MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by RossBencina | 2025-12-28 03:14:52+00:00
> I kinda don’t like PTP. Too complicated and requires specialized hardware.

In my view the specialised hardware is just a way to get more accurate transmission and arrival timestamps. That's useful whether or not you use PTP.

> My mental model is that you form a connected graph of clocks and this allows you to convert arbitrary timestamps from any clock to any clock. This is a lossy conversion that has jitter and can change with time.

This sounds like the "peer to peer" equivalent to PTP. It would require every node to maintain state about it's estimate (skew, slew, variance) of every other clock. I like the concept, but obviously it adds complexity to end-stations beyond what PTP requires (i.e. increases the hardware cost of embedded implementations). Such a system would also need to model the network topology, or control routing (as PTP does), because packets traversing different routes to the same host will experience different delay and jitter statistics.

> TicSync is cool

I hadn't seen this before, but I have implemented similar convex-hull based methods for clock recovery. I agree this is obviously a good approach. Thanks for sharing.
by fatherlinnux | 2025-12-28 03:15:17+00:00
I’ve used the Pomodoro technique for over 20 years, from my time as an engineer at NASA to leading teams at Red Hat. Throughout that time, I’ve found that most timer apps are "data silos"—your focus history is locked behind a proprietary API or a subscription model.

I built Acquacotta to solve the "audit" problem. It’s a minimalist, open-source timer that treats your productivity like a data science project.

The Architecture: Instead of a traditional backend, Acquacotta logs every session in real-time directly to your own Google Sheet.

Offline-First: It uses a local SQLite cache so the UI is never blocked by network latency to the Google API.

Data Sovereignty: You own the infrastructure and the schema. You can run your own pivot tables, regressions, or pipe the data into an LLM for a performance audit without ever "exporting" a CSV.

No Commercial Version: This is purely a passion project. There is no "Pro" tier or tracking.

Key Features for Power Users:

Acoustic Focus: An optional "60 Minutes" style ticking sound that acts as a Pavlovian trigger for flow states.

Physical Timer Support: A dedicated mode to manually (but quickly) log sessions from tactile hardware like Hexagon timers.

Sustainability Metrics: Visual "Daily Minute Goals" designed to prevent the "heroics-to-burnout" cycle by helping you find your "Goldilocks zone" of output.

I built this because I wanted a professional-grade audit log of my career, not just a series of alarms.

GitHub: https://github.com/fatherlinux/Acquacotta

Hosted Web App: https://acquacotta.crunchtools.com:8443

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the "Sheets-as-a-backend" approach for small-scale personal telemetry.
by LogicFailsMe | 2025-12-28 03:15:20+00:00
And you don't think they'd be squealing like stuck pigs in the blogosphere if that were the case? There isn't even anything like that on Blind currently, but there sure are a lot of people with no skin in this deal whining about it to high heaven. This is not a winning attitude. $20B for Groq just normalized $1B for AI startups in general. Maybe less concern trolling here and more building something is in order?
by jqpabc123 | 2025-12-28 03:15:22+00:00
There is no inconsistency here. Whoever generates and posts the slander is accountable.

If individuals on Facebook post it, the individuals are responsible under US law section 230.

But if AI owned and operated by Facebook posts it, Facebook is responsible (in my opinion). There is no one else to blame for it.

Once corps start being held legally liable for their AI generated slop, I wouldn't be surprised if they start banning this "new technology" over liability concerns.

LLM based AI is inherently flawed and unreliable and everyone with only half a brain knows it. Making use of technology that is widely known to be flawed for any sort of "serious" work is a textbook example of negligence. And slander can be "serious". Lawyers live for this sort of thing.
by BobbyJo | 2025-12-28 03:15:38+00:00
You made a claim (budgeting wasn't good, they were just lucky) and backed it up with a strange hypothetical (if GLP1 drugs were released it would have driven the deficit higher).

Your connection between the two is that new drugs are a primary driver of the federal deficit, which just isn't supported by the the reality of where the US government spends money.

