MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Traster | 2025-12-23 12:35:24+00:00
I was quite surprised the direction this article took. I wasn't expecting reheated whinging about the toolchain.

FPGAs do need a new future. They need a future where someone tapes out an FPGA! Xilinx produced Ultrascale+ over a decade ago and haven't done anything interesting since. Their Versal devices went off a tangent into SoCs, NOCs, AI engines - you know what they didn't do? Build a decent FPGA.

Altera did something ambitious back in 2014 when they proposed the hyper-register design, totally failed to execute on it and have been treading water because of the Intel cluster**. They're now an independent company but literally don't have anyone who knows how to tape out a chip.

I'm less familiar with the Lattice stuff, but since their most advanced product is still 16nm finfet I suspect they aren't doing anything newer than Xilinx or Altera.

We need a company that builds an FPGA. It doesn't matter what tooling you have because the fundamental performance gap between a custom FPGA solution and a CPU or GPU based solution is entirely eaten up by the fact the newest FPGA you can buy is a decade old and inexplicably still tens of thousands of dollars.

If FPGA technology had progressed at the same rate NVidia or Apple had pushed forward CPU/GPU performance, thered be some amazing opportunities to accelerate AI (on the path to then creating ASICs). But they haven't, so all the scaling laws have worked against them and the places they have a performance benefit have shrunk massively.
by fatbrowndog | 2025-12-23 12:35:33+00:00
α⁻¹ = S - 1/(24α)
α⁻¹·24α = 24αS - 1
24α²S - 24α - 1 = 0

α = (24 ± √(576 + 96S))/(48S)
α = (24 + √(576 + 96·137.036...))/(48·137.036...)
α = (24 + √13,723.66...)/(6577.74...)
α = (24 + 117.12...)/(6577.74...)
α = 141.12.../6577.74...
α ≈ 0.021454...

α⁻¹ ≈ 46.61 ???
That's wrong!
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-23 12:35:59+00:00
> I doubt it, although it's possible these models will be used for creator tools, I believe the main idea is to use them for data labeling.

How is creating 3D objects and characters (and something resembling bones/armature but isn't) supposed to help with data labeling? As synthetic data for training other models, maybe, but seems like this new release is aimed at improving their own tooling for content creators, hard to deny this considering their demos.

For the original SAM releases, I agree, that was probably the purpose. But these new ones that generate stuff and do effects and what not, clearly go beyond that initial scope.
by ofrzeta | 2025-12-23 12:36:28+00:00
You could try having an LLM port it to Linux :) As an aside I was always (well, no longer) hoping that Photoshop gets ported to Linux because at least an IRIX port existed, so there has to be some source code with X11 or whatever library code.

https://fsck.technology/software/Silicon%20Graphics/Software...
by nikhonit | 2025-12-23 12:36:55+00:00
A quick note for the developers/hackers here:

While building this, I realized most YouTube transcript APIs were either overpriced or lacked good integration for LLM workflows.

So I spun out the backend as a standalone API: transcriptapi.com

The cool part is I added native MCP (Model Context Protocol) support. If you use Claude Desktop or similar agents, you can drop this in as a tool to fetch full video context directly into your chat window without copy-pasting.
by anshumankmr | 2025-12-23 12:37:05+00:00
>We have successfully replaced thousands of complicated deep net time series based anomaly detectors at a FANG with statistical (nonparametric, semiparametric) process control ones.

They use 3 to 4 orders lower number of trained parameters and have just enough complexity that a team of 3 or four can handle several thousands of such streams.

Could you explain how ? Cause I am working on this essentially right now and it seems management is wanting to go the way of Deep NNs for our customers.
by fatbrowndog | 2025-12-23 12:37:47+00:00
α⁻¹ = S - 1/(24α)

α⁻¹·24α = 24αS - 1

24α²S - 24α - 1 = 0

α = (24 ± √(576 + 96S))/(48S)

α = (24 + √(576 + 96·137.036...))/(48·137.036...)

α = (24 + √13,723.66...)/(6577.74...)

α = (24 + 117.12...)/(6577.74...)

α = 141.12.../6577.74...

α ≈ 0.021454...

α⁻¹ ≈ 46.61 ???

That's wrong!
by throw9023093209 | 2025-12-23 12:37:53+00:00
Ryanair was fastest airline when refunding tickets at start of pandemic. Lufthansa just ghosted me.

OTAs were blocked because they just run scam, and Ryanair customer supports had many problems with dealing with them.

