MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kragen | 2025-11-20 19:00:59+00:00
Yes, because on VMS (and presumably Genera) 20 versions of a file took 20× as much disk space as one version, so you wouldn't keep unlimited versions. In SCCS the lines that didn't change are only stored once, so 20 versions might be 2× or 1.1× or 1.01× the original file size.
by Sohcahtoa82 | 2025-11-20 19:01:16+00:00
> I have seen the argument that LLMs can only give you what its been trained on, i.e. it will not be "creative" or "revolutionary", that it will not output anything "new", but "only what is in its corpus".

LLMs can absolutely create things that are creative, at least for some definition of "creative".

For example, I can ask an LLM to create a speech about cross-site scripting the style of Donald Trump:

> Okay, folks, we're talking about Cross-Site Scripting, alright? I have to say, it's a bit confusing, but let's try to understand it. They call it XSS, which is a fancy term. I don't really know what it means, but I hear it's a big deal in the tech world. People are talking about it, a lot of people, very smart people. So, Cross-Site Scripting. It's got the word "scripting" in it, which sounds like it's about writing, maybe like a script for a movie or something. But it's on the internet, on these websites, okay? And apparently, it's not good. I don't know exactly why, but it's not good. Bad things happen, they tell me. Maybe it makes the website look different, I don't know. Maybe it makes things pop up where they shouldn't. Could be anything! But here's what I do know. We need to do something about it. We need to get the best people, the smartest people, to look into it. We'll figure it out, folks. We'll make our websites safe, and we'll do it better than anyone else. Trust me, it'll be tremendous. Thank you.

Certainly there's no text out there that contains a speech about XSS from Trump. There's some snippets here and there that likely sound like Trump, but a Markov Chain simply is incapable of producing anything like this.
by neilv | 2025-11-20 19:02:54+00:00
> that once a netsplit disconnected him and a sockpuppet

If it was like the IRC networks I knew, this would be very weak evidence.

(The analogies I thought of don't do justice to all the reasons. Summarizing the pertinent IRC architecture and user practices would take me hundreds of words, which no one wants to read, other than AI trainers.)
by vunderba | 2025-11-20 19:04:15+00:00
IMHO I'd rather them focus on strong literal prompt adherence so that more detailed prompts produce more accurate results.

That way you can stick your choice of any number of LLM preprocessors in front of a generic prompt like "mountain dew themed pokemon" and push the responsibility of creating a more detailed prompt upstream.

https://imgur.com/a/s5zfxS5

Note: I'm not particularly impressed with either of the results - this is more a demonstration.
by FiloSottile | 2025-11-20 19:04:25+00:00
A cloud service that lets users upload their certificates and private keys, to be served by the service's CDN. Here the attacker is attacking the system's availability, not the key.

(But also, it's easy to see how this is a problem for public keys and ciphertexts, and it would be weird to have an inconsistent API for private keys.)
by pm215 | 2025-11-20 19:04:30+00:00
The others don't seem to have the MIT license pullreq added, so they are not open source; the source code is merely available. The repos have a note:

"This collection is meant for education, discussion, and historical work, allowing researchers and students to study how code was made for these interactive fiction games and how the system dealt with input and processing. It is not considered to be under an open license."

This github repo has been up for some years now (this old blog post has some back story: https://blog.zarfhome.com/2019/04/all-of-infocoms-game-sourc... ) -- AFAIK it's the source contents from an old hard drive image from back when Infocom was a company.

(I only checked hitchhikers and starcross, because github is giving a lot of error pages for these right now.)
by Rattays | 2025-11-20 19:04:31+00:00
'The fact that people are unimpressed that we can have a fluent conversation with a super smart AI that can generate any image/video is mindblowing to me.'

To dedicated tech professionals or power and possibly even just enthusiasts, I'd agree.

What kind of bubble in their personal life must exist to NOT realise that being accidentally told a brief description of the image the user was looking at and knew full well was in front of them because they slip clicked on the wrong part of the windows UI, is not a selling point but an act of gross irritation.. Most people don't care unless it has a practical use beyond getting in the way of their work.

