MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by LargoLasskhyfv | 2025-12-21 10:38:13+00:00
That all may be true and right, but looks and sounds so abstract. Since a picture says more than thousand words, I'll leave some here, of the same point, right at the border between the Netherlands and Germany:

https://openstreetmap.de/karte/?zoom=17&lat=51.90181&lon=6.1...

https://maps.app.goo.gl/Ynqa5V8YAZgiqdoJ6

https://www.bing.com/maps?cp=51.901264%7E6.137596&lvl=18.7&s...

What do they have in common?

On the Dutch side 3 modern tracks, fully operational.

One of them ending abruptly at a buffer stop.

Why?

Because the German side has only two old tracks.

This is going on for slightly more than a decade, IIRC.

So it could be said that Germany is putting the Dutch investment on the "Abstellgleis", because...why not?

Same shit is going on at the https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brenner-Nordzulauf#Stand_auf_d... for the https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brennerbasistunnel

Als möglicher Termin für einen Baubeginn in Deutschland wird der Anfang der 2030er Jahre genannt, für eine Fertigstellung 2040.

WIE BITTE?!

Two smaller countries, doing massive rail infrastructure projects, 'can do' mostly on time and budget.

Why can't Germany?

Hmmhrrrhmm. What else comes to mind? Oh yes! The https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fehmarnbelttunnel

Germany zero points again. Denmark more, wins! Or not. Because of what use is a bridge, err... tunnel to nowhere, for more years than necessary?
by fifilura | 2025-12-21 10:38:32+00:00
> after years of trials, one of our former President finally went to jail for a few weeks. And now, they're invited by media all over the country so they can complain about how unfair it was, they published a book about it, sold in the tens of thousands, their son is the new TV's favorite..

Yeah this is insightful. Another dictator went to jail in 1920s for staging a coup and used that time for writing his manifesto and getting sympathy from his followers. Some times (often these days) politics just lives on a plane outside the justice system. And it is really creepy.
by Hackbraten | 2025-12-21 10:39:11+00:00
> Then maybe some piece of data in this backup path interacts poorly with some other backend causing an error. The exception won’t tell you how you got there, only where you got stuck.

Then catch the exception on the backup path and wrap it in a custom exception that conveys to the handler the fact that you were on the backup path. Then throw the new exception.
by youngtaff | 2025-12-21 10:39:25+00:00
> SpaceX said it experienced an anomaly with one if its Starlink satellites that was likely caused by a small explosion. "The anomaly led to venting of the propulsion tank, a rapid decay in semi-major axis by about 4 km [2.5 miles] and the release of a small number of trackable low relatively velocity objects,"

Anyone know what relatively low velocity means… I presume it’s still pretty fast otherwise the objects would fall out of orbit immediately
by makeitdouble | 2025-12-21 10:41:12+00:00
Imagine you have a caching library that handles DB fallback. A cache that should be there but goes missing is arguably an issue.

Should if throw an exception for that to let you know, or should it gracefully fallback so your service stays alive ? The middle ground is leaving a log and chugging along, your proposition throws that out of the window.
by hshdhdhj4444 | 2025-12-21 10:43:11+00:00
The actual details are that the U.S. government canceled visa interview appointments for months, literally days before people were supposed to show up for them, and now are unable to travel back to the U.S. for at least 3-4 months, with some appointments being pushed to as late as 2027.

It’s a complete farces and shows the current administration to both be evil and incompetent. All they’ve achieved here is people getting paid American dollars, but nonetheless working in India, so they spend and pay taxes on those American dollars in India as opposed to the U.S.

