MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jinzo | 2025-11-25 10:10:20+00:00
15+ years ago I was doing a CS undergrad (or Bachelors? not sure how it translates) at the local uni in a small EU Country and this approach was the standard across all subjects as part of 'lab work'. There were people there to do that, not the prof himself, but approach was exactly the same. And after a few months they had a really good picture on what level everyone is ect.

On the other hand, I had a neighbour ask me if he can make his 1 month apprenticeship when he finished his 3rd year of CS High School (eg ~18 years old, 3 of 4 years of 'CS trade school') 6 months ago or so. I was totally gobsmacked by his lack of basic understanding of how computers work, I am confident that he did not confidentially know the difference between a file and a folder. But he was very confident in the AI slop he produced. I had a grand plan of giving him tasks that would show him the pitfalls of AI -> no need for that, he blindly copied whatever AI gave him (he did not figure out Claude Code exsists), even when the results were very visibly bad - even from afar. I tried explaining stuff to him to no avail. I know this is a sample size of 1, but damn, I did not expect it to be that bad.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-11-25 10:10:26+00:00
The whole chip in the middle is brighter than white. Half that video is super bright, making this example way more than I was suggesting in both area and average brightness.

> most of the image is near black, only a relatively smart part of it is white. The average brightness probably isn't over SDR FFF.

It's a lot more than I suggested, and I said average brightness half of FFF for my example.

Also if I knew you were going to hammer on the loose example numbers I would have said 2% or 1%.

> I'm bringing it up because that's how HDR looks on the web.

But I'm not defending how it looks. I'm defending how it could look, since you don't see why anyone would even want HDR on the web.
by NoboruWataya | 2025-11-25 10:11:24+00:00
The article doesn't generally read like AI to me, though I can't discount the possibility that I have been fooled by a new and more advanced slop machine.

I think HN is probably biased towards a subset of the population that is perennially interested in nuclear explosions. They surely occupied a much greater part of the public consciousness in the 50s than they do today (and certainly much greater than a few years ago, before a nuclear power invaded Europe).
by rand17 | 2025-11-25 10:11:40+00:00
This is a description that turns on every red light in my head: "netflix for", "binge watching", "turning into", "keep you hooked", "but smarter" etc. - probably I'm not the target age demographic or maybe this is an American thing? Also, the meaning of literal, here, would be something like having a hamster named Duolingo and you built a gun to kill the animal. That's a literal killer appliance.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-11-25 10:11:49+00:00
Yes and no.

I tend to work alone, so my scope is limited.

Some of the stuff I work on is quite involved, anyway.

I’ve been at this game awhile (coding for over 40 years), so I have learned a few tricks.

Of course, I “cheat.” I’ve learned to write software that doesn’t tend to have that many bugs, and I also don’t have to deal with other people’s code, so much. I write code for myself, which means that I don’t get to practice my debugging, so much, these days.

You can see for yourself. Much of my work is open-source, or source-available: https://github.com/ChrisMarshallNY
by alwillis | 2025-11-25 10:12:01+00:00
> 2026 is nearly upon us, and Google, Microsoft, and Apple remain steadfast in the refusal to ever allow anyone to share wide-gamut or HDR images.

It appears we’re getting closer to being able to exchange HDR images [1]:

[1]: https://gregbenzphotography.com/hdr-photos/iso-21496-1-gain-...
by bityard | 2025-11-25 10:13:03+00:00
Oh man, this is so good! I wanted to build this exact thing but never could find the time. LLMs are actually pretty good at satire once they've had a few drinks!

I particularly enjoyed https://news.ysimulator.run/item/2179

The only thing it's missing are the greyed-out mean-spirited one-liner retorts and over-done political snark starting at about halfway down the page.
by ErroneousBosh | 2025-11-25 10:13:48+00:00
This is a technique that's been used for crystal oscillators for almost a century by now. I have some 1950s crystal ovens that are a little metal box that fits over the crystal (quite a large crystal, about the size of two or three SD cards stacked) and heats up to around 75°C. The crystals were supposed to be specially cut to have close to zero temperature coefficient around that temperature so the slight up and down drift caused by the thermostat wouldn't affect it.

