MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nuuuwan | 2025-12-21 09:52:24+00:00
ALERT App (Update)

APP: <http://nuuuwan.github.io/alert/>

v0.1 of ALERT, an Awareness, Logistics, Evacuation, Recovery and Tracking platform for natural disasters in Sri Lanka

It aggregates

- Official alerts, DMC and others - Data-driven automatic alerts ( still experimental) - Practical disaster-related information

THE GOAL: Autonomy during disasters. Timely information so people can assess risk, spot emerging danger, and act early, without over-dependence on authorities.

How to use: 1⃣ Select your location on the map 2⃣ View alerts 3⃣ Explore additional useful data

Trilingual (සිංහල & தமிழ் translations are automatically generated.)

Thanks to everyone who has already shared feedback. Please keep it coming. Contributions from developers, translators, and disaster professionals are especially welcome.

CODE: <http://github.com/nuuuwan/alert> Long-term plan: <https://github.com/nuuuwan/alert/blob/main/README.requiremen...>

#SriLanka #DisasterPreparedness #AlertApp #EarlyWarning #CrisisTech
by gnfargbl | 2025-12-21 09:52:54+00:00
Claude tells me that there are about ~5000 theoretical high energy physicists actively publishing as tracked by INSPIRE-HEP (the de facto search engine in that field). If we estimate that about a third or half of string theorists take part in Strings in a given year -- because there are other big conferences like String Pheno that will be more relevant for many -- then we have something like 30-50% of high energy theorists working on string theory.

I agree that people should be "moving on to other things," but I'm not seeing the evidence that they actually are.
by zeristor | 2025-12-21 09:52:56+00:00
That is as long as gas forms the final price at the determination of each 30 min electricity price setting around.

The prices plummet from time to time, even going negative, but not enough for the prices to be lowered.

Seemingly it’ll take a few more years for more energy to reach the south, but by then data centres may be using more.
by Mossy9 | 2025-12-21 09:53:26+00:00
From a user perspective, yeah, practically every site I have to create an account for would be better if the signup was that simple. They're all basically one time throwaway accounts anyway, so why not treat them as such at the service level. Of course from the business view, there's all sorts of reasons, but one can dream...

Thanks for pointing out the terms of service agreement thing - it was so unobtrusive that I just glanced over it!
by pona-a | 2025-12-21 09:54:07+00:00
> Generative AI for source code learns from developers - who mostly publish their source with licenses that allow this.

I always believed GPL allowed LLM training, but only if the counterparty fulfills its conditions: attribution (even if not for every output, at least as part of the training set) and virality (the resulting weights and inference/training code should be released freely under GPL, or maybe even the outputs). I have not seen any AI company take any steps to fulfill these conditions to legally use my work.

The profiteering alone would be a sufficient harm, but it's the replacement rhetoric that adds insult to injury.
by cubefox | 2025-12-21 09:54:49+00:00
No it is from 2011. The text mentions an event in 2011, so it couldn't have been written earlier, and the first HN submission [1] was in 2011, so it also wasn't written later.

The title should say (2011), otherwise the whole piece is confusing.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2591154
by mahesh96 | 2025-12-21 09:57:33+00:00
Chat Memory Manager is a privacy-first desktop app that enhances ChatGPT with long-term memory, chat timelines, conversation branching (like Git), auto summaries, tags, and full-text search. Runs completely locally. No cloud. No accounts. One-time purchase. Built for developers, founders, researchers, writers, and serious AI users.
by throwaway_dang | 2025-12-21 09:59:12+00:00
I doubt you can find any essay or such where he said anti-Western action was good on the sole grounds that it was anti-Western.

It's difficult to summarise so many years of writing in a few sentences but from my own reading, he pointed out

a) many things done by the US lead to death or destruction b) many of these things are justified in the name of good that doesn't stand up to scrutiny c) the US government is often hypocritical d) US citizens are heavily propagandized both for foreign policy and domestic policy e) as a US citizen, it his duty to try and oppose these actions and since he's not a citizen of Iran, he isn't in a position to do anything about Iran f) a) through d) explain why he is often seen as an apologist, to use your word, for Iran; he tries to explain, from his point of view, why Iran etc. do the things they do g) a strong support of freedom of speech and opposition to censorship, including what he regards as private censorship as opposed to merely government censorship.
by saaaaaam | 2025-12-21 09:59:21+00:00
(a) you can’t directly upload to Spotify. You need an intermediary in the shape of a distributor. Whether that’s a label or a DIY platform like DistroKid.

