MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by throw0101a | 2025-11-26 02:14:42+00:00
> I think smartphones are a special case, because they generally cannot run public facing services that open up ports […]

Except for peer-to-peer applications, like Skype used to be originally: clients (tried to) talked directly to each other. IMHO it'd be great if we could have app(lication)s that worked like that again: less centralization.

> Compare that to a home network where, printers are shared, iot devices have open ports, computers and nas share drives.

Off the top of my head: your CPE/home router has an internal CA; you tell a local app(lication) to 'connect to' the CA and get a certificate (ACME, SCEP, etc); your home IoTs/NAS/etc also connect to the CA and get certificates; so all your personal devices have a root of trust. You 'bookmark' the IPv6 address of your printer/NAS/whatever. When you are away from home you want to connect to (e.g.) NAS, so you tell your smartphone to connect to it, and it knows the IPv6 address, but how can the CPE or NAS know that this random IP that is trying to connect is trusted?

Well, it uses IPsec negotiation and sends the X.509 certificate, and the other end of the tunnel (NAS) sees that the cert is trusted, and so allows the tunnel to be connected. If a connection attempt is made with an untrusted certificate the negotiation fails.

Of course if you don't want your NAS to allow external connections you don't enable the feature (default: off), and so it never punches a hole (PCP, UPnP IGD). And given a IPv6 subnet is /64 (the equivalent of four billion IPv4 Internets), good luck trying to scan that address space (and it is generally recommended to give residential users a /56).

As it stands now, you have to have third party tunnels (Wiregaurd, Tailscale, etc) and 'extra' protocols on top of IP (often dynamic DNS as well) to do the above, whereas with IPv6 universal connectivity can become part of the 'base network' architecture.
by awesome_dude | 2025-11-26 02:15:42+00:00
Initially I too thought - but we try to approximate infinity in CS all the time.

But I have come to think, well actually, approximate is doing some heavy lifting there AND I have never used infinity for anything except to say "look I don't know how high this should go, so go as far as you can go, and double that, which is really saying, you are bound by finite boundaries, you'll have to work within them, and the uncountable thing that I was thinking about is really finite.

Edit: Think of it like this

We know that it's most likely that the universe is infinite, but we can only determine how big it is by how far we can see, which is bounded by the speed of light, and the fact that we can only see matter emitting light (I'm being careful here, if the big bang theory is right, and I am understanding it correctly, there is a finite amount of matter in the universe, but the universe itself is infinite)
by pengaru | 2025-11-26 02:16:01+00:00
Until you find yourself desperate for a malpractice suit, and Surprise! your insurer and care provider are on the same team and you already agreed to arbitration when you got that insurance.

A friend had his life wrecked by Kaiser, and none of the attorneys he consulted wanted to touch the case because according to the attorneys they had an army of lawyers and he'd already agreed to arbitration when getting the insurance. The max they claimed could be won wouldn't even cover the legal fees.

You definitely don't want insurance from the same team you're getting the insured services from. It's the conflict of interests to end all conflict of interests, especially in the context of health care.
80.1 % on LoCoMo Long-Term Memory Benchmark with a pure open-source RAG pipeline
by ViktorKuz | 2025-11-26 02:17:05+00:00
I just pushed the current SOTA on the LoCoMo long-term memory benchmark for agents: 80.1 % accuracy using only:

-BGE-large-en-v1.5 (1024d) + FAISS

-Custom “MCA” gravitational ranking (keyword coverage + importance + frequency)

-BM25 sparse retrieval

-Direct Cross-Encoder reranking (bge-reranker-v2-m3) on the full union (~120-150 docs)

-Gpt-4o-mini only for final answer generation and judging (everything else is open weights or classic)

Repo: https://github.com/vac-architector/VAC-Memory-System Key tricks that finally broke 80% :

-MCA-first filter (coverage ≥ 0.1 → top-30) — catches exact-keyword questions early

-Feeding the entire union straight into Cross-Encoder (112–135 documents) instead of pre-filtering

-Proper query instruction for BGE-large (the classic “Represent this sentence for searching relevant passages”)

The whole pipeline runs in < 3s per query on a single RTX 4090. LoCoMo is currently the hardest public long-term memory benchmark (5.880 real human–agent conversations, multi-hop, temporal, negation, etc.).