I have test equipment made as recently as the early 2000s that uses a crystal oscillator in an oven as a frequency standard. It takes a good five minutes to fully stabilise.
by sidrag22 | 2025-11-25 10:14:17+00:00
I don't understand the youtube love i see all over this site. It's constantly something i see that people are okay with.. but i see so many things i dislike within it.

It has a social media style layer on top of it to entice people to keep watching, as well as creators to keep creating horrifyingly misleading titles/thumbnails, it captured a massive user base without utilizing ads and then removed the training wheels and went full steam ahead on ads and added a paid model.

they added shorts which is all the things i mentioned on steroids, and its owned by google.

I'm a strong advocate for turning youtube into just a search bar, with some subscriptions on the side for creators you actually care for. Imo, if something gets through all the noise and finds its way to me, its maybe worth watching, if its their social media style layer suggesting it to me? its a low % chance its worth watching a minute of.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-11-25 10:14:40+00:00
Ubisoft strategy with The Settlers IP is very hard to understand.

They bought to the market a game with an akward positioning, which could be enjoyable if you see it primarily as a tablet oriented development, but with very little to do with the original The Settlers. Amusingly, it would probably have been better received with a different name.

Accordingly, I could see how the creator would feel uneasy with what's happening.
by imiric | 2025-11-25 10:15:01+00:00
A kernel is a very special program, and splitting it into individual components would be orthogonal to the Unix philosophy, which is about user space programs. Besides, Linux is quite modular, and only loads what it needs, so the fact that it's monolithic is not a major concern. Yes, it would be better if kernel panics wouldn't impact the system, but nowadays these are very rare, and are usually related to hardware rather than software issues.

As for GNU utils and the examples you mention, those indeed align with the Unix philosophy, which you clearly misunderstand.
Ask HN: What do u use for agent/agentic evals?
by hhthrowaway1230 | 2025-11-25 10:15:01+00:00
Right now looking at MLFlow/Braintrust but find it hard to compare acrosss versions of agents, and a/b testing of agents, and mcp tools. Also obvious things like runaway agents (stuck in a loop), or token/spend optimalisation.

What do you all use?
by nr378 | 2025-11-25 10:15:30+00:00
You can hide fields in Python with a little bit of gymnastics:

class EncapsulatedCounter: def __init__(self, initial_value): _count = initial_value def increment(): nonlocal _count _count += 1 return _count self.increment = increment counter = EncapsulatedCounter(100) new_value = counter.increment() print(f"New value is: {new_value}")
by delaguardo | 2025-11-25 10:15:47+00:00
> EDN seems to lack a proper format for binary data

The best part of EDN that it is extendable :)

#binary/base64 "SGVsbG8sIHp6bzM4Y29tcHV0ZXIhIEhvdyBhcmUgeW91IGRvaW5nPw=="

This is a tagged literal that can be read by provided (if provided) custom reader during reading of the document. The result could be any type you want.
by cedws | 2025-11-25 10:17:27+00:00
Aside from other security features already mentioned Go also doesn't execute code at compile time by design.

There is no airtight technical solution, for any language, for preventing malicious dependencies making it into your application. You can have manual or automated review using heuristics but things will still slip through. Malicious code doesn't necessarily look obvious, like decoding some base64 and piping it into bash, it can be an extremely subtle vulnerability sprinkled in that nobody will find until it's too late.

RE dependency cooldowns I'm hoping Go will get support for this. There's a project called Athens for running your own Go module proxy - maybe it could be implemented there.
by fjfaase | 2025-11-25 10:17:53+00:00
It surprises that they are still teaching parsing techniques that are based on limitation from 40 years ago, when memory was limited and you had to parse a file one character at the time. Why not start with a back-tracking recursive descent parser on a file stored in memory? Can be made efficient with some simple caching. In an introduction course there is no need to aim for maximum performance if parsing a 10k lines program takes less than a second.
by muldvarp | 2025-11-25 10:18:02+00:00
> AI research tools are increasingly useful if you're a competent researcher that can judge the output and detect BS.

