MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pessimizer | 2025-11-28 15:54:17+00:00
The license has to be central to something like this, and it has got to be copyleft and/or even some sort of nationalist German-MIT license that only grants permission to German citizens and companies. You can't let the German taxpayer get exploited for the benefit of foreign corporations.

The "spirit of open source" is not real. If you think that the only real gift is MIT-style permissively licensed stuff, you should be proud not to be recognized by the government. You should ask for no credit and no reward. Christmas gifts you buy for someone are taxed, and are not considered charitable contributions.

Otherwise, it is a great and vital idea. "Open source" is just not specific enough. It may even exclude GPL.
by siamese_puff | 2025-11-28 15:54:22+00:00
After seeing multiple doctors in the USA (where I no longer live thankfully) for a chronic mouth ulcer problem an allergist prescribed me colchicine which seemed to cure them. These ulcers lasted over 15 years and colchicine seemed to be the only thing to eradicate them.

Insurance wouldn’t cover the cost and colchicine cost me $500 a month for a bottle. In the UK I can pay 10 pounds. Crazy drug and crazy price for something 3000 years old
by cbeach | 2025-11-28 15:54:24+00:00
Out of curiosity, which of Reform's policies are "lunacy"?

Removing the 2 child benefit cap? Increasing NHS spending? Returning to New Labour levels of net immigration, being a country with borders?

> That said I will find it very very funny if the Conservative party ends up last from that list.

At least we agree on that. The Tories deserve to be confined to the dustbin of history.
by asmor | 2025-11-28 15:54:48+00:00
You're ignoring the subtext of the comment above yours.

> Too much psychology talk in every day life, everyone is traumatised and has unresolved issues etc. That may be, but I wish we would handle it all more privately...

Their problem isn't with the language itself, but how it is handled in public. That point doesn't really translate if you pivot to creating an environment conductive to mental health.
by kadoban | 2025-11-28 15:56:07+00:00
> Might that be plausible?

Not really. You're talking about a fungus creating essentially a nuclear reactor inside of its cells, and creating it out of fuel that's not good enough to make a nuclear reactor in the first place (it at one time was, but now it's a mess of decay products and nonsense).

Reactors also take a certain amount of mass. You can't just squish two tiny microgram particles together and hope to get anything going.
by philipwhiuk | 2025-11-28 15:56:58+00:00
> On one hand, the output of locally run inference is astounding. There are plenty of models on HuggingFace that I can run on my Mac Studio and provide real value to me every single work day. On the other hand, while I have the experience to evaluate the output, some of my younger colleagues do not. They are learning, and when I have time to help them, I certainly do, but I wish they just didn't have access to LLMs. LLMs are miracle tools in the right hands. They are dangerous conveniences in the wrong hands.

Is weird to me. Surely you recognise just as they don't know what they don't know (which is presumably the problem when it hallucinates), you must also have the same issue, there's just no old greybeard to wish you didn't have access.
Tell HN: Want a better HN? Visit /newest
by alecco | 2025-11-28 15:57:27+00:00
Most good posts die in /newest, buried under low-quality submissions.

HN depends on people visiting /newest and upvoting or flagging what they see.

A few minutes there each day probably does more for HN than commenting.

It’s anonymous, thankless work, like Reddit’s old “Knights of New,” but it makes a difference.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newest

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by martindbp | 2025-11-28 15:57:44+00:00
What they are seeing is insane user and revenue growth. It's that simple. ChatGPT has like a billion users, and it came out 3 years ago. And then AI is getting better every year in a way that internet companies like Google or Facebook didn't. Google peaked very early in terms of usefulness, then it just spent decades monetizing it. AI is not even funded by ads, people are actually paying for it. It's really hard to get people to pay for something. I don't know if the investors will get a nice return, but given the numbers they're seeing I understand why they're doing it.
by toss1 | 2025-11-28 15:57:52+00:00
Yes

>>the spending implies expectation of dramatically increased capabilities, soon.

Even more than that, the spending is a death-race in expectation of:

1) a team reaching runaway superintelligence,

2) that it will be winner-take-all for the first team to get there, and

3) fear that somebody else will get there first.