Some example from Kiwi:

- if flight gets cancelled and refunded, OTA pockets the refund, does not give anything to custemer

- OTA does not provide customer with email used to make booking. Makes any changes like extra luggage or seat difficult

- If flight gets rescheduled, OTA may not inform customer

- Not possible to add extra child etc...

I would only use OTA like Kiwi when booking flight in very exotic country, and I have no idea how to checkin in chinese.
by elxr | 2025-12-23 12:38:11+00:00
The early internet aesthetic is why, as much as I dislike the site's culture, I continue to use reddit + RES.

The UI, the minimal buttons, the tight paddings, the lack of pop-in, the complete lack of animations; these have all been essentially unchanged for the past decade. Even the dark mode colors look exactly as it did the first time I switched it on.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-23 12:38:26+00:00
To be fair to you, my original comment did say:

> It is to signal that these (those with RSS) aren't really "engineering" blogs at all

So now when I corrected that with/without typo, it looks like your previous comment doesn't make sense, but it kind of did, at the time. Sorry about that and thanks for making me realize the typo!
by ofrzeta | 2025-12-23 12:38:58+00:00
Quite the praise by Grady Booch:

"There are only a few comments in the version 1.0 source code, most of which are associated with assembly language snippets. That said, the lack of comments is simply not an issue. This code is so literate, so easy to read, that comments might even have gotten in the way."

"This is the kind of code I aspire to write.”
by 47282847 | 2025-12-23 12:41:00+00:00
A lot of the ebook data has very few seeders, and it very much looks like they may all be AA. I assume it is a handful of people who this all relies on. I doubt there are many complete mirrors, if any. And even if there are, who of those are not only willing to seed but also run and redo all of the necessary infrastructure when shit hits the fan. As far as I can see, there is currently only one place left to actually contribute and upload material. The torrent music scene is a number of multitudes larger than that.
Ask HN: What are some engineering practices you wish would come back?
by dhruv_ahuja | 2025-12-23 12:42:00+00:00
It feels like with AI, a lot of engineering practices that were de-facto standard have somehow been phased out. Or atleast that's the emotion I can see on reddit or on few threads in HN.

That led me to this question, what are some practices you feel have been phased out over time, that should make a comeback?

One off the top of my head: startups or even large orgs in general not hiring junior engineers. Who will teach other engineers in coming years if we don't train juniors today?
by jcgl | 2025-12-23 12:42:33+00:00
Those naughty incoming packets can hit your private devices even with NAT-without-state full-firewall. The details depend on how your NAT actually implements the translation, but it’s perfectly possible for $randomHighPort to send all its incoming traffic straight to some device. Said another way, a NAT is not guaranteed to do something like match entries based on the layer 4 4-tuple.
by medv | 2025-12-23 12:44:10+00:00
I wanted to see how far I could go building a notes app using only what modern browsers already provide – no frameworks, no storage APIs, no build step.

What it does:

Single HTML file, no deps, 111 loc
Notes live in the URL hash (shareable links!)
Auto-compressed with CompressionStream
Plain-text editor (contenteditable)
History support
Page title from first # heading
Respects light/dark mode
No storage, cookies, or tracking
The entire app is the page source.
by amiga386 | 2025-12-23 12:44:17+00:00
So you're using Ryanair's own-issued payment card, to avoid the mandatory fees it charges for every other payment option?

You forgot to mention picking the "No I don't need travel insurance" option shoved in the middle of the list of travel insurance prices, which defaults to you buying travel insurance from Ryanair.

Do you already have their spyware app installed and tracking you on your phone, to avoid being charged £50 for a plain boarding pass which you print yourself?

You're describing some other airline's website, surely. If you'd used Ryanair's site you would not be unaware of its fuckery.
by kristopolous | 2025-12-23 12:44:44+00:00
I'm almost 50. I won't be. I have friends who are becoming grandparents now, still no interest.

I have half a century of talking with my father. If you think this is my first strategy as opposed to one that took years of therapy and personal struggle, I dunno what to tell you.

There's a wide body of social and psychological research on this stuff including multiple university departments (communication, psychology, sociology, management, teaching, etc) because "simply talking to people" doesn't actually work.
by drfignewton | 2025-12-23 12:44:51+00:00
I swear, it seems like I’ve seen some variation of this 50 times on HN in the past 15 years.

