MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by JohnBooty | 2025-11-23 16:17:21+00:00
Firefox performs poorly on Google properties (Gmail is fine, YouTube, gsuite, admin consoles are pretty bad)

I switch between FF and Chrome pretty frequently, and I've never felt any issues with YT or Gsuite. Haven't used the rest in multiple browsers so I can't compare.

There are some caveats to mention. One, I use AdBlock, and I'm subscribed to YT Premium so I don't see ads. Two, the documents I edit with GSuite are generally pretty trivial. Three, I've always used decently spec'd (not high end, but decent) computers so perhaps I'm not feeling performance issues that are felt on low end gear.

Still, I agree that's somewhat besides the point. Comapanies can (and do) decide to stop caring about Firefox at any point. There's no guarantee that Gmail will run well on Firefox tomorrow, or two months from now.
by mbouassa | 2025-11-23 16:17:26+00:00
I built Metrik to answer a simple question for AI voice agents: which LLM is fastest right now?

If you use Vapi with multiple providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, etc.), it’s hard to: – Measure Time to First Token (TTFT) consistently – See when a provider slows down – Route calls to the fastest model without manual changes

What Metrik does – Continuously pings multiple LLMs and logs TTFT/latency – Shows a live dashboard by provider/model – Can route Vapi agents to the currently fastest allowed model – Exposes a free API so you can pull the metrics into your own tools

I’d love feedback on what other metrics you care about (besides TTFT), and whether you’d want this as a hosted service, self-hosted, or just a library.
by LoganDark | 2025-11-23 16:17:32+00:00
The Vulkan specification is Open Source. Many Vulkan implementations are not.

Vulkan also isn't built on D3D at all, and only MoltenVK (an open-source implementation for Apple platforms) is built on Metal. (Edit: It appears Mesa also now has KosmicKrisp as a Vulkan translation layer for extremely recent (≤5 years) Mac devices.)

> WebGPU is available as both a C++ (Dawn) and a Rust (WGPU) library.

WebGPU is implemented by both a C++ library (Dawn) and Rust crate (wgpu-rs), but like Vulkan, is itself only a specification. Also I'd still hesitate to even call wgpu-rs an implementation of WebGPU, because it's only based on the WebGPU specification, not actually an exact conforming implementation like Dawn is.

> Vulkan is also not really cross-platform any more than DirectX .

Sure it is: DirectX makes assumptions that it's running on Windows, and uses Windows data structures in its APIs. Vulkan makes no such assumptions, and uses no platform-specific data structures, making it automatically more cross-platform.

Sure, users of DirectX can be cross-platform with the use of translation layers such as Wine or Proton, but the API itself can't be ported natively to other platforms without bringing the Windows baggage with it, while Vulkan can.

Additionally, Vulkan provides a lot more metadata that can be used to adapt to differing situations at runtime, for example the ability to query the graphics devices on the system and select which one to use. DirectX did not have this capability at first, but added it two years after Vulkan did.
by Juliate | 2025-11-23 16:17:51+00:00
Two things.

1. AI CEOs oversell, by a lot. OpenAI CFO admission that they are cooked unless the US government bails them out is a tell.

2. The (almost) purely utilitarian nature of software code is in contrast to the more personally meaningful aim of art in general (although both do converge when we're talking about purpose-fit artwork: design/music for ads/shop centres, for instance). That makes, in my view, most of the difference given the following.

Vibe coding is mostly a very well evolved (albeit not perfect or deterministic) code completion/linting/review tool. Although it does bypass (for the user/coder) a LOT of the intellectual work needed to come to the same result - and by that, I mean/think that it is highly detrimental to the user/coder intellect; and because of this, it becomes highly detrimental to the employer too, especially if it reduces its own workforce.

A software company that extensively uses AI instead of hiring competent (and junior) people is faced with the same fate as a company that just stops hiring: it's going out of business or bought in a few years. Because it outsourced its control over its own process, or the process/product it sells. That's also a reason why considering Engineering or R&D as a cost center only makes sense in the "accounting sense", not in the "common sense", but that's only one example of how MBA's fucked up the world.