Beating Mem0 official baseline by ~12–14 pp with fully open components feels pretty good. Would love feedback, especially from people who are also grinding on agent memory systems.

My background: My path didn't start in an IT office, but in Columbus, Ohio, where I worked as a handyman after leaving my job on the cell towers. The decision came from necessity: I bought a powerful PC on installments and resolved to create something that would change my life.

I had no experience, but I had an idea. Using Claude CLI as my sole mentor, I focused on architecture, not syntax.

Over 4.5 months of work, I engineered and created the VAC Memory System. To prove its value, I tested it on the toughest RAG benchmark—LoCoMo. Today, my system shows an overall result of 80.1% and a phenomenal 87.78% in the "Commonsense" category.

This is more than just code; it is the result of faith in an idea. I showed that by using modern tools, it is possible to achieve SOTA-level performance and create serious technology, regardless of your starting point. I highly anticipate your feedback.
by rester324 | 2025-11-26 02:17:09+00:00
Yeah, that sounds logical. Some of the most popular technologies of this time are just teeny-tiny tools, but some of long obsolete technologies and their attached skills which have no correlation to anything recent is somehow fundamental and has magical properties in your view :D Thanks for the good laugh!

> Databases have been studied and their properties understood for a very long time.

No they haven't. Noone ever considered schemaless databases or column-storage databases or vector databases for half a century after the birth of computing. So that kind of knowledge (relational DBs, etc in the 60s and 80s) meant nothing in light of these new technologies, and required completely different skills and knowledge.

But it's clear you are not familiar with these technologies, so it's a waste of time to engage with you now
by jemmyw | 2025-11-26 02:17:14+00:00
> You know that when a public pace of business has "No dogs" sign and you enter it, that you entered into a contract with that business

You are incorrect about that, which probably invalidates your other arguments. A condition of entry is not a contract. If you disobey the condition of entry then you have not broken a contract, and nothing changes between you and the business owner. They can ask you to leave and they can trespass you if you do not, but importantly, they can do those things for any reason they like, whether you obey the conditions of entry or not.

It is not a contract by law, nor does it meet the definition of a contract.

Similarly, YouTube can retract their website from public view, or attempt to block you specifically. But you have not entered into a contract with them by viewing the site.
by hiddencost | 2025-11-26 02:17:54+00:00
That presumes that performance improvements are necessary for commercialization.

From what I've seen the models are smart enough, what we're lacking is the understanding and frameworks necessary to use them well. We've barely scratched the surface on commercialization. I'd argue there are two things coming:

-> Era of Research -> Era of Engineering

Previous AI winters happened because we didn't have a commercially viable product, not because we weren't making progress.
by jjwiseman | 2025-11-26 02:18:04+00:00
I made a chart of the number of jobs posted to HN "Who is hiring?" posts (using data from hnhiring.com): https://bsky.app/profile/lemonodor.bsky.social/post/3m4t2b66...

It correlates pretty well with the line showing technology jobs over time in the article at hiringlab.org: https://www.hiringlab.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/sector_...

The main difference seems to be that the number of jobs posted to HN has dropped significantly lower, well below the low point of 2020. It's really pretty dismal, which seems to have started around the middle of 2022. Maybe the types of jobs that get posted to HN are doing even worse than "technology" in general.
by FloorEgg | 2025-11-26 02:18:06+00:00
> Sample efficiency isnt the ability to distill alot of data into good insights

Are you claiming that I said this? Because I didn't....

There's two things going on.

One is compressing lots of data into generalizable intelligence. The other is using generalized intelligence to learn from a small amount of data.

Billions of years and all the data that goes along with it -> compressed into efficient generalized intelligence -> able to learn quickly with little data
by nwienert | 2025-11-26 02:19:18+00:00
Man I wrote out a whole reply but accidentally closed it... anyway Youtube I use daily never had an issue, GH had a real bug but was caused by them just refusing to fix a specific issue. Beyond that I've never had any site that gave me trouble. I do make heavy animations all the time for websites, and Chrome is often a bit better there but only at pretty extreme limits.

