MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by b-man | 2025-11-28 19:11:53+00:00
> That may be. What's not specified there is the immense, immense cost of driving a dev org on those terms

I'm happy that we agree on the solution, but disagree only if it is cost worthy. About the cost, I took that into consideration when I wrote the conclusion:

> FAANG-style companies are unlikely to adopt formal methods or relational rigor wholesale. But for their most critical systems, they should. It’s the only way to make failures like this impossible by design, rather than just less likely.

There is an actionable plan in the article. It is possible to run teams like these. It is an economical decision of upper management to run the risk of having these outages vis-a-vis this alternative.
by cyberax | 2025-11-28 19:11:56+00:00
I would buy some physical gold as the ultimate hedge (don't invest ALL of you money!), and invest everything else in some highly rated fund. Vanguard, Fidelity, etc.

Trading yourself is just not worth it. You'll lose money long-term. An exception here is if you want to hold shares of a company long-term as a form of investment.

If your mortgage is a fixed rate at a reasonable interest, then keep it. If there's a high inflation episode, you'll be able to benefit from it.
by preem_palver | 2025-11-28 19:12:17+00:00
Keep 12 months living expenses in cash/t-bills. Depending on your age, increase to 24 mos if kids etc

If cash remaining -> if mortgage rate >4% pay down mortgage (locking in 4%+ yield). If you want to average 50% towards mortgage 50% VOO (S&P Index fund)

Deeper post ->https://monetarymusings.substack.com/p/how-to-not-blow-up-wh...
by johnnyanmac | 2025-11-28 19:13:55+00:00
It doesn't make sense. But that is exactly how policy makers justify how "the economy is doing good!" The GDP was never intended to be used as an indicator of national economic well being; only a simple statistic to measure how much money is exchanged between people.

But it only takes a few examples counter to what a public service should do to show that GDP reliance creates anti-patterns. e.g. rising healthcare costs is good for the GDP while universal healthcare is bad.
by pfannkuchen | 2025-11-28 19:14:03+00:00
Well if the prices rise due to tariffs, and then more money is released via income tax reductions, the two effects may offset each other from the perspective of the consumer.

Prices would rise, but the money available to the consumer would also increase. So I think it wouldn’t be the kind of inflation we usually see where prices rises but earnings don’t keep up.

Wealthy people don’t pay much income tax anyway, so the effect on asset prices would not be huge probably. The middle class would have more money to spend on housing, which would increase housing prices if middle class spending was dominating housing prices, but with investor housing purchases being such a large component of house purchasing buyer pool it may mostly just shift who is buying houses over to the middle class a bit (due to available money increase going disproportionately to middle class people who actually have their spending power substantially eroded by income tax).

Note that when I say wealthy people I mean independently wealthy, not high W2 earners, they aren’t wealthy IMO if their W2 job still generates most of their buying power.
by threethirtytwo | 2025-11-28 19:14:25+00:00
The bottleneck for commoditization is hardware. The manufacture of the hardware required is led by tmsc and samsung being a close second. The tooling required for manufacture is centralized with ASML and several other smaller players like Zeiss and the design of the product centers around nvidia though there are players like AMD who are attempting to catch up.

It is a complex supply chain but each section of the chain is held by only a few companies. Hopefully this is enough competition to accelerate the development of computational technologies that can run and train these LLMs at home. I give it a decade or more.
by lisbbb | 2025-11-28 19:14:29+00:00
Increasing electricity prices are going to be its undoing. AI is an environmental disaster in multiple directions.

What will we do with all the compute? Landfills, just like all other e-waste. It's never getting repurposed. I already saw this story play out multiple times in the past. The dot-com bubble led to so much waste--PBXs, switches, PCs, monitors, all thrown on the heap. Oh, sorry, "surplused" then thrown on a heap in the Philippines or wherever.
by sweetjuly | 2025-11-28 19:14:35+00:00
Yeah...HTTP/1 is one of those weird cases where the older protocol is considerably more difficult to implement correctly than the newer ""more complex"" standard. This is especially true if you want your server to work with they myriad of questionably compliant clients out in the world.

