.

Local roads are funded from local property taxes, and the total expenditure on those is under £5b a year.

The government has been trying to wean itself off fuel taxes over the last 20 years -- in 1999 it accounted for 2% of the GDP, it's now down to 1%. As more and more people shift to Electric vehicles the fuel revenue drops. There have been discussions on moving to a per-mile charge, but in any case, drivers subsidise other government funding priorities.

Rail on the other hand is massively subsidised -- on average it's about the same amount of subsidy as the fare revenue. The price charged per mile is far lower for regular long distance commuters (typically those with high wages), occasional use is peanalised. If I go to London at peak time tomorrow, I'll be paying about 90p a mile. If I lived in Brighton and travelled every day I'd pay under 20p/mile. The average rail user pays about 29p/mile (£3.1b and 17b km) and the subsidy is a similar amount.
by Aerroon | 2025-11-25 11:42:16+00:00
You brought up a light computing load that a laptop from like 2005 wouldn't struggle with?

People ran multiple browser windows, a 3D video game, irc (chat application), teamspeak/ventrilo (voice chat) and winamp (music) all at once back in the early 2000s. This is something an 8 year old phone can do these days.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-11-25 11:42:21+00:00
C++20 inverts the traditional relationship between the core language and metaprogramming, which arguably makes it new language in some ways. Instead of being a quirky afterthought, it has become the preferred way to interact with code. There is a point of friction in that the standard library doesn’t (and can’t) fully reflect this change.

Metaprogramming style in C++20 only has a loose relationship to previous versions. It is now concise and highly maintainable. You can do metaprogramming in the old painful and verbose way and it will work but you can largely dispense with that.

It took me a bit to develop the intuitions for idiomatic C++20 because it is significantly different as a language, but once I did there is no way I could go back. The degree of expressiveness and safety it provides is a large leap forward.

Most C++ programmers should probably approach it like a new language with familiar syntax rather than as an incremental update to the standard. You really do need to hold it differently.
by locknitpicker | 2025-11-25 11:42:34+00:00
> sorry, I can't take something that argues for "printf" in favour of anything else seriously.

I think you're arguing from a position of willful ignorance. The article is clear on how it lauds C++'s std::printnl, not printf.

http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/io/println.html

Here's what the article argues:

> With std::format, C++ has gained a modern, powerful, and safe formatting system that ends the classic, error‑prone printf mechanisms. std::format is not merely convenient but fully type‑safe: the compiler checks that placeholders and data types match.

Solid remark, and the consensus on how std::printnl and std::format are an important improvement over std::cout or C's printf.
by usrnm | 2025-11-25 11:42:48+00:00
> Windows NT started supporting unicode before UTF-8 was invented

That's not true, UTF-8 predates Windows NT. It's just that the jump from ASCII to UCS2 (not even real UTF16) was much easier and natural and at the time a lot of people really thought that it would be enough. Java made the same mistake around the same time. I actually had the very same discussions with older die-hard win developers as late as 2015, for a lot of them 2 bytes per symbol was still all that you could possibly need.
Ask HN: Scaling local FAISS and LLM RAG system (356k chunks)architectural advice
by paul2495 | 2025-11-25 11:42:56+00:00
I’ve been building a local-only AI assistant for security analysis that uses a FAISS vector index and a local model for reasoning over parsed tool output. The current system works well, but I’m running into scaling issues as the dataset grows. Current setup: ~356k chunks FAISS (Flat index) 384-d MiniLM embeddings llama-cpp-python for inference Metadata stored in a single pickle file (~1.5GB) Tool outputs (Nmap/YARA/Volatility/etc.) parsed into structured JSON before querying

Problems I’m running into:

Metadata pickle file loads entirely into RAM

No incremental indexing — have to rebuild the FAISS index from scratch

Query performance degrades with concurrent use

Want to scale to 1M+ chunks but not sure FAISS + pickle is the right long-term architecture

My questions for those who’ve scaled local or offline RAG systems:

How do you store metadata efficiently at this scale?

Is there a practical pattern for incremental FAISS updates?

Would a vector DB (Qdrant, Weaviate, Milvus) be a better fit for offline use?

Any lessons learned from running large FAISS indexes on consumer hardware?

Not looking for product feedback — just architectural guidance from people who’ve built similar systems.
by olliem36 | 2025-11-25 11:43:31+00:00
Sounds good for tasks like the excel example in the article, but I wonder how this approach will hold up in other multi-step agentic flows. Let me explain:

I try to be defensive in agent architectures to make it easy for AI models to recover/fix workflows if something unexpected happens.

