MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ErroneousBosh | 2025-12-20 20:34:40+00:00
They're a kind of analogue dynamic memory. I'd hesitate to call them RAM because the Access is not Random, but they are a kind of shift register and early computers used those for RAM.

Imagine a pair of MOSFETs connected to a pair of capacitors, and a bunch of those joined together in a chain. All the gates of each one of the pair of MOSFETS are connected together, giving you a "left" and "right" clock input.

When you put a signal in if you pulse the "left" and "right" inputs, it'll store the signal voltage in one capacitor, then pass it off to the next capacitor in turn, like old-timey firefighter handing buckets of water down a line of people.

They used to use this for delaying audio signals before digital memory and analogue to digital conversion was cheap enough to use.
by fuzzfactor | 2025-12-20 20:34:44+00:00
Some things are more of a genuine litmus test than others ;)

Most people are not that good at this either, but this one is easy.

As a simple sanity check, 6.6 is so much closer to 7 that the alkaline volume will dominate.

You can also take the 0.4 that the 6.6 deviates from 7 by, subtract it from the 9.1 and get 8.7.

Also, in electrochemical measurement, pH 7 = 0 millivolts.
by bayindirh | 2025-12-20 20:34:58+00:00
> not given to "friends"...

US started to eavesdrop on Turkey and Greece first. Germany pulled out of the project by citing this is going too far for them. Some citations from news:

The Germans were taken aback by the Americans’ willingness to spy on all but their closest allies, with targets including NATO members Spain, Greece, Turkey and Italy [0].

Operation Rubicon [1] has a map of spied countries, incl. NATO allies and "friends".

I failed to find that great long-read article. If I can find, I will attach it here, too.

[0]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/world/national-...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Rubicon
by nutjob2 | 2025-12-20 20:36:00+00:00
I think the people seeding these are also ideologs and so would be interested in also supporting the obscure stuff, maybe more than the popular. There is no way any casual listeners would go to the quite substantial trouble of using these archives.

Anyone who wants to listen to unlimited free music from a vast catalog with a nice interface can use YouTube/Google Music. If they don't like the ads they can get an ad blocker. Downloading to your own machine works well too.
by spwa4 | 2025-12-20 20:36:02+00:00
> My kid just opens steam and everything works. Any question he has he asks AI

(... and then presumably he applies what the AI tells him, occasionally asking why)

Frankly, this is a much better and targeted way to learn. If this is what happens, great!

I mean, I'd give him an intro how to pirate games, because

1) it's a technical challenge with a built-in reward

2) AIs (especially Gemini, but more and more ChatGPT too) refuse to help doing it

So a truly excellent pursuit for learning!

But I do feel it's very different from what happens with smartphones and that is desperately bad.
by ManuelKiessling | 2025-12-20 20:36:54+00:00
If I ask a SOTA model to just implement some functionality, it doesn’t necessarily do so using a great architectural approach.

Whenever I ask a SOTA model about architecture recommendations, and frame the problem correctly, I get top notch answers every single time.

LLMs are terrific software architects. And that’s not surprising, there has to be tons of great advice on how to correctly build software in the training corpus.

They simply aren’t great software architects by default.
by Sammi | 2025-12-20 20:37:12+00:00
Honestly the index seems as much a liability as a boon. Keeping the context clean and focused is one of the most important things for getting the best out of lmms. For now I prefer just adding my md files to the context whenever I deem them relevant.

Skills are much simpler than mcps, which are hopelessly overengineered, but even skills seem unnecessarily overengineered. You could fix the skill index taking up place in the context, by just making it a tool available to the agent (but not an mcp!).
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-12-20 20:37:22+00:00
That is really bizarre, because I have Comcast and I find their IPv6 support excellent. The only complaints I have are that I wish you could get bigger than a /60 prefix (a /56 would be nice), and that I wish it was feasible to get a static prefix as a residential customer. Granted you said you don't really care to fix it, but if that ever changes I do think you could get them to fix it pretty easily. IPv6 is one of the things they generally do right.
by jonas21 | 2025-12-20 20:38:02+00:00
An alternative business model is that you, or more likely your insurance, pays $20/mo for unlimited access to a medical agent, built on top of an LLM, that can answer your questions. This is good for everyone -- the patient gets answers without waiting, the insurer gets cost savings, doctors have a less hectic schedule and get to spend more time on the interesting cases, and the company providing the service gets paid for doing a good job -- and would have a strong incentive to drive hallucination rate down to zero (or at least lower than the average physician's).
by numpad0 | 2025-12-20 20:38:08+00:00
Not sure what was unexpected about the multi GPU part.