Meanwhile as a daily driver though Safari hands down feels better. Every little thing feels faster from browser open/close, page open/close, tab open/close/switch, scroll, text selection, window resize smoothness, just the e2e experience is so much smoother in so many ways. Yes heavy JS/animations maybe marginally slower, but even in benchmarks it's very close.
by schmuckonwheels | 2025-11-26 02:19:34+00:00
I assume you mean all the snake oil pre-playback ads? Mostly dangerous medical advice, solar scams, or wellness quackery.

This week, an instructional video I was watching on how to repair my water heater was suddenly interrupted by a campy ad for pussy-hair razors.

It was so ill-timed, bizarre, and inappropriate I burst out laughing.

The other one I was seeing a lot of, until very recently, was pornographic static ads that were implemented as an optical illusion. If you viewed it at full scale it was an innocuous image of a closet or chair or something, so it passed all checks, but when scaled into a thumbnail, it turns into a silhouette of a woman giving oral or something else obscene. Not sure what this technique is called or how it's done. (It's not a schooner, it's a sailboat.)
by tavavex | 2025-11-26 02:19:44+00:00
Oh, are we talking about bad YouTube UX? How about the "feature" where the right and left arrows seek the video 5s forward and back, while the up and down arrows increase and decrease the volume? That is, unless the last UI element you've touched was the volume bar, in which case the side arrows will also change the volume, and you'll have to use the mouse to clear the focus away from that volume bar to be able to seek the video again. I still wonder how they managed to break this despite it having had a sane, consistent, defined behavior for probably over a decade before that point.
by cherrycherry98 | 2025-11-26 02:20:10+00:00
Netscape 6, which was released in 2000 and based on the Mozilla Suite (now SeaMonkey) recommended 64MB of RAM. The Mozilla Suite was the basis of the Phoenix project (later renamed to Firefox) and they shared the same technological underpinnings: Gecko engine, SpiderMonkey JS engine, XUL interface, XPCOM, etc. Phoenix/Firefox was about using the Mozilla technology to deliver just a browser, independent of the suite, with aim of being lighter weight. So while Firefox didn't exist yet its heavier predecessor did.
by pinkmuffinere | 2025-11-26 02:20:43+00:00
I don’t think it’s verboten! I prefer Turkish over French.

English will certainly continue to evolve, and eventually it may be dropped altogether. But for example, you couldn’t understand English as it was spoken in the 1400s. It is different enough that we have a separate name for it, “Middle English”. Many of the changes languages undergo are influenced by interacting with other languages. There’s no reason to believe English will stop now.

As to why English will probably keep evolving instead of being totally dropped — it is now the lingua franca for most of the world. It would be unlikely to “just drop” the most useful language 90% of people know.
by grayhatter | 2025-11-26 02:22:20+00:00
> but let's not pretend it's a situation that people are in due to economic hardship.

I'd encourage you to not strawman my response. Because I already said myself that it appears to me it's only hobbyists who are losing support.

My objection isn't to the argument that it's dropping support, my objection is that it's dropping support without cause. Other than, the assumed this would be more comfortable for me.

Maintainers are absolutely not required to support everything for ever, but I recall a story where someone from Linux paid for a user to upgrade, not because that was required, because more because that would make dropping support for that floppy driver feel ethical.

This is the level of compassion everyone should expect from software engineers in critical positions of power.

I have no sympathy for people who lack the compassion to expend the effort to help others. I do have sympathy for people who have to watch the world that they, even if it's them alone. Have to watch their world get worse, so that others can avoid a trivial amount of perceived discomfort.

Should this solo maintainer (who understands C) be required do things exactly the way that I want? Of course not, but I'll be damned if everyone expects me to remain silent while I watch them disrespect other people who were previously depending on their support.
by SoftTalker | 2025-11-26 02:22:46+00:00
> how long it would take to retrain as a plumber

Yeah people have thoughts like this but then you hear a story about lying on your back in a muddy 3’ crawl space cutting into a blocked sewer line to install a cleanout and hoping you can roll away when the liquid starts pouring out.