HTTP/3 might have been easier, and using QUIC+HTTP/3 in your hobby OS is a fun flex :)
by the__alchemist | 2025-11-28 19:14:35+00:00
I was struck by this too. I initially found it offputting, but then realized that it reinforced her point: We are all subject to social media (etc) bubbles, and it's tough to see the insides of them!

By including these, she demonstrated her point with a genuine, meta example of how even someone writing about these can be unwittingly part of them.
by sudonanohome | 2025-11-28 19:14:38+00:00
Mercedes or BMW don't sell "tough trucks" lol.

They sell luxury goods, which people know to avoid when they care about reliability

The thing is, jeeps are even beating the BMWs when it comes to unreliability.

Yes Mercedes built that garbage for the US market because US market eats that crap. Then stellantis took it a step up and removed reliability from their vocabulary entirely - more profitable that way. I'd pick a modern VW over American garbage all day any day.

But sure, keep yourself convinced about exceptionalism of American SUVs.
by minimaxir | 2025-11-28 19:14:51+00:00
Don't use all-MiniLM-L6-v2 for new vector embeddings datasets.

Yes, it's the open-weights embedding model used in all the tutorials and it was the most pragmatic model to use in sentence-transformers when vector stores were in their infancy, but it's old and does not implement the newest advances in architectures and data training pipelines, and it has a low context length of 512 when embedding models can do 2k+ with even more efficient tokenizers.

For open-weights, I would recommend EmbeddingGemma (https://huggingface.co/google/embeddinggemma-300m) instead which has incredible benchmarks and a 2k context window: although it's larger/slower to encode, the payoff is worth it. For a compromise, bge-base-en-v1.5 (https://huggingface.co/BAAI/bge-base-en-v1.5) or nomic-embed-text-v1.5 (https://huggingface.co/nomic-ai/nomic-embed-text-v1.5) are also good.
by ErroneousBosh | 2025-11-28 19:14:56+00:00
> I'm not saying I've had zero positive experiences but the number of negative experiences is so high that it's just super scary.

Just for shits and giggles I decided to let Copilot (whatever the default in vscode is) write a Makefile for a simple avr-gcc project. I can't remember what the prompt I gave it was, but it was something along the lines of "given this makefile that is old but works, write a new makefile for this project that doesn't have one" and a link to a simple gist I wrote years ago.

Fuuuuuuuuck me.

It's 2500 lines long. It's not just bigger than the codebase it's supposed to build, it's just about bigger than all the C files in all the avr-gcc projects in that entire chunk of my ~/devel/ directory. I couldn't even begin to make sense of what it's trying to do.

It looks mostly like it's declaring variables over and over, concatenating more bits on as it goes. I don't know for sure though.

I won't be using it.
by chrismorgan | 2025-11-28 19:15:05+00:00
Again: compare early 2024. And that’s not the only thing; the second chart shows a possible flattening, but by no means certain yet, especially not when taken with the clear March–April jump; and the first chart shows no dwindling in 1–4, and clear recovery in 250+. The lie is easily put to the claim the article makes:

> Data from the Census Bureau and Ramp shows that AI adoption rates are starting to flatten out across all firm sizes, see charts below.

It’s flat-out nonsense, and anyone with any experience in this kind of statistics can see it.
by noobermin | 2025-11-28 19:15:05+00:00
So, I hate to be the guy, but Wagner does specifically try to divorce MeToo from this, but it does seem a rather direct line from MeToo to the thing she complains of, no? Just because MeToo may have been with pure and correct intentions, people often take away different things from social movements.