(b) Spotify introduced a threshold of 1000 streams before they pay anything. This disincentivises low quality warbling autotuned ditties as they are unlikely to pass that threshold. (It’s more nuanced - you don’t just need 1000 streams from a handful of accounts as that could easily be gamed.)

(c) Suno and Udio have been forced into licensing deals with the major record companies. The real threat will be when we see an open sourced Qwen or DeepSeek style genAI for music creation.
by derriz | 2025-12-21 09:59:23+00:00
Moral arguments for me don’t stand alone like a mathematical proof or scientific findings which can be examined as some sort of platonic form.

Morality arguments are social and contextual. That 2+2 is 4 won’t change and captures some sort of eternal truth while what is deemed moral is constantly changing over time and differs across different societies and social groupings.

So morality arguments require and appeal to a particular shared sense of right and wrong. If Chomsky was guilty of sexually abusing children, then I do not share his moral foundation and so his appeals to morality arguments do not convince me.
by Taek | 2025-12-21 09:59:35+00:00
We seem to be moving the goalposts on AGI, are we not? 5 years ago, the argument that AGI wasn't here yet was that you couldn't take something like AlphaGo and use it to play chess. If you wanted that, you had to do a new training run with new training data.

But now, we have LLMs that can reliably beat video games like Pokemon, without any specialized training for playing video games. And those same LLMs can write code, do math, write poetry, be language tutors, find optimal flight routes from one city to another during the busy Christmas season, etc.

How does that not fit the definition of "General Intelligence"? It's literally as capable as a high school student for almost any general task you throw it at.
by lxgr | 2025-12-21 09:59:55+00:00
Arguably there isn't even a widely shared, coherent definition of intelligence: To some people, it might mean pure problem solving without in-task learning; others equate it with encyclopedic knowledge etc.

Given that, I consider it quite possible that we'll reach a point where even more people will consider LLMs having reached or surpassed AGI, while others still only consider it "sufficiently advanced autocomplete".
by jstummbillig | 2025-12-21 10:00:03+00:00
I think is exactly right in principle and practically. The question is what domain knowledge you should improve on to maximize outcome: Will understanding the machine code be the thing that most likely translates to better outcomes? Will building the vector search the hard way be? Or will it be focusing on the thing that you do with the vector search?

At some point things will get hard, as long as the world is. You don't need to concern yourself with any technical layer for that to be true. The less we have to concern ourselves with technicalities, the further that points shifts towards the thing we actually care about.
by pavlov | 2025-12-21 10:00:09+00:00
The point is that, as far as development of AI is concerned, 2025 consumers are in the same position as the 1825 housewife.

In both cases, automation of what was previously human labor is very early and they’ve seen almost nothing yet.

I agree that in the year 2225 people are not going to consider basic LLMs artificial intelligences, just like we don’t consider a washing machine a maid replacement anymore.
by flir | 2025-12-21 10:01:30+00:00
I'm reminded of the Zero One Infinity rule (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_one_infinity_rule)

We're very much trained to solve the most general case of any problem, for sensible reasons.

I first learned about this formulation of the rule from a case study in Alan Cooper's The Inmates Are Running the Asylum, where breaking the rule resulted in a much better user experience.
by anthk | 2025-12-21 10:01:31+00:00
People praise MS Word and Excel there, shitting down on Markdown and proper languages.

The thing is, you have RTF covering a 99% of actual office cases. For the rest, a DTP would be far better, or Texmacs which is far superior for academics. The old WordPad with tables (and Ted for Unix once it's properly setup) would enough to do most boring documentation.

On Excel, just look what happened with Genomics. Also, overabusing Access for management (or worse, to handle Covid cases in a shitty XLS table) it's a nightmare.

