MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by easygenes | 2025-11-25 00:50:08+00:00
So say I have a 4TB USB SSD from a few years ago, that's been sitting unpowered in a drawer most of that time. How long would it need to be powered on (ballpark) for the full disk refresh to complete? Assume fully idle.

(As a note: I do have a 4TB USB SSD which did sit in a drawer without being touched for a couple of years. The data was all fine when I plugged it back in. Of course, this was a new drive with very low write cycles and stored climate controlled. Older worn out drive would probably have been an issue.) Just wondering how long I should keep it plugged in if I ever have a situation like that so I can "reset the fade clock" per se.
by roywiggins | 2025-11-25 00:50:47+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean

The way this works is:

1) x% of users have an exceptional first experience by chance. Nobody who has a meh first experience bothers to try a second time. 2) x²% of users also have an exceptional second experience by chance 3) So a lot of people with a great first experience think the model started off great and got suddenly worse

Suppose it's 25% that have a really great first experience. 25% of them have a great second experience too, but 75% of them see a sudden decline in quality and decide that it must be intentional. After the third experience this population gets bigger again.

So by pure chance and sampling biases you end up convincing a bunch of people that the model used to be great but has gotten worse, but a much smaller population of people who thought it was terrible but got better because most of them gave up early.

This is not in their heads- they really did see declining success. But they experienced it without any changes to the model at all.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-11-25 00:51:22+00:00
From the challenges outlined in Section 4, Identification of National Science and Technology Challenges:

advanced manufacturing; biotechnology; critical materials; nuclear fission and fusion energy; quantum information science; and semiconductors and microelectronics.

I have no clue what AI is going to do for most of these sectors/challenges & to me the problem-spaces feel largely non-virtualizable. Massive training & hallucination systems aren't going to happen into great yields regularly, not in a way that justifies the cost.

One place I do think that virtual science can make a huge difference is the last one, semiconductors and microelectronics. IMO there's already enormously promising work, that just needs more funding. Maybe bigger clusters would help some, but mostly, this field needs more works like the incredibly successful OpenROAD work that DARPA begot in 2018 with the Intelligent Design of Electronic Assets (IDEA) program. https://www.darpa.mil/research/programs/intelligent-design-o... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenROAD_Project

We should fund better AI powered chip synthesis tools, better open source chip design tools, more open source cpu design, and fund Silicon Foundry projects to build & test promising open source hardware cores. Some focus/personel/money here would go far far further IMO than a seemingly non-funded executive order to get the DoE to scrounge together some systems & command them to make an innovation or two.
by Forgeties79 | 2025-11-25 00:51:25+00:00
I think my favorite part so far is how literally every single comment rejected my (kind of ridiculous admittedly) assertion. Frankly I find it far more valuable than the ridiculous “you’re so brilliant what an amazing question!” attitude I get from LLM’s generally.

https://news.ysimulator.run/item/1313
Ask HN: What work problems would your company pay to solve?
by aryanchaurasia | 2025-11-25 00:52:00+00:00
I’m researching ideas for a new B2B product and want to understand real bottlenecks teams face.

What problems, inefficiencies, or recurring frustrations do you or your team deal with at work—where, if a solid solution existed, your company would actually pay for it?

Examples could include:

manual workflows

data or reporting pain points

communication gaps

compliance or documentation hassles

tools your team keeps hacking together internally

anything expensive, slow, or annoying

Would love to hear your role/industry (optional) and the specific problem you face.
by robertwt7 | 2025-11-25 00:52:05+00:00
this is very impressive! as much as I love Claude though, is it just me or their limit is much lower compared to others (Gemini and GPT)? At the moment I'm subscribed to Google One AI ($20) which gives me the most value with the 2tb google drive and Cursor ($20). I've subscribed to GPT and Claude as well in the past, I find that I was hitting the limit much faster in Claude compared to all the others, it made me reluctant to subscribe again. from the blog post it seems like they've been prioritising the Max users most of the time?
by AngryData | 2025-11-25 00:53:05+00:00
It is pretty important if you are doing things like 3d animation, video editing, or advanced CAD software. Plus software in general has ballooned its memory requirements and expectations. Even my 11 year old PC had to have a RAM upgrade a few years ago just because software updates suck up so much extra memory, and there is almost nothing consumers can do about it.
by davkan | 2025-11-25 00:53:11+00:00
Yes everyone does do that. Most people will not take a tangential single sentence criticism of an institution to mean that you hold none of the typical accompanying political views and are just narrowly opining on your experience.