This assumes we even need more Terence Taos by the time these kids are old enough. AI has gone from being completely useless to solving challening math problems in less than 5 years. That trajectory doesn't give me much hope that education will matter at all in a few years.
by esskay | 2025-11-25 10:18:06+00:00
It's already there really. It's heat output on the 4 and more so the 5 benefits from active cooling. The good news is the pi is practically pointless as a product for most people these days, and vastly better options are available cheaper, so unless you genuinely need the gpio theres little reason to buy one - very much their own fault for focusing on commercial applications but the Pi 5 as a product is practically pointless for a consumer use at this point. An old Pi 2 or 3 which dont need any cooling are very useful still for a range of applications but the newer ones are in a bit of a weird niche where they're overpriced compared to most options.
by srean | 2025-11-25 10:18:40+00:00
The brain absolutely and biology in general when one starts digging.

Discovery of DNA was positioned as a "Biology: Mission Accomplished" - it's far from true. We don't understand all of DNA and epigenetics. We don't have a good understanding of how life began.

Back to the brain, it's power consumption to capabilities, weight to capabilities is just insane. The link to brain size and intelligence is a mystery as well - jumping spiders, octopus, corvids, parrots ...
by emilsoman | 2025-11-25 10:19:02+00:00
That's cool, but they say the code execution would wait till the tool call is done. Would they be just keeping the code execution process alive? That seems like a bad idea given tool calls can take an unknown amount of time to finish. I am guessing they would be putting the python orchestrator code to sleep when the tool call starts and restoring the state when the tool call is done.
by mbreese | 2025-11-25 10:20:13+00:00
1) you have to have an OS that supports it.

2) even if your OS supports it, you may have difficulty using it for your root volume, so partitioning is probably required.

2a) in your case you may not want to use it on your boot volume which would negate the SSD benefit for you.

3) it is recommended that you have ECC RAM due to the checksums. This isn’t a hard and fast requirement, but it does make you more resilient to bitflips.

4) it isn’t the absolute fastest file system. But it’s not super slow. There are caching options for read and write that benefit from SSDs, but you’re just adding costs here to get speed increases.

I only use it on servers or NASs. The extra hassles of using it on a workstation keep me from running it on a laptop. Unless you want to use FreeBSD that is… then you’d be fine (and FreeBSD is pretty usable as a daily driver). Realistically, I’m not sure how practical it is for most home users. But it is an example of what a filesystem can offer when it is well designed.
by jlengrand | 2025-11-25 10:20:20+00:00
Really? Darn, that is such BS. I was already looking out to be fair, only reason I'm still there is because of my family plan and older parents who will struggle to switch.

That being said, I don't mind additional plans to be fair. Let me pay for what I use, not what you force down my throat. What I mind is the constant enshittification.
by defrost | 2025-11-25 10:21:58+00:00
From the atomic test annals: The DIXIE Showgirl (1953)

This is an official government photo in an official government archive. That little cloud under the dancer’s right foot is, of course, the DIXIE cloud

JPG: https://i0.wp.com/blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/wp-content/uploads...

From Restricted Data nuclear history blog: https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2012/05/18/friday-image-the-...
by arghwhat | 2025-11-25 10:22:09+00:00
I disagree, the answer you get is dictated by the question you ask. Ask stupid, get stupid. Present the problem better, get a better answer. These tools are trained to be highly compliant, so you get what you ask.

Same happens with regular people - a smart person doing something stupid because they weren't overly critical and judgingof your request - and these tools have much more limited thinking/reasoning than a normal person would have, even if they seem to have a lot more "knowledge".
by watwut | 2025-11-25 10:23:15+00:00
I watch in foreign language without subtitles or with foreign language subtitles. I use language reactor so the translation is right there, on mouse hover. It also allows you to quickly rewind the scene, so you can watch and hear same dialog multiple times. That helps a lot too.

