MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hebejebelus | 2025-12-23 18:34:10+00:00
Sort of related: About ten years ago there was a device called the Tessel by Technical Machine which you programmed with Javascript, npm, the whole nine yards. It was pretty clever - the javascript got transpiled to Lua VM bytecode and ran in the Lua VM on the device (a Cortex M3 I believe). I recently had Claude rewrite their old Node 0.8 CLI tools in Rust because I wasn't inclined to do the javascript archeology needed to get the old tools up and running. Of course then I put the Tessel back in its drawer, but fun nonetheless.
by ACCount37 | 2025-12-23 18:35:08+00:00
Nah, that's just plain wrong.

First, GPGPU is powerful and flexible. You can make an "AI-specific accelerator", but it wouldn't be much simpler or much more power-efficient - while being a lot less flexible. And since you need to run traditional graphics and AI workloads both in consumer hardware? It makes sense to run both on the same hardware.

And bandwidth? GPUs are notorious for not being bandwidth starved. 4K@60FPS seems like a lot of data to push in or out, but it's nothing compared to how fast modern PCIe 5.0 x16 goes. AI accelerators are more of the same.
by calmbonsai | 2025-12-23 18:35:11+00:00
No. They deliberately programed entire generations of diesel engines to give the wrong smog emissions results by knowing the environment and duty-cycle of emissions testing.

On both total emissions as well as emissions/ton/mile metric, long-haul commercial fleet diesel trucks are far better than the millions of polluting and poorly maintained small displacement privately owned diesel cars and pick-ups.
by linguae | 2025-12-23 18:35:17+00:00
Some honorable mentions:

1. Lotus 1-2-3 for MS-DOS

2. WordPerfect for MS-DOS, especially version 5.1

3. Aldus PageMaker, which predates Photoshop 1.0. It jumpstarted the desktop publishing revolution, and it also arguably saved the Apple Macintosh, which suffered from slow sales after its introduction, leading to Steve Jobs’ exit from the company.

4. Apple HyperCard, which further made the Mac stand out from its competitors.

5. Netscape Navigator. Yes, Mosaic predates Netscape Navigator, but it was Netscape Navigator that was many non-technical users’ first web browser in the mid-1990s.

6. The Apple iLife suite (e.g., iPhoto, iMovie, GarageBand), which set the Mac apart in the 2000s by offering very easy to use applications for handling digital media.

7. The entire NeXT ecosystem of applications and developer tools from the late 1980s and early 1990s. There are so many, but highlights include Interface Builder and Lotus Improv. NeXT didn’t do very well in the marketplace, but it maintained a niche audience well into the late 1990s due to its software ecosystem and its developer tools.

8. Microsoft Visual Basic was revolutionary for making it easy to write quick-and-dirty GUI applications for Windows.
by dwoldrich | 2025-12-23 18:35:29+00:00
They claim $1329.19 saved per taxpayer. https://www.doge.gov/savings

As long as we're in fiat, debt-based, race to the bottom, universally-enshittificate mode, that's a big ol' fart nothingburger. Call me when the Fed ends.

Doge dealt well-deserved shocks to the comfy bureaucracy and revealed corruption in the NGO's. The bureaucracy, the military/IC, the media, the banksters, the bought and paid for reps - it's all one of a piece. Doge helped a lot of people come to that conclusion, so that's helpful. I think Trump's people are all acting to mask whatever they're really doing anyhow. It's absurd WWF kayfabe nonstop and has been for years.
by rep_lodsb | 2025-12-23 18:35:35+00:00
"In 1193 (1981.), I submitted my first article [...] and in 1197 (1987.), I became a member"

Seems obviously wrong, or is that yet another dozenal notation, where what looks like the digit three is really a one? Because it should have been real easy to avoid mistakes like that for an entire decade by just remembering that 1190 = 1980 decimal (next time the decades and dozen-years align like that will be in 2040).
Show HN: A kids book that introduces authorization and permissions concepts
by samkim | 2025-12-23 18:36:30+00:00
A colleague and I made a kids' picture book that introduces authorization concepts.

We work at AuthZed and explain these concepts regularly. We thought it'd be fun to put them together in a format accessible and appealing to kids and grownups alike. It would also be helpful when explaining what we do for work and make a unique gift for our families.