I would imagine a large majority of readers read your original post and immediately in their head thought, “are they one of those school voucher people” or something along those lines.
by tialaramex | 2025-11-25 00:53:33+00:00
Although there are owning mutexes for C++ the C++ standard library does not provide such a thing. So the std::mutex used in the example is not an owning mutex and that example works and does what was described.

One reason not to provide the owning mutex in C++ is that it isn't able to deliver similar guarantees to Rust because its type system isn't strong enough. Rust won't let you accidentally keep a reference to the protected object after unlocking, C++ will for example.
by tombert | 2025-11-25 00:54:42+00:00
RAM has been cheap long enough and now no one remembers how to write efficient GUI apps.

I'm joking, but only kind of. It's not a domain that I do a lot of, but I haven't touched Qt in so long that it would basically be starting from scratch if I tried to write an app with it; I could write an Election app in like an hour.
by FridayoLeary | 2025-11-25 00:55:13+00:00
>Instead of raising income tax rates, the chancellor has decided to freeze thresholds for two years, a move that economists estimate will raise £7.5bn.

> The decision comes a year after Reeves argued against exactly such a move. She said in her 2024 budget speech: “Extending the threshold freeze would hurt working people, it would take more money out of their payslips.”

>Other likely tax rises include a move to end tax breaks for salary sacrifice pension schemes, raising about £2bn, and a new tax on electric vehicles, also estimated to raise £2bn.

> Essentially, the bond market is warning the chancellor that she cannot merely tax the ‘rich’ to fund her lavish spending pledges. Either she broadens the tax base or she cuts spending.”

Envy based politics doesn't improve things. Spend less money and spend it more cleverly. If Starmer doesn't want to get kicked out he needs to stop scoring own goals.

As for taxing electric cars, it was only a matter of time. It's just too much of a cash cow to ignore.
by marcus_holmes | 2025-11-25 00:56:04+00:00
I think this is a serious question that needs serious thought.

It could be viewed as criminalising behaviour that we find unacceptable, even if it harms no-one and is done in private. Where does that stop?

Of course this assumes we can definitely, 100%, tell AI-generated CSAM from real CSAM. This may not be true, or true for very long.
by taradinoc | 2025-11-25 00:56:06+00:00
A C-based alternative for compiling ZIL? I don't believe there's one that works. The two options for compiling ZIL code are to run ZILF on a modern system or to run ZILCH on a PDP-10 emulator.

The good news is you don't need to install any C# development tools if you use the prepackaged binaries, since they're standalone executables.
by ttkciar | 2025-11-25 00:56:09+00:00
Well, that's just great.

The academic community has been using the term "skill" for years, to refer to classes of tasks at which LLMs exhibit competence.

Now OpenAI has usurped the term to refer to these inference-guiding .md files.

I'm not looking forward to having to pick through a Google hit list for "LLM skills", figuring out which publications are about skills in the traditional sense and which are about the OpenAI feature. Semantic overload sucks.

How do we deal with this? Start using "competencies" (or similar) in academic papers? Or just resign ourselves to suffering the ambiguity?

Or maybe the OpenAI feature will fall flat and nobody will talk about it at all. That would frankly be the best outcome.
by hereme888 | 2025-11-25 00:56:26+00:00
This is ridiculous. The NYT, who is a huge legal enemy of OpenAI, publishes an article that uses scare tactics, to manipulate public opinion against OpenAI, by basically accusing them that "their software is unsafe for people with mental issues, or children", which is a bonkers ridiculous accusation given that ChatGPT users are adults that need to take ownership of their own use of the internet.

