MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by flail | 2025-11-28 16:56:07+00:00
What's the lifecycle length of GPUs? 2-4 years? By the time OpenAIs and Anthropics pivot, many GPUs will be beyond their half-life. I doubt there would be many takers for that infrastructure.

Especially given the humungous scale of infrastructure that the current approach requires. Is there another line of technology that would require remotely as much?

Note, I'm not saying there can't be. It's just that I don't think there are obvious shots at that target.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-11-28 16:56:09+00:00
"Why are people voting for Democratic Socialists and young cohorts are supporting communism at the rates that they do?" The current system, based on all available evidence, has unequivocally failed [1].

> "A recent survey by the Cato Institute and YouGov paints a troubling picture: 62 percent of Americans aged 18–29 say they hold a “favorable view” of socialism, and 34 percent say the same of communism." [2] (My note: Troubling for who?)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46062229 (citations)

[1] https://www.cato.org/blog/81-say-they-cant-afford-pay-higher...
by calvinmorrison | 2025-11-28 16:56:12+00:00
step 1. have syadmins run your stuff, recruit ITSM kids to help run it! We all learn and maintain our own hardware, software and get to poke at the fun internals of email, storage, etc.

step 2. cost savings by firing them all

step 3. we get locked in

step 4. oh no how did this happen
by jcamlin | 2025-11-28 16:56:19+00:00
The secret: T³ periodic domain + Fourier orthogonality = the weak solution is just a curve in coefficient space. Not a field. A curve. Temporal lifting samples that curve densely where it bends hardest. Standard DNS crashes from CFL blowup. This doesn't - because we're not fighting the geometry, we're riding it. Results:

Taylor-Green Re=10⁵: BKM=37.1, stable through full vortex-stretching cascade Kolmogorov Re=10⁸: 0.07% dissipation error 128³ grid → 411³ effective resolution (spectral super-resolution from temporal oversampling) Hardware: 8GB laptop, no GPU

No artificial dissipation. No hyperviscosity. Unmodified Navier-Stokes unlike all other DNS. GitHub link to code and data in the paper (linked)
by gregbot | 2025-11-28 16:56:21+00:00
>The increase in biomass and other effects could be caused either by the cells directly deriving energy from ionizing radiation, or by the radiation allowing the cells to utilize traditional nutrients either more efficiently or more rapidly

It has not actually been proven that this fungus gets energy from the radiation itself. They simply observe it growing faster in the presence of radiation which could be caused by any number of other things.
by epistasis | 2025-11-28 16:56:23+00:00
You would guess right, and I have even heard that this sort thing has been standard practice for a long time, without nefarious intent.

The problem is that even standard practice, without nefarious intent, can cause massive financial collapse. If, say, the vast majority of economic growth were being focused into such vehicles, the lack of transparency could make people misanalyze the situation and result in bad valuations that collapse when it all becomes transparent.
by abhashanand1501 | 2025-11-28 16:56:52+00:00
I like the 100% philosophy for coding:

1. 100% code coverage 2. 100% branch coverage 3. 100% lint (without noqa) 4. 100% type check pass(for python/js) 5. 100% documentation coverage 6. All functions with complexity less than 5. All functions with no of lines less than 70. All files with number of lines less than 1000.

These make code high quality, and quality of life is directly proportional to qualify of your code.
by slightwinder | 2025-11-28 16:57:30+00:00
Obsidian has the philosophy that the filesystem is the source of all truth, and it's showing directly the filesystem without any obvious layer in-between. The reason is, that you should be able to read your data with any other app and have the same amount of data accessible. So from their POV, there is not really any place to store the information for the sorting. Adding it to the filename, would annoy the people, so It's up to you to choose your own plugin allowing this.

Also, with the new bases-features, you can easily create your own sorting with a table, or whichever view you prefer.
by hedora | 2025-11-28 16:57:51+00:00
The US CLOUD Act says that if Amazon has the technical ability to access those machines, they must do so if the US government asks them to.

So, unless it’s a separate legal entity, and also shares no authentication, software deployment, or related infrastructure with the US part of Amazon, it’s either not providing sovereignty or is being offered in violation of US law.