It's very well known that most LLM frameworks including llama.cpp splits models by layers, which has sequential dependency, and so multi GPU setups are completely stalled unless there are n_gpu users/tasks running in parallel. It's also known that some GPUs are faster in "prompt processing" and some in "token generation" that combining Radeon and NVIDIA does something sometimes. Reportedly the inter-layer transfer sizes are in kilobyte ranges and PCIe x1 is plenty or something.

It takes appropriate backends with "tensor parallel" mode support, which splits the neural network parallel to the direction of flow of data, which also obviously benefit substantially from good node interconnect between GPUs like PCIe x16 or NVlink/Infinity Fabric bridge cables, and/or inter-GPU DMA over PCIe(called GPU P2P or GPUdirect or some lingo like that).

Absent those, I've read somewhere that people can sometimes see GPU utilization spikes walking over GPUs on nvtop-style tools.

Looking for a way to break up tasks for LLMs so that there will be multiple tasks to run concurrently would be interesting, maybe like creating one "manager" and few "delegated engineers" personalities. Or simulating multiple different domains of brain such as speech center, visual cortex, language center, etc. communicating in tokens might be interesting in working around this problem.
by basilgohar | 2025-12-20 20:38:16+00:00
I really, really can't get behind this sentiment. Having a reliable, accurate time keeping mechanism doesn't seem like an outlandish issue to want to maintain. Timekeeping has been an important mechanism for humans for as long as recorded history. I don't understand the wisdom of shooting down establishing systems to make that better, even if the direct applicability to a single human's life is remote. We are all part of a huge, interconnected system whether we like it or not, and accurate, synchronized timekeeping across the world does not sound nefarious to me.
by WD-42 | 2025-12-20 20:38:49+00:00
In most cases, they couldn't make that decision even if they wanted to. Only independent artists and those that are so large as to have enough sway (Niel Young for example) would be able to. The vast majority of artists you probably listen to don't actually own the rights to their own music.

So let the rights holders make the decision? They would never. Music rights exist for them to extract profit above all else. They don't care about preserving culture or legacy. Which is why it's important that somebody does.
by sylvainhalle | 2025-12-20 20:39:03+00:00
Thanks for the thoughtful remarks — and yes, you’re absolutely right on both points.

Hyphenation and justification are a big part of why magazine production pipelines historically stayed in Quark/InDesign rather than TeX. Even with TeX’s excellent line-breaking algorithm, narrow justified columns will expose whitespace issues unless you tune hyphenation, tolerance, and sometimes switch to ragged-right for specific blocks.

In this example, the wide spacing you point out is mostly due to conservative hyphenation + full justification. It’s not something the layout engine enforces — the same frames can be rendered with different paragraph settings.

The “users - a” case is also a good catch. That’s indeed a source / micro-typography issue (ASCII dash with spaces instead of an em-dash), and TeX is doing exactly what it’s told. A real production workflow would normalize that early on.

One thing I’m exploring next is adding a baseline grid and better vertical rhythm control at the frame level, which should make it easier to mix justified and ragged blocks while keeping alignment consistent.

Your experience with Quark Tags is very much the kind of workflow gap this project is trying to narrow: not to replace DTP tools, but to make TeX-based pipelines more predictable and design-oriented.
by ofirpress | 2025-12-20 20:39:59+00:00
> There are certain tasks, like improving a given program for speed, for instance, where in theory the model can continue to make progress with a very clear reward signal for a very long time.