What's the difference than an adult becoming affected by some subreddit, or even the "dark web", or 4chan forum, etc.
by umanwizard | 2025-11-25 00:56:28+00:00
I think that's roughly similar to how it's done in American English (though Americans are probably less likely to have any idea how to type accented letters). A serious publication would write Yáñez but an average person would be pretty likely to just type "Yanez". Anyway, my point was just that it's not too weird to see someone write "Erdos" if their native language doesn't have the ő character.
Show HN: Pastehub.app – 100 % client-side toolbox for whatever you just copied
by jcfs | 2025-11-25 00:56:34+00:00
I kept opening 10+ tabs for the same daily clipboard chores, so I crammed a bunch of tiny client-side tools into one page:

Drop any image → OCR + dominant color palette + QR/barcode decode Paste “72 kg in pounds”, “50C to F”, “180 cm to feet” → instant conversion Paste any math expression → instant result JSON pretty/minify, JWT decode, Base64 → text/file, hex, URL tracking-strip, etc. All 100 % in-browser, zero backend, nothing ever leaves your machine

It’s deliberately over-engineered for the weird stuff I copy every day. Try throwing something at it and tell me what breaks or what’s missing.

Feedback button goes straight to me.

https://pastehub.app
by etempleton | 2025-11-25 00:56:54+00:00
Yep, this has been a known problem of HD for years. They have an expensive, less performant product than other bike manufacturers, but their shrinking clientele demands they never change.

Any time they try to introduce something new their customers lose their minds as if it is an act of betrayal. It also may be true that their new products are half hearted attempts at innovation and rarely any good. They mostly live off of brand name.

The correct move 30 years ago would have been to create a different performance brand and poured R&D money into that, but they were too busy with their fat margins to worry about that.
by eru | 2025-11-25 00:57:27+00:00
No, no, just the opposite.

The point of a congestion charge (whether on driving or on public transport) is to alleviate the congestion 'punishment'.

As a mental model: congestion works a bit like an auction. Getting from A to B during rush hour brings people some benefits (otherwise, they wouldn't bother). Benefits differ between people. But that travel also costs, both in terms of fares and in terms of annoyance and perhaps delays.

So We can imagine every prospective commuter weighs their benefits against the costs. I say it works like an auction, because there's limited capacity, and the people who are willing to endure the most price + annoyance are going to 'win' the auction and will commute. Everyone else shifts their commute around or stays home.

The people you mention who 'have to' travel during rush hour are just the ones willing to bear the highest costs in our model, and thus they 'win' the auction. (Winning an auction isn't necessarily good..: after all, you have to pay the price.)

Having a congestion charge means different people can bid not just with their tolerance for annoyance and delay, but also with actual money.

So now people compare fare + congestion charge + annoyance against their benefits. Assuming benefits on the right side of the equation have stayed about the same, the breakeven point for 'annoyance tolerance' is going to be lower, just because the other part of the left side grew.

A similar example: if tomorrow your local Walmart was handing out free 20 dollar bills with every purchase, you can bet your hat that pretty soon the queues for the cashier at that shop would grow until the wait-in-line for the marginal customer cancels out the free 20 dollars. Keep in mind that the marginal customer isn't the average customer: the queue would mostly be made up of people who have more time than money.

Conversely, in our congestion charging scenario the winners of our auction will tend to shift towards the crowd that has more money than time (or tolerance for packed trains).

The nice thing about letting people bid with money is that afterwards someone else has the money and can spend it. When you bid with your capacity to endure frustration and delay, no one else gets any benefit from that. It's just a poor waste of society's resources.
by burnte | 2025-11-25 00:58:32+00:00
I said "it worked for an adult" because it did. It works. In adults. The article says it doesn't work well in adolescents, not adults. I work in mental health, I assure you fluoxetine works very well, but most drugs are not tested on non-adult populations. So this is a study on a population not normally tested to enhance the dataset we have about fluoxetine. More studies will try to replicate this result, and we'll have even more data about where it works and where it doesn't.
by tombert | 2025-11-25 00:58:51+00:00
Yeah, similar for me. I bought 64 gigs of DDR5 laptop RAM about a year ago; it ended up costing about $190. Now the exact same listing is going for $470. https://a.co/d/fJH1GkW