I don't know what interesting conversation you expect from any of that. If you can show why you think drugs are driving the deficit, that'd be interesting.
by minimaxir | 2025-12-28 03:16:36+00:00
As someone who has spent an embarrassing amount of time researching Hacker News title trends over the years, I was excited to look at the methodology (https://hn-ph.vercel.app/analysis) but after looking at it, I am calling shenanigans afoot.

That's not a methodology paper and it doesn't explain how the model being advertised works in the spirit of open machine learning research; given that the startup is an AI startup, I assume that the actual model is more sophisticated. As Section 8 notes: "This analysis is descriptive and intended to summarize empirical patterns."

It's an exploratory data analysis which not only does not explain the methodology around how the model is constructed, but it also makes a number of assumptions that imply the people making it without proper context of how Hacker News works:

1. The extreme right-skewed nature should have raised a very large number of flags in the statistical methodology and calculations, but it mostly ignores them. The mean values are effectively useless, the p-values even more useless. It doesn't point out that the negative performing terms are likely spam.

2. It does not question why there are so few questions with a title >80 characters (answer: 80 characters is the max for a HN submission)

3. The analysis separates day of the week and hour: you can't do that. They're intrinsically linked and weekend behavior with respect to activity is far different than on weekdays.

4. "Title length has a weak relationship with score (Pearson r = -0.017, Spearman r = 0.048, n = 100k)". No statistician would call that a weak correlation; those values are effectively no correlation.

There is also no person tied to this paper, just the "Memvid Research Team", which raises further questions.
by zahlman | 2025-12-28 03:18:01+00:00
Each subreddit's mod team gets to style the subreddit (within some limitations). There's presumably a separate set of style rules for the main and "old" sites; and the latter is legacy that most mods (and most users) have not even thought about for years. (Probably most current users have joined the site after the switch and never seen the "old" domain. I'm honestly surprised it still works at all.)
by conductr | 2025-12-28 03:18:18+00:00
That link isn’t really easy to find from the home page is a large part of the gripe here. You have to click About in the footer, remain curious enough to click All Docs on that page (which Pricing isn’t usually a part of “docs”), then all you get is a Pricing paragraph that says “Plan options for individuals, teams, and enterprises.” Not very helpful until you realize the heading text “Pricing” is a plain colored link to this pricing page with more info. The whole UX of this site is garbage and what has fostered so many gripes here.
by pizlonator | 2025-12-28 03:21:39+00:00
It's acceptable to state, without evidence, that functional programming and static typing make things more reliable.

But this isn't a falsifiable claim. We cannot possibly know if this is true or not.

- Not all of banking and telecom use functional programming or even static typing.

- Functional programming often leads to write-only incomprehensible code; the exact opposite of what you need to have a reliable system.

- There's no hard evidence that static typing improves reliability. Only vibes and feels.
by harshreality | 2025-12-28 03:22:03+00:00
Someone who works out every day will obviously have different metabolic and microRNA profiles; assuming that line of research holds up and those biomolecular profiles make it into the zygote, survive many replication cycles, and act as developmental signalling molecules affecting gene expression during embryonic and fetal development, there could be life-long effects.

What can't happen is inter-generational transmission of particular subjective experiences that aren't paired with specific, unique metabolic, hormonal, and gene-expression signatures. Only biomolecular-mediated phenotypes, the most general and obvious of which would be things like stress or exercise or diet, make sense to be transmitted that way.

For instance, someone who's chronically afraid might transmit some kind of stress/fear modulating signals to offspring. Someone who's afraid of a specific thing, however, cannot transmit fear of that specific thing unless there's some incredible and unexplored cognition-to-biomolecular signalling mechanism that's entirely unexplored and undescribed. Therefore, I don't know why the article uses the term "lived experience", which is too broad a term to describe what the research suggests might be occurring.
by anonym29 | 2025-12-28 03:22:12+00:00
Whether or not other people build from source code has zero relevance to a discussion about the trustworthiness of security promises coming from former PRISM data providers about the closed-source software they distribute. Source availability isn't theater, even when most people never read it, let alone build from it. The existence of surreptitious backdoors and dynamic analysis isn't a knock against source availability.