Yup, this will absolutely be a big driver of gains in AI for coding in the near future. We actually built a benchmark based on this exact principle: https://algotune.io/
by zamadatix | 2025-12-20 20:40:01+00:00
Half the reason (literally) the address looks so bad is not because of IPv6 but because everyone keeps choosing to implement randomized in-subnet addresses and cycle through them for privacy reasons.

E.g. 2600:15a3:7020:4c51::52/64 is not too horrible but 2600:15a3:7020:4c51:3268:b4c4:dd7b:789/64 is a monster by unrelated intent of the client.
by furyofantares | 2025-12-20 20:40:14+00:00
https://hn-wrapped.kadoa.com/furyofantares

My last 2-3 months here have largely been posting about AI slop. But the prior 9 months were not, and included a lot of nuanced posting about how to make use of AI agents. I even got accused of being a shill at one point.

The wrapped is pretty much focused on the slop stuff. That's less interesting than the earlier parts of the year - I know what I've posted recently but have forgotten a lot more of what was going on a year ago or how the year developed.

Roasts can be amusing but I don't think they're the right vibe for a wrapped. I know it's harder to get an LLM to write something witty and insightful than a witty but shallow quip so maybe that's why roasts are here. Wrappeds are sort of infodumps though and LLMs are good at that, maybe there could be a two stage step where it reasons about some custom quirky stats or factoids that work based on your profile and then the second stage generates them.
by pupdogg | 2025-12-20 20:40:44+00:00
Totally agree, a patent by itself doesn't prove something was built or used, just that the idea could be described and cleared prior art.

But are you saying none of those patents are even indirectly related to publicly documented programs like:

1. Operation Sea-Spray (1950) 2. Operation LAC (late 1950s–60s) 3. Operation Dew (ZnCdS tests)

We know these tests only became public decades later through hearings and declassification. Given that history, it seems fair to ask how much related research or enabling tech might still be classified. Lack of a clear public link doesn't really prove there wasn't one - it may just mean it hasn't been disclosed yet.
by ghostie_plz | 2025-12-20 20:40:58+00:00
Both C#m and Db can be played on piano using only the black keys (skipping the 3rd note of the scale). This makes them easy keys for beginners. I'm not sure if that's the reason, but it could be related.

Anecdotally, I know a few vocalists that sound great in these keys and use them as a starting point
by IgorPartola | 2025-12-20 20:41:06+00:00
> It is technically stealing

It is technically not. Stealing means you have a thing, I steal it, now I have the thing and you do not. You can’t steal a copyright (aside from something like breaking into your stuff and stealing the proof that you hold the copyright), and then a song is downloaded the original copyright holder still have copy.

Calling piracy theft was MPAA/RIAA propaganda. Now people say that piracy is theft without ever even questioning it, so it was quite successful.
by nemothekid | 2025-12-20 20:41:22+00:00
I think you and I simply disagree about your database being a core/critical part of your stack. I believe RDS is good enough for most people, and the only advantage you would have in self hosting is shaving 33% off your instance bill. I'd probably go a step further and argue that Neon/CockroachDB Serverless is good enough for most people.
by somat | 2025-12-20 20:41:49+00:00
> but you still cannot do things like “attach this surface of object A to that surface of object B)”

Sure you can, but openscad is an imperative language so you need to do it in an imperative manner.

a_cube_loc = [10, 5, 5]; a_cube_size = [2, 4, 1]; b_cube_loc = [a_cube_loc[0], a_cube_loc[1] + a_cube_size[1], a_cube_loc[2] ]; b_cube_size = [2, 4, 1]; translate(a_cube_loc) cube(a_cube_size); translate(b_cube_loc) cube(b_cube_size);

It would be nice to have more declarative constraints. The solvespace file format is plain text and it almost feels like you could write it by hand, but that would be a lot of manual record keeping. and you would loose all that imperative goodness. Perhaps you could have an imperative layer(say python or lisp or forth) that outputs the declarative layer(solvespace) and then solvespace renders(picture or stl) the declarative layer.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-12-20 20:43:01+00:00
I'm not subscribed to too many Youtubers. But it's insane that I still need 2 digits to count how many of those creators tried to work for over a week to address some urgent issue brought upon by one of Google's automation tools. Then simply resorted to Twitter to get their fanbase to rile up YouTube for them.

