MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by FloorEgg | 2025-11-05 08:06:13+00:00
"Minimize surprise" and "maximize accurate predictions" are the same thing mathematically. Minimize free energy = minimize prediction error.

LLMs do everything modelled in the free energy principle, they just don't do continuous learning. (They don't do perceptual inference after RL)

Your tone ("free energy thing" and "if you squint") comes off as dismissive and not intellectually honest. Here I thought you were actually curious, but I guess not?
by noir_lord | 2025-11-05 08:06:22+00:00
That has in part become the issue in modern politics, any compromise no matter how minor is seen as a loss.

Neither sides most ardent supporters was willing to accept anything that looked like a compromise and so you end up with things as they are now, with someone where compromise shouldn’t happen because there is no practical compromise.

US politics has collapsed down to the scorpion and the frog.
by imiric | 2025-11-05 08:06:37+00:00
Heh, my sympathies.

Have you tried mise[1]? The last thing you probably want is to add another abstraction on top of this mess, but I've had good experiences with it, and it manages Rust, Go, Python, etc. environments very well.

IME getting any modern toolchain setup on different distros can be problematic, especially if you mix in the often outdated distro packages. So using isolated environments with a tool specifically built for that works better.

[1]: https://mise.jdx.dev/
by astrange | 2025-11-05 08:07:15+00:00
It's almost impossible for the standard of living to not be higher than ever. That becomes true if you assign any value at all to new medical discoveries. Like, people have been cured of type 1 diabetes in the last year.

I don't think a guy at a bus stop represents the median household well. I'd rather have https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/cps.html.
Show HN: Un-LOCC Reduce LLM API costs by compressing text into images
by MaxDevv | 2025-11-05 08:07:24+00:00
I built a Python wrapper for the OpenAI SDK that compresses text into images before sending to vision models. Basically for large contexts, images can be more token-efficient than raw text.

The approach builds on DeepSeek's OCR compression research. Through 90+ experiments using an "Optical Needle in a Haystack" evaluation framework, I systematically optimized compression parameters across fonts, sizes, and resolutions.

The wrapper is a drop-in replacement for the OpenAI client - just add "compressed": True to messages containing bulk content. I recommend keeping instructions as plain text and only compressing documents, chat history, or codebases.

Links: Wrapper library: https://github.com/MaxDevv/Un-LOCC-Wrapper, Research & benchmarks: https://github.com/MaxDevv/Un-LOCC
by rafaelmn | 2025-11-05 08:08:06+00:00
> I think this is somewhat disingenuous since not everyone uses the latest thing, and people tend to stick to “what works” for them.

They say that the number of users on Claude 4.5 spiked and then a significant number of users reverted to 4.0 with the trend going up, and they are talking about their usage metrics. So I don't get how your comment is relevant to the article ?
by johnnyanmac | 2025-11-05 08:08:07+00:00
I'm so tired of "this plan wasn't perfect, it failed. Democrats suck".

And meanwhile the republican plan was to do nothing or actively make things worse than ignoring the problem. Why are some people seemingly hardwired to just blame democrats for any or everything? Because the plans they have don't immediately benefit them, the middle class person who was never down on their luck?

Even then, I fail to think of any policy that legitmately benefits the middle class either. Did abortion bans improve your quality of life? Do immigration raids help your 401k? Did that cut to EV credits get you better public transit?
by mrweasel | 2025-11-05 08:08:27+00:00
While I love a good cloud bashing, it's really not black and white. If you're really small, it probably doesn't matter much if you're using Hetzner or AWS, but co-location might be a bit to expensive. If you run an absolutely massive company, cloud vs. self-hosted comes down to whether or not you can build tooling as good as AWS, GCP or Azure, with all the billing infrastructure and reporting.

The issues are mostly in the SME segment and where it really depends on what your business is. Do you need completely separate system for each customer? In that case, AWS is going to be easier and probably cheaper. Are you running a constant low 24/7? Then you should consider buying your own servers.

