MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jancsika | 2025-12-13 16:39:54+00:00
> his soloing was a little underwhelming

I mean, it is true that a lot of his solos get busier and bangier until he's hammering out polyrhythms at the end. I just take it as part of the ride when listening to Brubeck.

But I really don't want to listen to other jazz artists emulate that, especially knowing how little chance there is that they'll have the same creativity and sense of rhythm that Brubeck had. (Edit: based on the experience of hearing the banging without the creativity/rhythm-- it's not fun.)
by rrrix1 | 2025-12-13 16:40:19+00:00
> Is it possible to bore for my own water supply, install solar+inverter/battery backup for electricity, get a medical degree to treat my own wounds? Sure but most would say it’s not reasonable.

I’m feeling attacked. Here I was thinking my lifelong work of self sufficiency for my family was completely reasonable until you came along. Thanks a lot!
by pjdesno | 2025-12-13 16:40:43+00:00
Because people don’t.

I’ve spent a bunch of time analyzing IBM’s publicly released Cloud Object Storage traces. Median object size is about 16K, mean is a megabyte or two. A decent number of tenants have mean object sizes under 100K.

People use object storage for a bunch of reasons. In general you’re better off supporting what your users are doing than demanding that they rewrite their applications because you think they’re doing it all wrong.
by pragmatic | 2025-12-13 16:40:59+00:00
What are the likely outcomes?

1) current admins working hand in glove with current AI hypemen safely bring old nuke plants online.

2) they bring it online but cause a meltdown or two in the process. Investor pressure lead to cut corners lead to meltdowns lead to public opinion turning against nuke power...again. Second nuke power winter begins.

3) something else?
by pontus | 2025-12-13 16:40:59+00:00
I would buy this in a heartbeat. I am profoundly bothered by the slop software that is on every TV these days. I keep joking that as tech invades more and more corners of our lives, we will at some point in the future be helping our parents with their couches by saying "Have you tried restarting your couch?"

Don't get me wrong, tech is great when it's a value-add, but TV tech has gotten out of control.
by jamesblonde | 2025-12-13 16:44:28+00:00
I agree that this is an anti-pattern for training. In training, you are often I/O bound over S3 - high b/w networking doesn't fix it (.saftensor files are typically 4GB in size). You need NVMe and high b/w networking along with a distributed file system.

We do this with tiered storage over S3 using HopsFS that has a HDFS API with a FUSE client, so training can just read data (from HopsFS datanode's NVMe cache) as if it is local, but it is pulled from NVMe disks over the network. In contrast, writes go straight to S3 vis HopsFS write-through NVMe cache.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-12-13 16:45:28+00:00
Yes, it is. You seem to have misunderstood what I wrote. The critique I was pointing to is of the amount of examples and energy needed during model training, which is what the "learning" in "machine learning" actually refers to. The paper uses GPT-3 which had already absorbed all that data and electricity. And the "learning" the paper talks about is arguably not real learning, since none of the acquired skills persists beyond the end of the session.

Nobody is arguing about power consumption in this thread (but see below), and in any case the majority of power consumption is split between one-time training and the burden of running millions of prompts at once. Processing individual prompts costs almost nothing.

And it's already been stipulated that lack of long-term memory is a key difference between AI and human cognition. Give them some time, sheesh. This stuff's brand new.

This is easy to settle. Go check any frontier model and see how far they get with multiplying numbers with tool calling disabled.

Yes, it is very easy to settle. I ran this session locally in Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Instruct-Q6_K: https://pastebin.com/G7Ewt5Tu

This is a 6-bit quantized version of a free model that is very far from frontier level. It traces its lineage through DeepSeek, which was likely RL-trained by GPT 4.something. So 2 out of 4 isn't bad at all, really. My GPU's power consumption went up by about 40 watts while running these queries, a bit more than a human brain.

If I ask the hardest of those questions on Gemini 3, it gets the right answer but definitely struggles: https://pastebin.com/MuVy9cNw

As for him, give the man a break, he's 94 years old and still sharp as a tack and intellectually productive.