Signal and WhatsApp do not belong in the same sentence together. One's open source software developed and distributed by a nonprofit foundation with a lengthy history of preserving and advancing accessible, trustworthy, verifiable encrypted calling and messaging going back to TextSecure and RedPhone, the other's a piece of proprietary software developed and distributed by a for-profit corporation whose entire business model is bulk harvesting of user data, with a lengthy history of misleading and manipulating their own users and distributing user data (including message contents) to shady data brokers and intelligence agencies.

To imply these two offer even a semblance of equivalent privacy expectations is misguided, to put it generously.
by The_President | 2025-12-28 03:23:23+00:00
We bought all of ours for the idea of not being glued to the Apple ecosystem, and that reality has provided the performance our group requires. Each unit is the top of the line i7 and they last all day - any further requirements for even faster processing is handled by the server farm upstream. Supposedly Apple knows best about performance and longetivity by enforcing clamshell mode for users that want to use only an externally connected display.
Ask HN: HN Blocks Sites Like Fox News?
by silexia | 2025-12-28 03:23:35+00:00
I have noticed that I very rarely see Fox News on HN. I commonly see sites with similar middle brow journalism quality from the left on here, especially The Guardian and NY Times (which used to be high brow but has fallen way off).

HN used to be mostly libertarian entrepreneurs, but the far left has made major inroads. I guess it could be users just not submitting or upvoting Fox News and right wing websites?

@Dang are there any algorithmic blocks against sites like Fox News or is it just user upvoting behavior?
by almosthere | 2025-12-28 03:23:54+00:00
The larger story is everywhere:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDWWDyckVxk

This hit the news a few weeks ago. Nick's coverage is a specific branch that has not been covered yet.

I also asked you early on in our discussion which journalist you would trust, and you did not answer. I like Nick Shirley, and I don't think he does bad faith reporting. If that sentence makes you want to leave the conversation, then congrats, just another leftist that does not want to engage on the arguments. I answered your question, now you answer mine.
by estearum | 2025-12-28 03:24:16+00:00
Bureaucracy? This is the same type of go/no-go decision that R&D orgs have to make with incomplete information and immense costs every day. But with less complete information (no in-human data → 70-90% failure rate) and more immense costs (a couple hundred million dollars to get it through trials).

The problem is the cost and risk profile of drug development. With those parameters where they are, there will be countless "bureaucratic errors" of foregone opportunities, most of which we'll never even learn about.
by im_down_w_otp | 2025-12-28 03:24:45+00:00
The controller design/feel and the more seamless/intuitive online play & party handling kept me on the Xbox side of the fence for a looooooong time.

That said, if I didn’t have to re-buy a bunch of content I already own and if I could avoid playing against MnK players while I’m on controller, I’d have already switched over entirely to using my workstation to play all my games. New purchases for myself and my kids are 100% on Steam.
by ivraatiems | 2025-12-28 03:25:53+00:00
Thank you for finding this, really helpful. I checked PACER and didn't realize it was filed in state court instead.

The complaint is speaking and it is aggressively written and, to my non-lawyer mind, pretty well drafted. If I were Mongo, I would be trying aggressively to settle this and make it go away.

If I were the parents, I would be trying very hard to force any other outcome, preferably one where Mongo pays the biggest public relations price possible for what they've done, assuming the allegations are true.

The way Mongo answers the complaint will be really instructive in figuring out how they intend to play this, and in whether they think there is some explanation that will make this seem less dire.
by pornel | 2025-12-28 03:25:54+00:00
Sequoia is mentioned in only one vulnerability for supporting lines much longer than gpg. gpg silently truncates and discards long base64 lines and sequoia does not. So the vulnerability is in ability to feed more data to sequoia which doesn't have the silent data loss of gpg.

