MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tim-tday | 2025-12-29 15:58:25+00:00
Is artificial intelligence good at sticking to the facts? (No, the latest ai technology based on LLMs consistently hallucinates facts citations and evidence)
Is artificial intelligence immune to manipulation, gaming and tricks? (No, there are significant numbers of attacks specifically designed to effectively fool an LLM)
Does AI do the right thing every time? (No, ai works faster than a human but with significantly higher rates of error)
So yeah. No.
by ekr____ | 2025-12-29 15:58:46+00:00
Right. Basically, beginners in any sport are naive to effectively all training stimuli, and so they will respond to a wide variety of inputs.

Once you get adapted it gets harder and harder to find new stimuli that will trigger new adaptation without breaking you down too much. If you're interested in running, Steve Magness and Jonathan Marcus talk about this quite a bit in the On Coaching podcast (https://www.scienceofrunning.com/podcast-2?v=47e5dceea252).
by sanskritical | 2025-12-29 15:59:57+00:00
Firstly, IB Times is one of the biggest news sources in existence. They own Newsweek. They do not pay for stories, and they do confirm sources. They are not a politicized outlet and generally swing left-wing, in contrast to some of the other sources.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Business_Times

All the sources you claim have standards repeated corporate-state slop during COVID. They have zero integrity, they are just mouthpieces for a government that would cover up its lies and never have accountability. I am not GenZ and your assertion that this is a generational issue is another form of ad hominem attack, showing your own personal willingness to dismiss speakers on the basis of perceived identity. Regardless, it is her word and the case records against the UK government. The latter has been caught lying countless times and is immune from prosecution for doing so, while she and the publications in question can be held accountable for any false claims. Ergo, they have skin in the game, they are taking the risk, and the government is not, and you should assume that she is telling the truth as the incentives are aligned with her to do so.
by tharkun__ | 2025-12-29 16:00:48+00:00
Also everyone complains about punctuality. A train stopping "nilly willy" somewhere it's not scheduled can very much cause exactly that in such a tightly scheduled system. So if you can, you avoid it.

Since we don't know "the other side of the story", we can't really tell. All people here see is the "I got kidnapped". If the story was written from the control room person's perspective, they might write a fascinating story about how they single-handedly avoided 17 trains being late by sending one train on a detour.

Would be awesome if there was someone on HN that knows if DB actually has the capacity to run a scheduling algorithm for their network within a few minutes, repeatedly, for many different trains at a moments notice. What kind of infra do they have for that, what do they use? With a large, interconnected, network that's tightly scheduled already that can't be easy.

OP was also unlucky in that he was on a regional train. They prioritize long distance trains usually as a regional train can more easily wait on a lower speed limit track somewhere than a fast long distance train on a potentially shared single track bottleneck.
by ACCount37 | 2025-12-29 16:01:07+00:00
Would you have guessed that "1/4 to 1/3 of diagnosed autists need ongoing support" off the top of your head?

Probably not. Because self-selection is doing its work. Out of 10 autistic people you know, about 0 are going to be in the "supervised living" category. They exist - you just don't see them.
by fcantournet | 2025-12-29 16:01:54+00:00
Unless you are a personal assistant, your job probably is not to "make the life of your hiring manager easier".

You have responsibilities, which ideally should be stipulated in some form in a contract, and if you are vaguely senior they hopefully go beyond "do whatever steeve needs to feel good".

I would argue that it is in fact your manager whose job entails making your (and your peers) professional life easier, by identifying the roadblocks, escalating problems if need be, etc...
by londons_explore | 2025-12-29 16:02:05+00:00
> The common thinking is that everyone is using ChatGPT, therefore you’ll be left behind if you don’t cheat.

So true. I am aware of classes where everyone who didn't use AI cheated.