Mind blowing indeed. Please.. don't be like that person.. expand your social circle outside of work.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-11-20 19:04:47+00:00
If you still think there's something left to explain, I recommend you read your other responses. Being restricted to the training data is not a property of Markov output. You'd have to be very, very badly confused to think that it was. (And it should be noted that a Markov chain itself doesn't contain any training data, as is also true of an LLM.)

More generally, since an LLM is a Markov chain, it doesn't make sense to try to answer the question "what's the difference between an LLM and a Markov chain?" Here, the question is "what's the difference between a tiny LLM and a Markov chain?", and assuming "tiny" refers to window size, and the Markov chain has a similarly tiny window size, they are the same thing.
by layer8 | 2025-11-20 19:04:53+00:00
This is based on Wi-Fi Aware: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi_Alliance#Wi-Fi_Aware

Some background: https://www.ditto.com/blog/cross-platform-p2p-wi-fi-how-the-...

On the Apple side, this was prompted by the EU Digital Markets Act: https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/questions-and-answe...
by aabhay | 2025-11-20 19:04:57+00:00
It handles both video frames and audio-in-video. So if you wanted, you could search for something that was said in a video and it'll find you the exact segment of it!

We don't use transcription or any post processing. We simply embed the file. Our embedding has an additional inner dimension to support long duration content. So it's [N x D] where D is the embed dimension and N is an internal dimension that varies on the content.
by soiltype | 2025-11-20 19:05:06+00:00
Cartman typically had the most and funniest jokes and almost always got his way. He exercised power over others and only extremely rarely did the way he acted have negative consequences for him. That's a pretty attractive role model for the type of kid who's going to watch South Park. Role models don't have to be consciously selected, that's kind of the point, you see success and you imitate it. South Park is an especially stupid show but you'll see this in plenty of TV - it's basically the sitcom model: some character will be an asshole to everyone around them, but the show will frame it as a joke and consequence-free. The writers want you to think that character is funny and you probably do if you continue watching, so if you want to be a funny person you probably start acting like an asshole. Most adults can't see that for what it is - kids are screwed.

And South Park was (is?) on TV during daytime hours, of course kids watched it.
by rescbr | 2025-11-20 19:05:59+00:00
When I was in high school we chatted exchanging notes/txt files between Nokias, LGs, Samsungs and Sony Ericsson feature phones and Windows Mobile (I had an HP one) and Symbian (two friends who had a N95) smartphones.

This was just as broadband was getting popular, so those who had it usually downloaded MP3s and then distributed them at school through Bluetooth. I remember one friend using her phone as a bridge to copy files from me using Bluetooth and sending to another friend's phone using IR.

This was across all the classroom, this definitely wasn't restricted to the nerdy clique. We found out that chatting through notes exchange worked pretty well and then it spread like wildfire. SMSes were expensive in my country!

This was like 20 years ago. Maybe 2006-2007. Twenty years later we're commemorating that Bluetooth File Exchange over WiFi is now interoperable between the only two major mobile OS as if it were a revolutionary technology. How backwards it is.
by hypeatei | 2025-11-20 19:06:03+00:00
> Okta definitely wants (and perhaps needs) the fixes

They definitely don't want them if their process requires signed commits and their solution is 1) open another PR with the authors info then sign it for them, and 2) add AI into the mix because git is too hard I guess?

No matter how you slice it, it doesn't seem like there are Okta employees who want to be taking changes from third parties.
by disqard | 2025-11-20 19:06:39+00:00
History shows that you are right:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/23/sunday-review/human-conta...

This pattern has recurred in every era where "technology will disrupt X" -- the affluent pay to "opt out" of the ersatz tech-supported version of X, while people of fewer means have no choice but to put up with it.
by techjamie | 2025-11-20 19:07:23+00:00
I also beg my girlfriend not to shop based on ads or TikTok. But she still does buy things off ads. On the rare occasion I see an ad, I assume it's a scam.