(Shrug) As long as he chooses to contribute his views to public discourse, he's fair game for criticism. You don't have to invoke quantum woo to multiply numbers without specialized tools, as the tests above show. Consequently, I believe that a heavy burden of proof lies with anyone who invokes quantum woo to explain any other mental operations. It's a textbook violation of Occam's Razor.
Show HN: I vibe coded a free typing game for my kids
by Alan01252 | 2025-12-13 16:45:42+00:00
My kids are surprisingly keen to learn to type, and I couldn't find any thing out there which was

A) Free without adverts B) Worked well on mobile/tablets C) Was clutter free and easy to use

I wondered how easily I could vibe code a solution.

Here's the result.

Everything here was "vibe coded" to an extent, the graphics, sounds, art-work, even the github pipelines ( and I used chatgpt to instruct me how to configure everything in AWS )

I'm particularly pleased with the phoneme game, https://free-kids-typing-games.com/games/phoneme-sound-lab/ which was crafted using Google's TTS engine, and I think could be expanded further.

The mobile keyboard is also particularly impressive and works really well for little fingers.

I thought the hacker news crowd might be interested.

You can see the code in all it's gory AI generated detail here

https://github.com/Alan01252/free-kids-typing-games.com
by shelled | 2025-12-13 16:45:59+00:00
This is really sad that some people are in ways blaming it on the author. While I do advocate zero to almost zero usage of services by these OEMs or big corps, in today's world everything, or almost everything, is linked to your email and/or phone number and in turn with a computing device, which, for me, makes these OEMs essentially public service providers for a cost. Locking a user out literally casts that person out of today's society — communication, dating, groceries, transport, hell, in some cases maybe even health care and emergency services — you name it. So it's very ingenuous and unkind of us not to raise hell and shout for extreme accountability on these corps' part instead of reminding a victim of T&C and not having diversified the online services usage enough across providers.

Any company or entity ought not to be allowed to wield power over our lives, like locking someone out arbitrarily, let alone via some asinine, half-baked algorithm.
by dang | 2025-12-13 16:46:16+00:00
Related. Others?

A Lisp interpreter implemented in Conway's Game of Life (2021) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34266240 - Jan 2023 (25 comments)

A Lisp Interpreter Implemented in Conway's Game of Life - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29661616 - Dec 2021 (85 comments)
by rvnx | 2025-12-13 16:47:13+00:00
Reminds me of a story: When Facebook was launched I created an account.

Fast forward 10 years, account got permanently locked for suspicious activity.

Unsuccessful appeal. So permanently lost contact with some of my childhood friends and no way to recover them as they are in private mode.

If you hope on Instagram to find a girlfriend, it can also have a serious impact on your life to not have access to it. No instagram + no WhatsApp = paranoid weirdo = not dating material
Show HN: LeadJot – Stop Losing Leads to Slow Replies
by NikoNaskida | 2025-12-13 16:47:33+00:00
Hi All,

We’re building LeadJot. An AI website chat widget that turns visitors into qualified leads.

Most sites lose visitors after hours. Forms sit. Emails wait. Leads disappear.

LeadJot talks to visitors right away. It answers basic questions. Asks the right ones back. Captures contact details. Pushes serious visitors toward booking a call.

What we’re focusing on:

Clear lead qualification. No fluff chats. Owner-controlled flows. You decide the questions and order. A lightweight widget that fits any site.

The goal isn’t to replace sales. It’s to filter noise and surface intent.

We’re early and iterating fast. Would love feedback and ideas about: - How strict qualification should be - How would one configure the chat flow

Happy to answer anything.
by zbentley | 2025-12-13 16:48:02+00:00
I think a lot is riding on that “generally”. You’re right that the default approach/majority of cases should avoid shelling out wherever possible, but there are a large minority of situations where doing that does make sense, including:

Calling a CLI tool which will be present everywhere your program might reasonably be installed (e.g. if your program is a MySQL extension, it can probably safely assume the existence of mysqld).

The CLI tool you want to call is vendored into or downloaded by your wrapper program, reducing installation requirements overhead (this is not always a good idea for other reasons, but it does address a frequently cited reason not to shell out).