The simple reality is that if AI makes better answers than a student, and exam scores are normalized, then students who don't use it will fail as soon as a decent proportion of students do use it.
by hn92726819 | 2025-12-29 16:02:19+00:00
That's true. I came off too dismissive. I like the advice, I was just disagreeing with:

> it’s clear to me why they rarely work: ...

and

> boring old discipline is much more sustainable approach

I like the idea of trying a more holistic approach, but grayscale doesn't have to contradict with that. Some people (myself included) can use grayscale as a tool alongside other things.
by reactordev | 2025-12-29 16:02:36+00:00
Nicholas Francis manages a fund for AgTech after a decade making games with Unity (the engine he made). He left in 2013 so I don't associate him with Unity today but it was his product.

2018 We get the new HDRP and Shader Graph.

2019 there were sexual harassment lawsuits.

The other co-founders left after they announced runtime fees in 2023 and the community fled.

2024 the URP team basically imploded. Leaving everything basically flat.
by hexbin010 | 2025-12-29 16:02:59+00:00
Some operators begin at 30 minutes

And some operators love to ignore their obligations

Our protections are good on paper but in reality quite poor. London is of course better than the rest of the country though.

I don't consider having to message a faceless social media team on "X" to get a taxi refunded good customer service at all. And they are definitely pushing for you to pay first and then get a refund, which is not in the spirit of the contract. My mother doesn't have "X" and wouldn't know where to start
by bewal416 | 2025-12-29 16:04:11+00:00
I used to write 5 things to be happy about on a whiteboard outside my dorm room every day. I wanted to get back into it! So I built a site purely for that purpose.

The coolest part is the "Bonus". Anyone online can contribute to the Bonus Thing. What's there at midnight will be saved permanently (unless I think it's inappropriate).

I built this with Vercel, Convex, Vite, and Blocknote.

You can learn more about the meta of this project here: https://ben-mini.com/2025/things-to-be-happy-about-and-perfe...
by 4d4m | 2025-12-29 16:04:19+00:00
Man pushes slot machine lever 5,000x and edits together best slot machine sounds to make song. Proceeds to beat chest about being a music maker.

+1 to Suno/genaudio being both fun, and evolving editing tools, but the mental justifications in the blog post are painful. I think you may find musicians bristle at your claim that all art is circular, because they are acutely aware of how sampling, copyright and ip ownership rights work, and legal risks of using recorded material as inputs doesn't fly for commercial music. If these were songs you wrote, youd own the copyright on them. The US legal system says no,you are not making music, its not copywritable due to some of the issues you highlighted in your post.

Further reading: https://help.suno.com/en/articles/2746945
by SecretDreams | 2025-12-29 16:04:23+00:00
> Is this the sort of thinking of “everyone needs to be able to do calculus in their heads with calculators around” or “you still need to write in the age of computers/printers” or something different?

I can't tell - are you suggesting these aren't good practices/traits to be learning when people are still in the "fundamentals of education/learning" stages of their lives?

I did all my basic differential and integral calculus studying by mind only. I don't do it that way in my career day to day now - nor could I without some serious practice. But the efforts I took in learning this way in undergrad made me a much stronger student and made me much more comfortable leveraging calculus in more application driven fields of study.
by lysace | 2025-12-29 16:04:24+00:00
It can be hard to prevent cheating in person too: A criminal enterprise was uncovered in 2019 in Sweden. They had targeted the local SAT variant (högskoleprovet).

Their end user equipment consisted of a modified mobile phone hidden somewhere private, a necklace that acts like a magnetic coil and small magnets that you place against the eardrum. Then the operation would call the phone while the customer was in the auditorium and give them the correct answers.

The answers had been provided by some team in a back office based on the test that they had obtained in realtime from some planted source taking the test at the same time, somehow.
by miyoji | 2025-12-29 16:04:55+00:00
This doesn't contradict my point at all, I agree entirely that people work with each other and it's a great way to learn. And obviously people aren't going to achieve what took tens of thousands of person-hours at the highest level in one lifetime on their own. One does need to stand on the shoulders of giants and all that.

But the OP was making a much stronger claim, that it is, in principle, impossible to learn anything on one's own, and that HAS to be wrong, for the reasons I listed.
by artyom | 2025-12-29 16:05:08+00:00
I thought "The Data Scarcity Problem" from the article is very well known to us engineers?

It's where the pulleys of a very sophisticated statistical machine start to show, and the claims about intelligence start to crumble.