It's really hard to apply a blanket conclusion to all industries, in regards to cloud cost and whether or not it's worth it. My criticism in regards to opting for cloud is that people want all the benefits of the cloud, but not use any of the features, because that would lock them into e.g. AWS. If you're using AWS as a virtual machine platform only, there's always going to be cheaper (and maybe better) options.
by throwaway665667 | 2025-11-05 08:09:49+00:00
> We didn't "intervene" until the germans declare war on us.

Yes, that was mistake and the lesson that should be learned.

> The genocidal civilization was Spain, not the aztecs.

This is complete revisionism, Spain laid war on the Aztecs supported even by other indians, it wasn't a voluntary biological warfare. The Aztecs killed tens of thousands of people per year.

> Who is we? Who destroyed half of europe to stop germany?

The allies. Are Allied bombings considered a contentious subject now?

> Did we wipe out the germans? Did we wipe out the german language, culture, history, etc?

Spaniards did not "wipe out" indian people, the Aztec civilization went the way of every conquered civilization. Did Arabs wipe out Egyptian language, culture, history, etc or did it dwindle in importance over the centuries as a new civilization took over the other?
by Animats | 2025-11-05 08:10:19+00:00
Don't most people in the US get fingerprinted at some point?

Let's see. I've been fingerprinted, all 10 fingers, for, at least, 1) the US Army, 2) security clearance for a DoD job, multiple times, 3) a permit to ride a horse on SF Water Department property, and 4) Customs and Border Protection Global Entry, which also took an iris scan.

California DMV takes a thumbprint, but not all 10 fingers. They've been recording me at every transaction for decades.

So I'm on file.

I think of being IDd as a normal part of life, for any position of trust. Is this unusual?
by TacticalCoder | 2025-11-05 08:10:31+00:00
Back when I was working in the book publishing industry (writing and typesetting computer books using Quark XPress [1] on the old MacOS [version 7, 8 and 9 IIRC], before Adobe's InDesign [2] ruled the earth), TIFF was all the rage. Probably still is.

I think the reason TIFF was so prevalent was it already had support for CMYK color space (even though many books were printed in black and white) and for lossless compression (as TFA mentions).

It was a "one size fits all" format and so our 100 or 250 MB (!) Zip drives [3] exchanged between authors/publisher/typesetters often contained TIFF files.

> For as long as I have published my books, one of my overarching goals was to give credit to those who actually invented the hardware and software that we use.

So thank you Mr. Stephen "TIFF" Carlsen!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuarkXPress

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_InDesign

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_drive
by t_mann | 2025-11-05 08:10:58+00:00
In principle, you don't even need a "server", ie purpose-built hardware like what he's showing. An old laptop will be fine for many projects, although I'd be interested if someone can help put a perspective on how to decide whether your specific project/load will be too much for your specific hardware. My bigger concern with 'true' self-hosting would be how to get a good/reliable enough internet connection.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-11-05 08:11:02+00:00
> Times are changing. The pendulum swing back from MAGA is going to be interesting

The pendelum swings in multiple dimensions. MAGA went mainstream in a way the Tea Party and conservativism did not by abandoning policy purity in favour of, first, messaging, and later, idolatry.

The preserved component between MAGA's messaging and Mamdani's rise is populism and, to a lesser degree, divisive politics. Where MAGA failed and Mamdani may deliver is in pragmatism (and not being corrupt).

There is an opportunity to unify "abundance" policies with inclusive progressivism or villanisation of wealth. (I'm not convinced you can do both. If you want to pursue growth and cost of living, you need to turn the capital spigots. Accumulated capital facilitates that. If you want to tackle inequality and billionaires, you'll need to temporarily destabilise those capital structures. You'll also, presumably, be increasing the lower and middle classes' purchasing power, which limits how much public spending you can do without spiking inflation.)

