MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by spyder | 2025-11-25 12:05:59+00:00
For us it's hard to train a model because our compute and resources is nothing compared to nature's "compute" the whole universe: "it" has absurdly more resources to run different variations and massively parallel compute to run the evolutionary "algorithm", if you think about all the chemical building blocks, proteins, cells, that was "tried" and didn't survive.

From that angle our artificial models seem very sample efficient, but it's all hard to quantify it without know what was "tried" by the universe to reach the current state. But it's all weird to think about because there is no intent in natures optimizations it's just happens because it can and there is enough energy and parallel randomness to eventually happen.

And the real mystery is not how evolution achieved this but that the laws of chemistry/universe allow self-replicating structures to appear at all. In an universe with different rules it couldn't happen even with infinite trial and error compute.
by ayaros | 2025-11-25 12:07:22+00:00
One thing I appreciate about Windows is (in my experience at least) you almost never have to go into the command line to change a weird setting. There's always a toggle in the GUI somewhere. I mean, I'll use the command line if I have to... I just like the fact that the supported options are enumerated visually; I don't have to worry I'll break something. Also, I can peruse through a place like the group policy editor to find settings I would have otherwise never considered changing.
by Libidinalecon | 2025-11-25 12:08:21+00:00
"Google Antigravity" makes it worse though. When I first read that I thought it was going to be some kind of quantum computing hype job.

On the other hand, I was thinking the other day what a shitty band name "The Beatles" are in isolation from the music. If the product is good enough it kind of frames the name and makes a bad name completely work.
by zimpenfish | 2025-11-25 12:09:32+00:00
> convicted three times of stealing in a year [...] clearly something is not working here between this person and the system.

Yep, it's definitely a "this person needs some kind of help" signifier.

I can see the logic of "three top-line serious felonies" -> much more severe punishment (even though, I believe, more severe punishment doesn't actually tend to reduce recidivism but I guess if you get life without parole, that's not a huge issue) - if someone commits three distinct murders[0], obviously there's a problem with letting them loose in polite society.

> powers to take actions that involved things other than prisons.

I think various places have tried things like that and (IIRC) they tend to work out well - people get reintegrated into society, they don't reoffend, etc. - but all it takes is one agitator (right wing paper or politician looking for cheap points) to bring up the "soft on crime" angle and it all goes out the window.

[0] obvs. without justification - if they've killed in self-defence three times, that's different than three unprovoked straight out murders, but you'd still want some kind of "look, maybe don't go places where you end up in fights etc." conversation.
by libraryofbabel | 2025-11-25 12:10:25+00:00
I went to grad school for history, and it completely cured me of any nostalgia for or desire to live in the premodern past. The past is an interesting place, but also a place of unmitigated horrors. If you were lucky enough to live into old age in relatively good health, you would have seen many friends die young, and half of your children as well. Just the number of deaths from "teeth" in the Bills of Mortality says it all. These would have been extremely painful worsening tooth infections eventually resulting in sepsis or a brain infection, and death:

> In seventeenth-century London — and for that matter most other places — teeth were a leading cause of death, owing to poor oral hygiene and no effective means to treat infections at a time when extractions — without anesthesia — were performed by the local barber.

I've had at least one infection that would probably have killed me in the 17th century. I am grateful for the existence of antibiotics.
by imiric | 2025-11-25 12:11:37+00:00
> why tar has multiple zip options

Convenience? `tar` integrates well with compression tools, but doesn't implement compression itself. This is the epitome of the Unix philosophy. You can just as well pipe its output to any compression tool of your choice, if you prefer not using its CLI.

> why find has a DSL?

Describing an advanced CLI as a DSL is a stretch. But to humour you: flexibility, and because files have many attributes which a good finding tool should expose to the user. Whether you like its CLI or not is a separate topic, but you're mistaking minimalism for simplicity as a requirement of the Unix philosophy. Some tasks are inherently complex, and forcing a tool to be "minimal" at the expense of flexibility would be counterproductive.

Besides, you're free to choose any other tool you like more to find files on your system. The fact GNU `find` is easily replaceable is precisely a sign that it follows the Unix philosophy well. I personally use `fd` and ripgrep more often than `find` these days.

Re: `cat -v`, I hardly know the history behind it, but it doesn't really matter. As a sibling comment mentions, there are no hard rules around this topic, and people will disagree about what it really means, and how a program should be designed. If I had an opinion on the topic of `cat -v`, I would probably argue with Rob Pike about it as well. None of this means that these design principles are not worth upholding, or that we won't make mistakes along the way. But going back on topic, it's a problem when a project like systemd explicitly chooses not to follow these principles.
by zimpenfish | 2025-11-25 12:12:10+00:00
> Driving on public roads carries a responsibility to respond reasonably in all kinds of stressful situations.

Yes.