Reason AI is great for boilerplate (because it's been done a million times) and not so great for specifics (even if they're specifics in a popular language).
by qnleigh | 2025-12-29 16:05:08+00:00
The air quality issue alone is mind-boggling. The air quality index nominally tops out at 500, corresponding to 'hazardous.' Major Indian cities blow past this threshold on a regular basis in the winter months. In Delhi, poor air quality is responsible for one in seven deaths annually [0]. People born in Delhi now are estimated to lose 8-12 years in life expectancy, depending on the study [1]. This is the norm for now, but it's hard to imagine how much worse things can get.

[0] https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/delhi/toxicity-15-o...

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-61793884
by animal531 | 2025-12-29 16:05:15+00:00
What I agree on is that if we had modern .NET available we'd get a free 2-3x improvement, it would definitely be great. BUT having said that, if you're into performance but unwilling to use the tools available then that's on you.

From the article it seems that you're using some form of threading to create things, but you don't really specify which and/or how.

The default C# implementations are usually quite poor performance wise, so if you used for example the default thread pool I can definitively say that I've achieved a 3x speedup over that by using my own thread pool implementation which would yield about the same 30s -> 12s reduction.

Burst threading/scheduling in general is also a lot better than the standard one, in general if I feed it a logic heavy method (so no vectorization) then I can beat it by a bit, but not close to the 3x of the normal thread pool.

But then if your generation is number heavy (vs logic) then having used Burst you could probably drop that calculation time down to 2-3 seconds (in the same as if you used Vector<256> numerics).

Finally you touch on GC, that's definitely a problem. The Mono variant has been upgraded by them over time, but C# remains C# which was never meant for gaming. Even if we had access to the modern one there would still be issues with it. As with all the other C# libraries etc., they never considered gaming a target where what we want is extremely fast access/latency with no hiccups. C# in the business world doesn't really care if it loses 16ms (or 160ms) here and there due to garbage, it's usually not a problem there.

Coding in Unity means having to go over every instance of allocation outside of startup and eliminating them, you mention API's that still need to allocate which I've never run into myself. Again modern isn't going to simply make those go away.
by Kuyawa | 2025-12-29 16:05:18+00:00
Been doing this for over twenty years now

<invoice> <avatar> <dice> <card> <view> <toolbar>

You name it, it works wonders and make my life easier. Of course I am a lone developer so I don't care.

You can check in this demo some custom tags used sparingly https://my.adminix.app/demo
by onchain-id | 2025-12-29 16:06:15+00:00
Hi everyone,

I’m working on Onchain ID, an open identity layer built on ENS for machines, devices, robots, and autonomous systems.

The goal is to provide programmable, interoperable onchain identifiers that can be owned, delegated, and verified without introducing new APIs, proprietary middleware, or lock-in. Onchain ID is intentionally just the identity layer — others can build payments, permissions, and automation on top.

I’m sharing this early to get feedback from builders, protocol designers, and anyone working on identity, robotics, or onchain infrastructure.
by cauch | 2025-12-29 16:06:23+00:00
It is indeed the same.

But in practice, having another human cheating for you was often unpractical: people don't usually like helping cheater, and simply trying to find an accomplice may get you in trouble. Because of that, it is relatively inefficient and therefore not a real problem and not a real impact on the final quality of the evaluation.

LLM is indeed just the same, except that finding an accomplice is now easy and without risk.
by tmoertel | 2025-12-29 16:06:45+00:00
One reason is that using static binaries greatly simplifies the problem of establishing Binary Provenance, upon which security claims and many other important things rely. In environments like Google’s it's important to know that what you have deployed to production is exactly what you think it is.

See for more: https://google.github.io/building-secure-and-reliable-system...
by nickdothutton | 2025-12-29 16:07:19+00:00
We have this sickness in the UK too. I think it may be terminal. It is some combination of regulation, not trusting anyone's initiative, mindless rule-following, "safetyism", never empowering front-line staff to make decisions, managerial tier expansion, and a few other things besides like infrastructure neglect, "financialisation", and general ignorance of the world of things, of the real, and over-reliance on the world of words, of laws, of construct on paper and not in steel and stone.
Show HN: I built Sapphire, a C-style scripting language and VM for desktop apps
by foxz | 2025-12-29 16:07:37+00:00
Hi HN,

I’ve always wanted a way to build native desktop applications that feel 'modern' without having to deal with the verbosity of C++ or the memory bloat of Electron.

