MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by KronisLV | 2025-12-12 23:10:46+00:00
Really like the idea of a font with extremely broad glyph support, sadly it looks really blurry on any custom size, like if I'd try to use this font in my IDE but would want to make it smaller so I can fit more text on the screen.

For that particular use case (tbh mostly aesthetics than glyph support), I also found the TTF version of Terminus to be pleasant: https://files.ax86.net/terminus-ttf/ though JetBrains Mono is good enough for me to not venture far away from defaults, albeit maybe Liberation Mono / Cousine was the peak of readability at somewhat small sizes out of any font out there for me.

Wonder if the Potrace approach of Terminus TTF version would work for Unifont. I imagine that Unifont is a pretty good default when doing shipping labels and for such utilitarian use cases.
by lillecarl | 2025-12-12 23:11:36+00:00
By requiring high-school garage engineering to DOS your local RF services you prevent essentially everyone from doing it.

I'm all in to allow free access to reading waves, but broadcasting is regulated for good reason. Today I was in the subway when my Bluetooth headset started lagging, it's happened once before on a highway close to a specific car, this is DOS.

The radio spectrum is limited and it must be regulated and follow regulations, enforcement is really hard, it's a lot easier and reasonable to dump it on the manufacturers by locking the juice behind closed firmware.
by shoo | 2025-12-12 23:11:45+00:00
Suppose we were critiquing an article that was advocating the health benefits of black coffee consumption, say, we might raise eyebrows or immediately close the tab without further comment if a claim was not backed up by any supporting evidence (e.g. some peer reviewed article with clinical trials or longitudinal study and statistical analysis).

Ideally, for this kind of theorising we could devise testable falsifiable hypotheses, run experiments controlling for confounding factors (challenging, given microservices are _attempting_ to solve joint technical-orgchart problems), and learn from experiments to see if the data supports or rejects our various hypotheses. I.e. something resembling the scientific method.

Alas, it is clearly cost prohibitive to attempt such experiments to experimentally test the impacts of proposed rules for constraining enterprise-scale microservice (or macroservice) topologies.

The last enterprise project I worked on was roughly adding one new orchestration macroservice atop the existing mass of production macroservices. The budget to get that one service into production might have been around $25m. Maybe double that to account for supporting changes that also needed to be made across various existing services. Maybe double it again for coordination overhead, reqs work, integrated testing.

In a similar environment, maybe it'd cost $1b-$10b to run an experiment comparing different strategies for microservice topologies (i.e. actually designing and building two different variants of the overall system and operating them both for 5 years, measuring enough organisational and technical metrics, then trying to see if we could learn anything...).

Anyone know of any results or data from something resembling a scientific method applied to this topic?
by coldtea | 2025-12-12 23:12:18+00:00
>Huh? Are you arguing that we still live in a pre-scientific era where there’s no way to measure truth?

No. A strange way to interpet their statement! Almost as if you ...hallucinated their intend!

They are arguing that humans also hallucinate: "LLMs much like humans" (...) "Just like your doctor occasionally giving you wrong advice too quickly".

As an aside, there was never a "pre-scientific era where there [was] no way to measure truth". Prior to the rise of modern science fields, there have still always been objective ways to judge truth in all kinds of domains.
by pegasus | 2025-12-12 23:14:15+00:00
> In that sense every corporation would be intentional, deceptive, exploitative, motivated, etc.

...and so they are, because the people making up those corporations are themselves, to various degrees, intentional, deceptive, etc.

> Moreover, it does not address the underlying issue: no one knows what computation, if any, is actually performed by a single neuron.

It sidesteps this issue completely, to me the buck stops with the humans, no need to look inside their brain and reduce further than that.
by mpweiher | 2025-12-12 23:15:19+00:00
That Tsunami also knocked out most of the Tsunami walls it encountered, because it was so much bigger than expected. Nevertheless, a nearby power plant of the same design survived a slightly higher crest than at Fukushima unscathed and even served as an emergency shelter for Tsunami victims.