Its clownish to say the least.
by gelatocar | 2025-12-21 10:43:29+00:00
Whenever there are stories about bushfires in Australia there is inevitably discussion about how the regeneration is amazing and how fires are part of the ecosystem. While this is true to an extent, it is important to point out that in recent years due to climate change the frequency and intensity of the fires is causing huge ecosystem change to areas that are burnt multiple times before they can recover.

https://connectsci.au/wf/article-abstract/25/8/831/21102/Too...
by jcupitt | 2025-12-21 10:44:07+00:00
libvips, the library behind sharp, has just released version 8.18.0: https://www.libvips.org/2025/12/04/What's-new-in-8.18.html

It includes support for UltraHDR (HDR and SDR in one JPEG file), camera RAW images, and the Oklab colourspace. This should all be coming to sharp in the next six month or so.
by littlecranky67 | 2025-12-21 10:45:37+00:00
Why is usage of AI even a discussion point? Steam also now enforces publishers to disclose if they used AI during game creation. It is a tool, and as a consumer I judge the end product. I don't care what tools were used in the production, just as I don't care if you use Photoshop, Pixelmator, Maya, 3DSMax or whatnot. The end result is what counts. And if the end result is full of bullshit AI slop and is not fun to play, don't give them an award. I played Claire Obscure and it is an absolut stunning and beautiful game.
by konradb | 2025-12-21 10:45:51+00:00
A little while ago Bloomberg published a list of his books. I created two lists on Goodreads containing these books, using Bloomberg as a source.

2007 -> 2017:

https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/237057.Epstein_s_Library...

2018 -> 2019:

https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/237060.Epstein_s_Library...

You can only add 100 books in a Goodreads list so I had to create two. In the lists I linked back to the original Bloomberg article.
by makeitdouble | 2025-12-21 10:49:48+00:00
Warning logs are usually polluted with stuff nobody wants to fix but try to wash their hands off with a log. Like deprecated calls or error logs that got demoted because it didn't matter in practice.

Anything that has a measurable impact on production should be logged above that, except if your system ignores log levels in the first place, but that's another can of worms.
by amindiro | 2025-12-21 10:51:30+00:00
I’ve spent the last few weeks deconstructing FlashAttention. While the original paper is brilliant, I found that just reading it didn't give me a "gut feeling" for why certain engineering choices were made (the transition from v1 to v2).

I decided to rebuild it from scratch using Triton. This post is a chronicle of that journey—moving beyond the high-level algorithm and into the "performance archaeology" of the GPU:

- Profiling with Nsight Compute to find the real bottlenecks.

- Looking at the generated PTX and SASS code.

- Debugging shared memory bank conflicts and MIO bottlenecks.

- Iterating through the logic to see why tiling and online softmax are hardware-necessitated, not just mathematical tricks.

I’ve tried to keep it in the spirit of Simon Boehm’s matmul deep dive. Would love to hear from any GPU engineers on whether my interpretations of the SASS/bank conflict behavior match what you've seen in production.
by frm88 | 2025-12-21 10:52:30+00:00
Writers and musicians are mostly broken. If we sum the rising cost of living, AI generated content and piracy, there's almost no reward left for their work.

For authors (books) ~70% of all the book sales go to the publisher, not the author (trad pub): https://reedsy.com/blog/how-much-do-authors-make/

For musicians: depending on how big a name you are and which publisher you chose, the publishers compensation ranges from 15% (small name/indy) to 60% (big name/Universal, Sony) https://www.careersinmusic.com/music-publishing/

This is an industry with profit maximising as its goal like every other industry. If artists are broke, first take a look at the publishers.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-12-21 10:52:42+00:00
There are a couple of things that are being glossed over:

Hardware failures and automated fail overs. That's a thing AWS and other managed hosting solutions do. Hardware will eventually fail of course. In AWS this would be a non event. It will fail over, a replacement spins up, etc. Same with upgrades, and other stuff.

Configuration complexity. The author casually outlines a lot of fairly complex design involving all sorts of configuration tweaks, load balancing, etc. That implies skills most teams don't have. I know enough to know that I have quite a bit of reading up to do if I ever were to decide to self host postgresql. Many people would make bad assumptions about things being fine out of the box because they are not experienced postgresql DBAs.

Vacations/holidays/sick days. Databases may go down when it's not convenient to you. To mitigate that, you need to have several colleagues that are equally qualified to fix things when they go down while you are away from keyboard. If you haven't covered that risk, you are taking a bit of risk. In a normal company, at least 3-4 people would be a good minimum. If you are just measuring your own time, you are not being honest or not being as diligent as you should be. Either it's a risk you are covering at a cost or a risk you are ignoring.

