MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by meindnoch | 2025-12-18 13:57:01+00:00
I don't really buy the premise of this article, and honestly I'm not sure I want to. Even if the evidence ends up showing that most statues weren't actually that brightly colored, it seems like we should still favor the garish reconstructions anyway. The vivid, borderline-ugly versions tell a better story and a more useful one, societally. They force us to confront how contingent our tastes are, and how the austere white-marble ideal was elevated by centuries of patriarchal, gatekept taste-making that declared one narrow aesthetic "timeless" and everything else vulgar.

The idea that we should walk this back because the colors might have been subtler feels like missing the point. The educational value isn't in perfect historical accuracy down to the pigment saturation curve, it's in breaking the spell of the solid-white classical canon. The garish reconstructions do that effectively; tasteful, muted ones just slide back into the same old norms. If we end up concluding "actually, ancient art was basically compatible with modern elite taste" that's not just boring, it's actively harmful to diversity of ideas about beauty.

So yes, even if the evidence points the other way, I'd argue we should lean into the loud, uncomfortable versions. Sometimes a less "accurate" narrative is the more important corrective, especially when the alternative reinforces centuries of aesthetic dogma we should really be questioning.
by Mikhail_Edoshin | 2025-12-18 13:57:02+00:00
I meant something like a standard component that everybody uses (or a selection of components that vary here and there but are interchangeable in general). A catalog of such components; a - well, I'll say it - a software factory that builds them, a fast one, a slower but very detailed on errors, one that accepts single bytes, one that takes a pointer to a string, and so on, all different, yet all working in the same way as far as the main task is concerned.
by theelous3 | 2025-12-18 13:57:05+00:00
> countries like Venezuela and certain regions in Africa

So approximately none of the world's money and only in the most desperate situations.

I'm all in favor of some kind of vehicle like this, a currency supplemental system that is decentralized and safe. What I don't give a shit about and what is obviously useless are the "usecases" people keep coming up with beyond currency. The absolute #1 best usecase is ticket NFTs - proving you did something on the network to the outside world. As soon as you need to prove to the network something you did on the outside world - 99.99% of the ideas people have - you are back to uselessland.
Show HN: DIY E-Ink Home Dashboard Without Headless Chrome (Python/Pillow)
by tjoskar | 2025-12-18 13:57:23+00:00
Hi HN,

I wanted a dashboard for my home that didn't glow in the dark or look like a computer screen. I built this using a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W and a Waveshare 7.5" E-Ink display.

Instead of the common approach of running a headless browser and taking screenshots (which is slow and resource-heavy), I render the image directly using Python and Pillow (PIL). This brings the refresh time down significantly and runs smoothly on the Pi Zero.

I wrote a blog post about the build process, the hardware I used, and the code structure.

I also ended up writing a short book/guide for those who want a complete step-by-step walkthrough to build the exact same setup, which is linked in the post.

Happy to answer any questions you might have to build your own display!
by adrian_b | 2025-12-18 13:57:24+00:00
I completely agree.

I have been using for many decades both Linux and FreeBSD, on many kinds of computers.

When comparing Linux with FreeBSD, I probably do not find anything more annoying on Linux than its networking configuration tools.

While I am using Linux on my laptops and desktops and on some servers with computational purposes, on the servers that host networking services I much prefer FreeBSD, for the ease of administration.
by andy_ppp | 2025-12-18 13:57:47+00:00
This is about the astonishing lack of ability in the political class in the UK. The security services are honestly wagging the dog and they think they can force some kind of key escrow eventually, but instead they’ll just destroy software development in the UK and possibly financial services.

It’s the same with the multi billion ID cards and digital ID which is almost impossible for a government as incompetent as this one to implement.
by gitremote | 2025-12-18 13:58:19+00:00
The decline of the US government is the faster than "Europe", because it's been declining rapidly in a few months. The US government currently has a monthly quota for ICE arrests. ICE agents racially profile people and ignore non-white people telling them they are US citizens because they assume they are lying. Non-white US citizens need to have papers on them that prove their status (US citizen), or else might be disappeared. The US government now bans immigrants from a list of dark skin countries but fast-tracks White South Africans for immigration. It politically persecutes their political opponents and ignores the rule of law. It is preparing for war with Venezuela, which would conveniently tie up US resources as Russia positions itself for entering Europe.

The UK is rapidly declining as a close second, but calling it "European" (especially when UK citizens see themselves as non-European) is just a lazy generalization.
by KptMarchewa | 2025-12-18 13:58:21+00:00
I very much agree. Doesn't need to be taken to extreme though.