It’s unclear to me if they’d have to comply with requests to (for example) backdoor their IAM service backend and push the binaries to Europe, or not. (I’m not a lawyer.)
by bastawhiz | 2025-11-28 16:57:56+00:00
> Google is now able to squeeze significantly more performance per dollar than their peer competitors in the LLM space

Performance per dollar doesn't "win" anything though. Performance (as in speed) hardly cracks the top five concerns that most folks have when choosing a model provider, because fast, good models already exist at price points that are acceptable. That might mean slightly better margins for Google, but ultimately isn't going to make them "win"
by FiddlerClamp | 2025-11-28 16:58:02+00:00
I think it was a one-two punch:

1. Snoopy becoming Flanderized, as in the "Happiness is a warm puppy" stuff from the 1960s.

2. Introduction of Woodstock the bird. That meant Snoopy and Woodstock went off and had their own adventures which didn't involve the human gang at all.

I also wonder whether Schulz participated in any recreational drugs in the 1960s. I don't meant to be disrespectful at all, but some of the stuff he drew was pretty wild.

There's a set of strips where Charlie Brown sees the moon as a baseball (and later, Alfred E. Neuman's head), another where Snoopy dreams of Charlie Brown flying him like a kite and him crashing to the ground in pieces, and a horror-movie-like series where Linus's blanket attacks Lucy. All very strange.
by Aurornis | 2025-11-28 16:58:31+00:00
> I've always wondered why we don't build homes with a buried tank of water used as heat storage

Skip the tank completely. Use the ground directly. This is what geothermal heating does.

Drill a deep hole and drop tubes into it. Use a heat pump to pump heat into or out of the ground. There is so much easily accessible thermal mass in a borehole that you don’t need to deal with a giant underground water tank
by seanieb | 2025-11-28 16:58:52+00:00
I spent the past year working for a company that relies heavily on Microsoft for email, productivity tools, and identity management. After that experience, I can say with confidence: never again. The support is astonishingly poor, and user experience feels like an afterthought.

More importantly, using Microsoft at scale can leave your organization fundamentally insecure. The obscure, insecure defaults are, at best, dangerous missteps and, at worst, borderline negligent. I’m convinced that only a small fraction of enterprises using Microsoft have the expertise and budget required to secure it properly.

My personal view is that if your organization depends heavily on Microsoft, it’s not serious about security, whether they’re aware of it or not.
by firesteelrain | 2025-11-28 16:58:59+00:00
Agree; there is little evidence these simulators did much beyond occupy people’s time for a while. I remember around 2022 in my Systems Engineering Masters someone wrote a similar simulator. I suppose it was inspired by this. It was a simulator that tried to simulate how infection spread in a cubicle setting.

There is one positive thing despite RTO becoming a thing and that is remote work became more recognized even if its trending more hybrid.
by robrenaud | 2025-11-28 17:00:28+00:00
I had some json data that I wanted an annotation interface for. So I asked codex to put it into sqlite and make a little annotation webserver. It worked quickly/easily and without hassle. Sqlite supports queries over json-like objects.

Maybe a very simple document oriented db would have been better?

My biggest gripe is that the sqlite cli is brutally minimal (makes sense given design), but I probably should have been using a nicer cli.
by lazide | 2025-11-28 17:00:38+00:00
All living organisms have this problem - people who can’t sweat/are in environments with no effective evaporation die, piles of leaves with fungus can heat up so much they catch on fire and burn, etc.

Most life has evolved some sort of mechanism to control it, but sometimes it doesn’t work right.

If such a fungus existed and we had enough radioactive material lying around for it to survive, I’d expect the occasional random meltdown to occur.

Notably, this happened due to pure natural causes anyway a couple billion years ago! [https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/meet-oklo-the-earths-tw...]
by runako | 2025-11-28 17:01:58+00:00
Without weighing in on the accuracy of this claim, this would be an expected part of the maturity cycle.