San Francisco progressives can influence national politics. But anyone insisting on copy-paste purism is a godsend to MAGA.
by dscthrowaway | 2025-11-05 08:11:05+00:00
Location: Germany, Rhine-Main Metropolitan Region Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: No Technologies: Typescript, React, Astro, SQL (esp. PostgreSQL), Docker, Gitlab CI/CD, HTML, CSS, Node.js, Nest.js, REST Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dennis-sch%C3%BC%C3%9Fler-7943ab237/ Email: hn@miscds.33mail.com

Hi HN. I am a dedicated Fullstack-Developer with a knack for thoroughness. I’ve built and maintained CRUD applications for various companies and customers over the last 6 years. I can work with and help out with agile procedures. Particular strengths of mine are requirement analysis, database schema design and frontend development. I thrive in teams that are eager to improve, seek consensus, and value discussions, technical or otherwise. I am a bad fit for teams that seek to avoid conversations.

I am looking exclusively for jobs where 20-24 hours is a possibility. If that sounds right for you, send me a mail. I am happy to hear from you!
by anilakar | 2025-11-05 08:11:57+00:00
DNA too. Until 2018 it was used here as waterproof evidence until the police managed to lock up an innocent person based on DNA and blurry surveillance camera photos only. He was only exonerated because the real perpetrator was caught by chance and confessed a week later.

The transmission chain that was later identified on CCTV was hand to escalator rail to hand, a 2+ km walk, and finally hand to latex glove.
by retrac98 | 2025-11-05 08:12:43+00:00
An aside - this monitor is proving surprisingly difficult to buy in the UK. Everywhere I look it seems to be unavailable or out of stock, and I’ve been checking regularly.

Relatedly, I also don’t understand why a half-trillion dollar company makes it so hard to give them my money. There’s no option to order ASUS directly on the UK site. I’m forced to check lots of smaller resellers or Amazon.
by spooky_deep | 2025-11-05 08:12:46+00:00
Property based testing is fantastic.

Why is it not more popular?

My theory is that only code written in functional languages has complex properties you can actually test.

In imperative programs, you might have a few utils that are appropriate for property testing - things like to_title_case(str) - but the bulk of program logic can only be tested imperatively with extensive mocking.
by gnuplustoejam | 2025-11-05 08:13:57+00:00
Sounds like something Nest engineers would have said.

It's not "signal switching", you see.

HVAC equipment is as old and varied as you can imagine, and there is higher current than you think running through those terminals, powering all sorts of nasties, oil burner relays, damper motors, crude AC contactors causing voltage spikes etc. HVAC low voltage power is as dirty as can be.

No one took this into account, they were more concerned with making the thermostat pretty.
by pfix | 2025-11-05 08:14:24+00:00
I've had a lot of servers going down. I've had data centers going down. For various reasons - but normally not a failed disk but configuration errors due to human error.

And I've had enough cases where the company relied on just that one guy who knew how things worked - and when they retired or left, you had big work ahead understanding the systems that guy maintained and never let anyone else touch. Yes, this might also be a leadership issue - but it's also an issue if you have no one else with that specific knowledge. So I prefer standardized, prepackaged, off the shelf solutions that I can hire replacable people for.
by purrcat259 | 2025-11-05 08:14:52+00:00
Its definitely mostly entrenched interests that are the issue.

Funny you mention mercury tower. Thats a rich person's idea of what good housing is... which is way over the price any middle or even upper class person can afford. It isn't affordable housing, it's a parking lot for excess liquidity.

For what its worth it's the raising of property height limits that helped kick off a lot of the construction boom. One could argue the situation was better when the restrictions were bigger.
by masklinn | 2025-11-05 08:15:33+00:00
> As noted a paragraph later, the Java compiler is able to detect and “fix” this, by rewriting the code to use a mutable string.

Does it actually do that nowadays? Back in my days it was incapable of lifting the builder out of loops, so for each iteration it would instantiate a builder with the accumulator string, append the concatenation, then stringify and reset the accumulator.

The linked docs don’t say anything about loops.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-11-05 08:15:37+00:00
That's the point of insurance. It's the idea that everyone pools together money and when something bad happens to one person, its finances are mitigated by the input of others. Some will benefit more and others benefit not at all. But no one can predict who is on what end.

Yes, if everyone gets cancer at the same time then Health Care is boned. But then again, so is society. So why worry about that worst case scenario?

>Note that GP only mentioned things we have control over -- exercise, weight, not smoking.

