MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by potato3732842 | 2025-12-23 02:10:27+00:00
>when the water table is as saturated as it is in much of the east, there's no sense in trying to conserve. The water pumped out of the river just ends up on the ground, goes in the watershed, and back down the river.

The laws of nature may agree with you but the laws of man do not and lawfulness comes at great expense.
Show HN: A GPT Image 1.5 UI for developers tired of rewriting prompts
by Zeos3154 | 2025-12-23 02:10:43+00:00
Hey HN,

After burning through dozens of credits rephrasing the same prompt in different AI image tools, I built gpt2image.io - a conversational interface for GPT Image 1.5.

**The core idea:**
Instead of prompt archaeology ("was it 'modern minimalist' or 'contemporary minimal' that worked?"), you iterate through dialogue:
- "Change the background to midnight blue"
- "Make the text bolder"
- "Keep everything but replace the laptop"

Context persists across turns. Style consistency is maintained. It's how humans actually work.

**Built for:**
- Developers mocking up UIs
- Designers exploring concepts rapidly
- Product teams creating marketing assets
- Anyone who needs images that evolve with ideas

**Tech highlights:**
- Built on Next.js 16 + React 19 (using React Compiler for optimization)
- Turbopack for stupid-fast local dev
- Multi-language support out of the box
- Clean API for integrations

**What it's not:**
- Not trying to replace Photoshop
- Not a magic solution for everything
- Still bound by underlying model capabilities

Try it: https://www.gpt2image.io (first 2 images free)

Looking for feedback on:
- What editing patterns break down
- What controls matter most in production workflows
- API features you'd actually use

Contact: contact@gpt2image.io
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-12-23 02:11:42+00:00
Its not even a POC at this point, just a readme and a sandbox for testing it while I work on it. But you might find the readme interesting:

https://github.com/MatrixManAtYrService/poag

I'm especially pleased with how explicit it makes the inner dependency graph. Today I'm tinkering with pact (https://docs.pact.io/). I like that I'm forced to add the pact contracts generated during consumer testing as flake outputs (so they can then be inputs to whichever flake does provider testing). It's potentially a bit more work than it would be under other schemes, but it also makes the directionality of the dependency into a first class citizen and not an implementation detail. Otherwise it would be easy to forget which batch of tests depends on artifacts generated by the other.

I suppose there's things like Bazel for that sort of thing also but I don't think you can drop an agent into a bazel... thingy... and expect it to feel at home.
by Waterluvian | 2025-12-23 02:12:14+00:00
Some days I just can’t get over how we’re just the dumbest ##^*ing species to ever visit space.

Oh let’s look at what the humans are up to with their climate change problem. Oh wow they’ve got giant data centers at work on the problem. I guess maybe it’s worth the extra heat. Let’s see what they’re calculati— nope they’re just collecting and trading numbers.
by darth_avocado | 2025-12-23 02:12:23+00:00
That’s not how the water system works. It’s not like all the evaporated water will end up in the lakes. California uses a lot of water for farming, it’s not like all the evaporated water ends up in the Sierras all the time. Water cycle is complex and reducing it to “it will just end up back to where it came from” is pretty reaching.

Besides it’s not just the evaporation. The leftover water concentrates a lot of the impurities that already exist in the water, and not all of it ends up in proper treatment facilities, which in turn pollutes the place wherever it ends up being. This is actually a problem in parts of Oregon.
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/data-c...
by gerdesj | 2025-12-23 02:12:25+00:00
Sorry?

Ethernet has had the concept of full duplex for several decades and I have no idea what you mean by: "hybrid on each end allows the use of the same channel at the same time."

The physical electrical connections between a series of ethernet network ports (switch or end point - it doesn't matter) are mediated by CSMA.

No idea why you are mentioning radios. That's another medium.
by kaibee | 2025-12-23 02:12:29+00:00
The thing about this kind of 'just so' story causal mechanism is that we still have to actually do the science to find out. Your body does filter and kill potentially cancerous cells all the time already. And cancer cells aren't like, some super thing that evolved to kill you specifically. My just-so story goes like this: 'the cancer cells die because they're suddenly outside of the specific bodypart that they were exploiting'. And we're probably both right, depending on the location of the cancer, the type of cancer, etc.
by appreciatorBus | 2025-12-23 02:12:56+00:00
The comparison to private ships doesn't quite land, IMO.

