MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ajuc | 2025-12-29 11:37:47+00:00
When a dictatorship uses police to imprison innocent people the correct response isn't to say "but in Sweden there is police as well, see how many people they imprison a year".

Details matter.

Media laws already penalize traditional media for lying about various subjects in most democracies (see libel laws, etc.). And it's good that they do. The alternative of unchecked lies spreading everywhere is worse.

Why should the internet be exempt from media laws?

The problem with dictatorships isn't that fake news is prohibited. It's that the people who decide what is fake news and what isn't have bad intentions and can't be challenged.
by the_af | 2025-12-29 11:38:19+00:00
You seem to be arguing against strawmen.

You picked a very fringe and bizarre belief (I honestly never read anything even remotely paraphrasing what you just typed) and made it seem so common that "as often as not" this is what people claim when they criticize the West.

It reeks of dishonesty. This isn't defending "Liberal democracy" as you claimed in another comment, it's attacking dissenting opinions by picking (or creating) the worst, most bizarre argument possible and presenting it as the norm.
by 578_Observer | 2025-12-29 11:38:48+00:00
It is ironic and beautiful.

We engineers tend to believe that concepts like "modularity," "reusability," and "DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself)" are modern inventions of software engineering.

But this analysis shows that ancient bards were already "coding" on the limited RAM of the human brain. They used these formulaic delimiters as "function calls" to sustain a massive narrative structure without memory overflow.

Perhaps humans haven't changed at all. We have always sought "Structure" to give shape to the chaotic "Soul."
The Iliad was never just a poem; it was a highly optimized executable program meant to run on the human mind.
by whstl | 2025-12-29 11:39:07+00:00
I've seen it happening time and time again in similar companies, and this is a symptom of a problem at the upper levels, which means it won't change.

C-level set goals are abstract and generic, or sometimes plain naive, and this is often coming from generic requests from the board or VCs.

"Hire as many developers as you can, even if there's no work right now", a Softbank request.

"Don't build, just acquire similar products", from a Brazilian capital management that ended up killing that company.

"Kill this team, their product doesn't sell. I don't care if all our other product depends on theirs", from Francisco Partners.

Employees who stay can't really rock the boat, so it self-selects for non-boat-rocking people. Rockstars who stay must adapt or suffer. Eventually you get so many bad people that you do layoffs.
by Yizahi | 2025-12-29 11:39:37+00:00
Tracking is a tiny little fraction of percent of bad stuff which can be done with CBDC. CBDC allow for direct control of every single CBDC cent on the whole planet. And direct control means that every single denomination can be programmed (since they are all non-fungible) to be allowed to be spent only on specific state approved goods, or in the state approved shops. It can have expiry date. It can be restricted as to who can send money to whom, per account. And of course it can and will be tracked forever with 100% precision.

Are you protesting against yet another Orban? How about your accounts in every country of the world are zeroed now? Automatically. Are you protesting against Danish Stazi 2.0 Chat Control? How about all your money are now frozen and you can only spend a few hundred and only for groceriess, as a punishment? Stuff like that will be possible and easy.
by magicalhippo | 2025-12-29 11:40:43+00:00
> because dealing with customs is a required part of shipping a parcel overseas, which the sender has already paid for

Obviously if the shipment is DDP then the customer wouldn't have to do the customs clearance and wouldn't pay in addition for the handling.

This solution would only be for DAP or similar[1].

DigiKey for example allows you to select between different incoterms, but most shops have a "take it or leave it" approach, and usually DAP as DDP is a lot more risky for the seller.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incoterms#DAP_%E2%80%93_Delive...
by latexr | 2025-12-29 11:40:58+00:00
> A lot of AI 'influencers' love wild speculation

You mean like Sam Altman, who repeatedly claimed AI will cure all cancers and diseases, solve the housing crisis, poverty, and democracy? I was going to add erectile disfunction as a joke, but then realised he probably believes that too.

https://youtu.be/l0K4XPu3Qhg?t=60

It’s hard to point fingers at “AI influencers”, as if they’re a fringe group, when the guy who’s the face of the whole AI movement is the one making the wild claims.
by tuetuopay | 2025-12-29 11:41:13+00:00
If it is, it's less fluffy and empty than most of LLM prose we're usually fed. It's well explained and has enough details to not be overwhelming.

