MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jasonvorhe | 2025-12-30 10:17:08+00:00
It's difficult having an honest discussion if participants claim to sense barely perceptible noises where there aren't any.

One attribute of a failed state is that it can no longer provide public services. German bridges are in dire need of repair, some just crumbled last year. Trains aren't on time if they ride at all. Bordering countries already complain about this affecting their schedules as well.

Another attribute is crime. We've seen a rise in knife attacks over the last few years. German cities try to curb this via weapon-free zones with no effect because making something illegal doesn't fix the root cause. Then there's this intellectually offensive and unnecessarily expensive security theatre at local christmas markets.

Next is state legitimacy. After last year's elections which followed a government collapse, the old (collapsed!) cabinet was brought back in to support a debt-driven military budget that the new cabinet wouldn't have approved. The Election Scrutiny Committee decided against a recount of the votes for a specific party that didn't make it into the Bundestag because of a missing votes to reach a requirement while there were many reports of votes having been mishandled - even in many previous elections. Not to forget the complete lack of interest in investigating critical infrastructure being destroyed that now affects the entire industrial core of the country.

Then there's corruption: Mask deals, Cum ex, Azerbaijan as just rather recent examples involving national and international scandals.

Economy: Barely any growth, inflation beyond the official numbers, rising energy prices (spot prices partially tripled in the ~5 years).

I could go on. I know it's a far cry from "gangs rule the streets" levels of "failed state" but compared to some slightly saner Western governments and compared to pre-2020 Germany, it's quite the failure with no signs for improvements.
by noobermin | 2025-12-30 10:17:43+00:00
My wife has tried to use a flip phone just for nostalgia's sake and she has a newer phone that supports android 14 (technically android go 14) and thus should work with most basic apps. However, one of her banking apps refuses to work claiming an app is screensharing (the POSB bank app thankfully identifies it as the "android system" app.) likely what is occuring I think is the second screen is drawn using some sort of thing that is reported as screen sharing, that POSB thinks could be malware.

Of course, asking POSB for help has lead to nothing being done. By and large the biggest threat to people finance wise in singapore isn't malware but are scams (what is called "pig butchering" in America is rampant here) whilst malware is always a threat sometimes I feel like just refusing to function is problem due to overzealous viligiance to a low probability threat.
by leosanchez | 2025-12-30 10:18:06+00:00
> that it is actually a sin to perform the duties (dharma) of a caste that you aren't born into

> which is the crux of the argument that Krishna made to Arjuna in the Bhagwat Gita.

Crux of Krishna's argument is, it is sin to perform the duties of a caste you are not born into?

You might have to explain more. To me it looks like bad faith interpretation.
by locknitpicker | 2025-12-30 10:18:22+00:00
> For years, we've been told a lot of things that have never come to fruition.

Sometimes I wonder if Musk's astronomical pay package is an engineered rug pull on Tesla's investors. Imagine if they know the jig is up and intend to fleece stockholders one last time by leaving them holding the bag when the house of cards comes crumbling down.
by aylmao | 2025-12-30 10:18:45+00:00
I think both aquisitions have little to do with the product, and make a lot of sense when you look at the numbers and broader strategy.

WhatsApp had a very clear value at the time of aquisition. It had 450 million users, growth of over 1 million users a day, and was in direct competition with one of Facebook's main products (Messenger) [1].

They did pay $4 billion cash + $15 billion in shares, which is a lot, but overall a not too unreasonable $8 cash + $33 in shares per user to join forces with it's biggest messaging competitor. It not only covered a flank, but catapulted Facebook to own worldwide private messaging overnight.

Manus apparently has "millions of paying users" already [2]. although Manus hasn't been around very long, it's developed by a company that's been around since 2022 [3]. Millions of paying users sounds like a good way for Meta to set foot on the consumer AI product space, which it doesn't seem to be capturing too quickly [4]. It's also based in Singapore and has a lot of Chinese ties, so there might be some strategy there.

[1]: https://about.fb.com/news/2014/02/facebook-to-acquire-whatsa...