If something goes wrong halfway through the code execution of multiple 'tools' using Programmatic Tool Calling, it's significantly more complex for the AI model to fix that code and try again compared to a single tool usage - you're in trouble, especially if APIs/tools are not idempotent.

The sweet spot might be using this as a strategy to complete tasks that are idempotent/retryable (like a database 'transaction') if they fail half way through execution.
by versteegen | 2025-11-25 11:43:36+00:00
Quoting a month old post: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/prSnGGAgfWtZexYLp/is-90-of-c...

My current understanding (based on this text and other sources) is: - There exist some teams at Anthropic where around 90% of lines of code that get merged are written by AI, but this is a minority of teams. - The average over all of Anthropic for lines of merged code written by AI is much less than 90%, more like 50%.

> I've never gotten a service overloaded response from Google like I did from Anthropic

They're Google, they out-scale everyone. They run more than 1.3 quadrillion tokens per month through LLMs!
by umjunsik132 | 2025-11-25 11:43:37+00:00
Overview

This model is built on Qwen2.5-Coder-1.5B-Instruct and has been fine-tuned exclusively on the official Roblox Luau corpus. It is designed to assist developers with code generation, completion, and understanding of Luau patterns commonly used in Roblox game development.

Key Features

Fine-tuned on quality-filtered Luau code from the official Roblox corpus

Optimized for Roblox-specific APIs and development patterns

Trained on TPU v5e-8 infrastructure

Includes interactive Colab notebook for immediate testing

Technical Details

The model uses Low-Rank Adaptation with target modules q_proj and v_proj, trained on filtered data (20-5000 character code samples) with a 90/10 train-validation split. Training was conducted with a batch size of 4, gradient accumulation of 32 steps, and a learning rate of 3e-5 using cosine annealing.

Access

Model: Interactive Demo: Available via Google Colab (link in model card)

The model is released under Apache 2.0 license and is ready for integration into development workflows.

Feedback and contributions from the community are welcome.
by peter_d_sherman | 2025-11-25 11:44:13+00:00
>"Due to their sub-nanometer size, molecular components can efficiently exploit effects such as coherent resonant transport, Coulomb blockade, and strong inter-molecular capacitive coupling, phenomena essential for implementing nontrivial functions, including memories, memristors, switches, and oscillators. Among such behaviors,

negative differential conductance (NDC)

, where

increasing voltage results in decreasing current

, is of particular importance. NDC enables high-speed switching, low-power logic, and oscillatory circuits, and has become a fundamental mechanism for emerging nanoelectronics, molecular computing and quantum sensing [4, 5, 6, 7]. While NDC has been well established in conventional semiconductor components (e.g., Gunn diodes, Esaki diodes) [8, 9], quantum dot arrays [10, 11, 12], two-dimensional heterostructures [13, 14, 15], molecular layers [16, 17, 18] and even single-molecule break junctions [19, 20], scalable integration of NDC into reproducible molecular circuits has been hampered for decades by the so-called wiring problem."

Looks like some very interesting and potentially promising research!
by jillesvangurp | 2025-11-25 11:44:17+00:00
The problem with that definition is that modern languages like Rust, Go, and Javascript fall between the cracks here with de-emphasizing things like classes and inheritance while still providing things like generics, interfaces, encapsulation, etc.

For example, Javascript was influenced by a few languages, one of which was a language called Self which is a Smalltalk like language where instead of instantiating classes you clone existing objects. It's a prototype based language. So, there weren't any classes for a long time in Javascript. Which is why there are these weird class like module conventions where you create an object with functions inside that you expose. Later versions of ECMA script add classes as syntactic sugar for that. And Typescript does the same. But it's all prototypes underneath.

Go has this notion of structs that implement interfaces implicitly via duck typing. So you don't have to explicitly implement the interface but you can treat an object as if it implemented the interface simply if it full fills the contract provided by that interface. Are they objects? Maybe, maybe not. No object identity. Unless you consider a pointer/memory reference as an identifier.

Rust has traits and other constructs. So it definitely has a notion of encapsulation, polymorphism, etc., which are things associated with OOP. But things like classes are not part of Rust and inheritance is not a thing. It also does not have object identity because it emphasizes things like immutability and ownership.

Many modern languages have some notion of objects though. Many of the languages that have classes tend to discourage inheritance. E.g. Kotlin's classes are closed by default (you can't extend them). The narrow IEEE definition is at this point a bit dated and reflects the early thinking in the sixties and seventies on OOP. A lot has happened since then.