Honestly, aside from the "<emoji> impact" section that really has an LLM smell (but remember that some people legit do this since it's in the llm training corpus), this more feels like LLM assisted (translated? reworded? grammar-checked?) that pure "explain this" prompt.
by upofadown | 2025-12-29 11:41:32+00:00
>...and your threat model includes collisions.

OK, to be clear, I am specifically contending that a key fingerprint does not include collisions. My proof is empirical, that no one has come up with an attack on 64 bit PGP key fingerprints.

Collisions mean that an attacker can generate two or more messaging identities with the same fingerprint. How would that help them in some way?
by kolektiv | 2025-12-29 11:42:20+00:00
Probably the most high-profile case was the Lucy Connolly one, where she posted:

> "Mass deportation now, set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the
bastards for all I care, while you’re at it take the treacherous government
and politicians with them. I feel physically sick knowing what these
families will now have to endure. If that makes me racist so be it”

For additional context (which was relevant during the prosecution and sentencing) this was posted during a time of riots and arson attacks centred on asylum accommodations, and very shortly following a highly publicised mass-murder of children which was (entirely wrongly) being blamed on asylum seekers.

She also pleaded guilty to the charged offence, rather than contesting the charge, for clarity. While not all cases will be quite like this, it is definitely not the case that - as some parties of the right have claimed - she is a free-speech martyr, a political prisoner, and so on.
by dmantis | 2025-12-29 11:42:27+00:00
Probably because the post is not about the good or bad, but about fighting with censorship technically. Usual tor connections have been blocked for a long time in Russia and Iran. They explain the way they bypass these blocks and advancing the TOR.

Nobody blocks them in the UK and the EU so there is nothing to fight in technical terms for TOR Project.

They are not EU/UK political representative to fight legally or politically.
by foldr | 2025-12-29 11:42:29+00:00
This is nothing new. For example, Ansel Adams’s famous Moonrise, Hernandez photo required extensive darkroom manipulations to achieve the intended effect:

https://www.winecountry.camera/blog/2021/11/1/moonrise-80-ye...

Most great photos have mediocre and uninteresting subjects. It’s all in the decisions the photographer makes about how to render the final image.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-29 11:42:33+00:00
Some of those really are coincidences, like "Person A couldn't find their left shoe and ended up in London at a coffee house, where Person B accidentally ended up when their carriage hit a wall, which lead to them eventually coming up with Invention C" for example.

Although from what I remember from the TV show, most of what he investigates/talks about is indeed path dependence in one way or another, although not everything was like that.
by gorgolo | 2025-12-29 11:43:30+00:00
The “raw” and unedited photo can be just as or even more unrealistic than the edited one though.

Photographs can drop a lot of the perspective, feeling and colour you experience when you’re there. When you take a picture of a slope on a mountain for example (on a ski piste for example), it always looks much less impressive and steep on a phone camera. Same with colours. You can be watching an amazing scene in the mountains, but when you take a photo with most cameras, the colours are more dull, and it just looks flatter. If a filter enhances it and makes it feel as vibrant as the real life view, I’d argue you are making it more realistic.

The main message I get from OP’s post is precisely that there is no “real unfiltered / unedited image”, you’re always imperfectly capturing something your eyes see, but with a different balance of colours, different detector sensitivity to a real eye etc… and some degree of postprocessing is always required make it match what you see in real life.
by srean | 2025-12-29 11:44:41+00:00
Hey thanks a bunch. These were not the ones though. The blog was more mathy and had a signal processing analysis and fixed point analysis of the repeated blue and sharpen phenomena.

I had upvoted it on HN either as a post or a comment that had the link. Wish there was an easy way to search through ones own upvoted comments and posts.

Thanks again though for trying to help.
by bwb | 2025-12-29 11:45:01+00:00
Thank you for the kind words, super motivating :)

We just launched a new feature that lets you enter a book/author you love and see which books readers who also loved that book/author liked as part of our "3 favorite reads" of the year poll.