That plant had always had the higher wall due to one engineer who insisted, and Fukushima actually had a natural barrier that was higher, but lowered during construction for convenience. And TEPCO dragged their feet on increasing the height to the new norm that had recently been made mandatory. My understanding is that this is one of the reasons TEPCO got dinged.

And even with all that, a German reactor, for example, would have remained undamaged due to various mandatory safety features even without a sufficiently high tsunami wall. For example, multi-sited and bunkered diesel generators, so no flooding. Also Hydrogen recombinators, so none of those lovely hydrogen explosions that blew the roofs off.

But of course Germany had to shut off its nuclear plants due to the regular occurring 1000-year Tsunamis in Germany that German plants would have survived.

We're crazy.

Oh, and still exactly 0 radiation deaths from Fukushima, and no measurable health impact expected. All health effects, including deaths were due to the unnecessary evacuation. And not just unnecessary in hindsight, this was known beforehand, gut officials panicked.

Did I mention that Japan is restarting their reactors and considers nuclear an essential part of their future energy strategy, as it is the cheapest baseload power source? The monetary cost of importing Gas exceeds even the vastly inflated cleanup and compensation costs (due to the unnecessary evacauations) by at last an order of magnitude. And of course the health impact of those fossil fuel plants during normal operations is higher than that of the nuclear accident.
by hasbot | 2025-12-12 23:15:39+00:00
Google AI does a pretty good job of this already:

> I'm on page 750 of Anathem. Please give me a recap.

> You are currently reading the section of the book where the main characters have been launched into orbit aboard a repurposed military rocket and are preparing to board the alien starship, the Daban Urnud.

more recap details follow....
by coldtea | 2025-12-12 23:16:05+00:00
When you ask humans however there are all kinds of made-up "facts" they will tell you. Which is the point the parent makes (in the context of comparing to LLM), not whether some legal database has wrong cases.

Since your example comes from the legal field, you'll probably very well know that even well intentioned witnesses that don't actively try to lie, can still hallucinate all kinds of bullshit, and even be certain of it. Even for eye witnesses, you can ask 5 people and get several different incompatible descriptions of a scene or an attacker.
by tzs | 2025-12-12 23:17:06+00:00
Hydroxychloroquine is definitely different from most of the bogus medical stuff going around.

When hydroxychloroquine was first proposed for COVID there was actually reason to think it might help. It is known to interfere with one of the mechanisms that COVID uses to enter cell membranes. The FDA in the US and equivalent regulators in many other countries gave it an emergency use authorization.

A few months later with more data it was found that it had some bad side effects and that it wasn't actually useful against COVID (most of the time COVID used a mechanism other than the one that hydroxychloroquine interfered with to enter cells).
by quesera | 2025-12-12 23:17:11+00:00
I really, really do not think that's one of the reasons it doesn't happen in America.

In particular, the largest protests against American elections (in my life at least) have been populated by almost-certainly unarmed protesters.

And there are many other countries with strict gun laws (i.e. not the US) where police don't fire upon crowds for any reason.
by aidenn0 | 2025-12-12 23:18:16+00:00
Many markets today only exist due to unfair exploitation of its staff, and the exploitation will continue for quite a long time if everyone who unionizes ends up without a job, since that will discourage unionizing at other companies.

We have spent most the last 50 years undoing all of the checks on corporate power that were enacted in the first half of the 20th century. There were literal pitched battles that happened when workers demanded their rights. Here's hoping the transition this time will be less painful (and actually gets repeated at all).
by nifemi1234 | 2025-12-12 23:18:25+00:00
Thank you for your amazing suggestions @rokoss21

The account lockout mechanism really stood out to me—it's a standard feature in security-first systems that I completely overlooked. I'll definitely look into implementing that to mitigate brute force risks.