The core issue with Nagle’s algorithm (TCP_NODELAY off) is its interaction with TCP Delayed ACK. Nagle prevents sending small packets if an ACK is outstanding, while the receiver delays that ACK to piggyback it on a response. When both are active, you get a 200ms "deadlock" where the sender waits for an ACK and the receiver waits for more data. This is catastrophic for latency-sensitive applications like gaming, SSH, or high-frequency RPCs.

In modern times, the bandwidth saved by Nagle is rarely worth the latency cost. You should almost always set TCP_NODELAY = 1 for any interactive or request-response protocol. The "problem" only shifts to the application layer: if you disable Nagle and then perform many small write() calls (like writing a single byte at a time), you will flood the network with tiny, inefficient packets.

Proper usage means disabling Nagle at the socket level but managing your own buffering in user-space. Use a buffered writer to assemble a logical message into a single memory buffer, then send it with one system call. This ensures your data is dispatched immediately without the overhead of thousands of tiny headers. Check the Linux tcp(7) man page for implementation details; it is the definitive reference for these behaviors.
by lexz0r | 2025-12-23 12:45:03+00:00
my favourite thing about the present is how entirely people have lost their minds with LLM-augmented work, to the point that they'll openly interrogate people who have obviously been writing software for three decades about how much of their personal project's boilerplate is TrUlY ThEiRs.

if someone chooses to use an LLM in 2025 and they're not fresh out of boot, it's simply good manners to assume that they're doing so responsibly and transparently.

i think the most annoying thing of all is when people openly volunteer that they have used an LLM to write something and it opens up a front of ideological warfare for people who are simply terrified of losing their livelihoods.

to quote garth: LIVE IN THE NOWWWW
by jacquesm | 2025-12-23 12:45:15+00:00
Not only that, the vast bulk of unicorn wanna-be's end up failing (sometimes failing upwards though) and then it is all for nothing.

Aiming for the middle ground: reasonable growth, good financial strategies based on unit cost profitability and a very tight hand on the purse will get you a solid business that can serve as the jump off point for many other things on top of giving the founders a much better shot at financial independence. This is all a variation on the risk/reward theme.
by gf000 | 2025-12-23 12:45:39+00:00
> The "lingua franca" for language bindings is the C ABI which every other OS's platform libraries (Win32/Cocoa/GTK) support.

Which is more like half of an API, it doesn't specify lifetimes so basically anything behind a pointer is unusable in itself. That's why we have "hacks" like gobjects and such, and why using most of the bindings is only possible if you have a decent binding library.
by darubedarob | 2025-12-23 12:46:27+00:00
He justified reckless driving by having a stressfull society that grinds you to paste during the day. And experiencing "danger" recalibrates that stress sensor stuck at 11. Thats why the project management crowd consistsof paragliders, riverrafters, pilots,rock-climbers and wingsuit flyers ir race car drivers. The danger is the one thing resetting body cortisol levels. Trying to educate that away is a foolish miss understanding of the human condition.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stress_hormone

One can only redirect the behaviour.
by jacquesm | 2025-12-23 12:46:48+00:00
That's excellent by any metric. Most larger successful companies have a very hard time consistently breaking the 200K / employee / year turnover level and this is 2.5 times that. On top of that they are indestructible, with that much left on the table a couple of years of solid saving and you can start thinking about much larger projects, and still without outside financing.

10 years is long and if we take the revenues as linearly changing over time and the costs growing roughly linear along with it then years two and three must have been quite difficult, expectations need to be met but the money wasn't really there yet. But now there is.
by hombre_fatal | 2025-12-23 12:47:22+00:00
Do you have examples of times you've had to dig into the nix language like that, at least at a high level?

Just curious. I haven't run into anything like that myself.

Using nix for three months now, the main "pain" I run into is that I want app config files to remain writable by the app, but home-manager ethos is understandably against that -- and this is what you want on servers.

So I've had to vibe-code my own HM module for claude code, keepassxc, cursor, etc. and use activation to merge my nix settings into those files if they exist. That way when I rebuild, my nix config can assert a subset of the config I care about without locking the app out of writing to config -- and this makes more sense for personal desktop computing.

