MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pedalpete | 2025-11-27 21:24:44+00:00
I keep getting the feeling that the tech media is it's own worst enemy, or it shows how little tech media like the verge understands about technology.

Though I agree that language is not intelligence, suggesting that the AI boom is only about LLMs, or that LLMs do not create value is incredibly misleading.

I disagree with the base concept that to justify the current investment, we must arrive at AGI.

Estimates put total AI investement at $1.5T.

Is it a lot? Sure.

But what is going to come out of it.

Faster and likely improved results from medical imaging. Lower cost and widespread ability to create images and videos, denting the multi-trillion dollar marketing industry. Self-driving and advanced driver assistance, lives saves, costs reduced. Improvements in education and low-cost tutoring available to more people.

Let's say these investements just break even with spend. Isn't that better for society?

I know people are going to say "but what about the radiologists"? We have a shortage of GPs and doctors to care for an aging population. These highly trained doctors can do more in the medical community.

What about the actors/directors/sound engineers, etc in the media industry. This will likely shrink, but we can't ignore their expertise entirely. This industry won't go away. A friend is a voice actor. He isn't being replaced, however, he is getting less work, not because of the final production, but because in the pre-production phases, they don't need his expertise because they can use AI as 'good enough".

The lens I look at this through is my grandfather, who developed film for a living. That job disappeared. Nobody cried out for the film developers when we made the shift to digital. We create more imagery now than ever before, more people are employed in the imaging business than ever before.

As a (former) software engineer myself, do I believe AI will replace engineers? I think this is true as much as packages replaces engineers. When I started programming, there weren't a ton of open-source packages and there weren't a ton of tools like NPM, Cargo, for managing packages. I saw the transition from "write most of the code yourself" to "lego-brick" style programming. It didn't reduce the amount of programmers, it increased what we could do, and allowed us to do more interesting work than boilerplate.
by qcnguy | 2025-11-27 21:24:53+00:00
CUDA is just a better dev experience. Lots of training is experiments where developer/researcher productivity matters. Googlers get to use what they're given, others get to choose.

Once you settle on a design then doing ASICs to accelerate it might make sense. But I'm not sure the gap is so big, the article says some things that aren't really true of datacenter GPUs (Nvidia dc gpus haven't wasted hardware on graphics related stuff for years).
by zozbot234 | 2025-11-27 21:25:05+00:00
> ... Also your boot-chain is still closed and proprietary, and completely different than the one used by all other ARM vendors. Being the special snowflake is not helping your business or your customers. ...

Why does the boot-chain matter? Can't we just have a custom U-Boot implementation that interacts with the bespoke boot chain while providing standard UEFI support to the rest of the system? Isn't that how Asahi works?
by johnea | 2025-11-27 21:25:12+00:00
Yea, I often wonder when I see this type of article, why don't they just use bind9?

No other DNS resolver is going to come close to it's number of deployment*years in operation.

I didn't read the article though, since I'm not going to enable javasript and cookies just to read someone's blag post 8-/

HTML much?
by rstuart4133 | 2025-11-27 21:25:54+00:00
I also own a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen11. It's the most expensive laptop I've every owned. I will never buy another one.

Annoyingly but unimportantly, the paint started peeling off in year 1. That's not covered by warranty, according to Lenovo. The battery dropped to 80% in a year. Apparently that's not a warranty issue either.

It now throttles all the time. That's almost certainly due to overheating, possibly because of some fan issue, possibly because the interior of the fan is clogged - but I can't figure out how to get to it to clean it as it looks to require heat sink removal. It does have an absolutely gorgeous 4K OLED screen. Pity the keys rub against it when the lid is closed, leaving a keyboard pattern of scratches in that lovely screen.

It does indeed mostly work well with Linux. Except for the video, that has some funky video routing that both X and Wayland struggle with. The only way I can get it to work is to boot with X using an X display manager, but then flip to Wayland. Staying in X doesn't work, booting in Wayland doesn't work. Apparently that was fixed in GenIII. And while it does work well for Linux, Lenovo refuses to honour the 5 year warranty unless you boot Windows.