It certainly trained on existing open source codebases; whose code reuse is encouraged; although indeed, the license on the code in output is a question; did it train on closed source/proprietary codebases? that's an open question. Does it threaten developer jobs? I am not sure, see above.

"art" GenAI is a whole other beast, operating (and training) on a whole other order of magnitude of quantities of artwork that are very opinionated, original, and for which authors/owners have NOT given their consent to be used neither in training, neither in the output. People promoting GenAI dismiss the objections and practice of those owners showing a poor understanding of the process that is art, and a glaring contempt of the copyright law. Did it train on copyrighted works? Yes. Does it track how? No. Does it compensate people? No.

Does it make comparable quality work in output? No, because it's automated and it completely misses the point.

Does this threaten original artists that put in the work then? Yes, because a lot of people who have money (hence power) but shit taste and no understanding of the art process believe that it does replace real people trained and dedicated to this process and the particular media they work with. And they invest their money where they believe it will further this replacement and give them more money.

But it literally, from start to finish, makes no sense. And that's precisely the point of the process that is art. Through actual, personal and group work, make sense out of something.

A machine, an algorithm does not do so. The art is mangled in the training/labelling process. The prompt is crap, and always will, compared to the specifics and accidentals of the original work used in the training step.
by skx001 | 2025-11-23 16:18:11+00:00
I need to learn how to get these Government contracts.

Do you know the design firm/agency behind this redesign project?

Side note - This again shows, in consulting/agency work, always charge more than you think. If a government department is willing to pay $97M for a redesign, then surely independent consultants can charge way more then they usually do.

Patio11 right again.
by andy_ppp | 2025-11-23 16:18:23+00:00
Why do governments think IT projects like this are even possible for them to accomplish? I can guarantee already the requirements of such a system are impossible to capture and then the developers and difficulty to build such a system with probably a thousand or more people working on it for 10 years and billions we can’t currently afford. I predict endless delays, a toxic work environment and the resulting system will not even end up working and will eventually be scrapped probably in favour of smashing everyone’s data into an LLM. Sigh.
by IAmGraydon | 2025-11-23 16:19:11+00:00
That would explain why the new location feature doesn't work for that account. I suspect that's also why the feature went live and then was immediately taken down. When it came back up, the locations of certain accounts were hidden. More info:

https://www.reddit.com/r/millenials/comments/1p4i95z/the_off...
by bjoli | 2025-11-23 16:19:57+00:00
I used it to write a macro processor for C which allowed me to write some macros with s-expressions and have it expand to a lot of C code. That way I could actually write real macros for C.

I have also written GUI apps for various things. Kind of like what I did with TCL back in the day.

I wrote a little maths game for my son.

I also wrote a static site generator in it that allowed me to execute racket code at compile time (interpreting each markdown file as a source file).
by dijit | 2025-11-23 16:20:00+00:00
I always bring it up in these threads, but as a dual british/swedish citizen I find it incredulous.

Sweden has a national database and a national ID card system, and it makes my life in Sweden a lot better.

That said, I don’t trust the UK government, I haven’t trusted any UK government in my adult lifetime and I am coming into middle-age.

Solve that problem first, maybe?
by nathan_compton | 2025-11-23 16:20:17+00:00
Well, the more scientific and pluralistic our society becomes the more religion is necessarily sapped of its ability to compel behavior. If you lived in 13th Century France the Catholic Church was a total cultural force and thus could regulate behavior, but the very act of writing freedom of religion into law communicates a certain idea about religion: its so unimportant that you can have whatever form of religion you want.

In any case, one ought to distinguish between "You shouldn't do things which are bad for you," and "You shouldn't do things you know are bad for others." Especially, "Giant corporations with ambiguous structures of responsibility shouldn't be allowed to do things which are bad for others."
by bofadeez | 2025-11-23 16:20:54+00:00
> Although, one can use either discrete or continuous time to simulate a complex economic system.