The goal was a fun story first and foremost. We aimed to present concepts accessibly but made conscious decisions to simplify, knowing we couldn't be comprehensive in a picture book format.
We also wanted visually appealing illustrations, so we built a custom tool to streamline exploring ideas with AI. It does reference-weighted image generation (upload references, weight which ones matter most), git-like branching for asset organization, and feedback loops that improve subsequent generations. It was built with Claude Code. Here's a screenshot: https://content.authzed.com/hubfs/screenshot-design-asset-ma...

We'd love feedback on where we chose to simplify. Did we get the tradeoffs right or did we oversimplify? And lastly, did you enjoy the story?

You can read the book online: https://authzed.com/resources/dibs-and-the-magic-library
by stouset | 2025-12-23 18:36:36+00:00
> but then lets the waste heat just pour out

There is no other alternative! If I build a perfect Dyson sphere and capture the energy output of a star, all of that energy will become heat. The average surface temperature of my Dyson sphere will be (IIRC) the ratio of the surface area of the sphere to that of the contained star, multiplied by the star's effective surface temperature.

"Recovering heat and making use of it" requires a heat differential. You need a cold side and a hot side to use energy. Using that energy causes the cold side to heat and the hot side to cool, until they reach equilibrium. The further the difference, the more usable work you can do. The closer the two sides are, the less work you can do.

Someone else here said it best: waste heat is the graveyard of energy. Once you have used energy, it will become high-entropy, low-grade, diffuse heat which is difficult-to-impossible to extract further work from.
by wood_spirit | 2025-12-23 18:37:56+00:00
A long time ago I was trying to get video multiplexing to work over mobile over 3G. We struggled with H264 which had broad enough hardware support but almost no tooling and software support on the phones we were targeting. Even with engineers from the phone manufacturer as liaison we struggled to get access to any kind or SDK etc. We ended up doing JPEG streaming instead, much like the article said. And it worked great but we discovered we were getting a fraction of the framerate reported in Flash players - the call to refresh the screen was async and the act of receiving and deciding the next frame staved the redraw so the phone spent more time receiving lots of frames but not showing them. Super annoying and I don’t think the project survived long enough for us to find a fix.
by magicalhippo | 2025-12-23 18:38:40+00:00
If you have competent people on both sides who care, I don't see why it wouldn't work.

The problem seems, at least from a distance, to be that bosses treat it as a fire-and-forget solution.

We haven't had any software done by oursiders yet, but we have hired consultants to help us on specifics, like changing our infra and help move local servers to the cloud. They've been very effective and helped us a lot.

We had talks though so we found someone who we could trust had the knowledge, and we were knowledgeable enough ourselves that we could determine that. We then followed up closely.
by SR2Z | 2025-12-23 18:38:45+00:00
This is a factual discussion of the president sending undesirables to a concentration camp in a foreign country. It's certainly not hysterical.

If this is emotional slop to you and you feel the need to complain about it, maybe you SHOULD be on r/Conservative or Xitter where you will find lots of likeminded people saying that this stuff is no big deal. Ironic.
by quitit | 2025-12-23 18:39:12+00:00
>I just read the post about Japan.

Great, now let's stack what you've written in both of your comments directly against what Gruber has written, and not what an imaginary strawman wrote.

You wrote:

1. I have no doubt that Gruber will find reasons why the EU is bad and regulation is bad.

2. The EU has already gone through the hard work of drafting the law, working with a non-cooperative Apple, and then actually seeing it implemented and the practical issues that arise.

3. Most of his description of what Japan does better is simply “mutual respect”.

Addressing point 1 (again):

I wrote words to the effect of (they're just above): Gruber's writing is not as black and white as you assert and then I made reference to the Japan regulation article as an example where Gruber again makes nuanced arguments towards regulated changes.

That article does not make a blanket statement that regulation is bad, and Gruber points to a long-standing idea that he has which neither the EU nor Japan have regulated, which he believes should be. He's also stated (repeatedly) that he's in favour of link-outs and other commonly requested changes to the app store terms, and believe's Apple are too slow to change on these.

So does Gruber believe all regulation is bad as you have asserted: no. His views are demonstrably in favour of well-minded regulation.