Then your desk job writing code starts to sound a little better.
by skx001 | 2025-11-26 02:22:50+00:00
> Yes, it's easy to build entire cities from scratch in a centrally managed society, such as a dictatorship or communist nations.

I would like to pushback on this assumption. I made that point because you mentioned Canada and its rapid immigration rise in the last 5 years. Western countries, namely Canada can do a lot to build more to ease the pressures on its housing demand.

Vast amounts of land is available to build amazing cities. There are specialist architect firms that can plan the most beautiful, walkable, livable, affordable cities very close to major hubs and metros currently.

In the 50s/60s/70s these very Western countries, spent a lot and built all kinds of infrastructure which led to meaningful increases in quality of life and perhaps created the most prosperous generation in these countries.

Even now when any government in the West wants to really do something, they don't really care about anything and it gets done, the money magically appears, the votes are found no matter how unpopular it may be. But for some reason building infrastructure, housing, mass transit has been completely forgotten.

The real bottlenecks are governance, bureaucracy, and NIMBYism. Like a few comments above pointed out, its keeping boomers happy with their high property values at the expense of the young.

Some things just don't make sense to me as an outsider. A few examples I read recently.

[1] It will take three decades to turn an 18-mile stretch of the A66 road in northern England into a dual carriageway. [2] It will take 20+ years just to add another runway at Heathrow London and cost $64 Billion Dollars! [3] While Dubai is building a brand new whole airport for $35 Billion, I think the worlds largest when its finished.

Nearly all of the political problems in Canada, UK, Australia and much of the US (NYC,SF, etc.) will completely go away if they had the "Build, Baby Build" attitude. Just build housing like there is no tomorrow.

There is no such thing as an "oversupply" of a basic human need, livable shelter.

I can assure you, knowing how Asian countries like China approach governance, Chinese cities will have no major issues in 50+ years. Any outstanding issues will will resolved well before they start to become a problem with various 5-10 year plans. The same for Malaysia, Singapore etc.

[1] https://archive.md/PcOZV

[2] https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/uk-chooses-heathrow-airport...

[3] https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2024/4/29/dubais-ruler-ann...
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-11-26 02:23:13+00:00
> The second half of that also sounds unhinged.

Since Hacker News also centers on entrepreneurship: I know quite some entrepreneurs in Germany who think this way about the bureacratic chicanery that companies have to handle, and already thought about whether hiring a hitman for these politicians would be a good idea. The hate for the political caste in Germany among many people is insane.
by mekoka | 2025-11-26 02:23:58+00:00
> Gradual growth inevitably results in loads of technical debt.

Why is this stated as though it's some de facto software law? The argument is not whether it's possible to waterfall a massive software system. It clearly is possible, but the failure ratios have historically been sufficiently uncomfortable to give rise to entirely different (and evidently more successful) project development philosophies, especially when promoters were more sensitive to the massive sums involved (which in my opinion also helps explains why so many wasteful government examples). The lean startup did not appear in a vacuum. Do things that don't scale did not become a motto in these parts without reason. In case some are still confused about the historical purpose of these benign sounding advices, no, they weren't originally addressed at entrepreneurs aiming to run "lifestyle" businesses.
by echelon | 2025-11-26 02:24:10+00:00
> bigger image dataset moat

If they have so much data, then why do Flux model outputs look so God-awful bad?

They have plastic skin, weird chins, and have that "AI" aura. Not the good AI aura, mind you. The cheap automated YouTube video kind that you immediately skip.

Flux 2 seems to suffer from the exact same problems.

Midjourney is ancient. Their CEO is off trying to build a 3D volume and dating companion or some nonsense and leaving the product without guidance and much change. It almost feels abandoned. But even so, Midjourney has 10,000x better aesthetics despite having terrible prompt adherence and control. Midjourney images are dripping with magazine spread or Pulitzer aesthetics. It's why Zuckerberg went to them to license their model instead of quasi "open source" BFL.

Even SDXL looks better, and that's a literal dinosaur.