BTW, for me this is the best use for AI: it's so much lower effort to type some sentences for AI to create a rough plan for me to engage with, and improve iteratively, then start implementing it, than doing this myself from scratch. Essentially anti-procrastination breaker.
by SketchySeaBeast | 2025-12-18 13:58:37+00:00
I've been using Claude sonnet 4.5 lately and I've noticed a tendency for it to create tests that prove themselves. Rather than calling the function we're hoping to test, it re-implements the code in the test and then tests it there. It's helpful, and it usually works very well if you have well defined inputs and outputs, I much prefer it over writing tests manually, but you have to be very careful.
by ninkendo | 2025-12-18 13:58:58+00:00
> For a counterexample, come visit Houten, NL (I live here and it's great) where you literally see kids around 10 years old biking independently

Or come to where I live in the midwestern united states and you see the same thing. I see kids as young as 7 years old riding bikes together on a bike path that has a very generous distance to the nearby road, and parents let them roam free.

Always remember: If you see a statistic about the US and think "wow, that sucks, the US must suck", remember, it's a very, very, very big country. The corollary to this is that if you see some small country with a really nice looking statistic, remember that the US probably has many, many, many places within it that also just as nice and share a similar statistic. If we were to lump the NL with all of Europe, I'm sure we could find some ugly looking statistics, and you would probably resent the idea of NL being lumped in with it.

Regression to the mean is a real phenomenon and I wish more people would understand it.
by bodge5000 | 2025-12-18 13:59:20+00:00
As has already been said, we've been here before. I could ship significantly faster if I ignored any error handling or edge cases and basically just assumed the data would flow 100% how I expect it to all the time. Of course that is almost never the case, so I'd end up with more bugs.

I'd like to say that AI just takes this to an extreme but I'm not even sure about that, I think it could produce more code and more bugs than I could in the same amount of time but not significantly so if I just gave up on caring about anything
by __alexs | 2025-12-18 13:59:25+00:00
The difference in participation within STEM between men and women is not well explained by biological differences. Blow has repeatedly claimed that it is actually the primary factor and seems actively disinterested in other explanations.

This is "controversial" in that it's a position that is not well supported by evidence and he has repeatedly used his platform in the past to make unsupported claims to the contrary.
by nerdjon | 2025-12-18 13:59:33+00:00
Something I have been very curious about for some time now. We know the quality of the code is not very high and has a high likelihood of bugs.

But, assuming there are not bugs and the code ships. Has there been any study in resource usage creeping up and an impact of this on a whole system. The tests I have done with trying to build things with AI it always seems like there is zero efficiency unless you notice it and can put it in the right direction.

I have been curious about the impact this will have on general computing as more low quality code makes it into applications we use every day.
by jjmarr | 2025-12-18 13:59:44+00:00
Coderabbit is an LLM code review company so their incentives are the opposite. AI is terrible and you need more AI to review it.

fwiw, I agree. LLM-powered code review is a lifesaver. I don't use Coderabbit but all of my PRs go through Copilot before another human looks at it. It's almost always right.
by dizhn | 2025-12-18 13:59:50+00:00
Not that I'm aware of. Sorry. Here's one my daemon.json files though. It tames the log file size and sets its format. And fixes the IP block so it won't change like I mentioned above.

{ "log-driver": "json-file", "log-opts": { "labels": "production_status", "tag": "{{.ImageName}}|{{.Name}}|{{.ImageFullID}}|{{.FullID}}", "env": "os,customer", "max-size": "10m" }, "bip": "172.17.1.1/24", "default-address-pools": [ {"base": "172.17.0.0/16", "size": 24} ] }
by WillAdams | 2025-12-18 14:00:04+00:00
One approach for this is that the person who makes the call needs to be on-site and in the front of the situation --- similarly, a judge signing off on a No-Knock Warrant --- the judge needs to be at least be present, and should be required to walk through the building/home/apartment after the warrant is served. If it's not important/severe enough for a judge to do this, then I would argue that there's no need for the "no knock" aspect.
by mihaaly | 2025-12-18 14:00:52+00:00
You, UK regulators and law enforcement, shall learn first how to do your frickin job!

Intruding everyone's privacy is not that!

Should everyone hand in their full recording of private conversations and full track of movements per month so you can filter out those breaking the law and claim you did your job?! NO!

Or better yet, should everyone spend two weeks in a high-security jail every three years, just so you can claim that, statistically speaking, crimes were punished? So your life can be easy, you can kick back, and collect paychecks? You'd like that, wouldn't you?! Maybe farmers can ask people making food for themselves but still collecting money for it, shouldn't they?

If you must intrude the privacy of all people then you are just a buch of incompetent idiots without a clue how to chase the actual criminals instead of harassing honest people! Exposing everyone to bad actors. Which is a crime on its own, by the way!

If you are unable to do without privacy violations for everyone then get a job you are able to carry out!