A very bad model that lacks accuracy and precision, yes. Maybe if you're a PhD quant at Citadel then you can create a very small statistical edge when gambling on an economic system. There's no analytic solution to complex economic systems in practice. It's just noise and various ways of validating efficient market hypothesis.

Also, because of heteroskedasticity and volatility clustering, using time-based bars (e.g. change over a fixed interval of time) is not ideal in modeling. Sampling with entropy bars like volume imbalance bars, instead of time bars, gives you superior statistical properties, since information arrives in the market at irregular times. Sampling by time is never the best way to simulate/gamble on a market. Information is the casual variable, not time. Some periods of time have very little information relative to other periods of time. In modeling, you want to smooth out information independently of time.
by HumanOstrich | 2025-11-23 16:20:58+00:00
Starlink is not a substitute for fixed broadband. It might be adequate for most use cases, but it's not equivalent and it never will be. Your "99%" figure is nonsense. More than 1% of people will see the difference in download speeds between 1Gbps and 300Mbps. You realize some apps and games show you information about latency and bandwidth?

Also, just because they advertise "up to 305Mbps" doesn't mean everyone is getting that. A friend of mine with Starlink in the midwest gets about 100Mbps during off-hours. See <https://www.ookla.com/articles/starlink-us-performance-2025> - median speeds are typically less than 150Mbps.

Starlink also costs about 2x-4x as much per Mbps as 1Gbps service (at least where I am). I doubt they're going to suddenly offer 1Gbps speeds in the next year without changing their pricing. They'll add a new, more expensive plan.

Even 1Gbps Starlink (which would be more than 3x the current max speeds) is going to have other differences such as increased latency (they mention 30-40ms in one place, 25-100ms in another), more jitter, and lost signal sometimes during bad weather. Starlink also uses CGNAT which eliminates a bunch of use cases and introduces its own problems with certain apps and games.

They've had issues with capacity before where they wouldn't accept signups for some areas. Adding capacity involves launching more satellites.

Starlink isn't the ultimate solution to everyone's Internet access problems.
by LoganDark | 2025-11-23 16:22:30+00:00
> Also a small correction: Vulkan actually _does_ run Apple platforms (via Vulkan-to-Metal translation) using MoltenVK and the new KosmicKrisp driver, and it works quite well.

I think, since they mentioned some enterprise deployments on Windows won't have Vulkan drivers preinstalled, that drivers merely being available is not enough for GP to count them as Vulkan "running". I think GP is only counting platforms (and circumstances) where you can reasonably expect Vulkan support to already be present.
by ModernMech | 2025-11-23 16:22:39+00:00
I've often heard this, but I don't really know of many people in the PL dev community who build their language in Racket. Also, I've taught a PL course and I tried to use Racket as a component, but students mostly just struggled with the LISP-y ness of it all, as they were primarily used to Java and Python. In all, I'm not really sure who Racket is for.
by jhbadger | 2025-11-23 16:23:02+00:00
Interesting -- I wasn't aware of Diamond OS for the Atari 8-bits -- it seems similar in concept to GEOS (which was available for the Commodore 64 and 8-bit Apple II series, and later in a much expanded version for x86 PCs) -- basically a GUI environment running on machines where the popular wisdom was that such a thing would be infeasible.
by programjames | 2025-11-23 16:23:36+00:00
You have yet to address or even acknowledge the focus of both my comments: this phrase is a common means of signalling party affiliation. I feel like you need to improve in how you approach these kind of discussions, because you're getting nowhere in convincing me when you come across as not even understanding my argument.