I did use ThinkPad's when IBM made them. They were expensive, but they were MacBook'est in quality. That's why I got the X1, but it seems Lenovo bought the name, only.
by AlanYx | 2025-11-27 21:26:14+00:00
Yes, that's the reason why a dedup vdev that has lower redundancy than your main pool will fail with "mismatched replication level" unless you use the -f (force) flag.

I'm not sure about whether an L2ARC vdev can offload the DDT, but my guess is no given the built-in logic warning against mismatched replication levels.
by hdgvhicv | 2025-11-27 21:26:20+00:00
In the U.K., Starmer won a landslide victory with 34% of the vote.

Sunak was not elected by the people. Neither was Truss, Johnson, or May

Cameron got 36% of the vote when he became PM. Brown wasn’t elected. Blair did well with 43%, but before him Major wasn’t elected.

Democracies are flawed, they’re just better than other systems we’ve had in the past.
by locallost | 2025-11-27 21:26:44+00:00
I am not German, but I live in Germany and things can be debated in detail and from various viewpoints. Things are rarely black and white.

But I am getting kind of tired of the canned half informed opinions like "outrageous energy prices" usually although not always followed by "closing cheap nuclear will do that for you". Energy like natural gas is still elevated compared to 2021 but it's nowhere near outrageous anymore. Electricity as an end consumer I can now get cheaper than in e.g. France, and they just announced dirt cheap industry prices etc. So things can be complex, what was the case in 2023 might not be in 2025. Things change but it takes too much effort to question if what was true two years ago is still really true, so we are stuck with these lazy views.
by mewse-hn | 2025-11-27 21:27:07+00:00
> I am not familiar with chocolate doom what makes it better than any other doom source port?

The earliest doom variants once the source code released started adding features that weren't faithful to the original dos version 1.9.

Even Boom which was a pretty conservative codebase that focused on limit removal for level editing added weird things like weapon recoil pushing the player back when you shoot a weapon.

So chocolate doom's name is wordplay on "vanilla doom" - it's the version of doom we all played in the 90s just updated with current i/o libraries (libSDL) so it can run on modern platforms.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-11-27 21:27:07+00:00
I didn't read the parent comment as endorsing that outcome, simply predicting that if people chase profits without regard for the well being of their fellow man, that's where we might end up heading. I think the question we have to answer is "how can we prevent that?", because history has shown us that humans are very happy to run roughshod over others to enrich themselves.
by Barathkanna | 2025-11-27 21:28:10+00:00
As someone building AI infrastructure, this deflation idea shows up very differently for us. Application founders can afford to say they will wait for the next model, but infrastructure founders cannot. The value we create is not in shipping features faster. It is in absorbing the volatility that sits underneath the entire AI stack.

Models keep getting cheaper and more capable every few months. However, the underlying compute economics do not deflate at the same rate. GPU provisioning, inference orchestration, bandwidth constraints, latency guarantees, regulatory requirements, and failure handling do not become magically simple because a new model improved its reasoning. In reality, each improvement on the model side increases pressure on the infrastructure side. Bigger context windows, heavier memory footprints, more parallel requests, and more complex agentic workflows all increase the operational burden.

For infrastructure teams, waiting does not help. The surface area of what needs to be built only grows. You cannot delay autoscaling, observability, scheduling, routing, or privacy guarantees. Applications will always demand more from the infrastructure, and they will expect it to feel like a commodity.

My view is that technical deflation applies much more to application startups than to infrastructure startups. App founders can benefit from waiting. Infra founders have to build now because every model improvement instantly becomes a new expectation that the infra must support. The baseline keeps rising.

The real moat in the next era is not the speed of feature development. It is the ability of your infrastructure to absorb the increasing chaos of more capable models while keeping the experience simple and predictable for the user
by aeonfox | 2025-11-27 21:28:23+00:00
I play the NYT connections pretty regularly. Today's (#25332) purple group was slightly more tenuous than real NYT games. Often good purple groups are both difficult to infer, but also the grouping makes more sense. Good connections puzzles will have fake-out groupings, forcing you to try and find as many groups as possible before making a guess. But still I was impressed by this one!