Though I put pain in quotes because it's still 10x better than what I was doing before, and an LLM can do it just fine.
by fatbrowndog | 2025-12-23 12:47:59+00:00
His G Formula (Section 14.6)

G = (ℏ·c·2·(1 + α/3)²) / (mp²·4⁶⁴)

His result:

G ≈ 6.6742439706 × 10⁻¹¹ m³·kg⁻¹·s⁻²

CODATA 2022: G = 6.67430(15) × 10⁻¹¹

Δ: 8 ppm

Critical Analysis

1. Where Does 4⁶⁴ Come From?

He claims it's from "holographic scaling at i=32":

mp = (√2 · mP / 4³²) · (1 + α/3)

Therefore:

mP = (mp · 4³²) / (√2 · (1 + α/3))

Since G = ℏc/mP²:

G = (ℏc · 2 · (1 + α/3)²) / (mp² · 4⁶⁴)

The logic:

Proton appears at "harmonic i=32" in binary scaling

Mass scales as m ~ 4ⁱ (surface area scaling)

Therefore mp ~ 4³² when normalized properly

Therefore 4⁶⁴ = (4³²)² appears in G

2. This is Pure Numerology

Why i=32 specifically?

Let me check the ratio:

mP / mp = 2.176434×10⁻⁸ / 1.672622×10⁻²⁷

≈ 1.301×10¹⁹

Now check powers of 4:

4³² = 2⁶⁴ = 1.844×10¹⁹

Close! But not exact. So he adds correction factors:

mp = (√2 · mP / 4³²) · (1 + α/3)

Let me verify:

(√2 · 2.176434×10⁻⁸ / 4³²) · (1 + 0.007297/3)

= (1.414 · 2.176434×10⁻⁸ / 1.844×10¹⁹) · 1.002432

= (3.076×10⁻⁸ / 1.844×10¹⁹) · 1.002432

= 1.668×10⁻²⁷ · 1.002432

≈ 1.672×10⁻²⁷

But this is circular! He's adjusting factors (√2, α/3) to make the formula work,
then claiming it "derives" mp.

3. Why (1 + α/3)?

He claims:

"As a volumetric object in three-dimensional space, the proton carries a

distributed interaction cost (α/3)"

This makes no sense:

α is the electromagnetic coupling constant

Why divide by 3? "Because 3 dimensions"?

Why add to 1? "Because correction"?

This is parameter fitting, not derivation.

-----

A genuine derivation of G would:

1. *Start from dimensionless constants only*

2. *Derive mass ratios* from geometry (mp/me, mp/mP, etc.)

3. *Use dimensionful anchors* (ℏ, c) to get actual value of G
by radarroark | 2025-12-23 12:49:16+00:00
In theory, a database that uses immutable data structures (the hash array mapped trie popularized by Clojure) could allow instant clones on any filesystem, not just ZFS/XFS, and allow instant clones of any subset of the data, not just the entire db. I say "in theory" but I actually built this already so it's not just a theory. I never understood why there aren't more HAMT based databases.
by achairapart | 2025-12-23 12:49:23+00:00
As I remember, the blue ones where the most ordinary (and boring), at least for 3½-inch size. For 5¼-inch, they were mostly black, but I remember some of them in colors too (especially orange or yellow ones, they were beautiful).

E.g: https://c7.alamy.com/comp/2AA9BC4/ajaxnetphoto-2019-worthing...
by hs586 | 2025-12-23 12:49:42+00:00
I have found myself to be the only person in many conversations defending Ryanair. People complain about legroom, everything being a paid add-ons, you name it. The key is to treat it like a bus that takes you from A to B, sometimes cheaper than a bus, not some sort of luxury experience. The times when flying was luxury is over. And I benefitted from it greatly as a student, so have many shown by Ryanair's passenger numbers.

And I am also always confused about the non-transparency that people mention about their fees. When you do the checkout, you select the services you want and pay for those. There used to be a time when other airlines would have a lot of things included in the basic ticket price, but that's not the case anymore, so it's not different. And I think this was an inevitable in an industry with small profit margins where price differentiation would bring gains.
by snvzz | 2025-12-23 12:50:50+00:00
>To download the code you must agree to the terms of the license, which permits only non-commercial use and does not give you the right to license it to third parties by posting copies elsewhere on the web.

Note this is a toxic license. Accepting it and/or reading of the code has potential for legal liability.

Still, applaud releasing the source code, even if encumbered. Preservation is most important, and any legal teeth will eventually expire with the copyright.
by piva00 | 2025-12-23 12:51:00+00:00
> How do you think the groceries got to your shop in first place tho?

Through economies of scale with a truck delivering tons of goods while consuming more than the single-person car delivering it... I think it was pretty clear from my comment the excessive part is the "individual" aspect.