Regarding encryption at rest, it is the most important takeaway from your advice. Would you advise I handle encryption at the application level or at the database level? I'd love to hear your thoughts on the trade-offs.
by idle_zealot | 2025-12-12 23:18:33+00:00
I suppose this is in the same realm as what some people are trying to do with WASM, creating a common execution environment? This is built on RISC-V instead though. I wish I knew more about the limitations/capabilities of each approach, but in any case a future where applications are built for a common VM seems like something we've been building to for a while, the modern web being the closest we've come.
by lesuorac | 2025-12-12 23:19:12+00:00
> However, by almost any way you can present "popularity" of a president - be it approval ratings, polling figures, popular vote, electoral vote, etc. - he is one of the more popular presidents in US history.

You might want to look up those data yourself because uh he's actually unpopular in those metrics.

Approval - 42.5% [1]. Much better than Trump's love interest Biden's 37.1% [2] but being below 50% is unpopular.

Popular Vote / Electoral Vote - 49.8%, 312. I may need to tell you this so I will. 50% is greater than 49.8%; a majority of voters (nevermind the country) did not want Trump. As before, this is better than Biden's 306 and Trump1's 304 but worse than Obama2 (332), Obama1 (365) and in general 312 (57%) is nothing to write home about.

[1]: https://www.natesilver.net/p/trump-approval-ratings-nate-sil...

[2]: https://www.natesilver.net/p/why-biden-failed
by saisrirampur | 2025-12-12 23:19:12+00:00
I love DuckDB from a product perspective and appreciate the engineering excellence behind it. However, DuckDB was primarily built for seamless for in-process analytics, data science, data-preparation/ETL workloads than real-time customer facing analytics.

ClickHouse’s bread and butter is real-time analytics for customer-facing applications, which often come with demanding concurrency and latency requirements.

Ack, totally makes sense that both are amazing technologies - you could try both and test them at the scale your real-time application may reach, and then choose the technology that best fits your needs. :)
by RossBencina | 2025-12-12 23:20:41+00:00
I don't think that's quite the problem. In mathematics, the word "theory" is often used when referring to particular mathematical frameworks (e.g. Group Theory, Graph Theory, Morse Theory). In that sense I think String Theory is very much a theory. As you imply, in physics, the word "theory" is typically used in a different sense. I'm not a physicist but I presume a physical theory has to be verifiable, consistent with observations, able to predict the behavior of unexplained phenomena. If I understand correctly, the basic problem is that in some quarters string theory is being passed off as a physical theory. I know of pure mathematicians who are interested in string theory and who couldn't care less whether its a physical theory.
by ripe | 2025-12-12 23:21:07+00:00
For others who might be as confused as me:

GNU Unifont is a bitmap font. It provides a fixed glyph for every code point in the BMP. It also covers additional code points in other planes.

I am guessing this is useful for writing editors that can edit Unicode text without knowing anything about various languages and their conventions. Authors who try to use this font to compose documents in (say) devanagari will have to learn the Unicode characters "in the raw", because I don't see a shaper for devanagari, so they won't get feedback that looks like real text.

If anyone can explain this better, please do!
by siliconc0w | 2025-12-12 23:21:25+00:00
Yeah the distributed nature of tech makes unionizing naturally difficult - multiple offices with different reporting chains, remote teams, etc. The way CWA handled this for Alphabet is a sort of fake "PR" union where the company is under no obligation to bargain with you and you don't really any of the protections.

An app could maybe help here as well to define more viable bargaining units - like "the QA team" rather than the "NYC Office" which may have thousands of employees with different eligibility and reporting chains.
by terminalshort | 2025-12-12 23:21:51+00:00
Given that the headline is:

> Secondary school maths showing that AI systems don’t think

And the article contains the quotes:

> the team wants to tackle a major and common misconception: that students think that ANN systems learn, recognise, see, and understand, when really it’s all just maths.

> The team is taking very complex ideas and reducing them to such an extent that we can use secondary classroom maths to show that AI is not magic and AI systems do not think.

This is not off topic
by araes | 2025-12-12 23:22:02+00:00
Everything about this $70,000,000,000 number is difficult to believe.