Ships
- ships big enough to do material damage would be very small in #
- ships big enough to do material damage would have a (somewhat?) professional crew
- whatever damage they could do would always be limited to tiny areas - only where water & land meet, only where substantial public or private investment had been made in docks/etc
- operators have strong financial incentive to avoid damaging ship or 3rd party property (public or private)

Cars
- in some countries the ratio of cars to people is approaching 1
- a vanishingly small portion of vehicles have professional drivers
- car operators expect to be able to operate at velocities fatal to others on nearly 100% of land in cities, excepting only land that already has a building on it, and sometimes not even that.
- car operators rarely held liable for damage to public property, injury, or death and there's strong political pressure to socialize damage and avoid realistic risk premiums

I don't love flock but IMO the only realistic way to get rid of license plates would be mandatory speed governors that keep vehicles from going more than like 15mph. I would be fine with that, but I suspect most would not. If we expect to operate cars at velocities fatal to people outside our vehicles, then there will always be pressure to have a way of identifying bad actors who put others at risk.
by kamaal | 2025-12-23 02:13:34+00:00
Every programmer worth their salt must learn to use power tools, and also train to work beyond the beginner-intermediate levels, that has now become the permanent situation in our line of work.

Nobody should be spending a day writing Python to do work that can be done using a vim macro in like 5 mins. Or spend a year doing in Python what can be done in a week in Perl.

>> $\=$/;for(@ARGV){open F,$_;while(<F>){print if/$_/}}

There are lots Perl one-liner patterns, once you learn to write them. You are basically saving yourself writing many dozen man-hours of Python/Java coding work.

I remember telling my manager during the Perl days. A 10 year Java experience guy looks great, but thats basically a junior Perl dev with 6 months experience.

There is nothing to feel great about wasting effort and more importantly time.
by 15155 | 2025-12-23 02:14:44+00:00
> they're complicated to put down on boards

https://gowinsemi.com/en/product/detail/46/

- Requires just 1V2 + 3V3

- Available in QFN

- Bitstream is saved in internal flash or programmed to SRAM via a basic JTAG sequence

https://www.efinixinc.com/products-trion.html
by ModernMech | 2025-12-23 02:15:08+00:00
> The purpose of the system is to spend public money according to the priorities of the electorate.

Those priorities are reflected by the will of Congress, not the will of POTUS. It cannot be the case that the electorate can just vote 50.00001% for a POTUS and the priorities of the 49.99999% get instantly vaporized. That's why the legislative process is slow and POTUS doesn't get to make any laws, because otherwise it would be tyranny of the majority. If POTUS gets to decide that because he won by the slimmest majority, he has has a mandate to unilaterally and immediately destroy everything the other side has ever done, then the American project is just over; it won't be long until a leftist POTUS comes in and actually does wage war on Right-leaning institutions the way the Right is waging war on left-leaning institutions.
by SmirkingRevenge | 2025-12-23 02:15:23+00:00
There's also some other relevance to tech here, given the role of the Ellisons in all this. It's quite possible the decision to pull the episode came from them. Paramount is trying steal Warner Bros out from under Netflix and is working the Trump admin hard to prevent the deal, even supposedly by telling Trump he can decide who gets hired/fired from CNN.

Andreessen was directly involved in the rise of Bari Weiss too.
by defrost | 2025-12-23 02:15:56+00:00
A16z-backed Doublespeed hacked, revealing what its AI-generated accounts promote (404media.co)

289 points by grahamlee 5 days ago | flag | past | 171 comments

so some slip through.

But: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=404media.co sure has a lot of [dead]
by malaya_zemlya | 2025-12-23 02:16:01+00:00
You can download a base model (aka foundation, aka pretrain-only) from huggingface and test it out. These were produced without any RL.

