MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by asimpletune | 2025-12-11 10:09:17+00:00
The AI/LLM movement is either utterly transformational or it’s not. By the former I mean there is no daylight between it and the latter.

If it’s not transformational then this is a bubble and the market will right itself soon after, e.g buying data centers for cheap. LLMs will then exist as a useful but limited tool that becomes profitable with the lower capex.

If it is transformational then we don’t have the societal structure to responsibly incorporate such a shift.

The conservative guess is it won’t be transformational, that the current applications of the tech are useful but not in a way that justifies the capex, and that some version of agents and chat bots will continue to be built out in the future but with a focus on efficiency. Smaller models that require less power to train and run inference that are ubiquitous. Eventually many will run on device.

I guess there’s also another version of the future that’s quasi-transformational. Instead of any massive breakthrough there’s a successful govt coup or regulatory capture. Perfectly functioning normal stuff is then replaced with LLM assisted or augmented versions everywhere. This version is like the emergence of the automobile in the sense that the car fundamentally altered city planning, where and how people live, but often at the expense of public transportation that in hindsight may have sorely been missed.
by mrtksn | 2025-12-11 10:09:49+00:00
The 15K application fee for background checks seems like a good idea. The Turkish program for citizenship by investment attracted many global crime syndicate members because apparently there were no proper background checks and you are allowed to pick a new name when you acquire the Turkish citizenship. Suddenly world class drug or illegal gambling kingpins turned into a businessmen from Turkey, over the years there were many many high profile scandals, murders etc and apparently they integrated their business into their new country too. Some speculate that has happened knowingly because at the same time the Turkish government reduced the money flow check and even started a program where you can just launder your money by paying some small tax. They din’t ask you questions where that money came from if you pay the tax. So you can get your drug cartel money into the bank banking system.

These days they are trying to clean up the mess they created a few years but it did help to keep the economy afloat when they were doing economically ridiculous but ideologically and politically motivated things.
by pil0u | 2025-12-11 10:10:31+00:00
The real gods of humanity.

How would you call them differently? The amount of power that wealth gives them over "us" is unfathomable.

We often contemplate history with lofty detachment, thinking how far we have come as humans and societies. Kings and queens seen as ancient fictions. Sure some KPIs like life expectancy/comfort improved thanks to technologies and progress. I don't deny all that, but that's not my point. The extreme majority of humans are still vessels/subjects to an absurd minority of other humans. How can't we see that as a failure?
by PurpleRamen | 2025-12-11 10:10:40+00:00
Yes and no. There is the infamous quote of Microsoft, about 30%(?) of their code being written by AI now. And technically, it's probably not that such a wild claim in certain areas. AI is very good at barfing up common popular patterns, and companies have a huge amount of patternized software, like UIs, tests, documentation or marketing-fluff. So it's quite easy to "outsource" such grunt-work if AI has the necessary level.

But to say that they don't write any code at all, it's really stretched. Maybe I'm not good enough at AI-assisted and vibe coding, but code-quality always seems to drop down really hard the moment one steps a bit outside the common patterns.
by wg0 | 2025-12-11 10:11:22+00:00
Thank you! That's great and it is possible but... With some limitations.

The idea is from sign up form to a D1 Database that can be accessed from the worker itself.

That's not possible without updating worker bindings like you showed and further - there is an upper limit of 5000 bindings per worker and just 5000 users then becomes the upper limit although D1 allows 50,000 databases easily with further possible by requesting a limit increase.

edit: Missed opening.
by simianwords | 2025-12-11 10:11:32+00:00
Rich people having too much wealth is not necessarily that bad a thing because most of the investment is in productive companies.

It’s not like they are using their wealth on frivolous consumption. Which means redistribution would only change who controls the investment and not the actual consumption patterns of people. Implication is that poor people will consume the same as before after redistribution with perhaps some extra assets.

So nothing materially changes other than some security. Poor people will continue to consume the same as before. Bigger problem is it’s not so clear that redistribution is necessarily a good thing because I feel the people who made money are more likely to make better decisions on their own companies.

I don’t know how companies would fare if for example Amazon were redistributed and run like some public company.

(Posting again)
by bobdvb | 2025-12-11 10:12:19+00:00
They don't really have to worry about patent infringement, the biggest issue is that they can implement anything they want, they just can't call it HDMI 2.1 without certification.

That's confusing for the consumer but technically viable.

HDMI exists to write standards, to certify them and to enforce the brand integrity. Patents are a different issue and would be handled separately.