So, for the past few months, I’ve been building Sapphire. It’s a general-purpose scripting language with a familiar C-style syntax, running on its own stack-based VM. My goal is to make it a go-to tool for creating fast, hardware-accelerated desktop apps.

Link: github.com/foxzyt/Sapphire

Why Sapphire?

Native Desktop Apps: It’s designed from the ground up for desktop environments, using SFML for hardware-accelerated rendering.

Custom VM: I implemented a dispatch table with computed gotos to keep instruction execution fast.

Immediate Mode UI: The language includes SapphireUI, a procedural UI system that renders everything in real-time.

Batteries Included: It already handles HTTP (GET/POST/Download), JSON parsing, and filesystem I/O natively.

Current Status: The core VM, the garbage collector, and the networking/JSON modules are quite solid. I’m currently refining the layout engine to make it even easier to build complex, responsive interfaces.
by belatwing | 2025-12-29 16:07:42+00:00
Winter travel is a unique experience. The season brings shorter days, cold weather, and often snowy landscapes, but it also offers cozy adventures, festive celebrations, and fewer crowds in many destinations. Traveling in winter requires extra planning, but the rewards can be unforgettable. In this guide, we will explore the benefits of winter travel, challenges to consider, practical tips, and real stories to inspire your next trip.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-12-29 16:07:42+00:00
Heh, on the other hand the one and only time I arrived hours earlier was in the US :) I was flying AMS to SFO via Portland, we cleared immigration unusually fast, and when I got to my gate (connecting flight was in like 4 hours) the lady there asked if I wanted to move to an earlier one, boarding in ~20 mins. I said sure, and I even got the checked-in luggage at SFO (she did say that there was a chance it'd get sent later).
by tiku | 2025-12-29 16:07:49+00:00
And I thought the Dutch Railways (NS, Nationale Spoorwegen) where weird..
We mostly have issues with trains not showing up, but then the next one arrives in 20 minutes so it usually isn't a big problem (unless you are cutting it close).

We had a lot of issues in the past with the first leaves falling on the track or a bit of snow. And they ordered trains without toilets. So also cattle trucks.

And have I mentioned that you pay a lot for this "service"?
second class, normal costs: €18,80 to get from Utrecht to Amsterdam and back, 50 kilometers.
by cyberpunk | 2025-12-29 16:08:57+00:00
... I had to take out a special insurance when working from home as a freelancer, and share evidence I had done so with my client as -- if someone slipped outside my house because I'd not swept up the snow somehow the company who was paying me would be liable for the insurance claim...

... Yep.

It's for similar reasons why everyone is up at the crack of dawn frantically shovelling snow outside their homes.

Rather spoils the fun of towing the kids to school on a sled when every 5 meters there's a perfectly swept bit you have to drag it across.
by sp527 | 2025-12-29 16:09:41+00:00
This video is clickbait drivel.

Her criticism is purely about the man, not Feynman as a physicist, a thinker, or a teacher. Feynman was probably on the spectrum and he had a lot of problematic behaviors. That doesn't meaningfully alter the core of his legacy.

It's also not terribly insightful to point out that a great figure from history was deeply flawed. If anything, that's so common as to be nearly guaranteed.
by jcgl | 2025-12-29 16:10:34+00:00
I'd say that load balancers (one-address-to-N-servers) count as a common practice, but I otherwise agree in that regard.

Regarding wildcard certs, eh. I wouldn't say they have a bad reputation. Sure, greater blast radius. But sometimes it can certainly simplify things to use one. Your ACME client configuration is easier and your TLS terminator configuration often becomes easier when the terminator would otherwise need to switch based on SNI.
by Atlas667 | 2025-12-29 16:10:51+00:00
I'm not gonna pretend I know about the specifics of DB, but tales of crappy public services are plenty around the world and a lot of the critique is aimed at enabling privatization.