However, most modern LLMs, even base models, would be not just trained on raw internet text. Most of them were also fed a huge amount of synthetic data. You often can see the exact details in their model cards. As a result, if you sample from them, you will notice that they love to output text that looks like:

6. **You will win millions playing bingo.**
- **Sentiment Classification: Positive**
- **Reasoning:** This statement is positive as it suggests a highly favorable outcome for the person playing bingo.

This is not your typical internet page.
by jwitthuhn | 2025-12-23 02:16:15+00:00
At 4 bits that model won't fit into 128GB so you're spilling over into swap which kills performance. I've gotten great results out of glm-4.5-air which is 4.5 distilled down to 110B params which can fit nicely at 8 bits or maybe 6 if you want a little more ram left over.
by 15155 | 2025-12-23 02:17:07+00:00
> and quite a bit worse than just dealing with an MCU.

Unless you're using some kind of USB DFU mode (which is annoying on assembly lines), SWD-based flashing of an MCU is substantially more complicated than the JTAG sequences that some internal-flash FPGAs use for programming..

These chips are just as easy or easier to program than any ARM MCU. Raw SPI NOR flash isn't "easy" to program if you've never done it before, either.
Show HN: I built a Python-native vault because I don't trust the cloud
by HoloSecNerd | 2025-12-23 02:17:45+00:00
I got tired of the OS scanning my local files. I wanted a directory that was mathematically invisible to the system.

This is a Python-native, air-gapped encryption tool. It runs locally. No APIs. No subscriptions. It just orphans the file, locks the door, and throws you the key.

I built it for myself. If you want the silence, it's yours.
by bombcar | 2025-12-23 02:18:05+00:00
It’s less the feels (though the glow from a CRT in a dark room is entirely different from an LED) and more that the games especially were designed for the bleed and flow that CRTs have.

It’s similar to how subpixel antialiasing really depends on the screen design and what order the colors are in.

The pixelated 8bit aesthetic is more reminiscent of early emulators in LCD than how it actually was “on hardware”.
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-12-23 02:18:17+00:00
Re: dependency pinning, I put together a little write-up about that: https://gist.github.com/MatrixManAtYrService/6eaf50373448c0b...

You can use it as an alternative to `git bisect` where only you're only bisecting the history of a single subflake. I imagine writing a new test that indicates the presence of an old bug, and then going back in time to see when the bug was reintroduced. With git bisect, going back in time means your new test goes away too.
by Ajedi32 | 2025-12-23 02:18:26+00:00
So is it your position, based on what you just said, that people who have committed murder but have not yet been caught are no more likely to commit murder a second time than the average person?

I think my example of helping police catch a murderer "before they kill again" is not only "grounded in reality" but has, in fact, quite plausibly already happened thousands of times throughout the course of Flock's existence.

Now, whether I think that justifies mass surveillance is another matter entirely.
by throwaway17_17 | 2025-12-23 02:18:37+00:00
I see that there is a section (relatively short) on real time GC. But for anyone who has read the Handbook, how much emphasis is placed on GC in constrained environments. I have fought the urge to implement a 3D, modern AA game with GC just to prove it is viable outside all but the most resource poor platforms or the most AAAAA, cutting edge, every cycle counted, hyper optimized game. But I am transitioning to a slightly less focused area of responsibility at work and may have some free time to prototype and this may be how I spend my winter and spring free time.
by autoexec | 2025-12-23 02:18:52+00:00
> If you look it up, the most gun crimes occur in Democrat-run gun-grabber areas that have the most gun laws.

Highly populated areas tend to be Democrat-run. People commit crimes so places with more people = more crimes. More gun crimes cause people to push for more gun laws. Gun laws limited to cities (or even states) have limited impact when it's trivial to get guns from neighboring areas without those laws. Gun laws with limited impact can still be helpful.

It's not as if we don't know for a fact that legislation works (since it works for many many other counties) but a patchwork system of laws that only applies to some areas and not others is bound to perform worse than federal systems. Even federal systems need to be smart and actually managed and enforced correctly to work well.

> Disarming people is an unacceptable solution for many reasons.