For tons of cases TCL/Tk + a Sqlite3 backend would perfectly work and it would be accesible to any platform, from GNU/Linux to MacOS, BSD, Windows. You can stick an HTML5 frontend with ease without even needing JS to access the data (plain HTML forms would work really well).

Ah, yes, graphs, charts. Gnuplot would help you in that case, or a fast Tk package. Reports? TkHTML with some easy CSS. It would cost far more initially? The potential risks on compatibility would be nil in a future. And, as a plus, yo don't have to worry about Macro viruses and whatever.
by zsoltkacsandi | 2025-12-21 10:02:05+00:00
> Economists say that a typical middle-class family today is richer than one in the 1960s.

My mother was a nurse and my father a warehouse worker. In their early 30s, on minimum wage, they were able to buy an apartment and still save enough to afford another one.

My wife and I are both software developers. We work longer hours, are far more formally educated, and have to continuously study outside of work just to stay employable in a rapidly changing industry. I earn a high salary at a large U.S. company, with bonuses and stock compensation. Yet as we approach 40, we still haven't reached the level of financial security my parents achieved decades earlier.

Nominally, our incomes are higher, but real purchasing power, access to housing, and long-term security have eroded, even as the demands on our time, education, and productivity have increased.
by lxgr | 2025-12-21 10:02:05+00:00
I think many people are now learning that their definition of intelligence was actually not very precise.

From what I've seen, in response to that, goalposts are then often moved in the way that requires least updating of somebody's political, societal, metaphysical etc. worldview. (This also includes updates in favor of "this will definitely achieve AGI soon", fwiw.)
by gethly | 2025-12-21 10:03:54+00:00
Yeah, i have the same experience.

The problem is that Facebook Groups decimated online forums. Those used to be great for thematic communities but became deserts and I think that whenever someone introduces something they did, whether paid or not, is now treated as spam or something one should pay for instead of discuss it(imagine how much technical talk could be had about a project you made) because the volume of messages became so low that any type of self promotion gets a lot of exposure(imagine that a forum gets 10 new posts per week, your post would then be shown for a quite some time until it would fall off the lists of recent posts) and search bots have time to index it.

FB Groups on the other hand became monetised, despite it breaking FB rules. So any link you post is instantly deleted, and you'll likely be banned, unless you pay for it to the administrator beforehand. It took these admins years to build these groups so they will not risk letting anyone use it to self promote without paying.

It's a total shitshow out there. Don't think it's just you. It's not. The internet just really sucks nowadays.
Ask HN: Which whole genome sequencing provider do you recommend in 2025?
by croemer | 2025-12-21 10:06:19+00:00
I work in bioinformatics and am interested in learning more about human genome analyses. Naturally, it's most fun to look into your own genome for concreteness.

Has anyone done WGS and has some insights to share?

I'm thinking of ordering under a pseudonym to make deanonymzing just a little harder.
by abainbridge | 2025-12-21 10:06:53+00:00
Pounding stone seems reasonable to me. Obviously I don't have any proof or even strong evidence but I saw a video that changed my perception of what is possible. It showed two old men making a millstone with hand tools: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lscs5ZgNQrE. The amount of labour involved and quality of the finished item was astonishing to me. Maybe you'll think that the hideous amount of labour needed to make a simple geometric shape makes you even more convinced the Inca has some other way to achieve their even harder task. But it is a fun video anyway.

Similarly astonishing to me is that Michelanglo's David was carved from a single piece of marble with a hammer and chisel. I mean, just look at it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_(Michelangelo)
by hidd | 2025-12-21 10:07:06+00:00
When I worked at a university's tech support, this was a recurring problem. People made grade lists in Excel, then imported them into the digital learning environment, which occasionally was set to a different language. This meant that the decimal point would be disregarded, and e.g. an 8.5/10 would be imported as an 85 (which got clamped to 10). Maximum grades for everyone, confused students and teachers :')
by amadeuspagel | 2025-12-21 10:08:25+00:00
Cursor has a browser? That by itself makes me want to try it again.