> People incapable of handling a traffic stop should not be licensed.

Also yes. But both of those points apply to the (US) cops and they frequently fail on both points (the first amply demonstrated by how many police chases end up in crashes and/or deaths; the second by any one of thousands of videos showing where the cops needlessly escalate traffic stops.)
by rutagandasalim | 2025-11-25 12:12:19+00:00
I spent weeks building aithings.dev — a directory curating all the actually useful AI tools. Wanted to make discovery simple, clean, human-curated.

Then I got curious and asked Claude 4 Opus to “rebuild aithings.dev from scratch.” It did. In 45 seconds. Pages, search, categories, design; all there.

Not gonna lie, that stung. But it also made me realize something: AI’s moving way faster than our comfort zones, and building with it > fighting it.

Still shipping aithings.dev though
by imtringued | 2025-11-25 12:13:38+00:00
There is a zero lower bound on the interest rate. Excess capital means negative returns on capital. The money system can't express the state of the real world so either companies close down until the yield is positive, or the companies pass on the artificial minimum price onto the consumer. In both cases, the real world is forced to match the state of the money system.

Being shocked that companies try their best to deal with the bad cards they have been dealt with should be expected. The money system simply cannot express the concept of surplus capital or abundance. Positive interest means capital is scarce, so capital must be made scarce even if there is abundance.

Before you come up with the argument that the interest rate is supposed to reflect a market property and therefore does not force itself upon the market, remember that I said that there is an artificial restriction in the money system that prevents the state of the real market to be expressed. The non-profit economy has never had a chance to exist, because our tools are too crude.

The non-profit economy includes resilient production with slight/minor overproduction.

Think about how stupid the idea of a guaranteed 0% yield bond is (aka cash). The government obligates itself to accept an infinite amount of debt if the real return on capital would ever fall negative. No wonder it has an incentive to inflate the value of the bond away.
by walletdrainer | 2025-11-25 12:15:38+00:00
Well, depending on your ethnicity of course. In Singapore I was just told off for a small bag with maybe a gram of weed left in my pocket after flying in from Amsterdam, they did not seem particularly interested in the situation but stressed that it should never happen again.

I’d be shocked if the airport experience at Bali was really different, although they would probably want a bribe from you.
by heresie-dabord | 2025-11-25 12:16:00+00:00
> The Pi 3 can go passively cooled and maybe even without a heatsink at load, but the newer Pis can't.

The Raspberry Pi 4 can be used without a fan. They are packaged inside keyboards, but both the Raspberry Pi 400 and the Raspberry Pi 500 are passively cooled.
by b112 | 2025-11-25 12:16:45+00:00
Yes, it's easy to build entire cities from scratch in a centrally managed society, such as a dictatorship or communist nations.

It's also easy to have cities grow fast, if you're primarily a rural/agrarian nation, and suddenly have a transition to become urban. This was (for example) Canada in the 1900s. Mostly rural, yet now it's mostly urban.

Canada saw fast growth of cities back then.

It's maintaining large cities once the fast growth is over, that is a different story. How will, for example, China look in 50+ years? 100+ years? When all its newly built mega-city projects are crumbling.
by sevensor | 2025-11-25 12:16:46+00:00
The semiconductor manufacturing process is so ridiculously cool that they have to make the working conditions terrible to keep the plant from being flooded with junior engineers. I worked in ion implant, which means I was responsible for honest-to-god particle accelerators working right. But you pay for the cool factor in sweat. Pager duty isn’t a thing you take turns with. It’s your duty to carry a pager, always, from the day you sign on until the day you leave. And you will get paged. A lot. At all hours. Some of those pages will require you to go in, but you work so many hours at the plant that you’re probably already there. Did you know that “exempt” means “exempt from the 40 hour work week?” You probably have to attend at least one passdown meeting a day. Those are at 6, and whether that’s a.m. or p.m., it means you’re working a long day. The fab needs weekend coverage too, so every fifth or sixth week, you go in and work straight through, 12 days.

And then there’s the software. Part of my job was entering numbers into a system that had been designed to make it hard to enter numbers in it. This was so that you wouldn’t change them too often. But we did. A big part of the job was data analysis, but instead of actual access, certain data was only available as server rendered PNGs. Small ones.

I could go on, but I think that’s enough.
by vladms | 2025-11-25 12:17:23+00:00
The yolk (used directly in the embryos development) is generated during 10 days (https://www.purinamills.com/chicken-feed/education/detail/ho...). This could give the opportunity to pack a lot of "indirect information" to be used by the future embryo.