So, everyone is spending as much as they can beg, borrow, or steal because in their view, there is only first place or being part of the underclass ruled by the other team that gets there first.

This is not about just making useful products/services that can increase productivity for their customers.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-11-28 15:58:11+00:00
After impact is when any action would occur. Many automakers are using either supercapacitors or some smaller battery and logic to enable doors to function after impact.

My example of seat belt pretensioners wasn’t to demonstrate when the action would be taken, but that pyrotechnics and vehicle dynamics are components of orchestrating a controlled failure mode in the event of a crash.

> General Motors Co. has since made the Corvette door’s emergency release handle more visible, the company said. Graphics on the handle, which lies on the floor next to the door, illustrate its function. GM also has added a “bystander access” feature on its e-doors to unlock them after a crash, so first responders or good Samaritans can free the occupants.

> Stellantis NV engineered a similar system on Jeep and Dodge models with electric doors, where airbag deployment automatically unlocks all doors. Stellantis and Ford also have outfitted their electric doors with supercapacitors that act as a battery backup to keep the power flowing to the latches even when a car’s 12-volt battery has died. And Ford, in response to this year’s recall, updated the software on its Mach-E to keep electricity flowing to door handles for 12 minutes after the small battery that normally supplies them — separate from the electric car’s main battery pack — goes dead.

https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2025-electric-car-doors/ | https://archive.today/YETme
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-11-28 15:58:36+00:00
How about "splitting for comprehension's sake"?

If I have a huge function, and I can peel parts off into sensible well-encapsulated sub-functions, and I name them well, then my ability to comprehend the whole goes up.

If I do that, future me will thank me, because I will almost inevitably be back to that function at some point.

But for this to work, the sub-functions have to really do what they say, and not do anything more. I have to be able to trust that I can understand them by just their name and arguments.
by ivm | 2025-11-28 15:58:59+00:00
That's a bold diagnosis to make about someone over the internet. As a kid, I used to buy a magazine that included various translated comic strips, including Calvin & Hobbes, Garfield, and Peanuts. Peanuts was by far the least interesting to me and didn’t resonate at all, while Calvin & Hobbes completely blew my mind. Even Garfield left me better memories because it was plain silly and not pretentious.
by awinter-py | 2025-11-28 15:59:55+00:00
Sandstorm (open source PaaS + app ecosystem) didn't make it but was encouraging to me at the time -- a standardized PaaS would seem to drastically reduce the lift to build and to host self-host things.

(No shade on compose / helm but have never had a 3rd party compose / helm thing that didn't poop the bed in some way after 6 months)

Is that happening here? Is there an ecosystem of other OSS self-host things built on pocketbase?
by nayroclade | 2025-11-28 16:00:00+00:00
The core argument here, as far as I can discern it, seems to be: A trillion dollars has been spent scaling LLMs in an attempt to create AGI. Since scaling alone looks like it won't produce AGI, that money has been wasted.

This is a frankly bizarre argument. Firstly, it presupposes that _only_ way AI becomes useful is if turns into AGI. But that isn't true: Existing LLMs can do a variety of economically valuable tasks, such as coding, even when not being AGI. Perhaps the economic worth of non-AGI will never equal what it costs to build an operate it, but it seems way too early to make that judgement and declare any non-AGI AI as worthless.

Secondly, even if scaling alone won't reach AGI, that doesn't mean that you can reach AGI _without_ scaling. Even when new and better architectures are developed, it still seems likely that, between two models with an equivalent architecture, the one with more data and compute research will be more powerful. And waiting for better architectures before you try to scale means you will never start. 50 years from now, researchers will have much better architectures. Does that mean we should wait 50 years before trying to scale them? How about 100 years? At what point do you say, we're never going to discover anything better, so now we can try scaling?
by lars_francke | 2025-11-28 16:00:10+00:00
A battery truck is allowed to have 42 tons.

I'm no expert but a far stretch but if this most basic fact is already wrong then my trust in the remaining stuff diminishes. On top of that they is only relevant if all truck loads were limited by weight.