[2]: https://archive.is/ykBOm

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manus_(AI_agent)

[3]: https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/20/meta-ais-app-downloads-and...
by tao2024 | 2025-12-30 10:18:50+00:00
OP here. I'm a CS PhD student at UIUC working on User Modeling and Applied ML.

We built LLMRouter because we noticed a gap in the current LLM stack: everyone knows we shouldn't route every query to GPT-4/o1 (it's slow and expensive), but building a reliable router that handles context, reasoning, and user history is surprisingly hard.

Most existing solutions are either simple regex/keyword matching or closed-source APIs. We wanted to build a standard, open-source library that unifies the SOTA.

What LLMRouter actually does: It provides a unified interface to 16+ routing strategies, ranging from lightweight ML to heavy reasoning agents:

Single-Round: Classification-based (KNN, SVM, BERT) and Embedding-based methods.

Multi-Round & Agentic: Routers that "think" before assigning models (CoT reasoning) or break down tasks step-by-step.

Personalized Routing: This is a key focus of our research. The router learns from user interaction history to fit individual preferences (e.g., some users prefer concise answers from faster models, others need detailed reasoning).

The Pipeline: We didn't just ship the model weights. The library includes:

Data Generation: A pipeline to generate synthetic routing data for your specific domain.

Benchmarks: 11 datasets to evaluate router performance.

Deployment: A CLI and Gradio UI to visualize routing decisions in real-time.

In our experiments, we typically see 30–50% cost reduction while maintaining response quality by correctly identifying easy vs. hard queries.

The code is open source (MIT/Apache): https://github.com/ulab-uiuc/LLMRouter

Happy to answer any questions about the implementation details or the specific RL/Ranking algorithms we used!
by atq2119 | 2025-12-30 10:18:58+00:00
A lot of this is personal preference, but I still feel like the most memorable shows tend to be the ones that have a bit of both. Season-long stories, but also episodes that can stand on their own.

In a show like Stranger Things, almost none of the episodes are individually memorable or watchable on their own. They depend too much on the surrounding episodes.

Compare to e.g. Strange New Worlds, which tells large stories over the course of a season, but each episode is also a self-contained story. Which in turn allows for more variety and an overall richer experience, since you can have individual episodes experiment with wacky deviations from the norm of the show. Not all of those experiments will land for everybody (musical episodes tend to be quite divisive, for example), but there is a density to the experience that a lot of modern TV lacks.
by lol768 | 2025-12-30 10:19:09+00:00
Plenty of UK banks that don't require this, and whose apps will also work on a rooted device. Monzo will display a warning that sets out the fact there's an increased risk, and then lets you be an adult and choose to continue to use the app if that's what you want to do.

The best part is that the Current Account Switching Service makes it very easy to make the jump from a legacy bank like HSBC.
by nl | 2025-12-30 10:20:05+00:00
> meant that person would do it in a clandestine fashion rather than this be an agreed upon task prior? Is this how you operate?

This doesn't mean this at all

In an AI heavy project it's not unusual to have many speculative refactors kicked off and then you come back to see what it is like.

Wonder you can do a Rust SIMD optimized version of that Numpy code you have? Try it! You don't even need to waste review time on it because you have heavy test coverage and can see if it is worth looking at.
by sokoloff | 2025-12-30 10:20:13+00:00
When coal powered engines became more efficient, demand for coal went UP. It went up because vastly more things could now be cost effectively be coal-powered.

I can see a future where software development goes the same way. My wife works in science and I see all kinds of things in a casual observation of her work that could be made more efficient with good software support. But not by enough to pay six-figures per year for multiple devs to create it. So it doesn’t get done and her work and the work of tens of thousands like her around the world is less efficient as a result.

In a world where development is even half as expensive, many such tasks become approachable. If it becomes a third or quarter as expensive, even more applications are now profitable.