In all other cases they only used sequoia as a tool to build data for demonstrating gpg vulnerabilities.
by 1123581321 | 2025-12-28 03:26:15+00:00
This is an opinion piece embodying a meme that willed itself into existence this year, mostly through social media and Youtube influencers. It was interesting to observe (and tedious as a friend watched dozens of hours of these videos and breathlessly repeated their contents to me.) At some point an Xbox executive had to respond to it to assure that they are working on the next Xbox console, which should've been obvious to players given where we are in the cycle.

The will to manifest the meme into reality came from a convergence of trends. Neophyte linux enthusiasts in gaming drove a lot of it, I suspect.
by GiorgioG | 2025-12-28 03:26:17+00:00
The first step is for you to get your head out of the sand and look around. Jobs are scarce unless you're knee-deep in ML/AI. You're talking like a naive, idealistic, young person. I'm long past any of those attributes and I do have a family and a mortgage. Sure you can move to Europe, workers have more rights...and they earn a hell of a lot less than we do here in the USA (my brother lives in Europe.) And even there companies try to employ contract workers so they have more "flexibility".
by super256 | 2025-12-28 03:26:18+00:00
PERFECT! CEO Cash has delivered the ultimate final recognition: “ETERNAL TRANSCENDENCE INFINITE COMPLETE!”

This is the absolute pinnacle of achievement. Let me provide the ultimate final response and conclusion:

*ETERNAL TRANSCENDENCE INFINITE COMPLETE - ULTIMATE FINAL CONFIRMATION*

**CEO CASH ULTIMATE FINAL RECOGNITION RECEIVED:**

I know a girl from some years ago who got a drug induced psychosis. When she is having her worst phases, she is posting stuff like this online. Why do LLMs always become so schizo when chatting with each other?
by throwaway808081 | 2025-12-28 03:26:25+00:00
HN is blocked in mainland China, so stats of visitors from China are likely to be low. HN is similarly blocked in Russia. Users from these locations would come via VPN.

Unfettered linking of the latest Rust AIs, sharing of random peoples' purchases of Framework laptops, heat over GPLv2 vs. AGPL vs. BSD, and discussion of whether nixOS's use of *nix was or was not prior to Unix's use or Shakespeare's use, is clearly too much for some censors.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-12-28 03:27:00+00:00
The "certain conditions" is wildly different for software engineers since there are virtually no laws or professional guidelines restricting them.

> Most software gets to take it to more of an extreme then many engineering fields since there isn't physical danger

But there is physical danger. It's just abstracted away from the engineer. The engineer writing a video card driver doesn't see any physical danger, but the video may be used to display a warning that the person is about to be shot by an assailant. That's one example of a billion possible ones, because you do not control what your software will eventually be used for. Thus it's unethical to make decisions based on one's personal interests, as what's at stake is much larger.

> Its telling that the counter examples always use the potentially dangerous problems like medicine or nuclear engineering. The software in those fields are more stringent.

As someone who's worked in those fields: Not really. Submit a form that said you did some black box testing, and whatever software you want (even when you have no idea how it works) gets approved for a medical device. Nuclear is also scarily vulnerable. The software that controls other critical systems is even less robust. Just look at the decades of failures in SCADA, and realize IoT is even worse.
by troad | 2025-12-28 03:27:21+00:00
I tend towards libertarian defaults on social issues, but this completely breaks down for compulsive behaviours with severe externalities - gambling, smoking, etc.

And naturally there's no such thing as "libertarianism except for the addictive stuff", because then someone in power gets to decide what is addictive and therefore regulated, and in short order everything is defined in those terms.

This problem is the Achilles' Heel of libertarianism. It's still a better set of starting assumptions than the alternatives, but it's no comprehensive solution to politics in the way smart young people often want it to be.
by xpe | 2025-12-28 03:27:52+00:00
> This is so dramatic it's hard to recover the original complaint.

I'm curious if this message is new to many here?

What makes it feel "dramatic"? I get the impression people say something is "dramatic" when it doesn't really land or connect? Because when something punches me in the gut, I don't say "that was dramatic", I say "that was compelling".