So, I believe that argument to be wrong in its entirety. And if we then factor in the CO2 costs, hydrogen is the clear loser in all regards.
by vixen99 | 2025-11-28 16:00:16+00:00
And also: silently praying in public near an abortion center. The lady in question should have asked the policeman (as he was) "How would you define praying?". At least he'd maybe have paused for an interesting short discussion on semantics and more before for arresting her - as he did. https://youtu.be/wXURFRSUS9U

Two years ago and she has received damages however similar attitudes still abound with marked police disapproval of attempts to display the English National flag - in England.
by Atiscant | 2025-11-28 16:00:47+00:00
As noted in another reply, the natural numbers example is contrived, but illustrative. Nevertheless, if you have a set theoretical foundation, e.g. ZF/C, at some point you need to define what you are doing in that foundation. Most mathematicians do not and happily ignore the problem. That works until it dont. The whole reason Vladimir Voevodsky started work on HoTT and univalent foundations was that he believed we in fact DO need to be able to pull definitions back to foundations and to verify mathematics all the way down.
by TazeTSchnitzel | 2025-11-28 16:01:00+00:00
I've seen LLMs claim that a text cuts off mid-sentence before in cases where it in fact doesn't, and I think this might be an artifact of them being presented with a truncated version by some unclear software process, perhaps to fit into a context window. In this case, however, it's unlikely that the LLM was presented the text directly, and rather it is recounting things it “knows”.
by permo-w | 2025-11-28 16:01:02+00:00
first of all, not everything is good or bad. the EU does masses of good and is probably [read: definitely] the most mature and healthy legislative body governing >100m population ever to have existed

chat control has not passed, and undoubtedly will not pass in any deeply unpalatable state. this is the point of the unanimity requirement of the EU. most likely in the end we will get some kind of law giving additional search powers to police, perhaps allowing them to remotely "switch on" chat scanning for a suspect via specific court order, comparably to how they compromised on facial recognition

secondly, to agree with the sibling comment, I look at the results, not the process. the EU has incredible results by anyone's measure, and perhaps their processes need a tweak or two, but this "it must be ultra-democracy or I don't want it" attitude just feels overly simplistic, and likely driven by ideological commitments to other things the EU opposes
by Fnoord | 2025-11-28 16:02:13+00:00
Is up a lot, yes.

It all goes slowww. But it is moving forward. You would need a tough screening regardless. Defense is very picky about their contractors. But I can give a hint where the money comes from: 3,5% of BBP has to be for defense, and 1,5% for infra for defense. Many countries were at about 2% before (getting a bit higher due to geopolitical changes early 2022).

Also, think of funding for European tech companies. Governments are getting rid of Microsoft 365 in favor of Nextcloud. Especially Opencloud (Nextcloud, also European, formerly known as nextcloud-go) and Opendesk. It goes slow, partly because of regulations and each country goes for their own local contractor (an expert who speaks the native language).

The victim is going to be our health care system, and general social security system. Because we were able to afford this thanks to NATO, and NATO is now a paper tiger.

We're also not known for our VC culture, but here goes: https://www.cursor.tue.nl/nieuws/2025/november/week-4/surf-z... SURF has financed many FOSS projects in the past.

Desire to invest in USA has gone down because of Trump, and that money will partly flow to China, partly internal. On the short term, USA has incredible soft power over EU. But on the long term, not so much anymore.
by philipwhiuk | 2025-11-28 16:03:14+00:00
The lesson surely though is 'don't use web-tech, aimed at solving browser incompatibility issues for local scripting'.

When you're running NPM tooling you're running libraries primarily built for those problems, hence the torrent of otherwise unnecessary complexity of polyfills, that happen to be running on a JS engine that doesn't get a browser attached to it.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-11-28 16:03:36+00:00
Ironically that MIT study that made the rounds a few months ago ("Study finds 90% of AI pilots fail" you remember), also found that virtually every single worker at every company they studied was using LLMs regularly.