The CLI tool’s functionality is both disjoint with the rest of your program and something that you have a frequent need to hard-kill. (Forking is much more error prone than running a discrete subprocess; you can run your own program as a subprocess too, but in that case the functionality is probably not disjointed).

Talking to POSIX CLI tools in a POSIX compatible way (granted most things those tools do are easier/faster in a language’s stdlib).
by Workaccount2 | 2025-12-13 16:48:18+00:00
It's really binary events that they should throttle execution and do batch orders.

The bad part of HFT is paying the smartest young minds this country has to offer to figure out how the parse GDP data as fast as computationally possible so they can send in an order before other players can. That's a dumb game that doesn't provide much benefit (besides speed in sparse critical moments adding a few % to the funds ROI).

They can arbitrage all day, but don't let them buy every Taylor Swift concert ticket the moment it goes on sale because they have a co-located office with a direct fiber line, ASIC filled servers, and API access.
Show HN: Production-ready VS Code Extension boilerplate using React 19
by Kiran7893 | 2025-12-13 16:48:27+00:00
Hi HN,

I built and open-sourced a production-ready boilerplate for building VS Code extensions using React-based webviews.

It focuses on removing setup friction while keeping the architecture clean and extensible.

Key features: - React 19 + TypeScript - Tailwind CSS - esbuild-based bundling (fast builds) - Two-way messaging between extension and webview - VS Code theme-aware styling - Production-ready build and packaging setup

The repo includes documentation and a deployment guide.

GitHub: https://github.com/kiran7893/vscode-extension-react-boilerpl...

Feedback and contributions are welcome.
by QuiEgo | 2025-12-13 16:48:28+00:00
1. This is a total nightmare, the author has my deepest sympathy.

2. Last time there was a post where this happened to someone, I looked into what you can do if you're locked out of your Apple ID or Google Account.

I know people will say "just self host", but all of the self-hosting solutions are not friendly to families or non-tech people. Telling my extended family to tailscale into my server to look at family photos from vacation is a total non-starter. All of the self-hosted solutions are also just way less smooth to use than the built-in integration iCloud or Google Drive gives with devices.

That said, there are straightforward options to deal with this (at least the data part), if you plan ahead. The high level strategy is to setup backups that let you get _a copy_ of your data not tied to any login you don't control. It's a bummer to have to go through these hoops, but again pragmatically, I'm stuck using these services to participate in modern life.

For Google Drive, you can rclone your data to a computer of your choice to get a copy of your data not tied to Google Account. It will even convert G-Suite files to Microsoft Office format, so you have a copy of the data offline.

For Google Photos, I'm not aware of a great way to get the data - rclone only gets low quality copies of photos. I'm an Apple user, so I didn't dive too deep here, perhaps the HN hivemind knows.

For iCloud and Apple Photos, you have a lot of options. You can use Parachute backup or the PhotoSync App to get a copy of your data not tied to your Apple ID. If you have a mac, you can also setup your mac to download everything offline, and do time machine backups - they are not tied to your Apple ID.

I will also add Synology NASes have a super, super easy to setup way to do all of this stuff (HyperBackup plus Synology Photos app) that's borderline worth the cost of admission on it's own, even with Synology's recent turn to the dark side. If you have non-technical family, you should strongly consider pointing them in this direction, if you can use a smartphone you can probably get this working.
by bichiliad | 2025-12-13 16:48:37+00:00
I just bought my first medium format camera recently. I know others have mentioned Lomography's beautiful new 35mm point-and-shoot, and I so wish for a 6x7 rangefinder that's cheap and attainable, easy to calibrate and repair, and portable. This sort of project is exciting to me, but man would I kill for a fully-featured medium-format camera with good support. The Mamiya 6 and 7 are both such incredible cameras, but they're so coveted and so boutique to repair that investing in one feels like not worth the commitment.

For context, the camera I got is a Mamiya RZ67. It's obviously also not straightforward to repair, and it's a beast in size, but I love that it's a fraction of the cost, modular, and readily available.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-12-13 16:50:08+00:00
> there's probably fewer different routes on the subway so trains conflict with each other less

This isn't obvious to me. Here's Deutsche Bahn's map of the system: https://cms.static-bahn.de/wmedia/redaktion/aushaenge/streck...