Also, I happily watch dubbings. Dubbings are easier to understand then original shows. Imo, it is fully ok to watch Nordic show in Spanish. Or an American show I have already seen, but this time in Spanish.
by kenver | 2025-11-25 10:23:45+00:00
Ever since I read about Rodney Brooks and his idea of the Subsumption architecture I've been convinced that something like this is going on in our minds - likely with some other mechanisms too. It just clicks for me - I'm mostly likely completely wrong, but it's a pretty cool idea, and I've used it to create some really interesting simulations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsumption_architecture
by 0xEF | 2025-11-25 10:23:58+00:00
Truly captures the spirit of these types of HN comments; Person A does a thing, Person B points out how pointless thing could have been done better in effort to flex smart.

Post - Blog post about recapping a Timex Sinclair 1000"

Response - "Ah yes, the 'multi-region composite mod'—because nothing screams cutting-edge like jury-rigging a 40-year-old potato to a VCR."
by psychoslave | 2025-11-25 10:24:04+00:00
It’s good at quickly producing a lot of code which is most likely going to give interesting results, and it’s completely unaware of anything including why human might want to produce code.

The marketing bullshit that it’s a "thinking" and "hallucinating" is just bringing the intended confusion on the table.

They are great tools for many purpose. But a GPS is not a copilot, and an LLM is not going to replace coworkers where their humanity matters.
by mort96 | 2025-11-25 10:24:27+00:00
This is going on for too long. Maybe you can somehow find a way to process all HDR content so that it's reasonable (i.e never makes the surrounding SDR GUI look grey, never makes bright pots which are bright enough to hurt) across all screens imaginable and all contexts. Maybe. I have my doubts, but go ahead.

Convince the web standards bodies and browser implementers and transform the world into one where HDR on the web is perfect and never causes issues.

But until that's done, there's a simple solution: Just don't support HDR. Until your hypothetical perfect solution is universally implemented, it does more harm than good on the web and should not be supported.

I don't see why anyone would want HDR on the web in its current form.
by MayeulC | 2025-11-25 10:25:56+00:00
> or even putting thermal mass around the existing oscillator

I was thinking along these lines as well. Put a metal block on the CPU and oscillator for thermal mass (not sure if separate blocks would be better). Ideally, with a large enough thermal capacity, the block should reach an average temperature and remain there.

Inertia is also good even if the temperature is not constant: clock drift can be measured and compensated. If the temperature rises slowly, the clock speed will increase slowly: the rate can be measured and compensated for. Jitter is the issue here, and thermal inertia should dampen it.

It may also be worth preventing convection from happening on the board. Putting the Pi in a wool sock may not be the best idea depending on its temperature, but an electrically insulating thermal conductor (or an electrical insulation layer + steel wool may do it).

Heatsinks may also be counter-productive (if they have a small thermal capacity), as their temperature depends on room temperature, which changes during the day.
by mlichvar | 2025-11-25 10:25:59+00:00
That's what the chrony tempcomp directive is for. But you would have to figure out the coefficients, it's not automatic.

An advantage of constantly loading at least one core of the CPU might be preventing the deeper power states from kicking in, which should make the RX timestamping latency more stable and improve stability of synchronization of NTP clients.
by talideon | 2025-11-25 10:26:03+00:00
Starlark is a subset of Python that's only primitive recursive. And in a distributed build system, being able to guarantee termination is a very good thing. It also means Bazel can do predictable fan-outs of builds. Starlark has very good reasons for existing.

CMake almost ended up using Tcl, but it was rejected because that would've introduced an external dependency, running counter to what they were trying to achieve at the time. Would Lua have been a good alternative to creating their own (rather janky) language? Sure, but Lua had very little mindshare in 2000. Even with the weird configuration language it has, it's still preferable to the horrible agglomeration of m4 macros that is Autotools.