EDIT: No support for the web midi API though. I guess this is the problem with the browser-in-IDE idea: You only want to use it if it's perfect, otherwise keep wondering whether something is a problem of the browser or your app. Maybe IDE-in-browser is easier, and chrome is approaching that with workspaces.
by komali2 | 2025-12-21 10:09:36+00:00
> Someone can work very hard and save their earnings, only to have the value diluted in the future. Isn't that also a delusion?

Yes, it is.

It's one of my pet peeves about the cryptocurrency movement vs neoliberal institutional types. "Bitcoin is juts bits on a disk!" is always answered with "well, dollars is too!" To which the institutionalist can only say, "no, that's different." But really, it isn't.

What the cryptocurrency people get wrong is that replacing one shared delusion with another isn't a useful path to go down.
by gethly | 2025-12-21 10:09:54+00:00
I went for physics degree but left after two semesters due to lack of structure and other things(essentially I had no idea what was going on the entire time, what I was supposed to know or do, what books to buy, it was quite a shitshow despite it being the top college in the country for this).

I was wondering that maybe if i am alder and have nothing to do I could try again but I lost interest. I prefer physical things, like martial arts, running and things like that to sitting in a class reading books. Makes no sense to my any more.
by simianparrot | 2025-12-21 10:09:58+00:00
Can we please stop and ask ourselves "is this a good idea?"?

Giving everyone the ability to bot, even literally grandma, with an "agent" that might hallucinate and fill your cc details into the wrong page. What could go wrong?

And before someone replies with the tiresome "well we might as well do it before someone else does", think about that argument for _two_ seconds. Should you push someone off a bridge just because someone else might do it if you don't?
by immibis | 2025-12-21 10:10:54+00:00
IMO, not having NAT is a "new toy". It allows end-to-end connectivity again. Any peer-to-peer apps work much better on IPv6, and if you're developing one then it's actually possible again.

You could try fd00::1, fd00::2, ... for short internal static addresses. You don't have to use a random prefix in that range - it's just policy (for good reasons that might not matter for a small network).
by techtalksweekly | 2025-12-21 10:11:11+00:00
https://techtalksweekly.io/

I run a newsletter called Tech Talks Weekly[1] where my subscribers get one email per week with all the latest Software Engineering conference talks and podcasts[2].

I originally built it for myself because I was subscribed to too many conference channels on YouTube and things started getting messy, so I wrote a script to fetch the new talks automatically. Eventually, I turned it into a newsletter.

I currently have over 7,500 subscribers with email open rate consistently between 32%-35%, although I plan to trim the list soon to get into the 40-50% range.

I recently started offering sponsorship options[3] and made $500 in Nov and $700 in Dec so far.

[1] https://techtalksweekly.io/

[2] https://www.techtalksweekly.io/p/what-is-tech-talks-weekly

[3] https://www.techtalksweekly.io/p/sponsor
by _the_inflator | 2025-12-21 10:11:33+00:00
I lost it when looking at the commit message(s) which scored an all time record maximum on the notorious WTF/minute scale - preemptively, by maxing out the ratio.

This is a brilliantly clever homage to the WTF/Minute concept as proxy for code quality metrics and therefore is used among others as an indicator for maintainability where a high count inevitably leads to frustration and bugs.

Hilariously and awesomely executed.
by goku12 | 2025-12-21 10:11:35+00:00
I had a Xolo Tegra Note 7 tablet (marketed in the US as EVGA Tegra Note 7) in around 2013. I preordered it as far as I remember. It had a Tegra 4 SoC with quad core Cortex A15 CPU and a 72 core GeForce GPU. Nvidia used to claim that it is the fastest SoC for mobile devices at the time.

To this day, it's the best mobile/Android device I ever owned. I don't know if it was the fastest, but it certainly was the best performing one I ever had. UI interactions were smooth, apps were fast on it, screen was bright, touch was perfect and still had long enough battery backup. The device felt very thin and light, but sturdy at the same time. It had a pleasant matte finish and a magnetic cover that lasted as long as the device did. It spolied the feel of later tablets for me.