With managed hosting, covering all of that is what you pay for. You are right that there are still failure modes beyond that that need covering. But an honest assessment of the time you, and your team, put in for this adds up really quickly.

Whatever the reasons you are self hosting, cost is probably a poor one.
Show HN: GoRay – Ray Core for Golang
by Wang0618 | 2025-12-21 10:52:55+00:00
GoRay is a library that brings Ray Core capabilities to Go.

It allows you to:

- Build distributed applications in pure golang using Ray's actor and task model - Call python tasks/actors from Go and vice versa

The project also includes a CLI tool (goraygen) to generate type-safe wrappers for your golang actors and tasks, providing compile-time safety.

How it works: The Go code is compiled into a shared library (-buildmode=c-shared). A Python driver loads this library and bridges the communication with the Ray core.

Github: https://github.com/ray4go/go-ray

I'd love to hear your feedback!
by heresie-dabord | 2025-12-21 10:52:59+00:00
"Washer" and "dryer" are accepted colloquial terms for these appliances.

I could even see the humour in "washer-bot" and "dryer-bot" if they did anything notably more complex. But we don't need/want appliances to become more complex than is necessary. We usually just call such things programmable.

I can accept calling our new, over-hyped, hallucinating overlords chatbots. But to be fair to the technology, it is we chatty humans doing all the hyping and hallucinating.

The market capitalisation for this sector is sickly feverish — all we have done is to have built a significantly better ELIZA [1]. Not a HIGGINS and certainly not AGI. If this results in the construction of new nuclear power facilities, maybe we can do the latter with significant improvement too. (I hope.)

My toaster and oven will never be bots to me. Although my current vehicle is better than earlier generations, it contains plenty of bad code and it spews telemetry. It should not be trusted with any important task.

[1] _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA
by formerly_proven | 2025-12-21 10:54:13+00:00
All iterators in Python use exceptions for flow control, as do all context managers for the abort/rollback case, and it is generally considered Pythonic to use single-indexing (EAFP) instead of check-then-get (LBYL) - generally with indexing and KeyError though and less commonly with attribute access and AttributeError.

[heavy green check mark]

try: data = collection['key'] except KeyError: data = ..try something else..

[red x]

if 'key' in collection: data = collection['key'] else: data = ..try something else..

The latter form also has the genuine disadvantage that nothing ensures the two keys are the same. I've seen typos there somewhat often in code reviews.
by ad_hockey | 2025-12-21 10:54:29+00:00
That does the Luddites a bit of a disservice:

> But the Luddites themselves “were totally fine with machines,” says Kevin Binfield, editor of the 2004 collection Writings of the Luddites. They confined their attacks to manufacturers who used machines in what they called “a fraudulent and deceitful manner” to get around standard labor practices. “They just wanted machines that made high-quality goods,” says Binfield, “and they wanted these machines to be run by workers who had gone through an apprenticeship and got paid decent wages. Those were their only concerns.”[1]

[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-the-luddites-rea...
by Dagger2 | 2025-12-21 10:55:55+00:00
Well, okay, show us how to follow those instructions then.

"the :1 is short for :0001 basically" is easy enough: you get 2001::0001::0001.

Then "just put that bit at the very end" -- but which bit? If it means the ":0001", then there's two of them and they can't both go at the very end. If not, then it fails to specify which bit. Either way I don't see how these instructions are followable at all, let alone easily.
Show HN: I built an LLM agent that finds you online and roasts you
by _josh_meyer_ | 2025-12-21 10:56:40+00:00
Hi, author here o/

This is an agent that looks up public information and roasts you based on what it finds.

The Santa theme is just seasonal UI. Underneath, it is a straightforward agent that does web lookup, identity confirmation, and multi turn interaction.

Happy to answer questions or hear what breaks.
by gyomu | 2025-12-21 10:56:46+00:00
I don't find it that surprising. The creatives that are against generative AI aren't against it only because it produces slop. They are against it because it uses past human creative labor, without permission or compensation, to generate profit for the companies building the models which they do not redistribute to the authors of that creative labor. They are also against it due to environmental impact.