Addressing point 2: The belief that the EU bears the brunt of regulation teething, and that's why it goes well in other regions.

Maybe you skipped the part where Gruber points to a 2021 regulation requirement from Japan, which Apple in fact did not provide resistance to, but worked with the regulatory authority to achieve their goal - then Schiller himself (the overseer of the App store at the time) came out and spoke in public with supportive language.
That is an example Gruber provided, however there are plenty more examples of the app store changing policies long before the EU took notice. The EU gets all the attention here because they seem to be uniquely incapable of foreseeing unintended consequences.

So is the EU's leading the source of friction. No and they're not even first in many respects.

Addressing point 3: Gruber makes only immaterial "mutual respect" comparisons between DMA/MSCA.

I'm guessing you skimmed this bit too - Gruber talks at length to MSCA and DMA's approach to regulation, stating that MSCA's changes prioritise privacy and security in contrast to the DMA, and practical aspects such as user safety (that's a wee bit more than "mutual respect"). Secondly that users are not presented with onerous choice screens (see end note 1) which is making reference to the EU's requirement that browser selection screens must be repeatedly shown when the user's default browser is Safari (but not if it's any other browser), Japan doesn't take this approach to a browser selection screen.

So is it true that Gruber makes immaterial comparisons between the two: again no.
by calmbonsai | 2025-12-23 18:40:36+00:00
> Basically I can think of only a one climate where life on bikes is really hard: very hot and humid.

Truth. I used to live in D.C. and our office was so enthused about bike-commuting we lobbied the building to install showers and a small locker-room so folks could change.

It lasted about a year. It was just too time consuming to maintain "bike clothes & work clothes" and change into/out of them (we're talking suits) every workday.

Now I live in Boulder, CO and we've got both better (drier) weather and athleisure sartorial standards--win win!
by egorfine | 2025-12-23 18:40:38+00:00
> The constraint that ruined everything: It has to work on enterprise networks.

> You know what enterprise networks love? HTTP. HTTPS. Port 443. That’s it. That’s the list.

That's not enough.

Corporate networks also love to MITM their own workstations and reinterpret http traffic. So, no WebSockets and no Server-Side Events either, because their corporate firewall is a piece of software no one in the world wants and everyone in the world hates, including its own developers. Thus it only supports a subset of HTTP/1.1 and sometimes it likes to change the content while keeping Content-Length intact.

And you have to work around that, because IT dept of the corporation will never lift restrictions.

I wish I was kidding.
by HocusLocus | 2025-12-23 18:40:55+00:00
This is a beautiful cope. Every time technology rolls out something that works great 90% of the time for 90% of the people, those 10%s pile up big time in support and lost productivity. You need functional systems that fall back gracefully to 1994 if necessary.

I started the first ISP in my area. We had two T1s to Miami. When HD audio and the rudiments of video started to increase in popularity, I'd always tell our modem customers, "A few minutes of video is a lifetime of email. Remember how exciting email was?"
by jackpepsi | 2025-12-23 18:41:23+00:00
I think they explain a compelling problem about typical commerical software vs FOSS, then they dive into their GPU accelerated VM solution. I don't see how it helps solve the original problem.

Is is that FOSS needs a standard sandbox and they think some kind of peer to peer app store that disturbes images for VMs is the way to do it?
by rcarmo | 2025-12-23 18:41:40+00:00
This was the most entertaining thing I read all day. Kudos.

I've had similar experiences in the past when trying to do remote desktop streaming for digital signage (which is not particularly demanding in bandwidth terms). Multicast streaming video was the most efficent, but annoying to decode when you dropped data. I now wonder how far I could have gone with JPEGs...
by j45 | 2025-12-23 18:42:10+00:00
It wouldn't be unheard of.

Qualcomm before they made all the chips they do today, ran a pretty popular and successful email client called Eudora.

Doing one thing well can lead to doing bigger things well.

More realistically, if the top end chips go towards the most demanding work, there might be more than enough lower grade silicon that can easily keep the gaming world going.

Plus, gamers rarely stop thinking in terms of gaming, and those insights helped develop GPUs into what they are today, and may have some more light to shine in the future. Where we see gaming and AI coming together, whether it's in completely and actually immersive worlds, etc, is pretty interesting.