The real takeaway of the study was that workers were using their personal LLM accounts to do work rather than using the AI implementation mess their companies had shat out.
by ChrisArchitect | 2025-11-28 16:04:47+00:00
A study from (2023)

Maybe take it easy on these scienceclock posts eh? (and friends https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45943338)

Some discussion earlier this year, from another suspect source that changed article date recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44695205

And then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36366137
by in-silico | 2025-11-28 16:04:50+00:00
> When that is gone and it starts doing web searches -- or it has any mechanisms that mimic actual research when it does not know something

ChatGPT and Gemini (and maybe others) can already perform and cite web searches, and it vastly improves their performance. ChatGPT is particularly impressive at multi-step web research. I have also witnessed them saying "I can't find the information you want" instead of hallucinating.

It's not perfect yet, but it's definitely climbing human percentiles in terms of reliability.

I think a lot of LLM detractors are still thinking of 2023-era ChatGPT. If everyone tried the most recent pro-level models with all the bells and whistles then I think there would be a lot less disagreement.
by LexiMax | 2025-11-28 16:05:22+00:00
It makes the opinion hidden from the vast majority of visitors, except those who go out of their way to both have an account and showdead.

It is in every appreciable way censorship via unaccountable mob. It's censorship in a way that Reddit's downvote isn't, because Reddit allows anonymous users to read downvoted posts - or at least did the last time I checked.
by crote | 2025-11-28 16:05:32+00:00
Aren't those kind of reimbursements usually strictly capped?

For example, if you do volunteer work in The Netherlands you can get at most €5.60/hour, with a maximum of €210/month and €2100/year. I assume Germany will have similar rules.

€12/hour is just about minimum wage. Explaining how that isn't a salary is going to be pretty much impossible - it'll rightfully be interpreted as tax fraud. On top of a violation of labor laws for paying less than minimum wage, of course.

I do see a lot of benefits, though. There are plenty of people who aren't well-off who are doing incredibly valuable work for F/LOSS project. If you're holding a conference you really want to be able to invite those people without putting the burden of travel expenses on them: a €200 train ticket can easily be a dealbreaker for a poor student.
by e40 | 2025-11-28 16:05:55+00:00
I completely disagree with this thesis. In my years as a founder (>40), it was very clear when I saw many forks in the road. One would lead to me getting more wealthy and one would lead to me being able to sleep at night. I chose the latter. Clearly the tech titans have chosen the other path.

I also witnessed many other founders doing really terrible things. It’s a meme around here that technical founders mostly get screwed by the time IPO or M&A proceeds are divvied up. I saw that time and again. Yes, there are exceptions, bit they are rare.

EDIT: was on mobile, wanted to add more:

IMO, the system we have sorts for sociopaths. The people with the power (politicians, CEOs, etc) are far more likely to be sociopaths than in the regular population because the rewards are so great. Look at the Paypal "mafia" (as they are called by many), and their exploits after Paypal.

Here's the way I look at whether someone got lucky or not: were they a 1-hit wonder or did they serially create companies with vast wealth? The former are people that got lucky. I've known some. The latter are mostly sociopaths. I've met many. They are predators. Some of them actually triggered my flight/flight response, and until that happened the first time, I had never in my life (in a business setting) experienced that. I now know what it means, when I feel that feeling. What is interesting is that my body sometimes knows it before my brain.
by imiric | 2025-11-28 16:06:05+00:00
No, but if someone takes the free food and builds a business by selling it to others, without giving anything back to the original places, it harms everyone other than the person doing that.

F/LOSS is not a charity or a gift, so your analogy is not appropriate. It is a social movement and philosophy with the goal of sharing knowledge and building software for the benefit of everyone. It invites collaboration, and fosters a community of like-minded people. Trust is an implicit requirement for this to succeed, and individuals and corporations who abuse it by taking the work of others and not giving anything back are harmful to these goals. Copyleft licenses exist precisely to prevent this from happening.

MIT is a fine license for many projects, but not for an operating system kernel.
by triceratops | 2025-11-28 16:06:06+00:00
Let's assume the lower end of that range - $800/kWh and take the example of Arizona. https://www.aps.com/en/Residential/Service-Plans/Compare-Ser...