I guess I'm glad I bought when I did; didn't realize how good of a deal I was getting.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-11-25 01:00:30+00:00
Well, I mean, they did. They built Livewire and spun it off with a SPAC (similar playbook seen with legacy auto and new EV efforts). The unfortunate reality is that, similar to AOPA and general aviation, young people cannot afford the sport due to confounding economic factors around purchasing power, disposable income, forward looking interest rate environment, cultural and intellectual interest, etc. What do you do if you build the next generation brand and product and arrive at a future that has no place for it? You've built a cautionary tale and museum piece. "Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future." - Niels Bohr

From a citation in another one of my comments:

> More troubling still is the industry’s struggle to attract younger generations. The percentage of motorcycle owners under eighteen has collapsed from eight percent in 1990 to just two percent today. Among the crucial eighteen to twenty-four age group, ownership has plummeted from sixteen percent to six percent over the same period. These figures suggest a fundamental breakdown in the traditional pathway into motorcycle ownership, where young people developed their passion for riding and carried it throughout their lives. Multiple barriers prevent younger Americans from entering the motorcycle market. The initial cost represents a significant hurdle for a generation burdened with student loan debt and facing challenges in achieving the same economic milestones their parents reached at similar ages. Insurance costs for young riders can equal or exceed the cost of the motorcycle itself, particularly for performance-oriented models. Many states have implemented graduated licensing systems that make it more difficult for young people to obtain motorcycle endorsements. Perhaps most significantly, the cultural transmission of motorcycle enthusiasm has been disrupted, as fewer parents and mentors ride motorcycles themselves or feel comfortable introducing young people to what is perceived as an increasingly dangerous activity.
by dragonwriter | 2025-11-25 01:01:27+00:00
If it was example code, it wouldn't let codegen be skipped, it would just provide guidance. If it was a dererministically-applied template, you could skip codegen, but that is different from an example, and probably doesn't help for what codegen is for (you are then just moving canned code from the MCP server to the client, offering the same thing you get from a tool call with a fixed interface.)
by throwaway3145 | 2025-11-25 01:01:34+00:00
Similar story to me. I was big into games and game design as a kid and was already doing some light modding of games but only a little programming. I experimented with using a memory editor to cheat on the Flash games in 6th grade, which promptly led to my account being banned. I was devastated and wanted revenge and swore I would write my own, sophisticated autobuyer bot. By mid 7th grade, I finished my project. I wrote it in REALBasic (was on a Mac). I implemented a barebones HTTP socket and cookie jar on top of the raw TCP socket provided by the language and learned to do all of that by sniffing my own network traffic and reading parts of the RFCs. I wrote rudimentary String parsing functions to parse the HTML results since I don't know Regex, and I also defeated the shop CAPTCHAs using a novel approach I have never seen anyone else use to this day. My bot worked phenomenally.

Fast forward to college, I re-implemented my bot as a pet project to learn Python. This time it was much better and included automatic selling of loot, automatic auctioning with feedback based pricing algorithms, and multiple account coordination for using a command and control server. I'm pretty sure I was the most sophisticated botter on the platform at the time. I had a very roundabout way to convert the loot into USD and was making around 7-10$/day completely passively.

Out of college I interviewed at a malware reverse engineering company. When you pass the interviews, they ask you to give a presentation before you get your offer. I chose to do a presentation about the bot (it was interesting from a security perspective)... big mistake. The VP of engineering was suddenly "pulled in to something" and I went home without an offer.
by AngryData | 2025-11-25 01:01:40+00:00
I very much disagree that consumers holding more hardware capabilities than they need is a bad thing. Replace computing hardware with mechanical tools, because they are basically tools, and consider if consumers be better off if wrenches and saw blades and machine tools were held more exclusively by business and large corporations. Would corporations use them more often? Probably. And yet it seems pretty clear that it would hurt the capabilities of regular people to not be able to fix things themselves or innovate outside of a corporate owned lab.