But on my second puzzle (#25049) I had two groups all come up in a row, I don't think the NYT one ever does this – which now makes me think you could shuffle their puzzle a bunch of times to find out the connections. And these connections were dead simple apart from purple which didn't make sense. And "Things You Container" is not correct English.

It's not bad for a vibe-code. But I'd be inclined to stick to the lovingly human-created NYT puzzles.
by tstrimple | 2025-11-27 21:29:02+00:00
Yeah, at first I was thinking it was an equivalent to the America the Beautiful passes which are $80/year for US citizens and residents for access across multiple parks. And you only need one of those per vehicle. But no, this is $100 per person per park entry which does seem quite excessive. I had an amazing time on a road trip with friends about a decade ago in the US South West. We visited Bryce Canyon National Park, Grand Canyon National Park, Rocky Mountain National Park, Yosemite National Parks, and Zion National Park. Some across multiple days. If our group had been "foreigners" with this fee structure, we would have had to pay an additional $800/person or so. That would have almost doubled the cost of our trip.
by scheeseman486 | 2025-11-27 21:30:34+00:00
In Australia, if you have the space for rooftop solar, it's far cheaper in the long run to buy solar+battery. We did the math for our household and even if grid prices are stable (which they aren't, they're fast increasing) we're still going to make money back on the investment in less than 4 years.

Granted this includes a government rebate for the battery, but overall the prices have plummeted. Any government that isn't pushing for renewables and energy storage at this point is actively working against it's citizens.
by jstanley | 2025-11-27 21:31:07+00:00
This one in particular stood out:

> we also have lots of crazier tricks we could pull out like panopticon viral screening or toilet monitors or daily individualized saliva sampling or engineered microbe-resistant surfaces or even dividing society into cells with rotating interlocks or having people walk around in little personal spacesuits, and while admittedly most of this doesn’t sound awesome, I see no reason this shouldn’t be a battle that we would win.

Are you sure that the potential for society to start enforcing these things upon us is a reason to be thankful?
by constantcrying | 2025-11-27 21:31:33+00:00
>They were doomed regardless of where they were based.

This was not inevitable. You even mentioned the reason it happened.

Cherry isn't a one of here. This exact same story, successful product -> limited innovation -> bad clones from China -> superior "clones" from Chinese with actual innovations, keeps repeating itself in Germany.

Germany is objectively not a good environment for manufacturing. Especially when it comes to manufacturing anything cost sensitive, but these companies obviously have themselves to blame. The PC Hardware market has drastically evolved and if Cheery had actually wanted to, they could have been at the forefront of that. But they haven't.
by nickpp | 2025-11-27 21:32:17+00:00
> this should be regulated at least a little bit

Don’t you think hotels aren’t already regulated? Just try opening a new one in a popular place and let us know how open the market is.

Repeat after me: regulations (no matter how good or well intended) favor the incumbents and hinder startups. Fewer startups means less competition. Less competition means fewer, crappier and more expensive products and services.

Trying to use more regulation to fix a market f’ed up by regulation will only deepen this spiral of doom.
by leobg | 2025-11-27 21:33:01+00:00
It was also two teenagers who, some 50 years earlier, came up with the idea of flying machines and the aerodynamics of wings in the first place:

The brothers Otto and Gustav Lilienthal were watching the storks take flight in the meadows of Mecklenburg in the 1850s. And it made them think, “We could do that, too, if we only had wings like that”.

Of course, Otto died in a crash of one of his motorless flying machines in 1891, I believe. But the Wright brothers saw the eulogy in the paper… and the rest is history.
by lazide | 2025-11-27 21:33:26+00:00
Haha, Marcus Aurelis is very disappointed.

Tell me what I made up, eh?