(I am an engineer who spent half his career dealing with this stuff at a technical, legal and commercial level).
by downsplat | 2025-12-11 10:12:19+00:00
Yeah at $WORK we use various LLM APIs to analyze text; it's not heavy usage in terms of tokens but maybe 10K calls per day. We've found that response times vary a lot, sometimes going over a minute for simple tasks, and random fails happen. Retry logic is definitely mandatory, and it's good to have multiple providers ready. We're abstracting calls across three different APIs (openai, gemini and mistral, btw we're getting pretty good results with mistral!) so we can switch workloads quickly if needed.
Ask HN: How are you handling LLM API costs in production?
by itaydressler | 2025-12-11 10:12:52+00:00
I'm running an AI product that's starting to scale, and I'm noticing our OpenAI/Anthropic bills growing faster than I'd like. We're at the point where costs are becoming a real line item in our budget. Curious how others are dealing with this:

Are LLM costs a top concern for you right now, or is it more of a "figure it out later" thing? What strategies have actually worked to reduce costs? (prompt optimization, caching, cheaper models, etc.) Have you found any tools that help you track/optimize costs effectively, or are you building custom solutions? At what point did costs become painful enough that you had to actively address them?

I'm trying to understand if this is a real problem worth solving more systematically, or if most teams are just accepting it as the cost of doing business. Would love to hear what's working (or not working) for you.
by Izkata | 2025-12-11 10:13:21+00:00
> For example, I've seen people write code which relies heavily on design patterns but then that same code uses an O(n^2) nested loop to find items that are common between two arrays. There is a simple 'pattern' you can use to store the items of the first array in a Set or HashMap and then finding common items is O(n) because Set and HashMap lookups are O(1)... Very useful pattern but I don't believe it has a name. I use it literally ALL the time. The idea of storing intermediate state in some kind of HashMap is a game-changer IMO but there's no name for that pattern of coding.

This is a "hash join" in relational databases. You can see it in the query planner output of at least postgres.
by crote | 2025-12-11 10:13:29+00:00
I just wish they sold the transceivers separately from the fiber. Being able to use any random length of cheap off-the-shelf SMF/MMF fiber would be so much more convenient than having to get a custom one-off cable.

They exist for medium-speed HDMI (see for example [0]), but I haven't seen them for modern high-speed DP yet.

https://www.amazon.com/Converter-Extender-Transceiver-module...
by adrian_b | 2025-12-11 10:13:43+00:00
I would not care at all if 1 ppm of the world population would hold 100 times the wealth of the poorest half of the world population, if all of the poorest half would have nonetheless the means to produce their minimum necessities in energy, food, clothes etc., independently of others, so that their survival for the next months or weeks or even days would not be completely dependent on the benevolence of the rich to create places where they must be employed in order to be able to survive.

A half of century ago, my grandparents were still relatively independent of the rest of the world, because they owned a house and some cultivated land, so even if their normal sources of revenue would have disappeared by becoming jobless, they could have still lived quite decently being sustained only by what they were producing in their garden and by their animals. They also did not depend on external services for things like water supply, garbage disposal or heating. They used electricity, but they had plenty of space so that today one could have used there enough solar panels to be also independent of external energy sources.

On the other hand, now I am living in a big city and I absolutely need a salary if I want to continue to live. Where I live there are no salaries for an engineer or programmer that are big enough so that one could ever buy a place like that owned by my grandparents.

I do not believe that this extreme dependency between employees and employers that has become more and more widespread during the last century will lead to anything good.

There are a lot of important technical problems that must be solved in order to ensure the survival of humanity, but the research to solve them is almost non-existent, because those who control the money are too short-sighted so they invest only according to various fads in research that will produce things of negligible benefit for most humans. The unsolved problems that have accumulated are such that only an effort of the kind that happened in the research done during World War II would solve them, but it seems unlikely that something like that will ever repeat.
by 6510 | 2025-12-11 10:13:45+00:00
On commodore 64 the screen is just a fixed size grid of characters. No one ever had issues making an ui. We pretend but flexible viewport size is not actually possible. If you are making a painting for example the size of the canvas greatly influences what can and can be done.

I made a stunning landscape photo one time that looked great only when displayed at roughly the size of a hand. If made larger undesirable details became visible (littering), when smaller important details were lost (a formation of birds over a fishing vessel).
by debugnik | 2025-12-11 10:14:15+00:00
> What you need is a unique handle type per container instance.