I don't think a lot of these discussions are that productive because they conflate a lot of concepts and dumb things down too much. A lot of it boils down to "I heard that inheritance is bad because 'inject reasons' and therefore language X sucks". That's maybe a bit harsh on some languages that are very widely used at this point.
by roenxi | 2025-11-25 11:44:28+00:00
There are a lot of edge cases where suicide is rational. The experience of watching an 80 year old die over the course of a month or few can be quite harrowing from the reports I've had from people who've witnessed it; most of whom talk like they'd rather die in some other way. It's a scary thought, but we all die and there isn't any reason it has to be involuntary all the way to the bitter end.

It is quite difficult to say what moral framework an AI should be given. Morals are one of those big unsolved problems. Even basic ideas like maybe optimising for the general good if there are no major conflicting interests are hard to come to a consensus on. The public dialog is a crazy place.
by chickensong | 2025-11-25 11:45:16+00:00
> Now you could argue, as you suggest, that we are all accountable for our actions. Which presumably is the argument for legalizing heroine / cocaine / meth.

That's not the only argument. The war on drugs is an expensive failure. We could instead provide clean, regulated drugs that are safer than whatever unknown chemical salad is coming from black market dealers. This would put a massive dent in the gang and cartel business, which would improve safety beyond the drugs themselves. Then use the billions of dollars to help people.
by cookiengineer | 2025-11-25 11:45:34+00:00
> France has made it clear they expect to have a backdoor in end-to-end encryption apps and disk encryption.

Note that "France" and "Johanna Brousse" (as the lead investigator lobbying for more agency data access) are not the same, by a couple million people.

Now's the time to get ahead of this. Communicate openly why Open Source matters, what's at stake, and try to ally with existing organizations like the EFF, IETF, Linux Foundation, CCC e.V. and others. They know how to deal with the media, and it's okay to ask for help.

Please let another person check the article from a non-technical perspective, because that's where journalists have a strategical bonus. If the blogpost/article/video/whatever contains too much technological lingo, the masses won't be able to understand it.

Wish you the best.

PS: I hope that you can see that not all people are as messed up as the kiwifarm doxxers. I've seen their "call to arms" to start new swatting attempts etc. Stay safe.

PPS: Don't engage with people that have anime avatars. Just block them. Your time is wasted trying to read or reply to them. Hate is a mind infiltration technique.
Show HN: Martini-Kit, create multiplayer games without writing networking code
by yaoke259 | 2025-11-25 11:45:37+00:00
I was working on a multiplayer racing game and kept hitting the same issues. State desyncs where players would see different positions. Race conditions when two players interacted with the same object. The usual stuff.

The frustrating part was that these bugs only showed up with multiple real players. Can't reproduce them locally, can't easily test fixes, and adding logging changes the timing enough that bugs disappear.

After rebuilding networking code for the third time across different projects, I noticed something: most multiplayer bugs come from thinking about networking instead of game logic.

## The approach

In single-player games, you just write: ```typescript player.x += velocity.x; player.health -= 10; ```