Update: Adding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudora_(email_client)
by epistasis | 2025-12-23 18:42:42+00:00
It is not "100%" necessary. Worst case, we just print dollars to pay off the debt. The US Government is not a business in the sense dollars, it's a business in the sense of issuing equity out in the world. And just as a company can print more equity at any time, the US government prints equity, equivalently, by either printing dollars or by issuing Treasury Bills (debt), which are merely more complicated dollars. T-bills are more complicated dollars in two ways 1) they throw off a small amount of interest making them more attractive than regular dollars, 2) their value can be retroactively changed whenever the US changes interest rates. That second point, they dynamic revaluation of previously issued T-bills by interest rate changes, is what gives a lot more monetary control than if we just printed dollars.

But if we are in a situation where there's been a bond investor revolt, and there's nothing else to be done, we just give dollars to everyone as T-bills mature rather than issuing more debt, and we retract from the world stage, and become like other countries in the world.

We are a loooooong ways away from that position, but this presidential administration is behaving so erratically that the US dollar is closer to losing its privileged status than I ever thought possible. It's such irrational, damaging, and erratic behavior going on right now that everything could topple if it continues for much longer.
by lbrito | 2025-12-23 18:42:47+00:00
I get the irony, but its a bit meaningless since we can't compare the quantity of these (yet) uncensored posts with those that have been taken down, and thus aren't visible.

More importantly, other commentors here have already admitted to flagging this entry. The way flagging exists now rewards one-sideism and partisan behaviour - all it takes is a relatively small group of discontented people to take down a story that is otherwise interesting to the vast majority of posters. A counter-flag option would balance things.
by thwarted | 2025-12-23 18:43:55+00:00
PJ O'Rourke had a line in his book "Parliament of Whores" when he, as a layman, ham-fistedly cuts a bunch of stuff from the federal budget, and then just subtracts 10% from it at the end. Probably not the originator, but a quote I think about often.

"Add it all together, and I've cut $282.8 billion, leaving a federal
budget of $950.5 billion, to which I apply O'Rourke's Circumcision Precept: You can take 10 percent off the top of anything. This gives me another
$95 billion in cuts for a grand total of $337.8 billion in budget liposuction."

Parliament of Whores, page 103.
by ErroneousBosh | 2025-12-23 18:44:04+00:00
You don't need vitamin supplements. You don't need to waste money on vitamin pills. You just need to eat food, and ideally avoid wacky diets like only eating meat or only eating plants or anything like that.

Eat a balanced diet, go outside sometimes, and you'll be fine.

One single cherry tomato contains enough vitamin C to last you for a week. If you take a vitamin C tablet too, you're just making your pee more expensive.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-12-23 18:44:17+00:00
Maybe, maybe not, whatever.

I was testing some low-bandwidth voice chat code using two unloaded PCs sitting on the same desk. I nearly jumped out of my skin when "HELLO, HELLO?" came through a few seconds late, at high volume, after I had already concluded it wasn't working. After ruling out latency on the audio side, TCP_NODELAY solved the problem.

All respect to Animats, but whoever thought this should be the default behavior of TCP/IP had rocks in their head, and/or were solving a problem that had a better solution that they just didn't think of at the time.
by mediaman | 2025-12-23 18:44:48+00:00
RLVR is not offline learning. It's not learning from a static dataset. These are live rollouts that are being verified and which update the weights at each pass based on feedback from the environment.

You might argue that traditional RL involves multiple states the agent moves through. But autoregressive LLMs are the same: a forward pass generating a token also creates change in state.

After training, the weights are fixed, of course, but that is the case of most traditional RL systems. RL does not intrinsically mean a continual updating of weights in deployment, which carries a bunch of problems.

From the premise that RLVR can be applied to benchmaxx (true!) it does not follow that it therefore is only good for that.
by sq_ | 2025-12-23 18:44:50+00:00
I find this stuff really interesting, so if anyone's curious, here's a few more tidbits:

GPS system time is currently 18s ahead of UTC since it doesn't take UTC's leap seconds into account [0]

This (old) paper from USNO [1] goes into more detail about how GPS time is related to USNO's realization of UTC, as well as talking a bit about how TAI is determined (in hindsight! - by collecting data from clocks around the world and then processing it).