I think far more people will be doing something that creates the outcomes that are today created by SWEs manually coding. I doubt it will be quite as lucrative for the median person doing it, but I think it will still be well above the median wage and there will be a lot of it.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-30 10:20:17+00:00
> and the EU are being de-banked by local banks because of US pressure allowing them to force any bank that wants to use USD

What is this about? I'm a EU citizen, never heard about any EU citizen getting removed from any EU bank because of USD. Nor have I heard anyone being sanctioned by the US in the EU unless they're Russia-related somehow. Is there any link to a story about this?
by tatjam | 2025-12-30 10:20:26+00:00
Exactly, for the thing that has been done in Github 10000x times over, LLMs are pretty awesome and they speed up your job significantly (it's arguable if you would be better off using some abstraction already built if that's the case).

But try to do something novel and... they become nearly useless. Not like anything particularly difficult, just something that's so niche it's never been done before. It will most likely hallucinate some methods and call it a day.

As a personal anecdote, I was doing some LTSpice simulations and tried to get Claude Sonnet to write a plot expression to convert reactance to apparent capacitance in an AC sweep. It hallucinated pretty much the entire thing, and got the equation wrong (assumed the source was unit intensity, while LTSpice models AC circuits with unit voltage. This surely is on the internet, but apparently has never been written alongside the need to convert an impedance to capacitance!).
by ryanjshaw | 2025-12-30 10:21:02+00:00
Apple TV (the box) has an Enhance Dialogue option built-in. Even that plus a pair of Apple-native HomePods on full volume didn’t help me hear wtf was going on in parts of Pirates of the Caribbean (2003) on Disney. If two of the biggest companies on the planet can’t get this right, I don’t know who can.
by piokoch | 2025-12-30 10:21:20+00:00
Well, the cycle is over.

I remember the rise and the fall of AltaVista search engine.

I remember the rise of Google that was able to circumvent all the "old days" SEO efforts by spamming keywords in the HTML headers. Then everyone was trying to guess how to game Google page rank algo.

Finally people learned how to cheat Google, searches on many topics are returning endless pages of spam, marketing content that is supposed to earn AdSenens money (Google's "disruption" of online ads, better than all those cringe banners, that, eventually, destroyed Google search).

Right now Bing is working better for me (Bing! WTF?), for some stuff I use Yandex (shrug), but most of the stuff goes through AI, if you ask them to provide source of the information and you check it, this seems to be working fine...

For the time being, until people learn how to feed AI bots with the manipulated content they want. This will be probably more complicated, but it will happen (gaming page rank was also harder than adding "right" words to HTML keywords), unless AI providers will be careful with what they give as a food for their hungry Nvidia GPUs.

But this will be more expensive than blindly scanning the internet. That's why I see here a proper place where governments should step in, finance curation of the content for AI, as this will benefit society in a big way.

I see here an opportunity for smaller players, like Mistral, who can get some gov/EU funding and provide more quality than others who will devour whatever they find.
by hkt | 2025-12-30 10:21:33+00:00
An Italian citizen who was debanked essentially because Trump didn't like her:

https://english.elpais.com/international/2025-12-28/the-comp...

When it comes to this kind of thing, an injury to one is an injury to all and we need to not tolerate it. At minimum, we need regulations guaranteeing that Visa and MasterCard, as well as participating banks, aren't allowed to debank anyone without judicial oversight. Make the same true of apps: call it a Banking Access Tribunal.
by snickerer | 2025-12-30 10:21:57+00:00
After working with agent-LLMs for some years now, I can confirm that they are completely useless for real programming.

They never helped me solve complex problems with low-level libraries. They can not find nontrivial bugs. They don't get the logic of interwoven layers of abstractions.

LLMs pretend to do this with big confidence and fail miserably.

For every problem I need to turn my brain to ON MODE and wake up, the LLM doesn't wake up.

It surprised me how well it solved another task: I told it to set up a website with some SQL database and scripts behind it. When you click here, show some filtered list there. Worked like a charm. A very solved problem and very simple logic, done a zillion times before. But this saved me a day of writing boilerplate.