My anecdotal evidence is that these public entities usually suffer from lack of funding or incompetence fueled by corruption, that usually takes a few forms:
- the contracting of work to a third party with kickback (incentives to continously do sloppy work)
- inaction due to lack of corrupting opportunities (leaders try but cant set up a good fraud scheme)
- nepotism that leads to incompetence

And lack of funding can and has been weaponized to cause a shitty service to then set the pretext for privatization. Usually there are private interests behind this public policy decision.

The more menial reason for lack of funding is sometimes massive spending or subsidies for capitalists elsewhere which skews the budget.

And of course also the intense bureacracy needed due to lack of democratic control. Yes, im saying people dont actually have a say and they could have a say. IE delegate democracy.

These are just universal problems of modern capitalist economies and their bourgeois politics.

Quite possibly DB suffers from these more intensely than others.
by KronisLV | 2025-12-29 16:11:17+00:00
I have no idea how planes are the dominant form of transport for relatively short routes (like within the bounds of a large country or to an adjacent one) and how even in Europe the train networks can be a bit of a mess.

Like surely it’s easier to run a railway network when compared to the insane complexity to safely operate an airport and all the work that goes into plane maintenance and pilot training and so on.
by Teknomadix | 2025-12-29 16:11:38+00:00
>People don't ask hammers to do much more than bash in nails into walls.

“It resembles a normal hammer but is outfitted with an little motor and an flexible head part which moves back and forth in a hammering motion, sparing the user from moving his or her own hand to hammer something by their own force and by so making their job easier”

https://gremlins.fandom.com/wiki/Electric_Hammer
by ajb | 2025-12-29 16:11:38+00:00
What language would you pick first, if you're going to add non English to London trains?

The problem with UK announcements is that they are piped to multiple places in the station, which is all hard surfaces and produces lots of reverberation and echo. This often makes them hard to understand even for natives. Also there are some stations with really terrible old speakers , such as horn speakers.
by lb1lf | 2025-12-29 16:11:44+00:00
The (immediate) area has been farmed for hundreds of years, so I would guess most old burial mounds etc has been recycled centuries ago. The houses there now are mostly built in the seventies, at which point (luckily!) the local council would NOT let you build upon any ancient structures.

Where I live now - same island, but farther from the natural port and, hence, less attractive land in the old days - we still have a few which noone bothered to remove (to till the land underneath or to use the stones for building walls or foundations).

My kids used to love going playing around those mounds, made for excellent inspiration for pretending games, that!
by seszett | 2025-12-29 16:12:05+00:00
I don't know about the Dutch but apparently the Flemish don't understand German without having learned it at school.

I speak both some German and some Dutch (as nth languages, I can understand them fine but speaking is hit and miss) and sometimes I don't notice which is which and answer in the wrong language, to me they're almost the same language with a different accent. I translate the German into some Frenglish mess for my Flemish friends to help them understand and it works great.
by mpyne | 2025-12-29 16:12:41+00:00
You're welcome to try to Trail of Tears everybody into your preferred walled cities, but the attempt would go badly for you.

Absent that we'll need to wait for population growth (not happening, if anything we're going the other way) or immigration (ha) to fill our cities up to NYC density.

Note that NYC itself used to be even more dense than it is today. No other U.S. city is likely to reach even NYC's current density in any near- to medium-time scale.
by kccqzy | 2025-12-29 16:12:51+00:00
Splitting trains is not uncommon. Generally for Amtrak there will be two conductors one for each part of the train. On the platform both conductors will tell you which part of the train goes where. They often check tickets more frequently than usual just to make sure you are on the right part of the train.

Train splitting is quite acceptable when the customer service is alright.
by DiggyJohnson | 2025-12-29 16:13:26+00:00
Re: test anxiety

I see this line of argument more and more over the last decade and it makes me feel heartless for my opinion.

But if you know the material but cannot apply it in an examination then you either don't actually know the material or don't have the emotional (for lack of better term) control to apply it in critical situations. Both are valid reasons to be marked down.