Walls, locks, gates, and all such are made for a purpose: to protect people. Don't break them!
by tejohnso | 2025-12-18 14:01:21+00:00
> they could sit on their hands and still get paid

Could? I know of government employees who literally cannot do their job, yet somehow they've been employed for over twenty years. When I say they can't do their job, I mean they have to ask coworkers how to do something that is and always has been a job requirement, and they have to "ask for help" every time. People are actually enabling massive amounts of waste and inefficiency.

Then there are those who don't even have work to do, and will take offense if you ask them to justify their continued employment. As though they are owed a position in the organization tomorrow just because they have a position in the company today.
by steer_dev | 2025-12-18 14:01:40+00:00
OP here.

I’ve realized that a 3,000-token system prompt isn't "logic", it's legacy code that no one wants to touch. It’s brittle, hard to test, and expensive to run. It is Technical Debt.

My thesis is that we need to stop treating prompts as the "program" and start treating them as temporary specs that eventually get compiled into the model weights via fine-tuning.

I built Steer (open source) to automate this "refactoring" process. It helps you climb the "Deliberation Ladder":

1. The Floor (Validity): Use Steer's deterministic verifiers (regex, AST, JSON Schema) to block objective failures in real-time. Don't ask an LLM if JSON is valid; check it with code.

2. The Ceiling (Quality): Use `steer export` to turn those captured failures into a fine-tuning dataset, training the model to handle nuance and "vibes" without a massive prompt.

Curious if others are seeing this "Prompt Bloat" in production?

Repo: https://github.com/imtt-dev/steer
by staticman2 | 2025-12-18 14:01:41+00:00
The woman isn't in the room with the men so you are saying he's being polite to film footage. This is an unintuitive argument.

If you want to test your theory bring up a game show from that era and see if the male host says "You are attractive" to every young female contestant.

If you don't think that's the same thing the dialogue is too idiosyncratic to be explainable in reference to normal social mores.
by gambiting | 2025-12-18 14:02:33+00:00
Because every other country on the planet when faced with the same kind of issue tightened its gun controls in response - Britain had a famous school shooting which immediately led to outlawing all hangun possession by private individuals, there hasn't been a shooting since(despite gun ownership in the UK being actually relatively high, it's pretty common for farmers to have shotguns). In contrast, whenever a school shooting happens in the US(and it's almost 100% every single day of the year now), legislators propose loosening gun restrictions to solve the issue. With some prominent voices saying that well if only teachers were armed, this wouldn't be a problem. And thus, the school shootings in the US not only happen every day, they are such a normal occurance that no one protests at the idea of automated AI cameras scanning students for weapons or schools having metal detectors or armed officers on site, all of which are insane in pretty much every other society. But no, in US you can't solve that - and I have no doubts that we'll have replies to this very comment explaining why US is so special that these same measures couldn't possibly work or worse - how those daily school shootings are a necessary price to pay for freedom of gun ownership and upholding the constitution.
by bluGill | 2025-12-18 14:02:43+00:00
One issue: the paints/pigments available in times past were not the full range we have today. Sometimes they had to make things somewhat ugly to both our and their taste because that is all they have available. They would still have done their best, but there are limits.

We are hampered even more today because blues and greens tend to be sourced from organic materials that decay quick, while reds and browns are from minerals that don't decay (but flake off). Even in the best preserved art that we have there is still likely significant differences between what we see and what they saw because of this color change.
by tuetuopay | 2025-12-18 14:03:54+00:00
Amazing read, and actually a pretty good demo of their profiler, I'm adding it to my toolbox. (edit: will need to try it out before as it's a paid tool)

In hindsight, making the sync point be paid for all users was a mistake, and an opt-in flag would have been the better option. This is especially true because users that hit the issue kind of mis-used the eBPF map. I've found that most of the map types are good for the userspace -> kernel direction, but most of the times not the other way around.

In the example, sending timing samples to userspace should be performed with a ringbuf map. Alas, those did not exist in 2018, and the perf event array map type had its own drawbacks that pushed people (ab)using array maps. The only times the usual maps are fine for kernel -> userspace is for some non-streaming data (e.g. accumulated packet count in network programs); streaming should be left to ringbuf.
by lordfarquad | 2025-12-18 14:04:08+00:00
The authorities here (UK resident) are already pushing hard for as much authoritarianism as they can get. They are also increasing prison capacity and the two tier system is a genuine thing with public services collapsing.

Police militarization, drones, army unit investigating private civilians, digital powers widening... I am more scared of the government than I am of local paramilitary forces at this point.

It may be enough to swing my vote towards Irish unity given the topic will be forced within my life time.
by raxxorraxor | 2025-12-18 14:04:31+00:00
I would be against a tax. In my country there are private institutions that collect royalties for any storage medium that is sold. Clients of these institutions are small and large media companies and authors, who get a part of the loot.