If it wasn't a hack, Google moves like molasses.
by HendrikHensen | 2025-12-20 20:43:10+00:00
> Should only “top-level” code ever log an error? That can make it difficult to identify the low-level root causes of a top-level failure.

Some languages (e.g. Java) include a stack trace when reporting an error, which is extremely useful when logging the error. It shows at exactly which point in the code the error was generated, and what the full call stack was to get there.

It's a real shame that "modern" languages or "low level" languages (e.g. Go, Rust) don't include this out of the box, it makes troubleshooting errors in production much more difficult, for exactly the reason you mention.
by msteffen | 2025-12-20 20:43:47+00:00
Okay, but…most programs are written in Python or Rust or something, where invoking library functions is a lot safer, more ergonomic, more performant, and more common than spawning a subprocess and executing a program in it. Like you can’t really ignore the human expectations and conventions that are brought to bear when your code is run (the accommodation of which is arguably most of the purpose of programming languages).

When you publish a library, people are going to use it more liberally and in a wider range of contexts (which are therefore harder to predict, including whether a given violation requires human intervention)
by mopsi | 2025-12-20 20:44:27+00:00
> There are a lot of things you can't say or will get shut down for.

Such as? I honestly can't think of anything.

> It is unacceptable to ban homeschooling. Some children need to be homeschooled, because of disabilities, or even high intelligence.

European education laws prioritize the child's right to education and social development over parental autonomy as an absolute. Mandatory schooling laws have been adopted to ensure minimum educational standards and to safeguard against neglect and abuse, which is especially important when it comes to disabilities. Someone with proper training and decades of experience will educate a disabled child far more effectively than a parent whose only guaranteed qualification may be knowing how to have sex.
by braebo | 2025-12-20 20:44:47+00:00
React is such a terrible technology due to being based on such a fundamentally bad idea. The entire render model introduces so much indirection by breaking the entire platform and forcing you to write code against piles of leaky abstractions while constantly keeping the library behavior attached to each line of code in the back of your head.

The fact that it hasn’t been taken out back and shot continues to baffle me everyday at work as I’m neck deep in Nextjs daydreaming about deleting 2/3 of the code and sticking the remaining Typescript and markup into a Sveltekit app.

This post is cool so sorry for using it to vent… it just kills me seeing how it works and knowing people are celebrating it instead of protesting it.. forcing others like me to use it on purpose.
by tliltocatl | 2025-12-20 20:44:56+00:00
I guess that's depends on the application. What I had was a series of wireless DAQ devices with a common application core but different sets of sensors (and hence drivers). Some are as simple as "read and I2C value and put in into uplink queue" and that's where I often made the mistake to assume I could rely on stock drivers. Other are fully driven from the MCU's analog guts. Once the application core was there on one board I quickly found myself spending 50% of my time fighting against DTS.

FreeRTOS is much less reusable, but that means you are confidently pessimistic about schedule risk. That's an RTOS and that's it. The rest is on you and you know it. With Zephyr you get tons of support infrastructure, but you also risk finding that it doesn't fit too late in the process. E.g. the flash chip power management issue was quite bad - we ended up dropping the features that required an external flash altogether.

Then again, Zephyr is the best we have got, but I feel it's due to the Zephyr team's dedication to details - and in spite, not thanks to, the general approach.
by etra0 | 2025-12-20 20:44:59+00:00
> 2) Ask an LLM, which gets you 80-90% of the way there.

Hallucinations and sycophancy are still an issue, 80-90% is being generous I think.

I know this is not issues of the LLM itself, but rather the implementation & companies behind them (since there are open models as well), but, what limits to LLMs to be enshittified by corp needs?

I've seen this very recently with Grok, people were asking trolley-like problems comparing Elon Musk to anything, and Grok very frequently chose Elon Musk most of the time because it is probably embedded in the system prompt or training [1].

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/nov/21/elon-musk...
by LeoPanthera | 2025-12-20 20:45:02+00:00
My problem with IPv6 is that my ISP (Xfinity) won't give me a static prefix, so every now and again it changes.