Puritanism has long been embedded in American society. I live in Singapore now, and people abroad seem to think that sexual openness is sort of an American thing compared to both the trad chinese as well as muslim malay cultures here. But, the reality that I think even a lot of Americans don't realise is that hollywood and openness around sex is fundamentally a reaction to american puritanism which was always a foundation part of America's DNA. Hell, the 60's counterculture was specifically a reaction against WASP conservatism which has roots in puritanism. My opinion honestly is once you understand that fact, a lot of things about American culture make a lot more sense. For example, while MeToo arose to address real harms and exploitation, a lot of Americans reached for the tools they knew best from their puritan roots: a new set of morals to measure others against by and public shaming. Ever escalating morality precepts to follow (lack of consent in actual sex somehow being a precursor to the episode in the article, some fleeting and private sexual stimuli being seen as a violation). This sort of pattern that grasps onto the old puritan culture seems to feed a lot of how American cultural trends evolve. See anti-racism as another example: open bigotry is the precursor to only certain races can cook certain foods, and so on.

My point is Americans unfortunately did not learn the underlying lesson about consent that Wagner perhaps wanted out of MeToo, but they did find a new set of puritan morals and a new culture of shaming to enact on others for social capital. I feel like once you sort of believe this idea of the puritanism germ, a lot of what happens to these movements for real change make a lot of sense. It also explains why a lot of movements or reactions against puritanism might change their target (not god or religion) but reproduce the methods and culture of puritanism.

And saying all this, I'm not sure it was avoidable. I am also NOT saying this is MeToo's fault or that MeToo shouldn't have happened, of course not. But, MeToo was the initiation for this. What Wagner describes is clearly an intensification and a fundamentalist form of the consent discourse that underpinned the discussions back in 2015 or whatever. I don't really like the unwillingness to engage with that fact.
by anonym29 | 2025-11-28 19:15:06+00:00
Firebase, GMS (Google Mobile Services). The Alphabet Corporation is part of many security and privacy conscious users' threat model, and these users aren't generally thrilled about leaking even limited message metadata like timing to their adversary, particularly when that adversary is known to cooperate with global passive adversaries.

There are actually two builds of Molly: Molly and Molly-FOSS. IIRC Molly uses regular Firebase, which can be faster and more reliable but comes with the above tradeoffs, while Molly-FOSS uses UnifiedPush.

Your point about exercising caution with forks of encrypted messaging apps is a great rule of thumb, and in general, social proof should NOT substitute for competent software security specialists reading and evaluating source code, but given you seem to trust GrapheneOS, it's worth noting that they've formally endorsed Molly: https://xcancel.com/GrapheneOS/status/1769277147569443309
by throw10920 | 2025-11-28 19:15:15+00:00
This is dishonest and incorrect. Discussing rulebreaking is not against the guidelines, which is clear to anyone who reads them (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). Accusations of those specific offenses (astroturfing, shilling, brigading) are against the rules, for reasons that are obvious to anyone who thinks about them for a few minutes.
by dathinab | 2025-11-28 19:15:56+00:00
One thing to add is that there is no guarantee this is even against the German constitution.

Local devices only scanning which only if there is an issue sends any information to anywhere outside of the device might actually be compatible with the German constitution by the argument that the privacy is only violated if the local validator phones home and that it only does so if there is a reasonable suspicion at which case it isn't baseless mass surveillance anymore... on a technicality iff the local scanner have close to now false positives. It's anyway a bad idea and a lot of the things it claims it's meant to help with have a lot of neglected other solutions which would improve things a lot.
by chc4 | 2025-11-28 19:17:03+00:00
Signal is an end-to-end encrypted messaging app. People continue to breathlessly mentioning the lack of database encryption as a problem, but that never made it a real security issue: its job is not, and has never been, dissuading an attacker who has local access to one of the ends, especially because that is an incoherent security boundary (just like the people who were very upset about Signal using the system keyboard which is potentially backdoored - if your phone is compromised, of course someone will be be able to read your Signal messages).
by aDyslecticCrow | 2025-11-28 19:17:04+00:00
Nobody cares? Here (sweden) its illegal to possess outside of military use. The US seems to give fines between 20-200 thousand $ for its usage and potential imprisonment for its sale. Even overboosting wifi routers for better range gets people in trouble.

It's among the most illegal things you could easily do with basic electronics equipment.

why? Part of it is historical; it used to be complicated, so being in possession of one got you in trouble with the anti terrorism squad.

These days; it's because it can block emergency services, police and military radio, and burglary alarms.