I agree that there is no indication that LLMs will ever cross the border from simple-boilerplate-land to understanding-complex-problems-land.
by alecco | 2025-12-30 10:21:59+00:00
> Now everybody else has a little extra money

The flaw is assuming that lower costs “free up” money.

Money isn’t "freed". Money is created. Banks create it when they lend against future income. If automation removes wage income, banks don’t create replacement demand: they redirect credit into assets.

That’s why you can have rising productivity, stagnant wages, booming asset prices, and weak consumption at the same time. The missing variable is where credit is created, not how efficient production is. (Think Japan in the 90s)

If you think the AI threat is real buy real assets now. (not financial IOUs in computer systems)

"How Do Banks Create Money?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3N7oD5zrBnc
Show HN: I built a standalone WASM playbook builder for sports coaches
by paulgrimes1 | 2025-12-30 10:23:28+00:00
Hello HN, I made a simple web app for drawing up plays for amateur sports coaches: https://playmaker.click/playbook

It's inspired by Excalidraw; I love how you can hit buttons and go into different modes so I tried to replicate that for desktop users. It should work nicely on tablets, phones not so much.

The main motivation was to learn some Rust and WebAssembly, the recent WASM 64-bit address space update is interesting to me, so I put together a lttle playbook engine that handles player movement, trail recording, and ball possession tracking. It runs the animation/interpolation stuff in the browser.

The rest of the stack is Laravel/Vue on the frontend, Tailwind for styling. Nothing too fancy. I wanted something where I could drag players around, record movements, and play them back like a little animation (double tap outside the field). Supports football (soccer), basketball, rugby, and hockey fields, reasonably badly drawn

There's rough edges for sure; the Rust code could probably be cleaner, I got a bit of help from Claude but where applicable I dug down into the reasoning as to "why", so it was a good learning experience figuring out how to expose structs to JS via wasm-bindgen and learning about serde.

The playbook all runs locally in the browser, and saves the play config into the URL using LZ-String so it can be easily shared without blowing browser URL address bar limits, but I haven't tested silly-big plays on it yet.

Happy to answer any questions about the setup or my approach in general. Cheers! PG
by spoiler | 2025-12-30 10:23:52+00:00
I'm a bit on the fence about this.

If someone buys a TV (y'know, a device that's supposed to reproduce sound and moving pictures), it should at least be decent at both. But if people want a high-end 5.1/7.1/whatever.1 sound then by all means they should be able to upgrade.

My mum? She doesn't want or need that, nor does she realistically have the space to have a high-end home-cinema entertainment setup (much less a dedicated room for it).

It's just a TV in her living room surrounded by cat toys and some furniture.

So, if she buys a nearly €1000 TV (she called it a "stupid star trek TV") it should at least be decent—although at that price tag you'd reasonably expect more than just decent—at everything it's meant to do of the box. She shouldn't need to constantly adjust sound volume or settings, or spend another thousand on equipment and refurbishment to access to decent sound.

In contrast, they say the old TV that's now at nan's house has much better sound (even if the screen is smaller) and are thinking of swapping the TVs since nan moved back in with my mum.
by hdgvhicv | 2025-12-30 10:23:58+00:00
Southampton 20p/mile

Brighton 17p/mile

Battle 22p/mile

Compare to say wilmslow to Manchester (33p/mile), or northwich (29p/mile)

Compared to to people doing one off journeys. London-Southampton 77p/mile, Brighton 46p/mile, Battle 53p/mile
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-30 10:24:41+00:00
> a car moves faster than you, can last longer than you, and can carry much more than you. But somehow, people don't seem to be scared of cars displacing them(yet)?

People whose life were based around using horses for transportation were very scared of cars replacing them though, and correctly so, because horses for transportation is something people do for leisure today, not necessity. I feel like that's a more apt analogy than comparing cars to any human.

> More output for less people/resources expended means more wealth produced.

This is true, but it probably also means that this "more wealth produced" will be more concentrated, because it's easier to convince one person using AI that you should have half of the wealth they produce, rather than convincing 100 people you should have half of what they produce. From where I'm standing, it seems to have the same effects (but not as widespread or impactful, yet) as industrialization, that induced that side-effect as well.
by trashb | 2025-12-30 10:24:51+00:00
> I have a Nikon Z8! I know what it is capable of!