Even at Meta's nonsensical pay scales of ~$250,000, $15B a year is still like 60,000 employees working all year long. 60,000 employees at 2000 hours (gov FYE) and they got ... ~nothing? 900 players??? There's like 10 games this week on Steam with more than 900 players. [1] It would be more like 125,000 developers at reasonable pay scales. (while still making six figure salaries, maybe $120k)

Major game studios are maybe 500-3000. Battlefield (DICE, 700 [2]), Call of Duty supposedly 3,000 [3] (Infinity Ward, 450 [4], Sledgehammer Games, 250 [5]), Final Fantasy XIV (Squeenix, 260-300 [6]). Every one has 100,000's of players or millions.

Valve's entire company is ~300-400 and they made their own (actually multiple) functional VR headset(s). (First SteamVR gets mediocre (heavy, blurry) reviews, second Steam Frame seems to get at least acceptable reviews) [7]. It's one of the most popular uses for all those Quest Headsets that Meta dropped the ball on.

Wasting $70,000,000,000 for ~nothing seems like it must just be accounting nonsense or a scam. 60,000 to 125,000 people working for years, and there were not layer upon layers of managers screaming warnings about the insane waste of money and lack of players?

"Umm, we've got like 900 players ... The insane management echo chamber will never listen to me, yet, could you, like, warn somebody or something ..."

[1] https://steamdb.info/upcoming/?lastweek&sort=peak_desc

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DICE_(company)

[3] https://www.gamesradar.com/over-3000-people-are-working-on-c...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinity_Ward

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sledgehammer_Games

[6] https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/6f76zy/the_ffxiv_dev...

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valve_Corporation
by ben_w | 2025-12-12 23:22:18+00:00
> It’s mostly the Tories that were responsible for the drafting of the Online Safety Bill, and let’s not forget the downright evil Investigatory Powers Act. Another Tory creation.

Read enough of my old comments, and you'll know that the Investigatory Powers Act is a big part of why I left the UK. The other half was how I expected Brexit would be used as an excuse to leave things like the European Court of Human Rights and thereby make it harder to fight such things.

Pleasant surprise that the UK is still bound to the human rights stuff, especially given Theresa May's opinion of such things and prior reputation the Home Office.

> The Tories were left wing and authoritarian.

No, they're right wing and authoritarian. Or at least, there's enough of an authoritarian streak in it to be a problem.

> They raised taxes, and failed to shrink the UK’s bloated state and civil service.

You didn't notice all the austerity policies, I take it? Their approach to the civil service was basically a government self-lobotomy, reducing state capacity to be competent.

Not that size of government is hugely important to the left-right split in the UK; that seems to be a much more American dividing line, from what I see in the American stories that make it across.

> I don’t know if I fully trust Reform to deliver, but by a country mile, they’re a safer choice than Conservatives, Labour or Lib Dems in 2029.

The other things Reform (or, given that it's owned by the leader, he) have called for include, to quote the Wikipedia page:

leaving the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR); repealing the Human Rights Act 1998 and replacing it with a new law; disapplying the 1951 Refugee Convention, the UN Convention Against Torture, and the Council of Europe Anti-Trafficking Convention (ECAT); creating detention powers without Hardial Singh constraints;

To be against these things is not the indication of someone who dislikes authoritarianism.

The only thing I see him calling for that I actually agree with is basically an example of "left wing" by UK standards: the nationalisation of the steel plant in Scunthorpe.

Not that I expect him to succeed. His experience of politics combines is much the same as Jeremy Corbyn: to be the one who opposes everything, not the one who has to take responsibility. Look how bad Corbyn was for Labour, that's my median for how bad Farage would be for the UK.
by sho_hn | 2025-12-12 23:24:10+00:00
I'm obviously biased when it comes to FOSS foundations, but Simon is also a member of the board of the Python Software Foundation, which is not nothing in terms of looking after our craft.

The LLM stuff feels minor in comparison, even if it may be what HN knows him for. It's certainly not the same level of achievement as your average bargain bin AI rambler in your LinkedIn feed.
by rayiner | 2025-12-12 23:24:47+00:00
Did you look at page 23, which I cited? “Use the National Guard and active-duty military to police American cities and stop crime and disorder” is at 51% and it goes up from there. “Using the U.S. military to target cartel drug smugglers in Latin America” is at 58%. “ Closing the border with added security and policies that discourage illegal crossings” is at 70%.

