MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by KaiserPro | 2025-12-17 08:06:20+00:00
I mean yeah, booo facebook.

The problem with that assessment is that only really the monetisation team were the ones abusing the data. They are an organisation that were very much apart from the rest, different culture and different rules.

For the longest while you could be actually making things better, of thinking you were.

When problems popped up, we _could_ apply pressure and get things fixed. The blatant content discrimination in india, instagram kids, and a load of other changes were forced by employees.

However, in 2023 there were some rule changes aimed at stopping "social justice warrior-ing" internally. It was repeatedly tightened until questioning the leaders is considered against the rules.

Its no coincidence that product decisions are getting worse.
by innocentoldguy | 2025-12-17 08:07:33+00:00
We are talking about writing/spelling, aren't we?

Why would you want to confuse the hell out of those learning Japanese by spelling せんせい (sensei) using an E with a macron, a la "sensē," when that is not at all how you spell it or type in phonetically in an IME? Having a one-to-one romanization for each Hiragana phonetic is far more logical for learners, who are essentially the target of romanized Japanese, than creating a Hooked on Phonics version that is completely disconnected from writing reality.

I also think your comment, written in Japanese, saying, "This stupid nonsense isn't going to be of any use to anyone," is both ignorant and uncalled for.
by nickpp | 2025-12-17 08:08:06+00:00
> the Phoebus cartel

> 1000hr incandescent light bulbs remain the standard offering till present day

This proves in fact that all the cartel did was establish a standard, an optimal average between various tradeoffs when building an incandescent lightbulb: brightness, cost, efficiency and life span. Yes, the cartel behaved anti-competitively. The effect on the market? Nil.

> perfect information and infinite time

There is absolutely no requirement for this for markets to work. Markets work just fine with partial information and just-in time. When new information and new market participants appear, markets will self-correct. The only way to prevent markets from working is through government intervention.

In facts, free markets are the only system we have that works with incomplete info and reacts in real-time. Central planning will happily decide on incomplete info then never adapt. We saw that during communism when the Party decided allocate X resources for production of Y and it always resulted in a glut or shortages. Central planning doesn't work.
by jameshilliard | 2025-12-17 08:09:09+00:00
> Israel is a colonialist occupation project.

Saying a country made up heavily of refugees fleeing persecution is just a colonialist occupation project is pretty ridiculous IMO.

> So the UN being "biased" against it is good and correct.

There are many countries(including the US) that much more easily fit into your "colonialist occupation project" label that the UN doesn't go after.
by giacomoforte | 2025-12-17 08:09:44+00:00
She's hardly the average person, is she? High IQ enough to get a job at Jane Street and then constantly swimming in these elite networks at Stanford, Jane Street and whatever that weird EA thing is supposed to be.

If you do a BSc in Math in Europe and you have some olympiad creds, you have a good shot of joining Optiver or similar, and go from there.
by kostarelo | 2025-12-17 08:10:03+00:00
I'm trying to do a deep dive on RAG/LLM based apps since I didn't had the chance yet.

I'm building a chat-assistant that will be able to discuss with you and find more about what's your current work status and what you're looking for. Then it will suggest best suited roles for you from the HN Who's Hiring threads.

It's still very early, I've managed to index the latest thread and there's a CLI chat tool to discuss with the LLM.

It's been great because I learned a ton already, about LLM deployments, RAG evaluation, prompt engineering, LLM internals, etc.

https://github.com/kbariotis/hn-jobs
by timr | 2025-12-17 08:10:47+00:00
> If you're trying to say that when those two denote /o:/ it is a different /o:/, you are laughably wrong.

There's literally a different sound, which is why the difference in kana exists. Disagree if you like -- as I said, it's subtle -- but I don't know why you feel the need to be insulting about it. Writing an inaccurate non-kana symbol for the two sounds is no more an argument than saying that the sounds are identical because they share a common romanization.

There are some words where you can more clearly hear the difference than others. Consider, for example, the pronunciation of 紅茶, vs your example of 氷. It's not wrong to pronounce the former as a long o, but you can hear the difference when natives say it. Similarly, こういう is not said as こおいう, and 公園 is not こおえん.
by superstarryeyes | 2025-12-17 08:10:50+00:00
nice! yeah, i agree. calm tech is a nice way to put it. the current big platforms are highly tuned to keep people engaged and enraged to the max, rss is kind antithesis of that. that's probably why big companies try to bury and hide it. youtube and reddit still give pretty good rss support though, which is nice.
by walpurginacht | 2025-12-17 08:11:07+00:00
i'm enjoying langgraph the most, it's got nice integration with langfuse for observability and langchain (despite its shortcomings) with its plethora of integrations makes things easier to do, and the way to define the graph and transitions is pretty intuitive

currently trying out pydantic's own graph based approach to use together with dspy
by lxgr | 2025-12-17 08:11:50+00:00
Not sure I follow. Is your main objection to it that it can obfuscate login activity since many systems track login/connection events at the sshd level and are oblivious to SSH multiplexing?