It seems to me you underestimate the amount of work your camera is already doing. I feel like you overestimate the raw quality of a mobile camera as well.

> Modern mobile phones have sensors with just as many megapixels, capturing a volume of raw data (measured in 'bits') that is essentially identical to a high-end full-frame sensor!

There may be the same amount of bits but that doesn't mean that it captures the same quality of signal. It's like saying that a higher amount of bits on a ADC correspond to a better quality signal on the line, it just isn't true. Megapixels are overhyped, resolution isn't everything for picture quality.

> The phone can do it! Why can't Lightroom!?

Be the change you want to see, if the features that you want are not in Lightroom write a tool to implement it (or add the features to a tool like ffmpeg). The features you are talking about are in just software after capture so it should be possible from the camera's raw.

Perhaps you would be better of buying a high quality point and shoot camera or just using your phone instead of a semi professional full-frame camera for your purpose. With a DSLR you have options how to process, if that means in your "typical workflow" light processing then that's up to you. perhaps If you want to point shoot, instagram you indeed don't want to spend time processing in Lightroom and that's fine.

It feels like you are complaining about how your expensive pickup can't fit your family and suitcases when going on holiday like the neighbors SUV even though they have the same amount of horsepower and are build on the same chassis. They are obviously build for different purposes.
by fiskfiskfisk | 2025-12-30 10:25:16+00:00
But as long as you're using a registrar in your own country and a TLD managed by a legal entity in your own country, you do have a path of legal recourse against both parties.

It might not be successful, but you do have far better options than relying on a third party in a country far away.

It's always a varying grade, not either/or.
Show HN: Omnvert Network Toolkits Ping/MTR,DNS,Headers,TLS,RDAP,PCAFlowsP→JSON
by kaant | 2025-12-30 10:25:47+00:00
I built Omnvert as a fast, privacy-first toolbox for the checks I repeat during incidents and deployments: ping/MTR, DNS propagation (recursive vs authoritative), redirect chains + headers, TLS handshake details, RDAP/WHOIS, ASN/prefix, subnet math — plus a small PCAP toolkit to turn captures into scriptable output (JSON/NDJSON), top conversations, and flow exports.
Show HN: Habit Tracking as an RPG in Google Sheets
by digital_tempo | 2025-12-30 10:25:49+00:00
I built this for myself after failing to stick with most habit trackers.

Instead of streaks, I use RPG mechanics: daily quests, XP, gold, rewards,
and penalties for missed habits. Everything runs inside Google Sheets
using formulas and a small script.

I’ve been using it daily for over 8 months.
Curious if others here have tried gamifying personal systems,
or have ideas on how to improve this approach.
by graemep | 2025-12-30 10:25:57+00:00
> I laughed at this, as an european. I mean just this year we've had like 3 scares with chat control,

Chat control is an EU thing. The article is about a move to Proton which is Swiss and therefore outside the EU and not directly affected by chat control or other EU laws. Of course the EU might make it illegal for them to supply their services to EU countries, but then no platform anywhere can avoid that problem.

On the whole EU govt surveillance (assuming you live in the EU) is better than EU govt surveillance plus US govt surveillance plus big tech surveillance.
by tapete1 | 2025-12-30 10:26:01+00:00
You can get all the domain stuff for less than 1 € from any competent hoster, e.g. netcup. For cloud drive, if you really want to put your own files on someone else's server, there are tons of cheaper options, e.g. 2 TB for 10 €/month from strato.
Gemini is of course something that no one needs.
by raverbashing | 2025-12-30 10:26:47+00:00
Oh couldn't have happened to a nicer person

Anyone is free to think this is unjust or that her actions are justified of course (I don't but that's another story)

"Oh but it's arbitrary" yes and in a world of tidy and tight laws and procedures nothing gets done because nobody feels like bearing the responsibility of it

A broken clock is right twice a day