In that view, it doesn't matter whether you use it for placeholder or final assets. You paying your ChatGPT membership makes you complicit with the exploitation of that human creative output, and use of resources.
by mcny | 2025-12-21 10:57:17+00:00
One thing that will always stick in my mind is one time I worked at a national Internet service provider.

The log disk was full or something. That's not the shameful part though. What followed is a mass email saying everyone needs to update their connection string from bla bla bla 1 dot foo dot bar to bla bla bla 2 dot foo dot bar

This was inexcusable to me. I mean this is an Internet service provider. If we can't even figure out DNS, we should shut down the whole business and go home.
by freespirt | 2025-12-21 10:57:59+00:00
Fair points on the CGT comparisons - you’re right that some of those systems are more complex than headline rates suggest. Luxembourg and Netherlands do have their quirks.

But on the timing point - that’s actually my exact argument. The 19% CGT decline from £16.9bn (2022-23) to £13.7bn (2024-25) happened BEFORE Labour’s October 2024 rate increases. The decline occurred under the Conservative government while rates were still at the “low” levels you criticised.

That’s precisely the problem: revenues were already falling when rates were at 10%/20%. Then Labour increased them to 18%/24% in October 2024, likely accelerating the decline further (we’ll see in the next fiscal year’s data).

So the revenue decline can’t be blamed on Labour’s rate increases - it happened before them. Which suggests either:

1. Even the “low” rates were still high enough to trigger behavioural responses, or 1. Other factors (non-dom changes announced, anticipated tax increases, international competition) were already driving capital flight

Either way, it supports the Laffer curve thesis: the tax base was shrinking before the rate increases, and those increases are unlikely to reverse the trend.

The OBR’s £7.5bn shortfall report (March 2025) specifically attributes this to behavioural factors beyond just asset prices, which is why they classified £4.5bn as structural rather than temporary.

What’s your read on why CGT revenues fell 14% in 2023-24 if rates hadn’t changed yet?
by anovikov | 2025-12-21 10:58:08+00:00
As for political division - i still remember 1994 midterms when the going complaint about politics was that elections were a fake since people told to choose between two parties that differ about as much as Coke and Pepsi do. That it was a choice with no choice. It's actually a fair description of what was going on. Maybe a bit of political division is a good thing.
by throwaway290 | 2025-12-21 11:03:19+00:00
Their argument is that only non citizens who committed some crime get deported. Which is basically normal in many countries except maybe EU. I for sure know of people who got deported after committing crimes or even just administrative wrongdoings while being on legal visas

What you can say US should hold itself to higher standard and how trump does it is absolutely wrong... Then I agree

Yoo can also say that right wingers move goalposts by first saying "only illegal migrants get deported" then saying "even legal migrants pending citizenship can get deported if they commit a crime" then "any non citizen can get deported because nothing in constitution prevents it" which happens but it's usually hard to get somebody for moving goalposts in a real life argument.

But saying "whether someone is a citizen or not" is irrelevant is wrong because for US citizens is very relevant
by metalman | 2025-12-21 11:04:44+00:00
Exceptionaly well documented and written article detailing the well known techniques used to build the iconic stone work in south america. I read an earlier account of a researcher who started investigating pre spanish south american quaries, and how there sudden realisation, while sitting down for lunch, that the round stone to there right, was the hammer used to shape the larger stone to there left and the rows of peck marks ending in raw stone, all of those centuries before. Having worked a bit of stone myself, learning to shape, temper stone drills, and test them for utility, it is very easy to understand how basic pragmatism and persistance, in stone, yields large structures that retain that essential message of we are not messing around in this effort, and your opinions can only embellish this. When considering stone articacts of any scale, it is always best to keep in mind that lithic technology pre dates our "species", and our evolutionary track is directly parallel with it, and there is quite litteraly, mountains of evidence for this.And should you so wish, any modest effort to go look, dig, search the ground, known hunting areas or settlement zones, will yield physical evidence that anyone can examine. our development of technology
by spwa4 | 2025-12-21 11:05:18+00:00
The thing is, nothing that usually changes things applies to Chomsky. What he did was most certainly not a normal thing to do in his time. Like one might say about George Washington or even further back, like Clovis. By today's standards they were morally wrong, but not by the standards of their time and they advanced morals. They made things better.