If your goal is different, maybe to just socially stigmatize people opposed to worlds you prefer, well I guess you're doing fine with that, but you do see how that's problematic at creating consensus, right? And how, the sane reaction is for me to faux-politely call you a shill or a clown. I don't think this is actually your goal (which is why I deleted my previous reply, it was unnecessarily mean unless this is your goal), I just don't think you've really built up your debate toolbox yet.
by Kiro | 2025-11-23 16:24:20+00:00
I think their explanation is great. The shader is run on all the pixels within the quad and your shader code needs to figure out if the pixel is within the shape you want to draw or not. Compared to just drawing it pixel by pixel if you do it by pen or on the CPU.

For a red line between A and B:

CPU/pen: for each pixel between A and B: draw red

GPU/shader: for all pixels: draw red if it's on the intersection between A and B
by junto | 2025-11-23 16:24:23+00:00
This reminds me of Adrian Thompson’s (University of Sussex) 1996 paper, “An evolved circuit, intrinsic in silicon, entwined with physics,” ICES 1996 / LNCS 1259 (published 1997), which was extended in his later thesis, “Hardware Evolution: Automatic Design of Electronic Circuits in Reconfigurable Hardware by Artificial Evolution, Springer, 1998”.

Before Thompson’s experiment, many researchers tried to evolve circuit behaviors on simulators. The problem was that simulated components are idealized, i.e. they ignore noise, parasitics, temperature drift, leakage paths, cross-talk, etc. Evolved circuits would therefore fail in the real world because the simulation behaved too cleanly.

Thompson instead let evolution operate on a real FPGA device itself, so evolution could take advantage of real-world physics. This was called “intrinsic evolution” (i.e., evolution in the real substrate).

The task was to evolve a circuit that can distinguish between a 1 kHz and 10 kHz square-wave input and output high for one, low for the other.

The final evolved solution:

- Used fewer than 40 logic cells

- Had no recognisable structure, no pattern resembling filters or counters

- Worked only on that exact FPGA and that exact silicon patch.

Most astonishingly:

The circuit depended critically on five logic elements that were not logically connected to the main path.

Removing them should not affect a digital design

- they were not wired to the output

- but in practice the circuit stopped functioning when they were removed.

Thompson determined via experiments that evolution had exploited:

- Parasitic capacitive coupling

- Propagation delay differences

- Analogue behaviours of the silicon substrate

- Electromagnetic interference from neighbouring cells

In short: the evolved solution used the FPGA as an analog medium, even though engineers normally treat it as a clean digital one.

Evolution had tuned the circuit to the physical quirks of the specific chip. It demonstrated that hardware evolution could produce solutions that humans would never invent.
by cluckindan | 2025-11-23 16:24:42+00:00
Did you just copy-paste this answer from an LLM? It sounds exactly like a generative model, and there are obvious issues with the response.

For example, ”RAG context is freshly curated each turn rather than accumulated” is nonsensical: it implies that context is curated instead of replaced, but also that the previous context is forgotten and replaced, and neither means that full conversation history (including context) is passed without truncation.

Also, no mention of tool-based retrieval. I have a hunch this is not a real product, just AI slop. Prove me wrong.
by gremlinunderway | 2025-11-23 16:24:47+00:00
Please look up the difference between private property and personal property. When people decry "property is theft", they're not talking about personal property, they're talking about private property.

Also, socialist states with advanced economies built airplanes, hydroelectric dams and all kinds of complex things. This is a joke of an argument. Say what you will about the living conditions, fairness, corruption or other issues with socialist states, but to pretend they "didn't build complex things" is ridiculous when you look up the number of scientific achievements made first by the USSR.
by locknitpicker | 2025-11-23 16:25:11+00:00
> Pushing everything to types like this creates a different burden where you're casting between types all over the place just to use the same underlying data.

TypeScript does not perform any kind of casting at all. What TypeScript supports is structural typing, which boils down to allowing developers to specify type hints in a way that allows the TypeScript compiler to determine which properties or invariants are met in specific code paths.

Literal types address a very common and very mundane use case: assert what can and cannot be done with an object depending on what value one of it's fields have.

Take for example authorization headers. When they are set, their prefix tells you which authorization scheme is being used by clients. With typescript you can express those strings as a prefix constrained string type, and use them to have the TypeScript compiler prevent you from accidentally pass bearer tokens to the function that handles basic authentication.