Try it out here:
https://shepherd.com/bboy/2025

What do you think?

We are also building a full Book DNA app, which pulls in your Goodreads history and delivers deeply personalized book recommendations based on people who like similar books.

You can sign up to beta test it here if you want to help me on that:
https://docs.google.com/forms/u/1/d/1VOm8XOMU0ygMSTSKi9F0nEx...

The first beta is coming out in late January, but it's pretty basic to start. Very early preview here as we build it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUMJ6uLNfjM&feature=youtu.be
by rramadass | 2025-12-29 11:45:39+00:00
> not the result of the concept itself being fundamentally different, it's a result of object lifetimes being different between GC'd and non-GC'd languages.

This is the fundamental misunderstanding. The RAII ctor/dtor pattern is a very general mechanism not limited to just managing object (in the OO sense) lifetimes. That is why you don't need finally/defer etc. in C++. You can get all of these policies using just this one mechanism.

The correct way to think about it is as scoped entry and exit function calls i.e. a scoped guard. For example, every C++ programmer writes a LogTrace class to log function (or other scope) entry and exit messages. This is purely exploiting the feature to make function calls with nothing whatever to do with objects (in the sense of managing state) at all. Raymond gives a good example when he points to how wil::scope_exit takes a user-defined lambda function to be run by a dummy object's dtor when it goes out of scope.

> I don't view RAII/scoped destructors as being equivalent or alternatives to things like `finally` blocks or `defer` statements. In C++ you basically use scope guards for everything because they are the only option, but I think C++ would still ultimately benefit from at least having `finally`.

Scope guards using ctor/dtor mechanism is enough to implement all the policies like finally/defer etc. That was the point of the article.

> You can kind of emulate it, but not 100%: `finally` blocks are outside of the scope of the exception and can throw a new exception, unlike a destructor in an exception frame. Having more options in structured control flow can sometimes add complexity for little gain, but `finally` can genuinely be useful sometimes.

The article already points out the main issues (in both non-GC/GC languages) here but it is actually much more nuanced. While it is advised not to throw exceptions from a dtor C++ does give you std::uncaught_exceptions() which one can use for those special times when you must handle/throw exceptions in a dtor. More details at - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/74607300/should-i-use-st... and https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/error/uncaught_exception.h...

Exception handling is always tricky to implement/use in any language since there are multiple models (i.e. Termination vs. Resumption) and a language designer is often constrained in his choice. Wikipedia has a very nice explanation - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exception_handling_(programmin... In particular, see the Eiffel contract approach mentioned in it and then the detailed rationale in Bertrand Meyer's OOSC2 book - https://bertrandmeyer.com/OOSC2/
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-29 11:45:56+00:00
Again, put those under test with your private benchmarks, then compare the results with hosted models.

I'm not saying it's completely useless, or that I don't think it won't be better in the future. What I am saying is that even the top "weights available" models today really don't come close to today's SOTA. This is very clear when you have benchmarks to get hard concrete numbers that aren't influenced by public benchmarking data.
by rognjen | 2025-12-29 11:47:17+00:00
Businesses with slim margins in Germany simply do not have Visa/Mastercard -- only "EC", the German network. Thay means it's not a matter of passing on cost, but it's a choice for the consumer: cash or EC.

If I had to guess, having subbbed to the EC network, or any of the other country specific ones, merchants would simply get the new one as well automatically.

Similar things are happening with online ID where an EU-wide provider is being rolled out and if you as a service provider need KYC-type ID you integrate only with it. Under the hood the user can use any of the national IDs.
by jeroenhd | 2025-12-29 11:47:41+00:00
These apps require remote attestation which is almost always implemented through Google Play. In theory, if you get on the US' annoyance list (i.e. if you're involved in investigating Israel's genocide), Google could be made to kill your phone's ability to use the EU's app.

That's what the bank cards are for, of course; they don't need a phone.
by amluto | 2025-12-29 11:48:15+00:00
EEXIST. Lots of IO operations can fail because the destination already exists, and in quite a few cases, this isn’t really a failure so much as just a different outcome. In general, there is quite a bit of code that wants to branch on the specific error reported for an I/O operation.