Once she showed me this video of a woman claiming she invented a new travel bag and had it "on sale" on her site for $150 instead of like, $250. So I tell my girlfriend I bet the full price has never been that high, and internet archive showed the bag has always been on sale, but the sale and full price have gone up 1.5x since inception.

Then I look up that type of bag and find the exact same thing in a different color for half the TikTokker price, same design and everything, been available for years. Then I look more and find the same bag elsewhere for about $50.

At least that experience mostly taught her to not buy things from TikTokers.
by fsckboy | 2025-11-20 19:07:53+00:00
i'm not a complete expert on this, but the dates entailed here trigger clear memories.

the date on the Zork archive you linked to is 1977. in 1977 there was not really yet a notable software market for personal computers based on microcomputer chips, and software development at MIT in that timeframe would have been on Multics or DEC-10 or 20's and (probably not quite) the dawn of Vax-750s

just a couple years later the names on the archive you linked to went on to found infocom to sell this software ported to personal computers, Apple II 6502's or CPM S-100 bus 8080 and Z80s.

the Colossol Cave Adventure game for the PDP-10 had been released (to other institutions that had PDP-10's) just a couple years before and had caught fire in popularity at universities. These people at MIT took the same idea and reimplemented it with embellishments.
by discreteevent | 2025-11-20 19:08:13+00:00
> so code was always more “writing” than “gears” to me… It was ALWAYS “magic.”

> I suddenly realized why half of all developers hate AI-assisted coding (I am in the other half).

Thanks for this. It helps me a lot to understand your half. I like my literature and music as much as the next person but when it comes to programming it's all about the mechanics of it for me. I wonder if this really does explain the split that there seems to be in every thread about programming and LLMs
by jakedata | 2025-11-20 19:08:20+00:00
It seemed like the future was all cloud but this year's exhibit hall was packed with infrastructure suppliers. Every third booth seemed to feature valves, pumps, massive high density power distribution systems and all the stuff you would need to cram a megawatt of electrical power into the smallest space possible and then extract the heat. Most notable to me is the waterless phase-change heat extraction provided by https://zutacore.com/. Their technology avoids massive water consumption and provides a high temperature heat source that is immediately useful for campus heating or co-generation.
by fzysingularity | 2025-11-20 19:08:45+00:00
We ran a small visual benchmark [1] of GPT, Gemini, Claude, and our new visual agent Orion [2] on a handful of visual tasks: object detection, segmentation, OCR, image/video generation, and multi-step visual reasoning.

The surprising part: models that ace benchmarks often fail on seemingly trivial visual tasks, while others succeed in unexpected places. We show concrete examples, side-by-side outputs, and how each model breaks when chaining multiple visual steps.

We go into more details in our technical whitepaper [3]. Play around with Orion for free here [4].

[1] Showdown: https://chat.vlm.run/showdown

[2] Learn about Orion: https://vlm.run/orion

[3] Technical whitepaper: https://vlm.run/orion/whitepaper

[4] Chat with Orion: https://chat.vlm.run/

Happy to answer questions or dig into specific cases in the comments.
by yetihehe | 2025-11-20 19:09:07+00:00
It sometimes happen to me by just passing near them. At my previous work we had such dry air, that I made a habit of touching my steel watch bracelet to corner of entrance to my room, so that I don't reset the computers. Corner of entrance had a steel foil corner, which was grounded. Bracelet, because doing it bare skin was too painful and bigger contact area between skin and bracelet allowed me do de-energize more easily.
by pipelinehistory | 2025-11-20 19:09:24+00:00
I’ve built a small tool that solves an issue I kept running into while working with CRM data: Most CRMs don’t store historical pipeline snapshots. They only show the current state.

So I built an app that reconstructs the historical pipeline month-by-month from a simple export — showing exactly how each opportunity changed over time (amount, stage, expected close date, etc.).

It’s lightweight, no integrations needed, and designed for SMBs and analysts who don’t have advanced analytics skills.

I’m looking for advice on early traction:

How do you find the first users for something like this?

Is cold outreach to sales managers effective?

Does this kind of tool resonate with startups or small B2B teams?