Regarding "teaching" the child while in the womb, it is exactly what is happening, see: https://www.americanscientist.org/article/baby-talk

I do agree that some organisms will transmit more "information" (via multiple ways, chemically, mechanical, etc.) than others (like maybe the birds) but the fact is the DNA is just a part of the development process and even if maybe it is "the first one", it will not "pack" everything.
Show HN: Jobstocks.ai – Live hiring momentum for 1k public companies
by TalO | 2025-11-25 12:17:38+00:00
Hi HN — I built JobStocks.ai, a dashboard that tracks real-time hiring momentum (job postings) across 1,000+ public companies and maps hiring trends vs stock performance.

What it surfaces:

- AI-generated company insights based on hiring acceleration/deceleration. - Exclusive alternative data: normalized hiring activity across industries and peers. - Signals before the market reacts (e.g., sudden hiring freezes, unexpected team expansions). - Hiring trends are compared directly to stock trends to highlight divergences that may matter later.

Why I built it: alternative data that’s fast and actionable — hiring is often a leading indicator for revenue/cost trajectory, but is hard to track across public filings. I’d love honest feedback on the UI, the signals, and how analysts might use this data.
by 21asdffdsa12 | 2025-11-25 12:18:17+00:00
Reminds me of cube the engine of sauberbraten2 - who uses a C/C++ hybrid with complex inheritance to inherit methods - like everything is a starts as an object. And so on and so forth.. turning inheritance into basically a mapped out set theory with the final class being the outermost part of a set holding the abilities of all inner sets. https://github.com/embeddedc/sauerbraten/tree/master/src

Its not very intuitive used that way.
by libraryofbabel | 2025-11-25 12:18:19+00:00
It’s already been (at least partly) digitized, e.g. https://www.deathbynumbers.org/data/

One thing you will have trouble with however, is that disease categories and the process of determining cause of death changed a great deal from 1527 to 1858. So the categories you're working with aren't stable at all.
by muldvarp | 2025-11-25 12:18:48+00:00
> you don't have to be rich to partake.

You still need to be rich to partake. Most business ventures will still require capital even in the age of super-intelligence. Super-intelligence will make labor worthless (or very cheap) it won't make property worthless.

> And when did "the rich" hoard anything for themselves only?! Usually I see them democratizing products and services so they are more accessible to everyone, not less.

There are plenty of examples of rich people hoarding their wealth. Countries with natural resources often have poor citizens because those citizens are not needed to extract that wealth. There is little reason why super-intelligence will not lead to a resource curse where the resource is human intelligence or even human labor.

> Computers in my pocket and on my wrist, TVs as big as a wall and thin like a book, electric cars, flights to anywhere I dream of traveling, investing with a few clicks on a website - all made possible to me by those evil and greedy rich in their race for riches. Thank you rich people!

Those rich people didn't share with you out of the goodness of their heart but because it was their best strategy to become even richer. But that's no longer the case when you can be replaced by super-intelligence.
by nalekberov | 2025-11-25 12:19:06+00:00
> Using the calculator as an example of a historically disruptive technology, school teaches you how to do all the basic math & arithmetic so that you can in principle do it by hand, even if calculators are pervasive and greatly speed up work in practical settings. In addition, you understand what it's doing for you, so should it give you a wrong answer (e.g. you mistyped "prompt"), you should be able to notice it, gut check it, verify it in some other way, etc.

Calculator analogy is extremely inaccurate, understandably people keep doing this comparison. The premise is that calculator didn't take bookkeepers' job, but instead it helped them.

First of all calculator do one job and does it very well, you never question it because it solely works with numbers. But AI wants to be everything, calculator, translator, knowledge base etc.. And, it's very confident at everything all the time until you start to question it, and even then it continues to lie. Because sadly current AI products' purpose isn't to give you accurate answer, it's about making you believe that it's giving you credible information.

More importantly calculators are not connected to the internet, and they are not capable of creating profile of an individual.

It's sad to see big players push this agenda to make people believe that they don't need to think anymore, AI will do everything for them.
by aljgz | 2025-11-25 12:19:53+00:00
Selling chips or chip manufacturing equipment is one of the many ways to get a return on this investment.

There's a whole hierarchy of products and services that benefit from this. At any level that there is a ban/preference to not use Chinese products it translates to a lower price for the same technology, which feeds into the domestic market for dependent tech.

Nobody buys their chips? They build data centers and sell computation as service. That does not sell enough? Domestic R&D now has an edge, creating momentum for medicine, agriculture, consumer products, weapons.

You can ban a small country for a long time, or a large country for a small time, but not large for long
by TMWNN | 2025-11-25 12:20:32+00:00
Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky depicts a human society thousands of years in the future, in which pretty much all software has already been written; it's just a matter of finding it. So programmer-archaeologists search archives and run code on emulators in emulators in emulators as far back as needed. <https://garethrees.org/2013/06/12/archaeology/>

(Heck, recently I migrated a VM to its third hypervisor. It began as a physical machine a quarter century ago.)
by tremon | 2025-11-25 12:20:47+00:00
The OP explicitly said "if you involve all required management", and that is key here. Having a process that is responsible for X million dollar of revenue yet is owned by no manager is a liability for the business (as is having an asset in operation that serves no purpose). Identifying that situation in a controlled manner is much better than letting it linger until it surfaces at a moment of Murphy's choosing.