Compare to databases. You could probably have plotted a chart of database adoption rates in the '90s as small companies started running e.g. Lotus Notes, FoxPro and SQL server everywhere to build in-house CRMs and back-office apps. Those companies still operate those functions, but now most small businesses do not run databases themselves. Why manage SQL Server when you can just pay for Salesforce and Notion with predictable monthly spend?

(All of this is more complex, but analogous at larger companies.)

My take is the big rise in AI adoption, if it arrives, will similarly be embedded inside application functions.
by monero-xmr | 2025-11-28 17:02:06+00:00
HN wants polite discussion which lends itself well to science and technology topics. Get farther away into history or politics where opinion comes in, then it becomes impossible to debate because arguments that disagree with the hive mind (upper middle class, intelligent, center-left technology professionals) get downvoted and flagged because of popularity.

This just isn’t a site for arguing politics, if you do it too much with opinions different from the hive mind you get banned for disruptive behavior
by graypegg | 2025-11-28 17:02:10+00:00
It's not always a good thing, but I love Ruby's ability to define new runtime-valid syntax that looks pretty much native to Ruby itself.

def method(thing: String | "default value")

the pipe operator seems to be defined here, as just a regular method: https://codeberg.org/Iow/type/src/commit/aaa079bf3dd2ac6b471... the type gets picked out by the module included in the class you want typechecked, which reads the default value from all methods (which is the "real" ruby syntax here, where `thing` is assigned a default value of the result of calling `String | "default value"`) and uses that for type checking.

I like that over-flexibility... it's regularly too clever and makes it difficult to follow the flow of an application, but I like it all the same.
by SoftTalker | 2025-11-28 17:02:19+00:00
> If someone punches you in the street or steals your wallet will you file a lawsuit or call the police?

In the USA, probably both. You (or your insurance company) might sue them to recover your financial losses, the police would investigate the crime of assault and/or robbery and pass any evidence along to the prosecutor.

Of course if they have no money or other assets, suing them is a bit pointless.
by dietr1ch | 2025-11-28 17:02:47+00:00
> moving off of them because they find that making the common case worse is not a trade off that most of their users want.

Until you have companies trying to intervene.

If Universities are publicly funded by the government, and those companies do stuff like spying on, or silencing public officials, then why should the government finance those companies?

I think its nuts that the EU has seen spying, access from services taken away, yet continues to fund those foreign companies. Are the Open Source alternatives worse? Would change suck even if the alternatives were better? It doesn't matter really. It makes no sense to pay to keep your bad deal running.
by ThrowawayR2 | 2025-11-28 17:02:55+00:00
> "Real devs use printf, not debuggers."

A dev should know how to use both printf and debuggers in the appropriate circumstances because each has its limitations.

> "StackOverflow is cheating."

Copying and pasting from Stack Overflow without understanding what it is that is being pasted is incompetence, not cheating. (The same goes for LLM assistance.)

You're arguing against things next to no one has said and it doesn't do much for the credibility of the rest of the essay.
by Froztnova | 2025-11-28 17:02:55+00:00
> because 4chan's services are available to people residing in the UK

I don't understand why 4chan is obligated to be the one to ensure that UK citizens don't access the site when this should be entirely within the UK government's power, no? At the very least, the infrastructure which allows their citizens to access 4chan is on UK soil so it stands to reason that they actually have authority over that.

I feel like making the case that any site which serves an international audience on the Internet has to observe the laws of every single country represented in that audience is bad precedent and has the potential to be incredibly stifling to anyone but the type of multinational corporation which has the sort of legal apparatus that's required to operate in that sort of environment.
by SubiculumCode | 2025-11-28 17:03:20+00:00
The solution, imo, is to increase the number of representatives to something like 1 per 50,000 or 100,000 citizens. When your representative comes from your own town, the same highschool, the more likely they are known by many in their district, and do not need to rely on advertising, as when they could literally knock on most doors in their district, they do not need to beg for money to run a campaign from huge national interests.
by bastawhiz | 2025-11-28 17:03:41+00:00
It definitely depends on how you're measuring. But the benchmarks don't put it at the top for many ways of measuring, and my own experience doesn't put it at the top. I'm glad if it works for you, but it's not even a month old and there are lots of folks like me who see it as definitely worse for classes of problems that 3 Pro could be the best at.