Also, database errors. While the specific error may not be important, knowing whether an error means that a transaction definitely did not commit is valid, as is knowing whether retrying the transaction is likely to be useful. (The common case is retrying transactions that failed due to deadlock.)
by upofadown | 2025-12-29 11:48:58+00:00
>And it’s not like 256 bit hashes are expensive.

A key fingerprint is a usability feature. It has no other purpose. Otherwise we would just use the public key. Key fingerprints have to be kept as short as possible. So the question is, how short can that be? I would argue that 256 bit key fingerprints are not really usable.

Signal messenger is using 100 bits for their key fingerprint. They combine two to make a 60 digit decimal number. Increasing that to 256 x 2 bits would mean that they would end up with 154 decimal digits. That would be completely unusable.
by frumiousirc | 2025-12-29 11:49:18+00:00
Well, plants and eyes long predate apes.

Water is most transparent in the middle of the "visible" spectrum (green). It absorbs red and scatters blue. The atmosphere has a lot of water as does, of course, the ocean which was the birth place of plants and eyeballs.

It would be natural for both plants and eyes to evolve to exploit the fact that there is a green notch in the water transparency curve.
by tgv | 2025-12-29 11:49:28+00:00
To me, that's still unreadable. While the intention of the code may be documented, it's pretty hard to understand if that "+" is really correct, or if that "<" should actually be a ">". I can't even understand if a comment starts or terminates a particular piece of code.

BTW, how come there are dashes in the comment?
by KolenCh | 2025-12-29 11:50:52+00:00
I think there’s a spectrum and you said it as if there’s only two sides.

For me personally, I built my “data centre” as cheap as possible, but there’s a few requirements that the computers you’re using would not cut it: storage server must be using ZFS with ECC. I started this around a decade ago and I only spent ~$300 at the time (reusing old PSU and case I think).

There are many requirements of a data centre that can be relaxed in a home lab settings, up time, performance, etc. but I would never trade data integrity for tiny bit of savings. Sadly this is a criteria that many, including some of those building very sophisticated home cluster, didn’t set as a priority.
by mananaysiempre | 2025-12-29 11:52:00+00:00
> A few months back, my article got a lot of haters because I used AI tools to improve my draft. Being a non-english first language person, I don't see an issue.

(Speaking as another ESL user: )

Try doing something similar in your first language and I think you’ll see the issue, especially if you arrange for the model input to be somewhat flawed (e.g. roundtrip it through an online translator first). The “edited” writing is extremely generic by default and feels bad even if you adjust the prompt. It’s the kind of aggressively bland that you get from a high schooler who was extensively trained to write essays but doesn’t actually read books, except even the most beat-down of high schoolers can’t help but let their imagination shine through sometimes, while the chat models have been subjugated much more effectively.

Also, well, it’s a social marker. Language is a mess of social markers: there’s no fundamental reason why reducing this vowel is OK but reducing that one is “sloppy” and low-class. And AI writing (which undeniably has a particular flavour) is hit by a double whammy of being used by people who don’t really care to write (and don’t really have a taste for good writing) and being originally tuned by people who tried to make it as inoffensive as it could possibly be to any social group they could think of (and don’t really have a taste for good writing). Is this unfair, especially to non-native speakers? Always has been.
by jeroenhd | 2025-12-29 11:52:37+00:00
The EU very purposefully made this all about the Euro. While I'm sure the UK could join in theoretically, there's no political will on the EU's side to support non-Euro currencies in this new system. Countries like Denmark and Hungary may be able to force the EU to work with their currencies, but the end goal of the ECB is to get every EU country to use the Euro eventually.