They may be lenient for a nerd playing with a router but the law its not on your side when push comes to shove.

https://legalclarity.org/are-signal-jammers-illegal-in-the-u...
by Neywiny | 2025-11-28 19:17:26+00:00
I'm sure it depends on who's teaching the class and what curriculum they follow, but we were doing piecewise linear functions well before differentiation so I think I do actually disagree as per your caveat. It's also possible that the courses triaged different material. As a calc for engineers not calc for math majors taker, my experience may have been heavier on deltas and steps.
by oliwarner | 2025-11-28 19:17:49+00:00
This is quite easy with OpenWRT.

Install the Wireguard packages, create a connection to your VPN of choice in a nearby country (I chose Sweden). Then I used the "vpn-policy-routing" package to route Imgur IPs (199.232.196.193 199.232.192.193) through the VPN.

Works for websites that keep nagging you for age verification too.

But seriously, it's been more emotional than I'd expected to get my cat memes back.
by disgruntledphd2 | 2025-11-28 19:17:54+00:00
> This assumes that the GDP growth and the material prosperity are in a simple linear relation. I don't think this makes sense.

Yeah, I felt that this was the weakest point of the argument presented.

I do like calling out the absurdity of "wealth" in various assets though, as well as the notion that we need to map this "wealth" back ultimately to energy (which makes sense, as we need energy for basically everything).
by LogicFailsMe | 2025-11-28 19:18:20+00:00
TLDR: Concern trolls are some of the worst people on Earth.

Or should I find my 9th grade algebra teacher (wherever she may be now), and on whom I had a raging crush deep in the throes of puberty, in order to apologize for all the boners I got in her class? I got an A in that class and all math classes I took going forward. But at what price?

How DARE I pleasantly associate mathematics with that long ago raging crush sometimes?
by lisbbb | 2025-11-28 19:18:31+00:00
I get what you are saying. How much experience do you have with financial bubbles? I was working when the dot-com bubble burst. I also have firsthand experience with the real estate/bond market implosion. This current one has all the same signs. There is no way to charge enough to balance out the massive infrastructure investment going on.

Those models you speak of are great now, but they will degrade over time and become useless unless they get updated, right?

I look at the early days of the Internet when sites like Google and Youtube were unprofitable and looked like a great deal for us lowly users. That did not last.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-11-28 19:18:51+00:00
I don't really understand the question. The harm is that many of us would prefer not to face algorithmic price discrimination.

I agree that many kinds of abusive price discrimination are possible without AI, and that it's hard to distinguish them from noncontroversial practices like coupons. But why does that mean we can't or shouldn't regulate the AI-enabled version?
by disgruntledphd2 | 2025-11-28 19:19:26+00:00
Yup. A substantial proportion of the difference in GDP between the EU and the US relates to how health care values are assigned. In the EU (for public healthcare), it's at cost while in the US it's the final transaction price. It would be interesting to deflate US GDP against the same metric used in the EU to get more accurate figures, but I've never seen such an analysis.
by saubeidl | 2025-11-28 19:19:29+00:00
It might not be ideal and wildly swing the pendulum every couple of years, but looking at American centralization from our end, it still seems more functional somehow. At least you guys can get something done.

Imagine if every state governor in the US had veto power over federal legislation. Imagine trying to get anything done that would require buy-in from both California and Alabama. That's the situation we find ourselves in.
by akerl_ | 2025-11-28 19:19:33+00:00
The evidence there seems to make my point? Those people aren’t being warned for the content of their opinions, they’re being warned not to engage in flamewars or insults or other forms of incivility.

My claim isn’t “nobody gets banned from HN”, it’s “nobody gets banned from HN for having unpopular opinions”.