You can do this with path-dependent types in Scala, or more verbosely with modules in OCaml. The hard part is keeping the container name in scope wherever these handle types are used: many type definitions will need to reference the container handle types. I'm currently trying to structure code this way in my pet compiler written in OCaml.
by johntennessee93 | 2025-12-11 10:14:15+00:00
Don't what? If most people had money, they'd waste it on clothes, cars and other frivolous purchases. Most billionaires made their wealth because they were effective at using that wealth for productive uses. Elon could have cashed out after PayPal, instead he revolutionized rocketry and electric vehicles. He deserves every cent of his wealth.
by anonzzzies | 2025-12-11 10:15:08+00:00
But that is a bit of the issue: I see people use 'young' and 'old' platforms and it's all the same: stuck to the phone scrolling through exactly the same slob, ai or human, hours on end. Can't say I even find LinkedIn any different (which I also do not use, but colleagues send me stuff sometimes). So I want no part of any of them. What do I say then? Because I feel they will think I am some sort of unabomber haxor dude coming to overthrow the gov because I am not a happy insta scroller. Which is absolutely insane. Maybe I will hang a big cross around my neck and carry a bible at all times and no phone. Same purpose, so probably works.
by musha68k | 2025-12-11 10:15:27+00:00
Amazing feat. I was a very happy owner of both consoles back in the day, and this port clearly shows how much the N64 brought that "SGI at home" feel in mid‑1996; at least until Voodoo 1 / QuakeGL, maybe even up to Unreal (Glide) or Sonic Adventure on DC?

I still remember gasping when I first saw the basically unattainable (for me) Japanese‑import N64 running Mario 64.

Such an interesting and varied gaming landscape back then; for example, the Wipeout experience on PSX was beyond the N64 port in that particular niche, for its own set of reasons.
by bobdvb | 2025-12-11 10:15:59+00:00
HDMI's gate is certification and the ability to then use their marketing brand.

This is absolutely not a technical issue. You can implement the 2.1 spec if you want, you just can't say it's 2.1.

If Valve wanted they could happily get it to work and let people figure out that it works, they just can't use that title in their marketing.
by myrmidon | 2025-12-11 10:16:00+00:00
Vote political parties into power that put a price on emissions and honestly work on reducing it.

The big problem is that this is not gonna be free. When fossils are used, it's obviously because they are the most economical option. As soon as you price in actual externalities (=> climate change), energy is going to get more expensive, and people don't like this. Almost everyone claims to be concerned about climate change, but a lot of people are neither willing to pay more for gas or power, nor do they want to risk making local industry less competitive.

The sad truth is that almost any cost for environmental sustainability/emission reduction is already too much for a lot of people.
by nicbou | 2025-12-11 10:16:04+00:00
I got access to around 30,000 Berlin apartment listings from the last year. The end goal to help foreign apartment seekers rate a listing’s price, size and location, and to give people realistic expectations. For example if your search criteria returns two listings per month and the chance of getting the flat is 1:100, you might rethink your approach.

The first release will be a map of median rent per square meter. Simple stuff.
by gpderetta | 2025-12-11 10:16:09+00:00
Given a Sufficiently Good™ compiler, yes, after devirtualization and heap elision all variants should generate exactly the same code. In practice is more complicated. Devirtualization needs to runs after (potentially interprocedural) constant propagation, which might be too late to take advantage of other optimization opportunities, unless the compiler keeps rerunning the optimization pipeline.

In a simple test I see that GCC14 has no problems completely removing the overhead of std::function_ref, but plain std::function is a huge mess.

Eventually we will get there [1], but in the meantime I prefer not to rely on devirtualization, and heap elision is more of a party trick.

edit: to compare early vs late inlining: while gcc 14 can remove one layer of function_ref, it seems that it cannot remove two layers, as apparently doesn't rerun the required passes to take advantage of the new opportunity. It has no problem of course removing an arbitrary large (but finite) layers of plain lambdas.

edit2: GCC15 can remove trivial uses of std::function, but this is very fragile. It still can't remove two function_ref.

[1] for example 25 years ago compilers were terrible at removing abstraction overhead of the STL, today there is very little cost.
by _pdp_ | 2025-12-11 10:16:18+00:00
Many of us grew up without social media and turned out to be fine!

Anyone arguing against this ban is delusional what social media does to undeveloped brains. There are plenty of studies to support this as well.

Social media is harmful to children. We are talking about 10 yo having access to non-stop stream of inappropriate content for their age. You can blame the parents but social media is now fact of life that cannot be so easily escaped.

Like buying alcohol, gambling, driving, voting and other similar things which are restricted under particular age, the discussion should be about at what age is safe for children to participate in the public discourse.

I really hope similar controls are implemented across EU.
by ajuc | 2025-12-11 10:17:50+00:00
The problem is oligarchy not inefficiencies.

In the absence of regulation, with these levels of inequality - democracy becomes a facade. Whatever the few oligarchs want - happens, no matter if people like it or not.

And yes, redistribution is one solution, and it does work. You just have to repeat it regularly.

There are also other solutions - like strong regulations on influencing public opinion/legislation with "lobbying", propaganda, media ownership and ethical journalism etc.

For one example - USA has neither regulation nor redistribution - so it became an oligarchy.
by KumaBear | 2025-12-11 10:18:09+00:00
No one is saying the rich shouldn’t exist. But there is a point where so much accumulated wealth is counter productive. The fact trillionaires will exist is mind boggling.