Most of the amazing things you see on social media either come from Midjourney or SDXL. To this day.
by decimalenough | 2025-11-26 02:25:34+00:00
If you're strict or allergic, very difficult. Fish sauces and pastes like terasi and patis are culinary staples on the level of soy sauce and make it into otherwise seemingly vegetarian dishes.

If you're willing to flex a bit and just avoid obvious meat/fish, you'll survive, there's plenty of tofu, tempeh, veg etc. Gado-gado is always veg, nasi/mee goreng, etc.
ClipEgg: We Confused Copying with Hoarding
by DaaaaveATX | 2025-11-26 02:27:41+00:00
Copy is broken. It has been for 40 years.

When you copy something, what do you actually want?

A reference to a thing. A way to say "this, here, I want to use this somewhere else."

What do you get instead?

Everything. The image. The formatting. The font declarations. The metadata. The entire DOM subtree. A 6MB cargo truck full of furniture when all you needed was the address.

We confused copying with hoarding.

And the math is insane.

40 billion copy operations happen every day. Average payload: 100KB of stuff nobody asked for. That's 4 exabytes sitting in RAM, syncing across devices, getting pasted into AI tools that charge per token.

The energy cost: 33 million tons of CO2 annually. Seven million cars worth. For clipboard formatting.

Old copy: Here's everything. Hoard it.

New copy: Here's a reference. Fetch what you need, when you need it, if you're allowed.

So I built the answer.

An egg. 200 bytes. A claim ticket, not cargo.

The receiver cracks it open based on context. Paste into a terminal? Plain text. Paste into Figma? Hydrate the full asset. Paste into a system that shouldn't have access? Nothing.

Copy = Frosting. Cut = Cake.

See it work: https://daaaave-atx.github.io/clipe96

Spec: https://github.com/daaaave-ATX/clipe96
by rich_sasha | 2025-11-26 02:28:34+00:00
Sure. But "fact" in a court of law means "facts subject to a legally-sanctioned epistemology". Every now and then you read about a judge instructing the jury to disregard some evidence, because it turns out to be inadmissible. Are random people really capable of doing this? And, likewise, leaving their biases at the courtroom doorstep? I have my doubts.

And yes, I believe trained lawyers are excluded from jury duty in the UK. But even if not, the average juror will not have had any training in discerning bias, weighing evidence, statistics etc.
by Retr0id | 2025-11-26 02:31:16+00:00
s/mainstream/mainline/

But yes, this is definitely an issue. I've been playing with a 2013-era Samsung device that came with a 3.0 kernel. It can run pmos with said kernel but there are multiple root LPE vulns. I've been looking into getting it to run a mainline kernel just for fun, but it's not going to be easy.
by Rendello | 2025-11-26 02:32:50+00:00
I love parsing and have made a lot of parsers, but never a typical programming language parser. It's interesting that most of the literature (from academic papers to blog posts) focuses programming language parsers, but the vast majority of parsers out there deal with other things. I had to really figure things out myself, and that's been the same story for every parser I've written.

A lesson I have to relearn every time: while you can always skip lexing (which is really just another parser), it almost always screws you over to do so.
by pchiusano | 2025-11-26 02:32:50+00:00
Thanks for this report.

The tooling takes a little getting used to but it’s extremely powerful. Here are a few benefits you’ll see -

UCM keeps a perfect incremental compilation cache as part of its codebase format, so you’re generally never waiting for code to build. When you pull from remote, there’s nothing to build either.

Pure tests are automatically cached rather than being run over and over.

Switching branches is instantaneous and doesn’t require recompiling.

Renaming is instantaneous, doesn’t break downstream usages, and doesn’t generate a huge text diff.

All code (and code diffs) are hyperlinked when rendered, supporting click through to definition.

I don’t know if you saw these getting started guides, they might be helpful -

https://www.unison-lang.org/docs/quickstart/

And then this tour -

https://www.unison-lang.org/docs/tour/

You can come by the Discord (https://unison-lang.org/discord) if you have any questions as you’re getting going! I hope you will give it a shot and sorry for the trouble getting started. There are a lot of new ideas in Unison and it’s been tricky to find the best way to get folks up to speed.

The Unison website and docs are all open source btw -

https://share.unison-lang.org/@unison/website