I personally find it extremely useful when working with servers more than 100ms or so away in many contexts, and even closer if the workflow requires making many short-lived connections.
by pezezin | 2025-12-17 08:12:13+00:00
The biggest source of homonyms are words imported from Chinese, as Chinese morphemes are usually monosyllabic. It is already a problem in Chinese due to the limited phonotactics, made even worse in Japanese.

So the most obvious solution would be to drop on'yomi (Chinese readings) and go to pure kun'yomi (Japanese readings) whenever possible. My understanding is that such a strategy was used by the Koreans to replace Hanja with Hangul.

Now, I understand that it would be a massive undertaking and extremely unlikely to ever happen, and honestly it's not really my problem, so I am just speculating here xD
by 15155 | 2025-12-17 08:12:22+00:00
> You can't take pictures of the entire contents of a book and publish it.

Copyright is "mostly" civil law, not criminal.

> can't run into an airport and yell that you've got a bomb.

Right: now try and argue that a license plate intentionally designed for public visibility is somehow subject to the same restrictions. All 50 states have legislation requiring public display of these objects: what tailoring of the First Amendment would legally be consistent with past case law?

> I expect there are plenty of cases where you can't publish your video feed.

Legally these cases are few and far between, and none of these exceptions apply to the situation being discussed. You're welcome to try and cite a case or explain relevant case law - good luck.

Freedom of the press is extraordinarily broad and is one of the more difficult things to limit using criminal penalties.
by moooo99 | 2025-12-17 08:12:40+00:00
The biggest factor is almost certainly the subsidy for switching to a heatpump.

But there are other factors as well. Air to Air heatpumps are uncommon in Germany, we usually install Air to Water ones, which are more complex. Unlike other countries, our heat pumps are usually mounted on a concrete slab and not on the wall. Then there are some norms for quality of the water, etc. they aim to increase the lifespan of the system, but increase upfront costs
by kazinator | 2025-12-17 08:13:25+00:00
According to Etymonline (i.e. Douglas Harper), quite curiously, the "center" speling in English is actually older!

Quote:

The spelling with -re was popularized in Britain by Johnson's dictionary (following Bailey's), though -er is older and was used by Shakespeare, Milton, and Pope.

At the same time, it Etymonline traces the origin to Old French (14th century) which had it as centre.

Just because Milton, Pope and Shakespeare wrote "center" doesn't mean it was a good idea. The latter couldn't spell his own name the same way twice!
by LoganDark | 2025-12-17 08:14:41+00:00
> This is basically using access control lists to mimic a capability system

Is it? My understanding is access control lists are typically static, and on resources, defining what is allowed to access them, or on processes/threads/etc, defining what they are allowed to access. If you get a capability from something, and that something eventually becomes invalid, making the capability invalid, is keeping track of that necessarily an access control list? Is any data structure double-checking operations like that always necessarily an access control list? If each capability has a reference to a parent that it relies on to remain valid, does that mean each capability stores an access control list for itself?

If your answer to all of these is "yes, that's an access control list" then my response would be to start ignoring the presence of an access control list as it ceases to mean much of anything.
by doganugurlu | 2025-12-17 08:14:54+00:00
Without maintainability, adding a new type of input or feature will break existing features.

Doesn’t matter how quick it is to write from scratch, if you want varying inputs handled by the same piece of code, you need maintainability.

In a way, software development is all about adding new constraints to a system and making sure the old constraints are still satisfied.
by ahartmetz | 2025-12-17 08:15:56+00:00
It uses JS like the early web did: for little pieces of logic here and there. It isn't based or structured around, and certainly not made of, JS. It's fine. I don't like JS neither, but I do like QML.

Also, feel free to use QtWidgets for desktop apps, it's IMO the better technology for that unless your data is simple and you want it to look like a typical touch UI for some reason.
by leroman | 2025-12-17 08:16:03+00:00
What model are you working with where you still get good results at 25k?

To your q, I make huge effort in making my prompts as small as possible (to get the best quality output), I go as far as removing imports from source files, writing interfaces and types to use in context instead of fat impl code, write task specific project / feature documentation.. (I automate some of these with a library I use to generate prompts from code and other files - think templating language with extra flags). And still for some tasks my prompt size reaches 10k tokens, where I find the output quality not good enough
by smaudet | 2025-12-17 08:17:59+00:00
Not at all. To clarify, saying something is "over", without really saying what your plan is, is low effort.

"This is a problem, and here is what I/we should do", takes a bit more effort.

Firefox is still open source last I checked. You can still contribute, write bugs, write letters to the CEO, etc...