Yes, people are upset the economy. But I assume the people complaining about “fascism” on here are upset about Trump’s “values,” which, as you note is at 50%, not his failure to meet his stupid promise to turn back the last few years of inflation.
by idoubtit | 2025-12-12 23:25:01+00:00
What was unclear in that article is that the XML is usually embedded in the invoice. For instance, Factur-X is the mandatory format in Germany, and it's a PDF which contains a metadata block with a XML EN16931 content.

This XML will usually not be read by the companies that pay the invoice. For instance, in France by the end of 2027, every business will have to send e-invoices, but never directly to the real recipient. The business sends the invoice to a registered go-between, which will ask a national platform for the address of the recipient's go-between, etc. So, only those official go-between companies will have to securely parse the XML.

BTW, in 2022 when the French government decided to make e-invoicing mandatory, it announced that it would develop a national unique go-between platform. Two years later, it dropped that part of the project and announced that there would be an official list of private platforms. So, by the end of 2026 or 2027, every French business will have to select one of the 112 platforms and buy a subscription. It give the State more control, but for small businesses it means higher costs and complexity.
by trhway | 2025-12-12 23:25:15+00:00
>they simply use technology to automate handling with what they can see

A police dept with 500 employees can't see at 10000 places at once. So, it isn't "simply to automate".

It would be like saying that rifle is just a simple automation of how one can use a hammer to drive a nail into a victim, and thus if one is allowed to own/carry a hammer and nails then the one is allowed to own/carry a rifle.
by toss1 | 2025-12-12 23:25:19+00:00
Yup

Every time I see a CyberTruck out in the wild, I am still just stunned by the crappy design — like a dumpster designed for anti-performance — the wheel positioning and size is all wrong, and the metalwork always looks cheap because the 'flat' surfaces are always wavy or rippled, and the seams don't match up properly.

I am definitely one of those people who used to look forward to buying a Tesla next time I change vehicles, but will never consider it now (and I'm big on electric vehicles).
by drtgh | 2025-12-12 23:25:36+00:00
Fukushima was the result of corruption,

Among others variables, the plant was designed to be constructed on a hill 30-35 meters above the ocean, but someones decided would be cheaper to construct it at sea level in order to reduce costs in water pumping, others decided to license this, and much latter, one decade before the disaster when was requested to reinforce the security measures within all the reactors in the country -in Fukushima for example to elevate critical systems to hills- others decided to ignore it [1][2]

[0] https://warp.da.ndl.go.jp/info:ndljp/pid/3856371/naiic.go.jp...

[1] https://warp.da.ndl.go.jp/info:ndljp/pid/3856371/naiic.go.jp...

[2]https://carnegieendowment.org/2012/03/06/why-fukushima-was-p...

What happens is that nuclear fusion is not here yet, and there is insufficient stable/maintained energy to meet current demand without using combined cycle power plants (combustion), and this without even a transition to full electric vehicles, with right now sounds to pure phantasy (how will be feed).

So the realistic by the moment sounds like to keep constructing new nuclear fission plants and renewables, keeping a diversification of sources, as is doing China with their mega projects. Without this will not be way to compete with their industry.

But more important, I think is needed to end the nepotism, the revolving doors (amakudari), and, of course, to prevent sociopaths from accessing positions of responsibility in any field... what sounds difficult because those positions are like magnets for them. This is what seems we don't learn from the human history.
by nospice | 2025-12-12 23:25:41+00:00
It feels good to be smarter than everyone else. You see your upvotes and that's good enough for an ego boost. Been there, done that.

I wish we were a bit more self-critical about this, but it's a tough problem when what brings the community together in the first place is a sense of superiority: prestigious schools, high salaries, impressive employers, supposedly refined tastes. We're at the top of the world, right?