We couldn't pass laws to help control what companies put in food, and failed to subsidize healthier food options. I wish you the best of luck with healthcare trying to pull off that endeavor with punishments for obesity. I'm guessing it wouldn't be poolitically popular.
by unwind | 2025-11-05 08:15:57+00:00
For people not used to reading MC8k assembly [1], it's helpful to point out the basic fact that the syntax is in general

opcode source, destination

which is the other way around from most contemporary ISA:s. So a line like

move.l d0, -(a7)

will first decrement the value of register a7, then write the contents of register d0 to the resulting address (it's a "push" for a downwards-growing stack).

Edit: added Wiki-linkage.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_68000#Instruction_set...
by astrange | 2025-11-05 08:16:08+00:00
> the exact same as the harms

It actually appears that the alternative harms aren't as bad; that is, recessions aren't caused by prior expansions and we don't get one by "deserving" them.

https://eml.berkeley.edu/~enakamura/papers/plucking.pdf

Hyperinflation is of course still not good, and it's hard to avoid a recession caused by a natural disaster or something.
by WillPostForFood | 2025-11-05 08:16:14+00:00
Good point! But HEART was just a tactical response to the Clinton plan. Never a part of the party platform, not something candidates ran on, and it disappeared as support for the Clinton plan died. When Republicans won the presidency back in 2000, and held the house, and briefly the Senate, they didn't make any attempt to bring back HEART. It was never the Republican plan for health care. It is also somewhat of a mischaracterization to call it a mandate for health insurance, it was much more narrowly focused covering catastrophic events.

Some side notes. It was introduced by Lincoln Chafee, who then switched to the democratic party. Heritage itself disowned it. The author later wrote, "I headed Heritage's health work for 30 years, and make no mistake: Heritage and I actively oppose the individual mandate, including in an amicus brief filed in the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals to the Supreme Court." There was also never any intent to have a punitive mandate, just a tax credit would be lost if for people who didn't buy insurance - more carrot than stick.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-11-05 08:17:21+00:00
> Politics in america is like entering an inverted world in which some weird internal drive actively makes people vote against their own personal interests.

Nobody willingly does this. If you think they are, that should be a strong sign to you that those people and you disagree about what their best interests are, and you should seriously consider the possibility that they are right and you are wrong. You might not be wrong, but jumping to "they are voting against their own interests because they are dumb" as many do is both unhelpful and untrue.
by bayindirh | 2025-11-05 08:17:32+00:00
Makes sense.

I sometimes connect the same 24" monitor (an ASUS VZ249Q) to my M1 MacBook via USB to DP (so no intermediate electronics), and the display quality feels inferior to KDE, for example.

Same monitor allows for unlimited working for hours without eye fatigue when driven from my Linux machine. I have written countless lines of code and LaTeX documents on that panel. It rivals the comfort of my HP EliteDisplay.
by rockwotj | 2025-11-05 08:18:16+00:00
> Direct I/O means no more fsync: no more complexity via background flushes and optimal scheduling of syncs. There's no kernel overhead from copying and coalescing. It essentially provides the performance, control, and simplicity of issuing raw 1:1 I/O requests.

Not true, you still need fsync in direct I/O to ensure durability in power loss situations. Some drives have write caches that means acknowledged writes live in non-volatile memory. So maybe the perf is wildly better because you’re sacrificing durability?
by intsunny | 2025-11-05 08:18:25+00:00
They're excited about putting the spec behind a notoriously closed paywall??

Us older nerds will remember how Microsoft corrupted the entire ISO standardization process to ram down the Office Open XML (.docx/.xlsx/etc) unto the world.

The original Office ISO standard was 6000+ pages and basically declared unreproducible outside of Microsoft themselves.

There is an entire Wikipedia article dedicated to the kafkaesque byzantine nightmare that was that standardization. [0]

ISO def lacks luster, and maybe even relevance.

[O] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open...
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-11-05 08:18:58+00:00
> tough shit for the landlords. That's a cost of doing business

If Mamdani does this, not only is he fucked, but he might take down the national progressive movement with himself.

"Tough shit" is a good Twitter reaction. It's terrible policy. Berlin did that, and it backfired in the most predictable way possible.