The difference between off-peak and on-peak rates there is about $0.21/kWh in the summer and $0.29/kWh in the winter, so assume an average delta of $0.25/kWh.

Assuming no solar panels, if you charge the battery on the grid at off-peak rates and discharge it completely at on-peak rates, you break even after using about 3200kWh. Assuming 2 kWh used every day during peak rates that's a breakeven period of 4.38 years.

Maybe my calculations are wrong somewhere, and I'd love to learn if that's the case.

I also acknowledge some big assumptions: namely, that you will always need to use all your stored energy day at the peak time (reasonable in the summer when the AC is running) and that you can use all your battery power for those loads instead of grid power. On the other hand electricity rates tend to go up over time and batteries last for years.
by hagbard_c | 2025-11-28 16:06:48+00:00
This message was brought to you by means of the Linux kernel (free software) running the GNU user space tools (free software) and the Nginx web server (free software) serving as a reverse proxy for the HN site (more or less free software, at least older versions are available).

All that work, for free, to allow you to complain about people writing free software. Entitled, you are.
by packetlost | 2025-11-28 16:06:51+00:00
I frequently write software like this (in other domains). Structs exist (in most languages) specifically for the purpose of packaging up state to pass around, I don't really buy that passing around a huge context is the problem. I'm not opposed to long functions (they can frequently be easier to understand than deep callstacks), especially in languages that are strictly immutable like Clojure or where mutation is tightly controlled like Rust. Otherwise it really helps to break down problems into sub problems with discrete state and success/failure conditions, even though it results in more boilerplate to manage.
by dchest | 2025-11-28 16:06:59+00:00
It does, here's a schema from an image I just saved with the latest version. Pretty simple.

CREATE TABLE image_attributes ( name text, value blob); CREATE TABLE layers (id text, parent_id text, sequence integer, uti text, name text, data blob); CREATE TABLE layer_attributes ( id text, name text, value blob);

Also, document-based apps that use Apple's Core Data framework (kinda ORM) usually use SQLite files for storage.
by vintagedave | 2025-11-28 16:08:39+00:00
> I’d wager that you could 10x for non-EU tourists

Except for normal people, where $400 a ticket is absolutely prohibitive. I can't imagine being able to take a family there at that sort of price. (To be honest, even at $40 that could add up quickly.)

I firmly believe institutions like museums should be accessible by everyone. I understand higher prices for non-EU people, on the logic that they need more income somehow and tourists are more likely to be able to afford it -- so long as they keep student prices, family/children prices etc.
by espadrine | 2025-11-28 16:08:44+00:00
Indeed. A mouse that runs through a maze may be right to say that it is constantly hitting a wall, yet it makes constant progress.

An example is citing Mr Sutskever's interview this way:

> in my 2022 “Deep learning is hitting a wall” evaluation of LLMs, which explicitly argued that the Kaplan scaling laws would eventually reach a point of diminishing returns (as Sutskever just did)

which is misleading, since Sutskever said it didn't hit a wall in 2022[0]:

> Up until 2020, from 2012 to 2020, it was the age of research. Now, from 2020 to 2025, it was the age of scaling

The larger point that Mr Marcus makes, though, is that the maze has no exit.

> there are many reasons to doubt that LLMs will ever deliver the rewards that many people expected.

That is something that most scientists disagree with. In fact the ongoing progress on LLMs has already accumulated tremendous utility which may already justify the investment.

[0]: https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/a-trillion-dollars-is-a-te...
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-11-28 16:08:45+00:00
You need massive infrastructure investments to freeze it, vehicles are more expensive because the tanks need to freeze it, fuel in stations need to freeze it, tanker trucks that deliver it need to freeze it, there is a lot of energy lost in freezing snd heating it back up.

China doesn’t feel rich enough to build all of that when charging stations are pretty straightforward and cheap. Probably the only thing holding back electric for long hauls now is the lack of infrastructure (grid is needed to build charging stations, and truckers prefer untolled routes without much of that), and also sunk costs on their existing trucks (which tend to last what feel likes forever with cheap repairs).