Literal types shine when you are using them to specify discriminant fields in different types. Say for example you have a JSON object that has a `version` field. With literal types you can define different types discriminated by what string value features in it's `version` field, and based on that alone you can implement fully type-safe code paths.
by skx001 | 2025-11-23 16:25:27+00:00
I follow Asim too! A very interesting case study indeed. The boy learned to code and started working full-time for his startup.

What's really great is all the kids seem to be very well rounded and come off as pretty confident on their own. This can be seen in the videos on the YT channel.

Finishing "school" several years early is the biggest plus for me. Imagine being done with high school by the age of 14. The possibilities are endless. Learn languages, travel, learn real tangible skills, join various bootcamps.

Your kid can have so much "life" experience by the time they turn 18-20.
by alcidesfonseca | 2025-11-23 16:25:43+00:00
I believe it to be historically true, but Dependent Haskell might change this (https://ghc.serokell.io/dh see unification of types and kinds).

In Lean (and I believe Rocq as well), the Type of Int is Type 0, the type of Type 0 is Type 1, and so on (called universes).

They all come from this restriction.
by neilv | 2025-11-23 16:26:08+00:00
Comcast/Xfinity did a major upgrade of my neighborhood a few weeks ago, and now I'm getting similar-sounding intermittent outages multiple times a day... but that's not what infuriated me, and not what they will regret.

As a technologist, I could understand there are a variety of possible causes, some not their fault, but then they had to go and be unambiguously jerky...

My mistake was contacting support, about what seemed like a port-filtering problem after they temporarily backed out the upgrade. After I was forwarded to the wrong kind of CSR, so I cut that short, apparently (I learned later) the CSR slammed me into a more expensive plan, and also video streaming.

After I realized I got slammed, and got into a support chat to undo that... I got what seemed to be a highly-skilled jerking-around, for literally an hour, where they kept trying a large set of dirty tricks, never just canceling the new things and giving me back the plan I'd had hours earlier. I finally told them that they needed to undo the slamming, and to email me confirming they're done that, since I would not be contacting Comcast again, and would instead call the AG's office and regulators. No email came, and then I got the fraudulent bill, and they autopaid themselves the fraudulent bill.

I'm sure the dirty tricks call center person preserved their dirty tricks metrics for the day. And, further up the org chart, the rest of the machine continued to run in the default sketchy profit-maximizing (and, more to the point, individual-bonuses-and-promotions-maximizing) ways.

So I think the first step is to leverage remaining good government, to make the company regret multiples of every dollar they've made by behaving this way to everyone, not only to me. Of course, making a company feel significant pain still won't directly end the problem, until either shareholders make CEOs and boards feel pain personally, or until more executives are criminally held responsible for knowingly leading criminal behavior of companies -- but making the balance sheet feel pain will be a start.
by Terretta | 2025-11-23 16:26:18+00:00
> I can’t stand the way he rewrites headlines, mostly because he’s bad at it. They are so painfully long and complicated.

Is some form of "click to find out" preferable?

I'm thrilled with how Techmeme headlines are rewritten since by now even major papers clickbait their headlines, removing the actual subject and outcome:

"This woman did a thing, then the incredible happened" -- NY Times (AYKM?)

Techmeme is one of the few sites you can read the headlines and decide correctly whether to click in to read or not.

// HN may need to revise its "don't editorialize headlines" guidance given how standard this headline badness has become.
by ffsm8 | 2025-11-23 16:27:11+00:00
The opposite argument would be that the default should behave like the house then, so ownership should switch over to the person providing the loan entirely - instead of passing on part ownership forever.

But that's obviously less desirable to the person providing the money, and they've obviously got all the cards... Hence the argument of this post.

I wouldn't call it evil myself, unless I wanted to classify capitalism as evil in it's entirety - which would feel disingenuous to me, considering the alternatives were always worse in hindsight.