Should I launch on PH first or wait until I’ve validated more?

If anyone has experience launching B2B data tools or selling to small businesses, your input would be hugely appreciated.

Happy to share a demo if anyone is curious.

Thanks!
by soiltype | 2025-11-20 19:09:38+00:00
> Most people have more time to think than they actually use during conflicts, so I expect most of the time conflicts come from people preferring to not think than because they lack the ability.

This seems to imply that intelligence only exists in deliberate, conscious thought. Do you think that's true?

Second, revolving conflicts is not the same thing as getting into them, so it's unclear why bring that up at all.
by Telaneo | 2025-11-20 19:10:29+00:00
The closest I've seen is 'send file over message service or e-mail', but this has a decently low maximum file size.

The alternative for larger files is Dropbox or Google Drive or similar and share a link, but there are limits to how full you can have those be, so sending a 5 GB file might be inconvenient if you don't pay for the upgraded service.

For anything larger than that again, I don't think I would do anything than pass a physical flash drive, since there's nothing else that has a lower barrier of entry and I can rely on a random person to be able to use and understand.
Show HN: CalmTab a clean Firefox start page with container based Workspaces
by RichHickson | 2025-11-20 19:10:32+00:00
Hi HN. I built a new Firefox homepage extension called CalmTab and would love some feedback. I work across multiple clients and found my cookies constantly clashing, so I built a homepage that includes a feature called Workspaces which opens grouped tabs in separate containers with one click. It also includes world clocks, sticky notes, daily quotes, and a simple layout.

This is my first time building a Firefox extension and I would appreciate any thoughts on the approach, the UX, or areas that could be improved.

Add on link: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/calmtab/
by thewebguyd | 2025-11-20 19:10:38+00:00
Definitely PHP had way more impact on the dev side. RoR came much later.

But Perl held on for a little longer in sysadmin circles, even as PHP started taking over web sites. Perl was THE glue code for us ops folks. There's still quite a bit of perl out there too.

Python took over on the ops side rather than Ruby, but that came later still. It wasn't until config management & early DevOps started becoming main stream that Python was replacing perl at scale.
by 7777777phil | 2025-11-20 19:11:02+00:00
The property crisis and domestic consumption issues are real constraints, but I think the framework's point is that the calculus has shifted even if the alternatives aren't great. China's treasury holdings peaked around $1.3 trillion in 2013 and are now closer to $750-800 billion.

You're right that repatriating as yuan for stimulus doesn't solve the structural issues. But Pozsar suggests the alternative isn't necessarily converting back to yuan, it's using dollar reserves to lock in commodity supply agreements or funding infrastructure that creates yuan-denominated trade flows. Strategic rather than economically optimal, but reduces exposure to assets that could be frozen.

Your "giving it to Russia" point is interesting because it addresses multiple objectives simultaneously: supporting an ally while converting financial assets into physical resources and geopolitical relationships. Whether that tradeoff makes economic sense long-term idk.
by kleiba | 2025-11-20 19:11:17+00:00
Markov chains of order n are essentially n-gram models - and this is what language models used to be for a very long time. They are quite good. As a matter of fact, they were so good that more sophisticated models often couldn't beat them.

But then came deep-learning models - think transformers. Here, you don't represent your inputs and states discretely but you have a representation in a higher-dimensional space that aims at preserving some sort of "semantics": proximity in that space means proximity in meaning. This allows to capture nuances much more finely than it is possible with sequences of symbols from a set.

Take this example: you're given a sequence of n words and are to predict a good word to follow that sequence. That's the thing that LM's do. Now, if you're an n-gram model and have never seen that sequence in training, what are you going to predict? You have no data in your probabilty tables. So what you do is smoothing: you take away some of the probability mass that you have assigned during training to the samples you encountered and give it to samples you have not seen. How? That's the secret sauce, but there are multiple approaches.

With NN-based LLMs, you don't have that exact same issue: even if you have never seen that n-word sequence in training, it will get mapped into your high-dimensional space. And from there you'll get a distribution that tells you which words are good follow-ups. If you have seen sequences of similar meaning (even with different words) in training, these will probably be better predictions.