The point of stoicism is to make your own decisions and be able to chart your own life by following principles you believe are just - in large part by avoiding being controlled by emotional reactivity/manipulation.

Not to cut out emotions all together, but to not be driven by them. Especially when someone is trying to induce them in you.

This often comes across as ‘stone faced in the face of extreme emotion’ - but doesn’t mean the person isn’t feeling them. Rather that they are not letting themselves be driven by or controlled by them in the moment, if they do not serve a useful purpose for them.
by kragen | 2025-11-27 21:33:39+00:00
That's a 7% yearly ROI, which is a pretty decent number, better than you'd do on average in the stock market and more predictable. If he had a little storage so he didn't have to sell any, it would improve further. But also 6000W of panels in the low-cost category now costs €300: https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-modul-preis...
by techblueberry | 2025-11-27 21:34:40+00:00
Hype. Any company that could approach a billion dollars run by one person could be disrupted by a company run by two people. Everyone would see this and try to compete with 5, 10, or 100 people.

If there was an exception it would be IP related. Maybe some game or whatever, but I think the company would have to look special and be more about the IP and less about being really great at writing agents.
by kragen | 2025-11-27 21:34:41+00:00
pvXchange, but they're €23 because you fucked up the math: https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-modul-preis...

€12 would be 44× cheaper (7000/6000/(12/450) ≈ 44). Maybe in a couple of years.
by hagbard_c | 2025-11-27 21:35:07+00:00
This may have been true in the 80's but it is no longer the case. Left wing politics and whatever nutty ideas this faction produces is now more extreme than its counterpart in Europe. It is as if US lefties have taken the 'everything is bigger in the USA' mantra and applied it to their utopian ideologies. State-run grocery stores? The whole 'DEI/DIE' bureaucra[c/z]y? The aggressive way in which gender ideology is being forced upon those too young to realise they're being bamboozled? Only in the U.S.A...
by fuzzfactor | 2025-11-27 21:35:31+00:00
Well it was far removed from today, but our high school had been built experimentally on runways in the nearby Everglades after the air base had been decommissioned following the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The pavement was vast in all directions and educational buildings had been placed on or alongside it, all parking was on existing tarmac.

Anyway, in Mechanical Engineering our senior project was a gyrocopter.

It was pretty much like somebody had a broken one just sitting around doing nothing, a student brought it in like it was "show & tell" and the decision was made to launch. It didn't come in at the beginning of the year.

I did graduate a bit early and never did get to see much of the progress.
by squigz | 2025-11-27 21:36:03+00:00
This is a brilliant comment.

I'd like to elaborate on something you touch on briefly:

> I'm asking people without any ability to help me with it to just take it and work it out with me, and that's not helpful.

> that somebody needs to be somebody with the appropriate skills and abilities to help them with it.

I think there's an important line to walk here. I think it's important everyone (men and women) are able to talk about their feelings and experiences with their friends - but I don't think the goal needs to be "helping work it out". Just sharing and listening can be liberating, can help ease the road to talking to a professional, and can help others see that others struggle too.

There is a tendency in conversations of any sort to be always searching for a "solution" or an "answer", instead of just listening.

(There's a lot of nuance here in choosing when to share, etc, but I just wanted to talk a bit about it)
by squigz | 2025-11-27 21:36:12+00:00
> I recall seeing some fairly befuddling ones, like "Study finds that being in a green environment with plants & flowers reduces depression" etc., how do you even quantify this into numbers?

"Effects of things on depression" doesn't seem like such a crazy thing to need to quantify.

> I tell you I feel good if there's more greenery in the city, you want proof to see "how" good before you build more parks?

A very disingenuous comparison, I think. There's a pretty big difference between that and "What is the effect of certain environmental stimuli during surgery"

I'd really rather not have surgeons explore this question on their own.