> Stuff that’s been working fine for years is easy for a team to forget about

That's why serious companies have a documentation system describing their processes, tools and dependencies.
by fzaninotto | 2025-11-25 12:20:48+00:00
I've closed my share of AI-generated PRs on some OSS repositories I maintain. These contributors seem to jump from one project to another, until their contribution is accepted (recognized ?).

I wonder how long the open-source ecosystem will be able to resist this wave. The burden of reviewing AI-generated PRs is already not sustainable for maintainers, and the number of real open-source contributors is decreasing.

Side note: discovering the discussions in this PR is exactly why I love HN. It's like witnessing the changes in our trade in real time.
by spaceducks | 2025-11-25 12:20:58+00:00
WebP is much more limiting than JPEG XL. in lossy mode WebP has forced 4:2:0 chroma subsampling, supports only 8 bit per channel colors (really only about 7.8 bits, because thanks to WebP being tv-range the values aren't in a 0-255 range but in a 16-235 range, causing even more color banding than 8 bit per channel already has), no HDR, a maximum resolution of 16385 x 16385 making it unsuitable for larger images...

JPEG XL on the other hand supports up to 4099 color channels, a bit depth up to 32 bit per channel (technically up to 64 bit, but this currently isn't used), supports HDR natively, can use splines to compress elements like strands of hair, thin tree branches or line art that are typically hard to compress with DCT, supports patches for compressing repeating image elements, supports thermal, depth and alpha channels, supports losslessly recompressing existing JPEGs saving about 20%, supports CMYK and spot colors for printing, supports layers and selection masks, supports storing raw camera sensor data in bayer patterns, etc.

WebP is just a web delivery format, JPEG XL was designed to support many uses cases like web delivery, medical imaging, raw camera sensor data, authoring, multi-spectral imaging... the list goes on. if we support JPEG XL now, chances are it'll be quite a while before we need a new general purpose image format because JPEG XL covers so many current use cases and was designed to accommodate potential future use cases as well.
Show HN: Tornago – Cross-platform Tor wrapper in Go (client and server)
by mimixbox | 2025-11-25 12:21:22+00:00
tornago is a Tor wrapper library written in Go, created because some tools — especially around fraud prevention and privacy — need safe, anonymized network routes.

It’s intended for production use, but it hasn’t seen enough real users yet, so there are bugs that will only surface through actual deployments.

Highlights

- Works on Windows, macOS, Linux, and BSDs (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, DragonFly)

- Supports both client and server, including .onion Hidden Services

- Manages the tor daemon lifecycle + SOCKS5 communication

I’d like to see it tested in real projects — whether that’s fraud investigation, anonymous crawling, privacy-focused services, or simply protecting your own identity when accessing the network.

If Tor reliability matters to your system, try it and let me know what breaks. Issues and PRs are welcome.

GitHub: https://github.com/nao1215/tornago
by junon | 2025-11-25 12:21:59+00:00
It's not a silver bullet in that it can open up other vectors of much more probable attack.

If I have a FOSS project where there are other contributors with write access but not publish access (very common) OIDC now allows them to publish via workflows, opening you up to Jia Tan type attacks.

Like I said, if it works for your org, great. Otherwise it can cause bigger problems.
by exDM69 | 2025-11-25 12:22:08+00:00
I've used recovering from poisoned state in impl Drop in quite a few places.

In my case it's usually waiting for the GPU to finish some asynchronous work that's been spun up by CPU threads that may have panicked while holding the lock. This is necessary to avoid freeing resources that the GPU may still be using.

I usually prefix this with `if !std::thread::panicking() {}`, so I don't end up waiting (possibly forever) if I'm already cleaning up after a panic.
by Libidinalecon | 2025-11-25 12:23:53+00:00
As someone who was incredibly lazy intellectually in high school, I can't imagine what would have got me motivated beyond time and growing up.

I did nothing in high school and then by 19 for fun on Saturdays I was checking out 5 non-fiction books from the library and spending all Saturday reading.

There was no inspiring teacher or anything like that for me that caused this. At 16 I only cared about girls and maneuvering within the high school social order.

The only thing I can think of that would have changed things for me is if the math club were the cool kids and the football team were the outcasts.

At 16 anything intellectual seemed too remote to bother. That is why I would suspect the real variable is ultimately how much the parents care about grades. Mine did not care at all so there was no way my 16 year old self was going to become intrinsically motivated to grow intellectually.

All AI would have done for me in high school would have been swapping a language model for copying my friend's homework.