It had only 1 GB RAM. We have much more powerful SoCs today. But nothing ever felt that smooth (iPhone is not considered). I don't know why it was so. Perhaps Android was light enough for it back then. Or it may have had a very good selection and integration of subcomponents. I was very disappointed when Nvidia discontinued the Tegra SoC family and tablets.
by gorbachev | 2025-12-21 10:12:08+00:00
It's not even close to virtually all music. 256M songs doesn't come even close.

It's virtually all popular music recently published commercially in the world.

It's missing large portions of bootlegs, old music, foreign music, radio shows, mixtapes and live streaming music to list a few prominent categories from music in my private archive of cultural works. Those categories, btw, are well represented by torrents on tracker sites.
by magicalhippo | 2025-12-21 10:12:33+00:00
> I think it should be acceptable for AI to learn and produce, but not to learn and copy.

Ok but that's just a training issue then. Have model A be trained on human input. Have model A generate synthetic training data for model B. Ensure the prompts used to train B are not part of A's training data. Voila, model B has learned to produce rather than copy.

Many state of the art LLMs are trained in such a two-step way since they are very sensitive to low-quality training data.
by astrobe_ | 2025-12-21 10:12:33+00:00
> Any webpages embedding facebook/twitter/microsoft/google trackers have already deanonymised you

I bet OP has already blocked at least 3 of them. Private browsing is only a partial solution, blocking/unblocking domains, scripts, etc. on a case-by-case basis is a more reliable way to defend your right to privacy against abusive practices (I'm talking about fine grained adblockers such as uMatrix/uBlockOrigin) daily.

I admit it can be a hassle sometimes, in particular if one explores the net every day, but staying away from bad actors (such as some of those 4) is one way to maybe eventually stop them - even if "vote with your clicks" feels as pointless as "vote with your feet" when you're just one in many millions.
by krapp | 2025-12-21 10:12:46+00:00
It's self evident. The US is free because we have guns, and we can use those guns to defend ourselves and rise up against a tyrannical government. Other nations are prisoners of their tyrannical governments and slaves to their whims because they don't have guns and effective political action is impossible.

You may ask "why then does America not rise up against its obviously increasingly tyrannical government?" The answer is that a tyrannical government cannot exist in the US because we have guns, and therefore freedom. Americans have guns and therefore nothing to worry about.

Yes, it may appear to the untrained, socialism-poisoned foreign mind that the US is collapsing into some kind of Christofascist white supremacist kleptarchy but you have to remember that Americans mistrust government but trust God and the free market, which is why we put God on our money.

Rather what's happening in the US is the ultimate expression of American liberty. We're casting off the chains of the Constitution itself and building a new nation. One where we can live free from the consequences of our actions like the Founding Fathers intended. And by "we" I mean "they," the ultimate form of Americans, white billionaire pedophiles.

But it's all fine as long as the rest of us can shoot watermelons on the back 40.
by emsign | 2025-12-21 10:13:27+00:00
He already said he had nomoral objections to deal with Epstein knowing about his first conviction for sex trafficking, because in Chomsky's view the man served his time and justice had been served. Yes, to Chomsky Epstein was an innocent man after serving a few months for sex trafficking and having sex with a dozen of minors. The socialist anarchist Chomsky had no ethical objections when he asked a convicted billionaire sex trafficker how to invest a few millions.
by jotaen | 2025-12-21 10:15:03+00:00
> piracy is often the only option to ”own” any media at all.

Maybe I’m misunderstanding something here, but I find that nowadays the process of buying high-quality, DRM-free MP3 music is as simple and straightforward as it can be: you purchase the files (on Bandcamp, Amazon, Apple Music, etc.), download them legally, and then physically own them forever.

By the way, when purchasing through Bandcamp, 80+% goes to the artist (https://bandcamp.com/fair_trade_music_policy). So not only do you own the music, but you also make sure the artist is properly paid for their work.
by willguest | 2025-12-21 10:16:03+00:00
I love the idea that we believe that we can replicate all of the natural processes involved in getting a tan, and to such a precision that we can then speed up the process 10 fold, and that we can fit it all into a single unit that can be wheeled in and out of the room.

Unless of course our calculations are a bit off, then we accidentally created a bed version of the wrong chalice from raiders of the lost ark, but I think it's fine.