To me the #1 most important factor in a maintaining a prosperous and modern society is common access to tools by the masses, and computing hardware is just the latest set of tools.
by pabs3 | 2025-11-25 01:01:56+00:00
> if your device runs a true open source distro

The situation with Android security updates means that such a distro is either not based on Android (and likely less useful), or there are months-long delays to security updates for the non-GPL components.

Similarly, non-Google versions of Android can't run important apps that require attestation, including the Australian government app myGov.

https://grapheneos.org/articles/attestation-compatibility-gu...
by stego-tech | 2025-11-25 01:02:15+00:00
20-year old me would’ve been amazed at how much closer technology is getting to Ghost in the Shell. 30-year old me is firmly in the “nope, no thanks” camp.

I love seeing the advancements still, don’t get me wrong, but in the current data, advertising, and attention economies under Capitalism? No fucking way that shit is ending up in my head.
by treetalker | 2025-11-25 01:03:06+00:00
From the abstract:

> Conclusions: Habitual cheese consumption (≥1 time/week) was modestly associated with a reduced 3-year incidence of dementia in older Japanese adults. [Absolute risk difference of 1.06 percentage points.] While the absolute risk reduction was small, these findings are consistent with prior observational evidence linking dairy intake to cognitive health. Further research is warranted to clarify dose–response relationships, cheese subtypes, and underlying mechanisms.
by plasma | 2025-11-25 01:03:07+00:00
GitLab's write-up mentions a dead man's switch where "The malware continuously monitors its access to GitHub (for exfiltration) and npm (for propagation). If an infected system loses access to both channels simultaneously, it triggers immediate data destruction on the compromised machine. "

https://about.gitlab.com/blog/gitlab-discovers-widespread-np...
by Nition | 2025-11-25 01:04:13+00:00
There was some confusion. I originally read Wiseowise's comment as a failure to think of anything that could be "useful but bad for humanity". But given the followup response above I assume they're actually saying that LLMs are similar to tools like the Internet or Wikipedia and therefore should simply not be in the bad for humanity category.

Whether that's true or not, it is a different claim which doesn't fit the way I responded. It does fit the way Libidinalecon responded.
by kingstnap | 2025-11-25 01:04:16+00:00
I tried that once. Specifically because I wanted to see if we could leverage some sort of productivity enhancements.

I was using a local LLM around 4B to 14B, I tried Phi, Gemma, Qwen, and LLama. The idea was to prompt the LLM with the question, the answer key/rubric, and the student answer. The student answer at the end did some prompt caching to make it much faster.

It was okay but not good, there were a lot of things I tried:

* Endlessly messing with the prompt. * A few examples of grading. * Messing with the rubric to give more specific instructions. * Average of K. * Think step by step then give a grade.

It was janky and I'll throw it up to local LLMs at the time being somewhat too stupid for this to be reasonable. They basically didn't follow the rubric very well. Qwen in particular was very strict giving zeros regardless of the part marks described in the answer key as I recall.

I'm sure with the correct type of question and correct prompt and a good GPU it could work but it wasn't as trivially easy as I had thought at the time.
by tialaramex | 2025-11-25 01:05:04+00:00
So, all of Try is unstable. This means your stable Rust isn't allowed to implement Try for your own custom types, however the syntax is stable, so since Try is implemented for all of Option, Result and ControlFlow, those all work with the ? syntax even though that implementation is marked unstable.

Let me give you another example you've probably used without realising it, when you write password.contains("foo") in Rust. Why can you write "foo" there? Rust doesn't have overloading, and yet you can pass strings, characters, and functions including lambdas - how can this work? They all implement core::str::pattern::Pattern, an unstable trait used to deliver this functionality for all string matching.

In fact mechanically what's happening here for Try is that ? always worked for Option and Result, the "try v2" feature isn't about the syntax at all, it's about the behind the scenes implementation of that syntax. But that's not important, the syntax is promised and the final implementation will almost certainly be tryv2 or something very similar.