Disarming people is an acceptable solution for many reasons. We already do it to all kinds of people in many circumstances. It's just a question of when/how much is appropriate for which circumstances.

> The best solution to gun crime is to arm the law-abiding.

Only if you're a gun/ammo manufacturer. Real world evidence has shown over and over that the best solution is laws placing legal regulations on firearms. We can point to nation after nation whose gun problems are drastically lower than ours because of the laws they enacted.

On the other hand, there exists only fantasy world evidence that giving every man woman and child a gun would solve the problem. Arguably it's already been tried in the US and the result was complete failure.
by Aurornis | 2025-12-23 02:19:00+00:00
> and for up to one million lines of cell service for those and other school-issued laptops and tablets, according to contract documents reviewed by New York Focus

One million lines of cellular service for 800,000 students.

It’s a good idea to enable cellular service for those who don’t have adequate access at home. The majority of people don’t fit this description, though. As the article says, only about 1/8th of the students surveyed could be categorized as having inadequate access.

Somebody pushed a huge contract and got it, even though the service wasn’t needed at this scale. WiFi Chromebooks by default with a cellular option for the students who needed it would have saved a lot of recurring cellular contract charges.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-12-23 02:20:21+00:00
> Ethernet has had the concept of full duplex for several decades and I have no idea what you mean by: "hybrid on each end allows the use of the same channel at the same time."

Gigabit (and faster) is able to do full duplex without needing separate wires in each direction. That's the distinction they're making.

> The physical electrical connections between a series of ethernet network ports (switch or end point - it doesn't matter) are mediated by CSMA.

Not in a modern network, where there's no such thing as a wired collision.

> Take a single switch with n ports on it, where n>2. How do you mediate ethernet traffic without CSMA - its how the actual electrical signals are mediated?

Switches are not hubs. Switches have a separate receiver for each port, and each receiver is attached to one sender.
by kamaal | 2025-12-23 02:20:23+00:00
>>I think the reason python won was that it was easy to learn and read and was batteries included.

This is also a big reason why AI assisted programming will wholesale replace Python programmers.

If your are optimising for people who wish to remain at beginner levels all life, and that replaced people using power tools to solve harder and bigger problems. It shouldn't be surprising that now some automation will replace you.
by dghlsakjg | 2025-12-23 02:21:34+00:00
Wondering what the people who created the government think of the current government is massively different than wondering what either of two French philosophers who never participated in statecraft born 150 years later thinks.

It is perfectly normal to wonder what the architect of a system thinks of the current system, and entirely separate from wondering what a pair of unrelated Frenchman think of that system. Even if they are just “some ancient dead old dudes”.
by coppsilgold | 2025-12-23 02:21:40+00:00
I always wondered how useful such tools are against a competent adversary. If you are a competent engineer designing malware, wouldn't you introduce a dormancy period into your malware executable and if possible only talk to C&C while the user is doing something that talks to other endpoints? Maybe even choose the communication protocol based on what the user is doing to blend in even better.
by IgorPartola | 2025-12-23 02:22:30+00:00
One thing I ran into recently when I played around with passkeys is the problem of orphaned keys. Basically if I log into a website using the passkey and then go to my account settings and remove that passkey then log out I have a problem. Now I can’t sign in but when I go to recover my account iOS/macOS will refuse to create a new passkey because one already exists for this website. So I have to go to my passwords list and manually remove it. I believe I was correctly using the JS API for signaling orphaned keys but the OS still wouldn’t remove it so it was a situation of having to educate the user to remove the orphaned key manually (and hoping the user doesn’t get confused and remove the wrong key). You also apparently can’t create more than one passkey for the same username and the same website. So if I initially create an account from my MacBook and the passkey gets listed as “MacBook”, I then go to log in from my iPhone and it still uses the “MacBook” passkey because of iCloud sync. But this is confusing because I cannot have an iPhone key.

Overall it’s not terrible but I think these edge cases are going to keep biting people and need to be addressed in some way. And yes I understand that I could use a Yubikey or Bitwarden or some such but the point was that I wanted to see how this flow works for “normal” users who just use the iCloud Keychain and the experience leaves something to be desired.
by eru | 2025-12-23 02:22:34+00:00
> Now, Kg is a measure of mass (or weight, depending on who you are asking), which throws density into the equation, [...]