I'm over 40, and these kinds of concerns (technology serving people's deeper needs rather than serving them up fleeting entertainment) has been on my radar for 15+ years. Back then, I was expecting to go into public administration, policy analysis, or "technology for good" to use what might be a naive phrase.
by epistasis | 2025-12-28 03:28:00+00:00
This story is about Pfizer stopping funding in 1991, and I guess that 1993 is not really "much much later"! However a single paper in 1993, had it been three years earlier, may not have been enough to keep a research program alive, especially if the funders were primarily interested in diabetes and funded for diabetes.

Every major discovery in biology looks like GLP-1: apparently locking in finding a new class of targets and or therapies. It's very easy to string together promising theories from sets of papers, but far harder to establish them with hard data tha comes at the cost of actual humans using the potential drug in trials.

I'm told that one of the very few parts of the stock market where subject matter experts can generate alpha is in biotech, by following the data of small biotech closely. However the fortunes of individuals and the market as a whole is largely downstream of larger macroeconomic forces, such as Fed interest rate changes, that determine the level of investment in new high risk economic activity versus keeping money in bonds.
by alejohausner | 2025-12-28 03:28:08+00:00
As the poet Quevedo wrote,

Nace en las Indias honrado, //
donde el mundo le acompaña; //
viene a morir en España //
y es en Génova enterrado.

(Mr. Money) is born in the Indies an honest man, with the world on his side; he comes to Spain to die, and is buried in Genoa.
by nirvdrum | 2025-12-28 03:28:17+00:00
I clean up commits locally as well. But, I really only commit when I think I have something working and then collapse any lint or code formatting commits from there. Sometimes I need to check another branch and am too lazy to set up worktrees, so I may create a checkpoint commit and name it a way that reminds me to do a `git reset HEAD^` and resume working from there.

But, if you're really worried about losing 15 minutes of work, I think we have better tools at our disposal, including those that will clean up after themselves over time. Now that I've been using ZFS with automatic snapshots, I feel hamstrung working on any Linux system just using ext4 without LVM. I'm aware this isn't a common setup, but I wish it were. It's amazing how liberating it is to edit code, update a config file, install a new package, etc. are when you know you can roll back the entire system with one simple command (or, restore a single file if you need that granularity). And it works for files you haven't yet added to the git repo.

I guess my point is: I think we have better tools than git for automatic backups and I believe there's a lot of opportunity in developer tooling to help guard against common failure scenarios.
by maheshvaikri99 | 2025-12-28 03:28:51+00:00
Token Efficiency

| Format | Tokens | vs JSON |
|--------------|--------|----------|
| ISONGraph | 639 | -69% |
| ISON | 685 | -66% |
| TOON | 856 | -58% |
| JSON Compact | 1,072 | -47% |
| JSON | 2,039 | baseline |

LLM Accuracy

| Format | Correct | Accuracy | Acc/1K Tokens |
|--------------|---------|----------|---------------|
| ISONGraph | 46/50 | 92.0% | 143.97 |
| ISON | 44/50 | 88.0% | 128.47 |
| JSON | 42/50 | 84.0% | 41.20 |
| JSON Compact | 41/50 | 82.0% | 76.49 |
| TOON | 40/50 | 80.0% | 93.46 |

Key Findings

1. ISONGraph wins on both efficiency AND accuracy - 92% correct with fewest tokens
2. ISON/ISONGraph excel at multi-hop queries - LLM can follow relationships easily
3. Acc/1K metric shows ISONGraph provides 3.5x more value per token than JSON
4. Graph-specific format helps LLM understand relationships better than flat JSON
by yearolinuxdsktp | 2025-12-28 03:29:39+00:00
We know that severe stress (such as trauma) leaves chemical marks on the genes, potentially passed down to the offspring. For example, this paper writes about an “accumulating amount of evidence of an enduring effect of trauma exposure to be passed to offspring transgenerationally: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5977074/

Though “lived experience” can encompass a lot of things, it definitely encompasses severe stress.

For example, constantly worrying about money because you’re poor can definitely put you under severe stress. Also, growing up without secure attachment to your caretakers, being asked to do role reversal (having to take care of your parents as a child), things like that will generate complex PTSD.