If you want to pick on any build system for not picking an existing language, Meson would be a better target, as it's similar to but not Lua, and a suitable subset of Starlark-esque subset of Lua would've been useful.
by anthk | 2025-11-25 10:26:12+00:00
Myself wants. I remember when the UBIFS module (or some kernel settings) for the Debian kernel was MLC against SLC. You could store 4X more data now, but at a cost of really bad reability: A SINGLE bad shutdown and your partitions would be corrupted up to the point of not being able to properly boot any more, having to reflash the NAND.
by rldjbpin | 2025-11-25 10:26:19+00:00
feels like the main message is missed by seeing most of the discourse here:

> Outages like today's are a good thing because they're a warning. They can force redundancy and resilience into systems.

the advice is not to shun big companies and providers, but rather have a backup solution built-in for situations like this. switching solely to an in-house alternative is not always a great idea, but it can be a great backup solution.
by nephihaha | 2025-11-25 10:27:28+00:00
I've had the same problem online for years, when I translate something people presume I am using Google Translate (even though in one case said language isn't on Google Translate — I checked!)... Or got the answer off Wikipedia.

One of the funniest things was being accused of plagiarising Wikipedia, when I'd actually written most of the Wikipedia article on said subject. The irony... Wikipedia doesn't just use unpaid labour, it ends up undermining the people who wrote it.
by ManlyBread | 2025-11-25 10:27:38+00:00
Why would their response be appropriate when even the creators of the LLM doesn't clearly state the purpose of their software, yet alone instruct users how to use it? The person I replied to said that this software should be used yo "help you build and run experiments, and help you discuss your findings, and in the end helps you write your discoveries" - I dare anyone to find any mention of this workflow being the "correct" way of using any LLM in the LLM's official documentation.
by gf000 | 2025-11-25 10:27:49+00:00
And you would get garbled up bytes in application logic. But it has absolutely no way to mess up the runtime's state, so any future code can still execute correctly.

Meanwhile a memory issue in C/Rust and even Go will immediately drop every assumption out the window, the whole runtime is corrupted from that point on. If we are lucky, it soon ends in a segfault, if we are less lucky it can silently cause much bigger problems.

So there are objective distinctions to have here, e.g. Rust guarantees that the source of such a corruption can only be an incorrect `unsafe` block, and Java flat out has no platform-native unsafe operations, even under data races. Go can segfault with data races on fat pointers.

Of course every language capable of FFI calls can corrupt its runtime, Java is no exception.
Can We Trust AI as Customer Support?
by adipm_tech | 2025-11-25 10:28:27+00:00
I’m curious how founders, engineers, and support folks here think about this.

A lot of customer service is moving toward AI agents—handling FAQs, troubleshooting flows, and sometimes even resolving tickets end-to-end.

But can we fully trust AI to act as front-line customer support?

If yes, what convinced you? If no, what are the biggest blockers—accuracy, edge cases, empathy, accountability?

Would love to hear real experiences from teams that have tried replacing (or augmenting) human support.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-11-25 10:29:13+00:00
Well the reason I was talking about limits that way is because it's something screens already do when displaying HDR content. They can't go full power over much area, and the bigger you go the dimmer your limit gets. So repurposing those existing algorithms with some tweaking.

It's not very hard on a technical level.

And no it doesn't have to be universal and perfect to reach the point that HDR is a benefit. There are some blatant flaws that need fixing, and just a few fixes would get us a lot closer.
by pbmonster | 2025-11-25 10:29:17+00:00
Is it unreasonable to ask "why not"? I like the state of Android's (as packaged by GrapheneOS) settings UI much better than any other settings system, period.

It's all in one place - I can't think of a single thing I would want to configure that isn't found in that one dialog. It doesn't always make sense, but it's searchable, and the search works.
by graemep | 2025-11-25 10:29:37+00:00
> Doing derivatives

Not something everyone learns. My kids seemed to enjoy it. My older daughter learned quite a lot of algebra etc. by doing physics.

> learning the periodic table

You do not need to rote learn all of it, and you remember enough by learning about particular elements etc.

> basic language and alphabet skills

My kids learned to read through firstly reading with me (or others) so enjoying the story and learning words as we went and guessing words on flashcards. Then on to reading because they linked it.

Admittedly none of the above was in school, but my point is that its not intrinsic to learning.

> At some point in education with most fields, you will have to move beyond concepts and do some rote memorization and repetition of principles in order to get to higher level concepts.

Not a great deal and it does not feel like as much of a grind if you enjoy the subject and know where you are going.