Which is to say, if Google was set up to win, it shouldn't even be a question that 3 Pro is the best. It should be obvious. But it's definitely not obvious that it's the best, and many benchmarks don't support it as being the best.
by friendzis | 2025-11-28 17:04:05+00:00
I have skimmed through the article and if I get the details through all the humor, satire and sarcasm even remotely correct, the major assets are actually the duality of payment obligations and residual value guarantees, both from meta. One could include cost overrun protection at the construction time too.

The "fire sale prices" would be so delicious as to guarantee that the entity(-ies) involved stay solvent as long as meta stays solvent.
by brianshaler | 2025-11-28 17:04:16+00:00
It maps pretty cleanly to the well understood derivatives of a position vector. Position (user count), velocity (first derivative, change in user count over time), acceleration (second derivative, speeding up or flattening of the velocity), and jerk (third derivative, change in acceleration such as the shift between from acceleration to deceleration)

It really is a beautiful title.
by KerrAvon | 2025-11-28 17:04:29+00:00
Not meaning to single you out specifically, but this entire discussion — all of this license gatekeeping is ridiculous. This is a very cool project, but if the license ruins it for you, there are zillions of open source GPL3 kernels.

I mean, this is not different from bitching about someone writing their custom kernel in C++ instead of Rust, or Zig. It’s not your project! Let people do their own thing! MIT is a perfectly fine license; maybe the lack of zealotry associated with it would even be a positive thing for whatever community might be built around this eventually, if the author is even interested in having other contributions.
by rob_c | 2025-11-28 17:04:37+00:00
They're all awful. The ICL model used to "inform" the UK lockdowns had (probably still has) a serious race condition such that when running multi-threaded that meant all of the timelines had errors of +/-1week... (It's a miracle the code didn't crash)

After this was pointed out pandemic "planning" in the UK simply went from per-week to monthly plannings following the same broken model...

It still turned out to be crazily wrong and over predicted every, single, metric, by orders of magnitude that it was tasked with simulating.

Not too mention it couldn't load configs correctly. Work correctly on the national academic supercomputer. Or gracefully present any results/findings.

This was signed off _blindly_ by the cluster admins, academics, policy advisors and international "experts". And there was significant push back for over a week once this had been demonstrated that there must be a problem with the test methodology (simply running and *checking* the output multiple times). Ask me how I know there wasn't.

The whole field of pandemic modelling I'm sure has come on leaps and bounds in recent years, but it's a shocking sad truth most/all UG computing students with a 1st could have done a better job than these experts at the top of their field.
by ramon156 | 2025-11-28 17:04:59+00:00
I can guarantee some dutch banks are also locked into MS. Maybe not the big ones that actually need to care about tech, but the ones that don't care about tech went head-first into Microsoft Suite these last few years.

Its' an awful sight. What's worse is that there's no argument for this extra cost (apart from maybe vendor lock-in), and now no one knows who to blame for the big bill that comes in every month.
by whizzter | 2025-11-28 17:05:27+00:00
This is quite cool, seeing taking off planes appearing and rising is cool.

Some comments: - Is the Up axis correctly scaled? The ascent rate of planes taking off seems very steep - Planes landing seems to get "stuck" at the beginning of a lane at about 600 feet (tracking/radar cutoff?), maybe a fix the that slightly adjusts it to ground in a landed state if a plane "stops" or disappears from the data tracking.
by kace91 | 2025-11-28 17:05:40+00:00
I meant before the DOGE stuff: the technical discussions on his claims about Tesla’s future capabilities, purchase of twitter and latter management, etc.

I am generally very happy with HN’s moderation, but I do feel some borderline topics that have been banned or buried missed interesting discussion. I don’t fault those responsible for not wanting to deal with the potential mess though.
by alecco | 2025-11-28 17:05:45+00:00
No, I mean dishonest. When people gang up to push each other's blogs/startups/whatever, it's dishonest. When political groups organize to mass upvote/flag, it's dishonest. They are purposefully sabotaging the wider community for their niche interests. They are cheaters. And IME, more often than not, they are immoral and/or anti-social.
by DSpinellis | 2025-11-28 17:06:21+00:00
Indeed! The repo includes some v4 elements: https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/tree/Researc...