So I built martini-kit to make multiplayer work the same way:

```typescript const game = defineGame({ setup: ({ playerIds }) => ({ players: Object.fromEntries( playerIds.map(id => [id, { x: 100, y: 100, health: 100 }]) ) }),

actions: { move: (state, { playerId, dx, dy }) => { state.players[playerId].x += dx; state.players[playerId].y += dy; } }

}); ```

That's it. No WebSockets, no serialization, no message handlers. martini-kit handles state sync, conflict resolution, connection handling, and message ordering automatically.

## How it works

Instead of thinking about messages, you think about state changes:

1. Define pure functions that transform state 2. One client is the "host" and runs the authoritative game loop 3. Host broadcasts state diffs (bandwidth optimized) 4. Clients patch their local state 5. Conflicts default to host-authoritative (customizable)

Those race conditions and ordering bugs are structurally impossible with this model.

## What's it good for

- Turn-based games, platformers, racing games, co-op games: works well - Fast-paced FPS with 60Hz tick rates: not ideal yet - Phaser adapter included, Unity/Godot adapters in progress - Works with P2P (WebRTC) or client-server (WebSocket) - Can integrate with Colyseus/Nakama/etc for matchmaking and auth

## Try it

[Interactive playground](https://martini.blueprintlab.io/preview) - test multiplayer instantly in your browser

Or install: ```bash npm install @martini-kit/core @martini-kit/phaser phaser ```

Links: - Website: https://martini.blueprintlab.io/ - Docs: https://martini.blueprintlab.io/docs - GitHub: https://github.com/BlueprintLabIO/martini - npm: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@martini-kit/core

Open to feedback and curious if anyone else has hit similar issues with multiplayer state management.
by ragequittah | 2025-11-25 11:45:39+00:00
There's a large swath of people who try desperately to get the practice you speak of and end up with none or worse. We're biological beings we all try pretty hard to connect. Many just get broken down to the point where trying to connect is more painful than avoiding it.

I personally don't ever see a chatbot ever being a substitute for myself but can certainly empathize with those who do.
by jasongill | 2025-11-25 11:45:39+00:00
Not sure if you actually read this document before posting it, but it is just a general cautionary statement, not about any specific test (and surely not about prenatal ultrasounds which have been proven safe).

All this says is effectively "all screening carries risks such as false results and overdiagnosis, so people should carefully assess benefits, harms, evidence, and costs before choosing private tests".
by gortok | 2025-11-25 11:47:06+00:00
> The verification ability is especially important in the case of AI, which is presently a lot more fallible in a great variety of ways compared to calculators.

Um. yea. This is the first time a non-deterministic technology has achieved mass adoption for every day use. Despite repeated warnings (which are not even close to the tenor of warnings they should broadcast), folks don’t understand that AI will likely hallucinate some or all of their answer.

A calculator will not, and even the closest aspect of buggy behavior for a calculator (exploring the fringes of floating point numbers, for example) is light years away from the hallucination of generated AI for general, every day questions.

The mass exuberance over generative AI has been clouding folks from the very real effects of over-adoption or AI, and we aren’t going to see the full impact of that for some time, and when we do, folks are going to ask questions like “how were we so dumb?” And of course the answer will be “no one saw this coming.”

My spouse is an educator with nearly 20 years in the industry, and even her school has adopted AI. It’s shocking how quickly it has taken hold, even in otherwise lagging adoption segments. Her school finally went “1-1” with devices in 2020, just prior to COVID.
by skx001 | 2025-11-25 11:47:17+00:00
Alternative Link: https://www.aa.com.tr/en/asia-pacific/jakarta-world-s-most-p...

Key Facts: Number of megacities, urban areas with 10 million or more inhabitants has quadrupled from 8 in 1975 to 33 in 2025.

Jakarta is now the world’s most populous city, with nearly 42 million residents. The current population of Indonesia is 286 million.

In 2019, Indonesia said it will be moving its capital to Nusantara, a new city which is under construction.
by scotty79 | 2025-11-25 11:47:25+00:00
On one hand it shows terrible inadequacies of Canadian health care. On the other would it be better to force people to suffer till the natural end of their lives that are terrible because of those inadequacies? Healthcare won't get significantly better soon enough for them anyways. It seems better to "discover" what percentage of people want to end their lives in current conditions and improve those conditions to improve that percentage. That might be a very powerful measure of how good we are doing with added benefit of not forcing suffering people to suffer longer.
by nikcub | 2025-11-25 11:47:29+00:00
https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/14369/files#diff-bc37d03...

Found this part hilarious - git ignoring all of the claude planning MD files that it tends to spit out, and including that in the PR

Lazy AI-driven contributions like this are why so many open source maintainers have a negative reaction to any AI-generated code
by rahidz | 2025-11-25 11:47:34+00:00
>but for some reason AI has become a real wedge for people

Well yeah, for most other technologies, the pitch isn't "We're training an increasingly powerful machine to do people's jobs! Every day it gets better at doing them! And as a bonus, it's trained on terabytes of data we scraped from books and the Internet, without your permission. What? What happens to your livelihood when it succeeds? That's not my department".
by bdbdbdb | 2025-11-25 11:47:34+00:00
Sorry to be that guy.

I contemplated the same idea a while back because I'm constantly printing out colouring sheets for kids and it seemed like an app people would use.

Ultimately I decided not to build it because there are so many free colouring page sites out there, and there's a non-zero environmental cost to asking Gemini to generate a happy bat image.

Pretty much any colouring page a kid could ask you for is already a Google search away. In fact the challenge is not finding a happy bat colouring page but narrowing it down from the thousands of results.

I just don't see the value in using Gemini to add yet more generic colouring pages to the millions that exist. I'm sorry, I don't mean to poop on your work, it's interesting to read the tech implementation but ultimately I don't like creating walled gardens with AI generated alternatives to what's already free
by jasode | 2025-11-25 11:48:58+00:00
>, UTF-8 predates Windows NT.

Windows NT started development in 1988 and the public beta was released in July 1992 which happened before Ken Thompson devised UTF-8 on a napkin in September 1992. Rob Pike gave a UTF-8 presentation at USENIX January 1993.

Windows NT general release was July 1993 so it's not realistic to replace all UCS-16 code with UTF-8 after January 1993 and have it ready in less than 6 months. Even Linux didn't have UTF-8 support in July 1993.