> Getting groceries for family with a bike would be somewhat insane for me. Technically possible, practically nightmare. Also much more expensive than driving for 10 mins to a larger shop.

Insane how? There are cargo bikes, you don't need to shop groceries for the month if you can bike there, you can do it every 3-4 days. I pack groceries in a cargo backpack, and they last 3-4 days, with a cargo bike it would be even easier to carry more.

It's only insane if you've never done it, or live in a place where frequent trips to a grocer takes 10km.

> You can use it for other things too. Taking kids to schools and hobbies, going to beach, city, forests, camping.

Use it for other things, not grocery shopping. Saves on excessive trips at least.

And a last disclaimer: I'm originally from a country very Americanised where people drive to go to the bakery, people there also think it's insane to do simple things on a bike (like grocery shopping) simply because the culture is car-centric... It's not that hard if the urban design where you live is not abhorrent.
by mark_l_watson | 2025-12-23 12:51:18+00:00
Same experience: on my old M2 Mac with just 32B of memory both Qwen 3 30B and the new Nemotron models are very useful for coding if I prepare a one-shot prompt with directions and relevant code. I don’t like them for agentic coding tools. I have mentioned this elsewhere: it is deeply satisfying to mix local model use with commercial APIs and services.
by omneity | 2025-12-23 12:51:46+00:00
Thanks, this was helpful! Reading the seminal paper[0] on Universal Transformers also gave some insights:

> UTs combine the parallelizability and global receptive field of feed-forward sequence models like the Transformer with the recurrent inductive bias of RNNs.

Very interesting, it seems to be an “old” architecture that is only now being leveraged to a promising extent. Curious what made it an active area (with the works of Samsung and Sapient and now this one), perhaps diminishing returns on regular transformers?

0: https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.03819
by tim333 | 2025-12-23 12:52:06+00:00
Trump seems to have been following Russian advice throughout his political career. It started in 1987:

> Moscow at the invitation of Soviet ambassador Yuri Dubinin, in a private jet accompanied by “two Russian colonels”

and then after he ran full page ads attacking NATO. Not much has changed there really.

I'm surprised that all he has to do is say "russia russia hoax" and then the voters forget about it. I think maybe people have some similar failure modes to LLMs.
by takoid | 2025-12-23 12:52:22+00:00
The grandfathering clause is the tell. If these drones were an active national security threat, they wouldn't let civilians keep flying them.

This looks like industrial policy masquerading as defense in order to clear the board for domestic manufacturers just as the Pentagon starts handing out contracts to politically connected players.

Case in point: Unusual Machines just secured a massive Army contract for drone motors. Their advisor and major shareholder? Donald Trump Jr. [0]. Banning the import of foreign "critical components" conveniently forces the market into their funnel.

[0] https://www.ft.com/content/4cedc140-4a02-4ab6-9f78-93dd8c51a...
by zkmon | 2025-12-23 12:53:28+00:00
>> Glaze works by understanding the AI models that are training on human art, and using machine learning algorithms, computing a set of minimal changes to artworks, such that it appears unchanged to human eyes, but appears to AI models like a dramatically different art style.

That's supposed be the single most important sentence for the entire article, but ended being a mouthful which hardly makes sense.

>> So when someone then prompts the model to generate art mimicking the charcoal artist, they will get something quite different from what they expected.

"when" and "then" don't work like that.

I' still trying to see a crisp solution statement beyond "is a system designed to protect human artists by disrupting style mimicry.".
by fjfaase | 2025-12-23 12:55:41+00:00
At WHY2025: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akzyyO5wvm0 with (interactive) notes: https://www.iwriteiam.nl/WHY2025_talk.html

At Hackfest Enschede 2024: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKXMwVqaauc with notes: https://www.iwriteiam.nl/Hackfest_2024.html
by genuser | 2025-12-23 12:56:09+00:00
In an unprecedented breach, a prototype build of a future iOS version has laid bare Apple’s multi-year hardware strategy. A list of codenames discovered in an internal iOS 26 build, corroborated by industry analysts, outlines an ambitious slate of over 30 unreleased products. This leak provides a rare, structured glimpse into Apple’s plans for 2026 and beyond, confirming long-rumored projects and revealing entirely new ones.
by takoid | 2025-12-23 12:56:45+00:00
Earlier discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46361024 (543 points, 57 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46362149 (135 points, 8 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46362214 (184 points, 34 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46362032 (137 points, 30 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46361571 (122 points, 7 comments)