[0] https://www.cnmoc.usff.navy.mil/Our-Commands/United-States-N...
[1] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19960042620/downloads/19...
by andsoitis | 2025-12-23 18:44:54+00:00
Not the same way.

In Germany, a Nazi swastika is a criminal symbol because Nazism is considered an existential threat since Germany's constitution is built around "defensive democracy", or wehrhafte Demokratie. Consequently, the state is obligated to prevent the re-emergence of Nazism. If you display a Nazi swastika, you will likely be detained for prosecution under § 86a StGB.

There are only a few exceptions (art, science/education, journalism, explicit anti-Nazi protest), but the context has to unambiguous.

This is different from "terrorism law"; instead criminalization of the Nazi swastika is protecting the constitutional order.
by jimt1234 | 2025-12-23 18:45:01+00:00
Honestly, the argument that CBS buried the piece to protect Trump is difficult to accept because, well, watching brown people being treated like shit or even tortured is MAGA porn. Innocence or guilt is meaningless - Dear Leader said they're all enemies!

All the MAGAs I know on Facebook are posting about how the video is great ("It's about time someone does something!"), so I would think Trump would want the piece to air.
by ddtaylor | 2025-12-23 18:45:15+00:00
Fabrice Bellard is widely considered one of the most productive and versatile programmers alive:

- FFmpeg: https://bellard.org

- QEMU: https://bellard.org/qemu/

- JSLinux: https://bellard.org/jslinux/

- TCC: https://bellard.org/tcc/

- QuickJS: https://bellard.org/quickjs/

Legendary.
by eleventyseven | 2025-12-23 18:46:21+00:00
A lazy easy cheap shot. But do you deny these aspects from the article are not coming? Or won't be still here in 5 years?

- Addition of more—and faster—memory.

- Consolidation of memory.

- Combination of chips on the same silicon.

All of these are also happening for non AI reasons. The move to SoC that really started with the M1 wasn't because of AI, but unified memory being the default is something we will see in 5 years. Unlike 3D TV.
by saltcured | 2025-12-23 18:46:44+00:00
Sadly, I'm not too surprised to hear that. I wish we had more rapid iteration to improve such capabilities for real world use cases.

Things like back pressure and flow control are very powerful systems concepts, but intrinsically need there to be an identifiable flow to control! Our systems abstractions that multiplex and obfuscate flows are going to be unable to differentiate which application flow is the one that needs back pressure, and paint too-wide brush.

In my view, the fundamental problem is we're all trying to "have our cake and eat it". We expect our network core to be unaware of the edge device and application goals. We expect to be able to saturate an imaginary channel between two edge devices without any prearrangement, as if we're the only network users. We also expect our sparse and async background traffic to somehow get through promptly. We expect fault tolerance and graceful degradation. We expect fairness.

We don't really define or agree what is saturation, what is prompt, what is graceful, or what is fair... I think we often have selfish answers to these questions, and this yields a tragedy of the commons.

At the same time, we have so many layers of abstraction where useful flow information is effectively hidden from the layers beneath. That is even before you consider adversarial situations where the application is trying to confuse the issue.
by bob1029 | 2025-12-23 18:46:48+00:00
> Why JPEGs Actually Slap

JPEG is extremely efficient to [de/en]code on modern CPUs. You can get close to 1080p60 per core if you use a library that leverages SIMD.

I sometimes struggle with the pursuit of perfect codec efficiency when our networks have become this fast. You can employ half-assed compression and still not max out a 1gbps pipe. From Netflix & Google's perspective it totally makes sense, but unless you are building a streaming video platform with billions of customers I don't see the point.
by j45 | 2025-12-23 18:46:48+00:00
It's less about neutering, and more about diet.

Junk food and processed sugar creates dietary based ADHD kids.

One's information diet also changes how the brain develops, that's not a pseudo threat.

I sense some trepidation around not having unfettered access to swim in the whole ocean as a child with more and more sharks and angel fish floating around.

The environment to monitor is increasingly digital, not just in person. See my note above about parents who think their kids are safe at home, when they're letting the entire unfiltered world into their kids devices, eyes, minds without context.