It's the other way round: chemically how much energy you get from burning your fuel is almost completely a function of mass, not of volume. (And in fact, you aren't burning liquid fuel either, in many engines the fuel gets vaporised before you burn it, thus expanding greatly in volume but keeping the same mass.)

> [...] which throws density into the equation, which is proportional to the temperature [...]

For an ideal gas, sure. But not for liquid fuels.

> "litres-of-fuel per km-driven" (Volume/Distance) is still fully reductible to an area: litres is still a volume (1 cubic decimeter) and km is still a distance (1x10⁴ dm) Maybe you meant that the other way around? Distance/Volume (as in Miles/gallon) is an Area⁻¹ (Distance⁻²), which is more difficult to imagine in space.

I don't think that the reciprocal is a problem. No, what I mean is that you can't cancel fuel with driving. Litres-of-fuel is a different unit than distance-driven ^ 3. Similar to how torque and energy are different physical quantities that you can't cancel willy-nilly, despite their units looking similar.

You might find a physical interpretation for an adventurous cancelling, and that's fine. But that's because you are looking behind the raw unadorned units at the physics, and basing your decision on that.

Units are a very stripped down look at physics. So units working out are necessary for cancelling to make sense, but not sufficient.
by autoexec | 2025-12-23 02:22:46+00:00
> I don't love flock but IMO the only realistic way to get rid of license plates would be mandatory speed governors that keep vehicles from going more than like 15mph.

I don't understand this reasoning. License plates don't stop speeding from happening. Removing license plates wouldn't prevent enforcement of speed limits either. A cop can pull over and ticket someone without a license plate just as easily as they do now.

At best they're good for a small number of situations where they help identify a car used in a crime (say a hit and run) but even then plenty of crimes are committed using cars that can't be linked back to the driver (stolen for example) or where the plates have been removed/obscured.
by josephg | 2025-12-23 02:23:13+00:00
I really like this analogy. In a sense, C restricts what you can do compared to programming directly in assembly. Like, there's a lot of programs you can write in assembly that you can't write in the same way in C. But those restrictions also constrain all the other code in your program. And that's a wonderful thing, because it makes it much easier to make large, complex programs.

The restrictions seem a bit silly to list out because we take them for granted so much. But its things like:

- When a function is called, execution starts at the top of the function's body.

- Outside of unions, variables can't change their type halfway through a program.

- Whenever a function is called, the parameters are always passed using the system calling convention.

- Functions return to the line right after their call site.

Rust takes this a little bit further, adding more restrictions. Things like "if you have a mutable reference to to a variable, there are no immutable references to that variable."
by ashirviskas | 2025-12-23 02:23:50+00:00
Moon lander computers were also game changers. Does not mean I should be impressed by the compute of a 30 year old calcualator that is 100x more powerful/efficient in 2025 when we have stuff a few orders of magnitude better.

For simple compute, its usefulness curve is a log scale. 10x faster may only be 2x more useful. For LLMs (and human intelligence) its more quadratic, if not inverse log (140IQ human can do maths that you cannot do with 2x 70IQ humans. And I know, IQ is not a good/real metric, but you get the point)
by evil-olive | 2025-12-23 02:23:53+00:00
there are many free "offline-only" password managers, eg `pass` [0] comes to mind.

you're charging $149. what does yours have that the free ones don't?

(other than a website full of cryptographic gibberish like "By using the unique DNA state-vector of every file as a seed, the engine generates distinct, unrelated keys for every file in the batch.")

0: https://www.passwordstore.org/
by phendrenad2 | 2025-12-23 02:25:43+00:00
It seems to me that there are exactly 3 buyers for FPGAs: Government contractors (who spend millions all at once), retro gamers (small market), and electronics hobbyists (another small market). It's no wonder every company has orientated itself towards the first one. I look to China to accidentally make chips that are an order of magnitude better "just because they can".