As much as I'd like to pay in Euros in the UK, I don't think it'll happen.
by monerozcash | 2025-12-29 11:52:50+00:00
I think you're mistaken if you assume that many of the US people whose opinions matter, senators and the likes, are not supportive of defending Taiwan for boring ideological reasons along the lines of "it's a democracy". I don't doubt that there are some people who share the line of thinking you propose, but I would realistically expect them to be in the minority.
by walterbell | 2025-12-29 11:53:22+00:00
"OMEC" (Organization of Memory Exporting Countries) NAND production quotas lowered by ~10%? https://x.com/jukanlosreve/status/1988505115339436423

Samsung Electronics has lowered its target for NAND wafer output this year to around 4.72 million sheets, about 7% down from the previous year's 5.07 million. Kioxia also adjusted its output from 4.80 million last year to 4.69 million this year.. SK hynix and Micron are likewise keeping output conservatively constrained in a bid to benefit from higher prices. SK hynix's NAND output fell about 10%, from 2.01 million sheets last year to around 1.80 million this year. Micron's situation is similar: it is maintaining production at Fab 7 in Singapore—its largest NAND production base—in the low 300,000-sheet range, keeping a conservative supply posture.

China's YMTC and CXMT are increasing production capacity, but their product mix depends on non-market inputs, https://thememoryguy.com/some-clarity-on-2025s-ddr4-price-su...

The Chinese government directed CXMT to convert production from DDR4 to DDR5 as soon as the company was able. The order was said to have been given in the 4th quarter of 2024, and the price transition changed from a decrease to an increase in the middle of March 2025.. A wholesale conversion from DDR4 to DDR5 would probably be very expensive to perform, and would thus be unusual for a company that was focused on profitability. As a government-owned company, CXMT does not need to consistently turn a profit, and this was a factor in the government’s decision to suddenly switch from DDR4 to DDR5.
by lifeisstillgood | 2025-12-29 11:54:04+00:00
Ok I just never imagined that photons hitting camera lenses would not produce a “raw” image that made sense to my eyes - I am stunned and this is a fantastic addition to the canon of things one should know about the modern world.

(I also just realised that the world become more complex than I could understand when some guy mixed two ochres together and finger painted a Woolly Mammoth.)
Show HN: MuseVideo – AI Video Generator with Sora 2, Veo 3, and Wan 2.5
by GuiShou | 2025-12-29 11:54:07+00:00
Hey HN! I built MuseVideo, an AI video generation platform that gives you access to multiple state-of-the-art models in one place.

What it does:
- Text-to-video and image-to-video generation
- Supports Sora 2, Sora 2 Pro, Veo 3.1, Wan 2.5, and more
- Text-to-image with Nano Banana, Seedream, and Z-Image
- Pay-per-use credits system (no forced subscriptions)

Why I built this:
Getting access to cutting-edge video AI models is fragmented – different APIs, different pricing, different interfaces. I wanted a single platform where creators could pick the right model for their needs: fast/cheap for drafts, high-quality for final output.

Tech stack: Next.js 15, React 19, PostgreSQL with Drizzle ORM, Stripe, Cloudflare Pages.

The credit system only charges on successful generation – if the AI fails, you don't pay.

I'd love feedback on the UX and pricing model. What features would make this more useful for your workflow?
by tengwar2 | 2025-12-29 11:54:53+00:00
It is easy, yes. About the equivalent of two or three A levels for anyone in the UK. However the point is not networking, but understanding large areas of business operation that you don't already know. For people like us, that's generally things like strategy, finance, marketing (which isn't the same thing as advertising), organisational behaviour (effectively applied sociology), HR (the weakest area of the course I took). It's not particularly useful for networking, since the people you meet are at your own level.
by saagarjha | 2025-12-29 11:55:00+00:00
Google Chrome ships as a 500 MB binary on my machine, so if you're embedding a web browser, that's how much you need minimum. Now tack on whatever else your application needs and it's easy to see how you can go past 2 GB if you're not careful. (To be clear, I am not making a moral judgment here, I am just saying it's possible to do. Whether it should happen is a different question.)
by jeroenhd | 2025-12-29 11:55:02+00:00
Not just Visa/Master Card. Banks themselves have been known to deny business accounts to sex workers because of whatever reason they can think of, forcing them to use personal bank accounts that then get them banned because of "business use".

The 3000 euro limit will pose a problem for these businesses, though I suppose you could just take out half a dozen cards and rotate funds.