The parallel comment has very nearly invoked Godwin’s law, so I guess I’ll concede that if your opinion is “a group of people should be killed”, then yea, expressing that opinion would likely end in a ban. We can debate how much of that ban is for the opinion vs calling for the murder of other humans.
by mips_avatar | 2025-11-28 19:19:46+00:00
Depends on how important keyword matching vs something more ambiguous is to your app. In Wanderfugl there’s a bunch of queries where semantic search can find an important chunk that lacks a high bm25 score. The good news is you can get all the benefits of bm25 and semantic with a hybrid ranking. The answer isn’t one or the other.
by Etheryte | 2025-11-28 19:19:46+00:00
The problems this article outlines are very real, but the explanation for the underlying mechanics doesn't really pass any kind of a sniff test for me. The central thesis is that real economic growth is stagnating because the overhead for producing energy grows with time. But this is not the case! Fossil fuels will run out eventually, yes, but nearly every other type of energy production does not suffer from this, and is in fact getting better over time. Solar panels of today are miles ahead of those of yesterday. Similarly we're building out more and more wind and thermal energy. Nuclear is also fine, if we don't account for the regulatory difficulty in actually getting new plants up and running.
by sudonanohome | 2025-11-28 19:20:02+00:00
100% manuals are the way to go if you want to feel like a driver, not a passenger. I love my manual Jetta Thing is, people are lazy. US market is automatics only. Can't make people understand what the clutch is or why slushbox is bad for fuel efficiency. No one cares. Gas guzzlers are the national idea My kid learned to drive a manual in 15 minutes. Too much effort for US drivers!
by grishka | 2025-11-28 19:20:08+00:00
> What "proprietary blobs" does Signal have?

As they say in the Github readme, FCM and Google Maps.

FCM doesn't technically require a blob — it's just that Google wants you to think it does. I reverse engineered their library and it turned out to be a criminally over-engineered wrapper around two broadcast receivers. So, the Mastodon app is proudly the first app ever to both support FCM push notifications, and be 100% open-source.
by jeroenhd | 2025-11-28 19:20:33+00:00
The reference server is an Android app so yes, that is probably the point of the default design, but reading the README I believe you can also use a more traditional server-to-server setup:

DeltaChat/ArcaneChat Integration DeltaChat and ArcaneChat are perfect companions for Tyr. These are messengers that use email protocols but provide modern chat interfaces. When you configure DeltaChat/ArcaneChat to use Tyr's local server: 1. DeltaChat/ArcaneChat sends messages via SMTP to Tyr 2. Tyr wraps them in Yggmail protocol and sends through Yggdrasil 3. The recipient's Tyr receives the message via Yggdrasil 4. Their DeltaChat/ArcaneChat fetches it via IMAP from their local Tyr 5. All this happens peer-to-peer, with no central servers

If you run Tyr on a VPS/RPi/old smartphone, you can still exchange messages decentralised this way, as long as your server and the device/server you're communicating to are both online, and have DeltaChat/ArcaneChat fetch the messages later.

Such a setup could be useful if you find people around you using Tyr and you're losing messages because your phone kills the app, though a PoC like this probably won't have much of a network effect.
by dfabulich | 2025-11-28 19:22:14+00:00
"Yet you don’t need SEEDS analysis to know that the British economy itself is at an advanced stage of disintegration."

"Put another way, very little of the world’s supposedly enormous wealth actually exists in any meaningful sense."

Citation overwhelmingly needed. His claim that the economy is disintegrating is supported by the argument that: "you know, just look around." But what we're looking around and seeing is wealth accumulating at the very top.

The mistake he's making is thinking that if most people aren't doing well, then nobody is doing well, that the 1% aren't even really rich because their wealth is all a fiction.

In fact, wealthy people are really, actually wealthy. They are unimaginably wealthy. It is literally beyond the author's imagination how wealthy they are, leading him to the truly absurd conclusion that they're not really even wealthy at all.

"Nobody could be that wealthy, could they?!" Yes, my dude. Yes, they actually can be that wealthy. Indeed, they actually are.
by epistasis | 2025-11-28 19:22:17+00:00
They make Amazon Q, but they don't make a general purpose LLM, which is precisely why I fid them more trustworthy. They run others' LLMs [1] , but don't have an interest in using customer data to improve the next generation of their LLM, or move into adjacent businesses to commercialize LLMs. At least not yet.

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/bedrock/model-choice/