Here's a map of Shanghai's subway system: https://www.travelchinaguide.com/images/map/shanghai/subway-...

The German intercity rail network certainly identifies more lines, around 57 to Shanghai's 18, but this isn't directly related to the complexity of the topology. For example, line 14 appears to begin in Aachen and dead-end into Berlin, at which point line 95 begins in Berlin and runs out to Poland. As far as the routing is concerned, those could be the same line. But they're given different numbers. When the same thing happens (at a smaller scale) in Shanghai at the west end of line 9, the tail bit of the line going to Songjiang is still called "line 9". Note that if you want to ride out to Songjiang, at some point you're going to have to get off your "line 9" train and walk over to another station where a different "line 9" train will take you the rest of the way.

Discounting that, the two layouts appear to be roughly similar on the fundamentals, if differently scaled.

The most obvious difference is that the routes between major German cities are served by several lines. This is clearly meaningful in some cases; line 29 from Munich to Nuremberg continues north to Hamburg via Berlin while line 41 from Munich to Nuremberg continues northwest to Dortmund via Frankfurt and Cologne. On the other hand, line 8 from Munich to Nuremberg parallels line 29 for the entire length of line 8 (line 8 stops in Berlin, but line 29 doesn't).

My first guess would be that conflicts arise from the fact that the German trains are on the ground, and when their tracks cross, conflict can occur. This isn't true of a subway system; when subway tracks cross, they do it at different altitudes, allowing both tracks to be in use simultaneously.
by woodruffw | 2025-12-13 16:50:24+00:00
It’s hypocrisy insofar as neither Viagra nor Bud Light has a child demographic in their market. The CEOs of those companies don’t let their kids have them because they’re not for kids; YouTube designates at least some its product as for kids.

(In this way, it would be hypocrisy if Anheuser-Busch’s executive suite were all teetotalers.)
by hopelite | 2025-12-13 16:50:44+00:00
Does anyone know if in the USA you could simply use small claims court on every individual device and service to get likely default judgements against Apple and then when they are unlikely to pay up, get a judgement against Apple and make a big deal about strolling into a store or even HQ to take Cook’s own devices out of his office or maybe just seize his corporate jet and auction it off?
by adamzwasserman | 2025-12-13 16:51:03+00:00
On effect size: my primary goal at this stage is falsification. If French and English models show no meaningful differences at matched compute, that's informative: it would support the scaling hypothesis. If they do differ, I'll need to be careful about causal claims, but it would at least challenge the "transformers are magic" framing that treats architecture as the main story.

The L2 regularization and information theory pointers are helpful, it will go on my reading list. If you have favorites, I'll start there.

On the "we know nothing" point: I'm sympathetic. The Stroop example is exactly why I'm skeptical of strong claims in either direction. 197k papers and no mechanism suggests language processing has properties we don't yet have frameworks to describe. That's not mysticism. It's just acknowledging the gap between phenomenon and explanation.
by arunabha | 2025-12-13 16:51:20+00:00
I am not sure I follow your reasoning. You're complaining about a request for donation, on a site which provides a language and supporting infrastructure like a package manager for free?

Why shouldn't the PSF be allowed to ask for donations on their site? I'm sure if you're unhappy with them, they will cheerfully refund you the price you paid?

Oh!, that's right, you paid nothing and you claim that asking for donations is somehow 'enshittification' of PSF.

Frankly, the level of entitlement in your post is something else.
by yorwba | 2025-12-13 16:52:30+00:00
They've tried a bunch of other names for various projects that failed to garner attention:

https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=heavenlxj

https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=xjliu1229

https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=gravitywp
by cgbeeng | 2025-12-13 16:52:56+00:00
What I want is simply a well-made monitor with a single HDMI input and built-in speakers. Make it as flat as you want.

The rest is almost unnecessary in this day and age.

If everyone were to do this, it would open a bigger market for a well-made upgradable combo smart device and air TV tuner that the TV manufacturers could produce if they wanted to.
by amarant | 2025-12-13 16:53:50+00:00
> but somehow Jetbrains manages to get slow even on a M3 Max with 36GB RAM.