The provided kernel predates the actual edition by a few months. It is based on https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/Research/Dennis_v..., which matches V4 more than V3.
by exasperaited | 2025-11-28 17:06:33+00:00
Governments also don't move to open standards because open standards doesn't have a hospitality suite to invite them to at football matches or Cheltenham.

One of the most remarkable things in British politics in the last 25 years went almost unremarked upon, in part because it happened in a reactionary way.

Blair/Brown's New Labour got so deeply into bed with Microsoft that it caused the coalition government that replaced them to develop a point of agreement and move government functions off Microsoft to open standard formats, and that change stuck. Hence this weird little country that has so many problems has accidentally good IT for anything that they rolled out, there's a lot of open data etc. etc.

That would never have happened if their decision was being guided only by lobbyists; it happened that it was so strengthened by the major tech giants working with the other side.

EU governments can absolutely do this; I find it difficult to believe universities cannot.
by dietr1ch | 2025-11-28 17:06:35+00:00
> Funny line-- but I think it's important to highlight how the Brits were able to find value and unlock a history in objects that other cultures stopped caring about.

Do you really think they stopped caring about? Bold claim to say this applies for every culture and artifact over there.

Or is it maybe that pillaging, which destroys what's left behind, and then having no good way to take things back other than defeating the British Naval Empire makes maintaining your own history hard?
by dragonwriter | 2025-11-28 17:06:45+00:00
In the US, you might wait for criminal action if it was progressing to initiate civil action because (1) a criminal conviction can be used as evidence (and it is asymmetrical, because an actual doesn't have the same weight), and (2) criminal process can result in a restitution order which makes civil action unnecessary (and in some jurisdictions may allow recovery from a dedicated fund for victims of crime even if no recovery is possible from the perpetrator, and in that sense may be better than winning a civil action), and (3) criminal prosecution doesn't cost the victim money, civil prosecution generally does.
by leoc | 2025-11-28 17:07:05+00:00
(Meanwhile, apparently MS itself continued using SLM, the in-house source-control system which had been commercialised as MS Delta, internally until about 2000. https://wiki.c2.com/?MicrosoftDelta https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180122-00/?p=97... https://ricomariani.medium.com/super-brief-notes-on-early-so... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44255526 )
by flail | 2025-11-28 17:07:29+00:00
> We've got something that seems to be general and seems to be more intelligent than an average human.

We've got something that occasionally sounds as if it were more intelligent than an average human. However, if we stick to areas of interest of that average human, they'll beat the machine in reasoning, critical assessment, etc.

And in just about any area, an average human will beat the machine wherever a world model is required, i.e., a generalized understanding of how the world works.

It's not to criticize the usefulness of LLMs. Yet broad statements that an LLM is more intelligent than an average Joe are necessarily misleading.

I like how Simon Wardley assesses how good the most recent models are. He asks them to summarize an article or a book which he's deeply familiar with (his own or someone else's). It's like a test of trust. If he can't trust the summary of the stuff he knows, he can't trust the summary that's foreign to him either.
by crazygringo | 2025-11-28 17:07:34+00:00
Short answer: to Google it's not so bad but it's not like the legal risks are any different from Microsoft. And to the rest -- yes it is very hard.

Universities need cloud storage with online collaboration and a fully functioning office suite.

LibreOffice doesn't work because it's desktop-only and has no collaboration. However, there's an online-collaboration fork called Collabora Online, and you can use something like Nextcloud to provide your own privately hosted cloud backend. But obviously this is a gigantic effort for the university's IT department to provide and maintain with reliable redundancies and backups.

Also, LibreOffice/Collabora is pretty good if you stick to its native formats, but its interoperability with MS Office files has a lot of bugs.

In the end, it's just cheaper and more reliable to use MS or Google like everyone else. Students, professors and administrators wind up having basically the same needs around office software as businesses do.