Harddrives and any form of media storage is more expensive for that reason. Not much, but you always pay. Reason for that is that these device would allow for copies of copyrighted material to be stored. And you cannot just found a private org like that, you need the sanction of a public office.

You can guess how AI would be factored in here, you will be forced to pay and money would be funnelled to established players. No thank you, I would vote for the Stalin option in that case.
by dlahoda | 2025-12-18 14:04:46+00:00
anybody can buy esim on street(ask llm how to do so) for cash or crypto. anybody can randomly talk on random webrtc domain or use random delta chat email to text.

if somebody really has high income(and high risk) illegal scheme he will not use signal for very bad things.

more, llm can tell exactly do things outlined above.

so chat control is for small(small income) crime and control of ordinary citizens behave well. in this sence it will serve its purpose.

so what is purpose going for signal developers? why not they try to do same with webrtc standard and browsers and llms?
by falcor84 | 2025-12-18 14:05:02+00:00
I love the integration of SageMath to some of the examples there, but am thinking - why not have the whole thing built on top of a computer algebra system? I know it's a lot of work, but it's getting easier, and could offer a lot of value.

On a related note, I was very pleasantly surprised to stumble upon the mojo language GPU Puzzles [0] and to see that they include manim animations for many of the puzzles, and include the source for these in the repo [1]. In this case, they are entirely separate from the actual language constructs, but I imagine that it would be very feasible to have the algebraic structures fully integrated with the code for their visualizations.

[0] https://puzzles.modular.com/

[1] https://github.com/modular/mojo-gpu-puzzles/blob/main/book/s...
by brigandish | 2025-12-18 14:05:31+00:00
The US has a three part test[1] for what constitutes incitement:

- intent

- imminence

- likelihood

If the UK had speech protections like the US (which I wish they would) then it would fail the imminence and probably the likelihood tests (you rightly note that it is ineffective).

[1] https://uslawexplained.com/incitement
by mmastrac | 2025-12-18 14:05:57+00:00
In the pre-AI days I worked on a system like this that was constructed by a high-profile consulting team but continuously lost data and failed to meet even the basic standards.

I think I've seen so much rush-shipped slop (before and after) that I'm really anxiously waiting for this bubble to pop.

I have yet to be convinced that AI tooling can provide more than 20% or so speedup for an expert developer working in a modern stack/language.
by davidhalter | 2025-12-18 14:06:13+00:00
Mypy is not trash at all. It is still the most precise type checker, supports a lot of complicated cases and has plugins that make a lot of things more type safe. I believe Mypy is severely underrated and a lot of people believe that it's not as good as Pyright because of the conformance tests.

The problem is that the conformance tests were mostly written by Eric Traut, so there's a natural bias towards specifying what Pyright does well. There's a lot of things Mypy does really well that should probably be implemented in Pyright.
by crazygringo | 2025-12-18 14:07:13+00:00
> They force us to confront how contingent our tastes are, and how the austere white-marble ideal was elevated by centuries of patriarchal, gatekept taste-making that declared one narrow aesthetic "timeless" and everything else vulgar.

But the whole point is that the white-marble ideal didn't come from "patriarchal, gatekept taste-making". That the statues were still mostly white marble at the time, with colored ornamental features, or very light pigmentation for something like a sunburn. That there is something timeless about human taste in that sense.

> If we end up concluding "actually, ancient art was basically compatible with modern elite taste" that's not just boring, it's actively harmful to diversity of ideas about beauty.

When ideology clashes with evidence, isn't it time to let go of the ideology? Also, nothing is "actively harmful" to diversity here. This isn't taking away from space in museums for African art or Chinese art or anything like that, or saying that they are any less beautiful or timeless themselves. Or taking anything away from Norman Rockwell paintings or hip-hop album covers or whatever you consider to be non-elite. The same timeless aesthetic principles can be at play, expressed in different cultural systems.
by cmiles8 | 2025-12-18 14:07:27+00:00
There are certainly some valid criticisms of vibe coding. That said, it’s not like the quality of most code was amazing before AI came along. In fact, most code is generally pretty terrible and took far too long for teams to ship.

Many folks would say that if shipping faster allows for faster iterations across an idea then the silly errors are worth it. I’ve certainly seen a sharp increase on execs calling BS on dev teams saying they need months to develop some basic thing.
by antonvs | 2025-12-18 14:07:42+00:00
I was amused by the UK TV show Spooks (aka MI5), from the early 2000s - it showed an organization with a ridiculous amount of surveillance and other powers, acting in blatantly partisan ways, but it tried very hard to make that all seem like a good thing.

The underlying argument was essentially the same one used in the US: almost anything is justified if it helps prevent anything they subjectively determine as “terrorism”.