I'm only taking issue with tendency people have to throw shade without offering a solution.
Show HN: I built a deterministic vector DB kernel in Rust using fixed-point math
by varshith17 | 2025-12-17 08:18:20+00:00
While building a vector database in Python (valori: https://pypi.org/project/valori/), I ran into a bug that took longer than I want to admit.

The same embeddings, indexed on macOS and Windows, would sometimes produce slightly different nearest-neighbor results. Nothing dramatic but enough to break tests and make snapshots non-reproducible.

At first I assumed it was my code. Then I realized the problem wasn’t my logic at all it was "floating-point math".

Different CPUs, different compilers, FMA instructions, and subtle differences in IEEE behavior meant that “the same” computation wasn’t actually the same everywhere.

That sent me down a rabbit hole.

The idea:

Instead of trying to fight floating-point nondeterminism, I asked a simpler question:

What if the core of a vector system never used floats at all?

So I built a small kernel in Rust that uses fixed-point arithmetic (Q16.16) for all vector math. No floats in the core. No randomness. No architecture-dependent behavior.

Same inputs → same state → same snapshot → same search results. Always.

What the kernel does

Fixed-point vectors (Q16.16)

Deterministic insert, search, and replay

Snapshot + restore with bit-identical output

No RNG anywhere

No dependency on CPU floating-point behavior

The kernel is no_std friendly and is meant to be embedded under different layers (node server, Python client, edge devices).

Indexes and embeddings live outside the kernel. The kernel is just a deterministic memory engine.

Why this matters

Most vector databases optimize for throughput and scale. That’s fine.

But there’s a whole class of problems where reproducibility, auditability, and replayability matter more:

Edge devices (robots, drones)

Offline or intermittently connected systems

Long-running agents that need stable memory

Systems where “almost the same” isn’t good enough

This project is my attempt to explore that design space.

The code is early and opinionated, but the determinism is real.

Happy to hear feedback, skepticism, or pointers to similar work I should study.
by rw2 | 2025-12-17 08:18:21+00:00
Having used it compared to Nano Banana:

-The latency is still too high, lower than 10 seconds for nano banana and around 25 seconds for GPT image 1.5

-The quality is higher but not a jump like previous google models to Nano Banana Pro. Nano banana pro is still at least equivalently good or better in my opinion.
by pjmlp | 2025-12-17 08:19:10+00:00
If only, this will only happen when regular consumers can get GNU/Linux desktops and laptops fully working on shops like Media Market, Saturn, FNAC, Dixons, Publico,....

Until then it will be computer nerds buying from online shops, building their own PCs, or running Linux VMs alongside Windows and macOS.

Android, ChromeOS, WebOS have succeed among users, exactly because they are consumer OSes, where the use of Linux kernel is an implementation detail, and are available everywhere.
by OldOneEye | 2025-12-17 08:19:18+00:00
I agree. Kids or animals. Specially dogs that are mindless brutes.

I've been 3d printing with resin for a long time before I had my dog. Now I don't do it, unless I can be sure that I can have the dog out my printing room for several days straight, for the water-washable resin to solidify on the sun after usage, and all the different after-print steps that have to be taken care of.

It's also annoying to clean the plate, and deal with the resin bottles when you stop using them. There's no easily accessible infrastructure to dispose of the waste from the printing process so if you become lazy, you end up creating toxic hazards for anyone in the community. Not a good outcome at all.

Still, safe 3d printing brings me a lot of joy, specially to prepare board games sessions with friends and neighbours. Printing, painting, etc. You just have to be responsible and civic and do the right thing.

There's a safe way to handle this stuff, but you have to be very disciplined about it. Animals and kids complicate that big time.
by csydas | 2025-12-17 08:21:55+00:00
>We don't know if firefox might want to roll out their own locally hosted LLM model that then they plug into..

https://blog.mozilla.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/278/files/2025...

it's the cornerstone of their strategy to invest in local, sovereign ai models in an attempt to court attention from persons / organizations wary of us tech

it's better to understand the concern over mozilla's announcement the following way i think:

- mozilla knows that their revenue from default search providers is going to dry up because ai is largely replacing manual searching

- mozilla (correctly) identifies that there is a potential market in eu for open, sovereign tech that is not reliant on us tech companies