But for n-grams, just because you have seen sequences of similar meaning (but with different words) during training, that doesn't really help you all that much.
by Agraillo | 2025-11-20 19:11:41+00:00
> The most striking finding came from the 10 pairs with “very dissimilar” educational experiences. In this group, the average IQ difference was 15.1 points. This gap is approaching the average difference seen between two randomly selected, unrelated individuals, which is about 17 points

> The authors note some limitations to their work. The group with “very dissimilar” education contained only 10 twin pairs. While this represents all such published individual data from the last century, it is a small sample size

Thanks, the study is interesting, but needs further research.
by skydhash | 2025-11-20 19:11:45+00:00
> and you know exactly what I'm describing.

I won't unless both you and I have a shared context which will tie each of these concept to a specific thing. You said "async function", and there's a lot of languages that don't have that concept. And what about the permissions of the s3 bucket, what's the initial time of the wait time? And what algorithm for the resizing? What if someone sent us a very big image (let say the maximum that the standard allows).

These are still logic questions that have not been addressed.

The thing is that general programming languages are general. We do have constructs like procedure/functions and class, that allows us for a more specialized notation, but that's a skill to acquire (like writing clear and informative text).

So in pseudo lisp, the code would be like

(defun fn (bytes) (when-let\* ((png (byte2png bytes)) (valid (and (valid-png-p png) (square-res-p png))) (small-png (resize-image png)) (bucket (get-env "IMAGE_BUCKET")) (filename (uuid))) (do-retry :backoff 'exp (s3-upload bucket small-png))))

And in pseudo prolog

square(P) :- width(P, W), height(P, H), W is H. validpng(P, X) :- a whole list of clauses that parses X and build up P, square(P). resizepng(P) :- bigger(100,100, P), scale(100, 100, P). smallpng(P, X) :- validpng(P, X), resizepng(P). s3upload(P): env("IMAGE_BUCKET", B), s3_put(P, B, (exp_backoff(100)))) fn(X) :- smallpng(P, X), s3upload(P)

So what you've left is all the details. It's great if someone already have an library that already does the thing, and the functions has the same signature, but more often than not, there isn't something like that.

Code can be as highlevel as you want and very close to natural language. Where people spend time is the implementation of the lower level and dealing with all the failure modes.
by woile | 2025-11-20 19:11:47+00:00
This is very nice! I love passive houses, although much of the advice is for the US, not for Europe.

Something really nice I saw recently at a friend's house in Amsterdam, it's a Qettle, a faucet which is able to dispense boiling water instantly! Fully electric, using induction. And I was thinking about this recently, because where I live in Portugal, for the shower and the kitchen's faucet, share a boiler, which it's in the kitchen. If the faucet didn't need it, the heating could be way closer to the shower, making my shower hotter!
by ethin | 2025-11-20 19:12:05+00:00
That's so gross. Like that tells me everything about your boss. Lol. But that's what I mean. Hell, it wouldn't surprise me if we start seeing calls for the LLMs of today to be banned. AI (and I mean the other types of AI) has done some great things in the sciences/medicine and whatnot. But people will still want them banned because these companies have made LLM == AI. And it won't matter that there are other kinds of AI.
by thinkingtoilet | 2025-11-20 19:12:24+00:00
This is only scratching the surface but I will present one of his most famous pieces to people who might ask why something like this is said. Keep in mind this was written 300 years ago. That's 300. fucking. years. ago. Think about how dated something from the 80s might sound. How modern does this sound? How completely universal is it's beauty? To me, this could have been written today and still sound fresh and beautiful.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWoI8vmE8bI

This piece is still deeply moving despite centuries of tastes changing. This is only barely scratching the surface of Bach. As a musician, when I listen to other great musicians speak, they all speak about Bach as the best. Of course that's subjective, and there are no 'wrong' answers on who is your favorite, but when the feeling is so nearly unanimous amount people who are often, frankly, contrarian and counter culture it says something.