I don't disagree that we don't need nearly as much data on some things as others - but I do still want data supporting reasons to spend millions of public dollars.
by vladms | 2025-11-27 21:36:34+00:00
People changed environment even before these optimizations. I think now it's more a problem of fast enough "catch-up and converge", for example for CO2 : https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?c... - if the rich countries would reduce a bit faster (using better technologies) then those technologies could be used by the others and impact would be reduced.
by squigz | 2025-11-27 21:36:36+00:00
If you manage to "self-monitor" all the time, and never show more than a modicum of vulnerability, that seems very disconnected to me.

Perhaps 'disconnected' is the wrong word, but what I mean is that emotionally healthy people feel their emotions and express them, not just hold them at arm's length and pick and choose which to feel and express.
by diacritica | 2025-11-27 21:36:55+00:00
Hi, Pablo from Penpot here.

- New rendering engine should fix the performance issues. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciG0U5jJtHY (older reference https://community.penpot.app/t/its-time-for-penpot-to-almost...) Open beta coming in the next few weeks, finally!

- Our business model is Open Nitrate (see https://community.penpot.app/t/penpots-upcoming-business-mod...). For the impatient, think of it as a reverse open-core. The current pricing model for SaaS is quite straightforward. The "unlimited storage" for Enterprise on SaaS is fine, believe me.

- This is a European startup that was founded in 2011 and pivoted to a product-centric actvity in 2021. We're 45 people. We believe open source is the right social contract. All employees use Linux as their operating system. Yes.

- In terms of our vision of AI, I published this whitepaper in August https://penpot.app/blog/penpot-ai-whitepaper/ If you want to understand how we think about Penpot, design and platforms, read it.

- 3 months later, we can demo our MCP server capabilities here https://community.penpot.app/t/penpot-mcp-server-showcase-as... but see also our internal folder with 1min clips here https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1CCuBqHEevWsp15bY... (my favourite is the flat design to design tokens and back to design). "design as a graph" is our ML-based applied research. We hope to have something cool ready at some point next year.

- The whole point of building Penpot was to unite designers and developers. New tools and platforms can play a role. We focused on declarative and semantic design paradigms departing from imperative design paradigms.

- We have 1.2M users, 25k Penpot new deployments every month, 30k new SaaS signups every month and a growing community of contributors and partners. Ironically, the early adopters are Fortune 500 companies knowing that a cycle is over and that they need to own their design assets. UI design is now as valuable as code, if not more.

- I don't like the "Open-Source Figma" label as we're building a superior tool but I understand it's a nice shorcut for now :)

- DM me on Linkedin if you have a couple of millions to spare :P
Vibro-Braille for Deaf-Blind
by Billiamdan | 2025-11-27 21:37:07+00:00
We've build a prototype of method potentially feasible to become the basis for assistive apps for deaf-blind individuals. For instance in communication or spatial navigation with just a sensor screen of a smartphone and haptic feedback.

Wondering how to better approach real patients to test. And also curious how steep the learning curve would be.

Any thoughts and advices are highly appreciated.

https://www.kaggle.com/competitions/google-gemma-3n-hackathon/writeups/feelu-is-a-mobile-assistant-for-deaf-blind-individ

https://github.com/nullhtp/feelu
by pclmulqdq | 2025-11-27 21:37:40+00:00
I see more discussion in the sibling thread, but I am still waiting for a case actually relevant to the virality of the GPL. The article is about how use of GPL code can "infect" LLM weights and force their disclosure, and I am personally somewhat doubtful that is legally the case. I am also further convinced that this theory has never been given a real test.
by nrclark | 2025-11-27 21:38:49+00:00
It matters when you're doing custom hardware, or when you're designing a product where boot speed matters, or when you need to implement something special.

A full-featured U-Boot implementation would be fine IMO. But for the generations that I've used, that's not on the table. What we get is a proprietary flow through a proprietary hypervisor into a fork of Android's bootloader (even if vanilla Linux is the target OS). There's no way to control startup boot options, and no way to use KVM, Xen or any hypervisor except the proprietary one that's also part of the boot chain.

This doesn't lend itself to flexible products, or to products that are easy for a company to design or support. That is why things like this happen: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46008156