- mozilla (incorrectly imo) believes that attaching ai to firefox is the answer for long term sustainability for mozilla

with this framing, mozilla has only a few options to get the revenue they're seeking according to their portfolio, and it involves either more search / ai deals with us tech companies (which they claim to want to avoid), or harvesting data and selling it like so many other companies that tossed ai onto software

the concern about us tech stack dominations are valid and probably there is a way to sustain mozilla by chasing this, but breaking the us tech stack dominance doesn't require another browser / ai model, there are plenty already. they need to help unseat stuff like gdocs / office / sharepoint and offer a real alternative for the eu / other interested parties -- simply adding ai is mozilla continuing their history of fad chasing and wondering why they don't make any money, and demonstrates a lack of understanding imo about, well, modern life

my concern over the announcement is that mozilla doesn't seem to have learned anything from their past attempts at chasing fads and likely they will end up in an even worse position

firefox and other mozilla products should be streamlined as much as possible to be the best N possible with these kinds of side projects maintained as first party extensions, not as the new focus of their development, and they should invest the money they're planning to dump into their ai ambitions elsewhere, focusing on a proper open sovereign tech stack that they can then sell to eu like they've identified in their portfolio statement

the announcement though makes it seem like mozilla believes they can just say ai and also get some of the ridiculous ai money, and that does not bode well for firefox as a browser or mozilla's future
by skissane | 2025-12-17 08:22:36+00:00
> For LLMs, there is an added benefit. If you can formally specify what you want, you can make that specification your entire program. Then have an LLM driven compiler produce a provably correct implementation. This is a novel programming paradigm that has never before been possible; although every "declarative" language is an attempt to approximate it.

The problem is there is always some chance a coding agent will get stuck and be unable to produce a conforming implementation in a reasonable amount of time. And then you are back in a similar place to what you were with those pre-LLM solutions - needing a human expert to work out how to make further progress.
by akie | 2025-12-17 08:23:28+00:00
The reason is that the post you link to is overly simplistic. The only reason why Simon's experiment works is because there is a pre-existing language agnostic testing framework of 9000 tests that the agent can hold itself accountable to. Additionally, there is a pre-existing API design that it can reuse/reappropriate.

These two preconditions don't generally apply to software projects. Most of the time there are vague, underspecified, frequently changing requirements, no test suite, and no API design.

If all projects came with 9000 pre-existing tests and fleshed-out API, then sure, the article you linked to could be correct. But that's not really the case.
by ursAxZA | 2025-12-17 08:23:34+00:00
In plain-text romanization, the standard and expected spelling is “sensei.” That’s the formal, conventional representation, especially for typing and learning.

Phonetically, in natural speech, the vowel often compresses toward a long /e/ sound, so you may hear something closer to sense or sensee depending on context and speaker.

In stylistic writing (e.g. light novels or dialogue), you might occasionally see phonetic renderings to reflect speech, but in formal or instructional contexts, “sensei” remains the correct and expected form.

In short:

• Orthography: sensei

• Phonetics: can vary in actual speech

• Stylistic writing: sometimes bends toward pronunciation

Different layers, different purposes.

I think this may mostly be a case of people talking past each other.

One side is focusing on orthographic convention (how it’s written and typed), the other on phonetic realization (how it’s actually pronounced in speech).

Those aren’t contradictory claims — they’re just different layers of the same thing.
by pacjam | 2025-12-17 08:24:21+00:00
Oh interesting - it's just a .mp4. I put it on vercel blob storage just as a fast way to make it easily embeddeded in our CMS system, but I think I put it on the wrong Vercel account and the bucket got rate limited (happened a few hours ago, which is when I think you were probably looking). Can you see it now? In my own Firefox it looks OK now.
by englishcat | 2025-12-17 08:24:22+00:00
Thanks for you feedback, agreed.

The current version of word definition is somewhat rudimentary. right now we supported four languages(English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean), but we dont take much time to optimize for each language yet.

Our thought is that we will have a shared template across all the learning language, but also have abilities to customize the word definition template for language-specific needs.
by klardotsh | 2025-12-17 08:24:44+00:00
The REx hold up for about 60-65mph on flat ground without climate control. Change those parameters and you’ll still eat battery, just less of it. In the NA config of the car where the REx only comes on at 7% battery, this is a critical failing, but OBD coding the car to enable on-demand REx at any point below 75% (and then hold state of charge) transforms it into a whole new beast that’s extremely road trip capable.
by k9294 | 2025-12-17 08:25:15+00:00
I’ve worked with relatively large projects in TypeScript, Python, C#, and Swift, and I’ve come to believe the more opinionated the language and framework, the better. C# .NET, despite being a monster, was a breath of fresh air after TS. Each iteration just worked. Each new feature simply gets implemented.

My experience also points to compiled languages that give immediate feedback on build. It’s nearly impossible to stop any AI agent from using 'as any' or 'as unknown as X'casts in TypeScript - LLMs will “fix” problems by sweeping them under the rug. The larger the codebase, the more review and supervision is required. TS codebase rots much faster then rust/C#/swift etc.
by kazinator | 2025-12-17 08:25:47+00:00
> E with a macron, a la "sensē,"

Sorry, yes. That is my mistake. Hepburn doesn't use any such ē notation. Hepburn preserves えい and ええ as "ei" and "ee", conflating only "ou" and "oo" into ō (when they appear in a combination that denotes the long o:).