Unlike IPv4, my LAN addresses include the prefix, so every time they change it, all my LAN addresses change.

Combined with the lack of DHCP6 support in many devices, this means reverse DNS lookups from IP to hostname can't be done, making identifying devices by their IP essentially impossible.
by somewhereoutth | 2025-12-20 20:45:23+00:00
> generated code can be verified by compiling and running it

I think this gets to the crux of the issue with LLMs for coding (and indeed 'test orientated development'). For anything beyond a most basic level of complexity (i.e. anything actually useful), code cannot be verified by compiling and running it. It can only be verified - to a point - by skilled human inspection/comprehension. That is the essence of code really, a definition of action, given by humans, to a machine for running with /a prior/ unenumerated inputs. Otherwise it is just a fancy lookup table. By definition then not all inputs and expected outputs can be tabulated, tested for, or rewarded for.
by Braxton1980 | 2025-12-20 20:46:05+00:00
"confidently stated"

How? Because they stated their opinion and they think they're right?

As opposed to having an opinion you think is wrong?

>half of teachers are using LLM

This is their opinion based on a study that polled teachers? How is this unreasonable?

Determining popularity by polling makes complete sense.

You're just anti intellectual for political reasons. Also supporting Trump while not liking people who are opinionated and overly confident makes you a hypocrite
by reeredfdfdf | 2025-12-20 20:46:07+00:00
Yea, in 29 Germany, France and UK will have elections, and far-right parties with anti-EU and partially pro-Russian attitudes are leading the polls. If they win, there will be hardly any unified "Europe" left. Why would I then trust Germany ruled by AfD over MAGA-America?

At least with China there's some consistency. I can reliably trust them not to give a shit about me or my privacy, and to further their geopolitical interests. Meanwhile populists in the West aren't really even acting rationally from geopolitical perspective, they're more unpredictable.
by vlaaad | 2025-12-20 20:46:22+00:00
Unrelated, but I just can't stop myself from saying that I absolutely hate Spotify even though I'm a paying customer. Fuck you Spotify. You were supposed to be a convenient way to discover and listen to music. Now you are only convenient for listening to music, and absolutely terrible for any recommendations. This is sad really. Spotify had good recommendations. It's absolutely in a position where it can provide good recommendations — it has both a vast music library and a vast amount of data on user preferences. And it chooses to push procedural/ai-generated slop instead to earn more money. I thought that maybe buying $SPOT stock will make me more at peace with its greed, but it didn't work. Spotify fucking deserves to crash and burn because it sees paying customers as idiots who might not notice they are fed garbage. Fuck you Spotify, fuck you.
by zozbot234 | 2025-12-20 20:46:32+00:00
> Looking for a way to break up tasks for LLMs so that there will be multiple tasks to run concurrently would be interesting, maybe like creating one "manager" and few "delegated engineers" personalities.

This is pretty much what "agents" are for. The manager model constructs prompts and contexts that the delegated models can work on in parallel, returning results when they're done.
by tcdent | 2025-12-20 20:47:22+00:00
IDK all of my personal and professional projects involve pushing the SOTA to the absolute limit. Using anything other than the latest OpenAI or Anthropic model is out of the question.

Smaller open source models are a bit like 3d printing in the early days; fun to experiment with but really not that valuable for anything other than making toys.

Text summarization, maybe? But even then I want a model that understands the complete context and does a good job. Even things like "generate one sentence about the action we're performing" I usually find I can just incorporate it into the output schema of a larger request instead of making a separate request to a smaller model.
by solatic | 2025-12-20 20:47:45+00:00
> But maybe the local network interface is down, maybe there's a local firewall rule blocking it,...

That's exactly why you log it as a warning. People get warned all the time about the dangers of smoking. It's important that people be warned about smoking; these warnings save lives. People should pay attention to warnings, which let them know about worrisome concerns that should be heeded. But guess what? Everyone has a story about someone who smoked until they were 90 and died in a car accident. It is not an error that somebody is smoking. Other systems will make their own bloody decisions and firewalling you off might be one of them. That is normal.

What do you think a warning means?