New York needs more housing. New York City's public finances simply do not permit a massive public housing construction binge, and Albany can't fund a socialist mayor's public works with upstate tax dollars. That means that housing must be privately developed. New York City, just today, transferred power away from City Council and to Gracie Mansion to help facilitate new housing. That means the impediment is local opposition. The literature shows that opposition gets dampened when folks aren't afraid of gentrification; rent freezes do that.

If Mamdani takes the easy route and "tought shits" the landlords, his housing policy grinds to a halt. Market rents, covering 75% of New York apartments, will spike. The experiment will be over. He doesn't strike me as an idiot, which is why I don't suspect he'll do this.
by yread | 2025-11-05 08:19:39+00:00
But most of these variations were part of the spec (endianness with II or MM, later magic 43 for bigTIFF 64bit extension). I work with tiff and tiff-derived formats in digital microscopy where its very much not historical. And the alternatives (DICOM supp 145, vendor-specific garbage ... and thats it) are worse.

I quite like the format, the only thing I would change is to have the option not to store directory information in a linked list spread throughout the file but in a simple array. Duplicate it at the beginning and end of the file and you've got resilience too (important in the age of floppies)
by anon291 | 2025-11-05 08:19:59+00:00
I've filed my own taxes for years and have a complicated set up; real estate, stocks, rsus, espps, private shares, amt, etc ... It's extremely straightforward and takes less time than using turbotax if you've done it before. The instructions are obvious.

You can also call the IRS and be told for free what the rules are. People pay h&r block and Intuit when the irs is extremely responsive and will connect you with an actual American irs rep to answer your questions.

People pay for the software because they've been marketed to not because they need it. For the situations that are actually hard, then a software like TurboTax is useless.

Also if you get the numbers wrong the IRS just corrects it
by hebelehubele | 2025-11-05 08:20:15+00:00
> high megapixel sensors, pre-capture, and cameras capable of pushing between 30fps and 120fps worth of compressed raws or high quality JPEGs

Surely those are buffered in the RAM first, then flushed to the card. When the buffer is full, cameras either stop recording or have to flush continuously, which reduces the burst rate.
by rsva | 2025-11-05 08:20:20+00:00
A lot of operational data and decision models are based on relational data models. From a standpoint of analytics and decision making, a graph data model exposes many tools that can be leveraged for this. For example, you can deal with the violation of the Independent, Identically Distributed assumption that many of us (knowingly or unknowingly) use with ML models. The relation to graph tool is a way to transform relational data into frequently encountered models for graph based analysis.
by drivebyhooting | 2025-11-05 08:20:23+00:00
> And so far in the US, training and using an LLM has been ruled by the courts to be fair use so long as the materials used in the training were obtained legally.

Just like OpenAI is rightfully upset if their LLM output is used to train a competitor’s model and might seek to restrict it contractually, publishers too may soon have EULAs just for reading their books.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-11-05 08:21:05+00:00
> Others whose housing situation is marginal, or who are homeless, might find it much preferable to the alternative

I lived in an illegally-sublet room with no window when I first moved to New York. I worked on Wall Street, and could afford something better. But I preferred to save money versus having a window I would look out of given my work (on the weekdays) and party (on the weekends) schedule.

Communal bathrooms are fine. Communal kitchens are fine; I know plenty of New Yorkers who might occasionally use their hot plate. (This changed post Covid, for what it's worth.)
by fork-bomber | 2025-11-05 08:21:34+00:00
A large motivation for this move is likely to ensure that attempts by some incumbent ISAs to lobby the US government to curb the uptake of RISC-V are stymied.

There appears to be an undercurrent of this sort underway where the soaring popularity of RISC-V in markets such as China is politically ripe for some incumbent ISAs to turn US government opinion against RISC-V, from a general uptake PoV or from the PoV of introducing laborious procedural delays in the uptake.

Turning the ISA into an ISO standard helps curb such attempts.

Ethernet, although not directly relevant, is a similar example. You can't lobby the US government to outright ban or generally slow the adoption of Ethernet because it's so much of a universal phenomenon by virtue of it being a standard.