Really? That surprises me, given that I don't have any performance issues at all on my first gen dell xps 13.

Which specific products do you use? I use mostly intellij ultimate, but I have been playing around a bit with the community edition of Rover lately too. They're both silky smooth on my nearly 13 years old ultra portable.
by pyrolistical | 2025-12-13 16:54:41+00:00
They claim AI workflows require:

1. Small Objects at Scale

2. Latency Sensitivity

3. The Need for Directories

I’m skeptical on the last one. They talk about rename performance as being the issue.

I think what they mean is if you use path as the object key, if you rename a directory in the middle of a path, you need rename every object key that uses it.

But to me that is just a poor usage of an object store. You should never “rename” object keys.

Consider how git does it. If you rename a directory and diff it, the underlying object store didn’t rename any key. In fact all the files in the object stores are unchanged. Only the tree file changed, which maps paths to file hashes.

While renames would get faster that way, it would increase latency to do a path to object key look up.

I would like to see how fundamental the requirement to have directories are to AI workflows. I suspect it’s human “but I’m used to it” requirement
by evanelias | 2025-12-13 16:54:47+00:00
To me those "And..." headers read as intentional repetition to drive home a point. That isn't bad writing in my opinion. Notice each header varies the syntax/phrasing there. They aren't like "And [adjective] [noun]".

We're clearly not going to agree here, but I just ask that as you read various articles over the next few weeks, please pay attention to headers especially of the form "The ___ Trap", "The ___ Problem", "The ___ Solution".
by gregates | 2025-12-13 16:55:49+00:00
And the reason is that those products are (rightly) regulated. Would there be beer marketed to kids if it were legal? Would it be fine if it were the parents' sole responsibility to ensure their kids weren't drinking beer, including at school, at friends' homes where the parents may have different rules, etc., absent a general social consensus that kids shouldn't have beer?

This is anecdotal evidence for the emerging consensus that social media is bad for you and especially for kids. There's a legitimate question whether the people pushing these products know this and don't care or actively suppress evidence.

Tobacco companies famously did this and it caused a lot of harm. It's about that more than just a chance for a cheap shot "hypocrisy" accusation.
by WaxProlix | 2025-12-13 16:55:56+00:00
Oh man, you're in for a bad time then, as pretty much everything - yes even amateur racing cars - has software in it now, and you don't own any of it.

As a car guy, it surprises me you weren't aware of this trend yet but I guess we all find out sooner or later. But hey - maybe that '89 Carrera will keep on trucking for a few more decades though - good luck!
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-12-13 16:57:07+00:00
My son has a friend that went the sports route. He is always trying to sneak Roblox screen time when he is over on a play date and when my kid goes over to his house, his parents are very strict about no screen time and they have a great time.

It’s still up to the parent to enforce limitations even if you can distract them with other things.
by real-hacker | 2025-12-13 16:57:55+00:00
Every AI chat today is private by default — and massively wasteful. What if AI answers were public, cached, and shared instead? In this episode of _The Gilfoyle Show_, we unpack a deceptively simple idea that challenges privacy, business models, hallucinations, and the very way AI products are designed. Efficient? Dangerous? Inevitable? Let’s talk about the question AI platforms would rather avoid.
by marcosdumay | 2025-12-13 16:58:32+00:00
> If this code is stored on your device, and can be copied, it will be copied by some exploit.

Yeah... We really need some key-management hardware where the secrets can be copied by some channel that is not the primary one. This used to be more common, before the IT companies started pushing everything into the cloud.

I have recently started to see computer boards with write protection for the UEFI data, what is a related thing that also did go away because mostly of Microsoft. So, maybe things are changing back.
by munchbunny | 2025-12-13 16:59:38+00:00
> I would like to see how fundamental the requirement to have directories are to AI workflows.

In my experience, it's not that directories are inherently important, it's that an organization mechanism is, in the service of a few key problems:

1. Privacy and data handling requirements

2. Versioning

3. Partitioning

4. Probably some others I'm forgetting

Hierarchical storage is a useful all-purpose tool for these things.