Chomsky is wrong by the standards of his time and is making things worse rather than better.

It was very much the opposite of Chomsky's ideology as well. So it additionally means he's fake. BOTH on his morals and politics/activism, from both sides (ie. both helping a paedophile, and helping/entertaining a billionnaire).

So it's (yet another) case of an important figure that supposedly stands for something, not just demonstrating he stands for nothing at all, but being a disgusting human being as well.
by surgical_fire | 2025-12-21 11:05:43+00:00
Are you telling me that, for example, rock texture used in a wall is "asking questions about what it means to be human"?

If some creator with intentionality uses an AI generated rock texture in a scene where dialogue, events, characters and angles interact to tell a story, the work does not ask questions about what it means to be human anymore because the rock texture was not made by him?

And in the same vein, all code is soldering cables so the machine does a thing? Intentionality of game mechanics represented in code, the technical bits to adhere or work around technical constraints, none of it matters?

Your argument was so bad that it made me reflexively defend Gen AI, a technology that for multiple reasons I think is extremely damaging. Bad rationale is still bad rationale though.
by janandonly | 2025-12-21 11:07:28+00:00
Indeed writing carelessly with disregard for formatting, grammar and punctuation, is something only for the highly powerful and rich, or for the extremely dyslexic and dumb.

Makes one wonder, even if this guy was rich, was he maybe very dumb? And/or dyslexic?

He must at the very least have been a sociopath to not care about all the lives he ruwend.

But a sociopath is very capable of looking sincere and pretending to not know about the hurt done to others. To me it seems more like he was a narcissist.
by stevekemp | 2025-12-21 11:07:42+00:00
Sure! Walk out of the sauna, over the garden, down the dock, then jump into the lake for a naked swim.

Do that daily for about four weeks, come rain or shine, whilst enjoying your summer vacation.

Of course that probably doesn't work for every country, but here in Finland it's normal enough. Too bad I'm a pale-skinned redhead, covered in freckles, and I get burned if I'm not too careful.
by tokioyoyo | 2025-12-21 11:10:02+00:00
It’s the usual “I don’t like it, I’m against, but it’s okay if I use it” thing. People understand the advantage it gives a person over another one, so they will still use it here and there. You’ll have some people who will be vehemently against it, but it will be the same as people who categorically against having smartphones, or avoiding using any Meta products because of tracking and etc.
by synecdoche | 2025-12-21 11:12:17+00:00
The video does not counter the parents argument about measuring fit.

What the masons in the video do is certainly impressive. Cutting organic shapes that fit perfectly together, as if they once were elastic, is another level.

Perhaps the did something similar to what dentists do when building on teeth so that the added material is not the only contract point when jaws are closed. That is, a contact sheet that leaves contact marks.
by BoingBoomTschak | 2025-12-21 11:12:32+00:00
Which also means almost always limited to the latest, almost always crappy (or blind to the original ambiance) remaster! One of the main reasons why I don't bother with streaming, really.

(And because they lack much obscure stuff and I don't like being dependent on the Internet and a renter's whims for something as essential as music, I guess)
by ssl-3 | 2025-12-21 11:14:31+00:00
Eh. It worked for me after that wind storm.

As previously-stated: There was no rate increase that I could discern.

I did neglect to mention that there was also no issue with renewal, but perhaps I should be more careful to always use absolute rote specificity and leave nothing to implication.

They also sent over some folks with a tall ladder to have a look at the roof of this property that they insured, which was good since we had no means to visually inspect it from the ground. (The roof was fine.)

Anecdotally, that phone call to the insurance company had no downside at all.

It provided a roof inspection that I did not have ready means to perform on my own, and a relatively small amount of money (a couple of hundred bucks) that became very useful not just because of lost food, but also due to all of the other storm-related issues that we were not insured against.