Eventually everything from vehicles to housing will be rented to us as a way to extract the little wealth that’s left. Or layered subscription services. These aren’t great corporate ideas they are extractions of wealth.
by nwellnhof | 2025-12-11 10:18:23+00:00
It's even more than the bottom 5% if you only look at the US. 13 million or 10.4% of US households have negative net worth according to [1]. I've seen articles claiming that the bottom 15-25% of US Americans have negative net worth. So I am richer than all these households combined. Technically true, but completely misleading.

[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/13-million-american-household...
by mytailorisrich | 2025-12-11 10:18:43+00:00
> a report that argues global inequality has reached such extremes that urgent action has become essential.

This is always stated like if that was an obvious fact that somehow "action is needed" against the richest, but is it?

Does it matter that a few individuals are multi-billionaires (usually because of the notional value of shares they own)? I would say that it does not. What matters is how the majority and the poorest are faring, which is orthogonal.
by bryanrasmussen | 2025-12-11 10:18:50+00:00
>Give an rgba color to rows and nth cells (columns).

that sounds like a use for tables, so I find it difficult to imagine a non-table layout that would want this.

>Resizing columns by size of cell content.

I can sort of see this as a requirement for non-table layouts that would not work well, however my experience from table time was that was one of the biggest irritants at least for me, that columns would haphazardly resize based on what was in them, and sometimes you wanted them to and sometimes not. As a general rule I found it better design wise to truncate text rather than have things expanding and contracting in response to what copy editors were doing.

>framesets are here to stay now

woo yeah, I see them a lot in the wild. I mean really the only time I really see frames used anymore are iframes and generally in eCommerce and similar security requiring solutions where the frame can be partially controlled by the storefront, but is more fully controlled by the payment provider. I just find the statement "framesets are here to stay now" really weird and triumphal for something that is so rarely used?

>I still have one of the funnier "how to make this without tables?" challenges.

I followed the link, I would think it is better suited to a "why would you make this" challenge. I'm not sure

1. it shouldn't be a table. seems like maybe it should be

2. why the freaky animation. or for that matter why the animation nearly crashed my browser.

I'm definitely sure lots of designs could not be adequately achieved without tables and framesets, but my experience seems to have run contrary to yours because for me CSS was a godsend in fixing the things I found irritating about those two technologies, this does not mean that I never encountered situations where I thought this would be easier with tables, but as soon as I tried putting tables back in I found all those irritants came back in.

From my experience tables and framesets were best suited to layouts that are rarely ever wanted, and when used to implement slightly different layouts had too many problems and irritants to be useful.

Your mileage has obviously differed, but I'm not sure that "here is a particular problem that people seldom wish to solve and which I have constructed, that plays to the strengths of my favored technology while avoiding its pitfalls" is as impressive an argument as you seem to think it is.
by igorkraw | 2025-12-11 10:19:44+00:00
I see this argument often but for me it misses something.

The difference is about power. The wealth being this concentrated means the power is concentrated.

If people are okay with the idea of an ETF, or a wealth manager (or any type do fund manager/investment bank) then they should be okay with sovereign wealth funds/national ETFs that provide dividends with a guaranteed single share single vote setup.

If you want competition, then the US government used to be good at creating and sustaining artificial compétition in military procurement - similar to how Amazon let's teams compete on the same projects internally.

Because the competition would be artificially and enforced by laws, there's just as much as potential for massive efficiency gains as there is potential for corruption (the Norwegian national wealth fund has gone swimmingly for them)
by denismi | 2025-12-11 10:19:54+00:00
Australia is a Five Eyes country, with carte blanche access to data that the incumbent social media companies freely share with all the acronym deep-state authorities.

Could you elaborate further on how preventing a sizeable proportion of its citizens from communicating through these established spy-nets, causing them to disperse out to unpredictable alternatives they might not be able to control, increases mass surveillance?
by dragonwriter | 2025-12-11 10:20:27+00:00
> We are heading to a centralised command economy. Marxists want more of that

Marxists want the working class whose labor is applied to capital in production to direct capital, and thereby production, rather than capital being privately owned and its owners directing labor, and thereby production. While the democratic centralism favored in Leninist theory and its derivatives is (at least in the theory in which it is conceived) a means of achieving that, current Western Marxists are, IME, all over the map with regard to centralism. They are more united about who should wield power over the economy than about the structure of how that power should be wielded.
by vintagedave | 2025-12-11 10:21:10+00:00
Yes, though it was a remarkably brief mention. I believe Borland tried to standardise it back in 2002 or so,* along with properties. (I was the C++Builder PM, but a decade and a half after that attempt.)

C++Builder’s entire UI system is built around __closure and it is remarkably efficient: effectively, a very neat fat pointer of object instance and method.

[*] Edit: two dates on the paper, but “bound pointer to member” and they note the connection to events too: https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2002/n13...