MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lapcat | 2025-12-06 01:07:59+00:00
You're completely missing the point. From the blog post:

if rule_result.action == "execute" then rule_result.execute.results = ruleset_results[tonumber(rule_result.execute.results_index)] end

"This code expects that, if the ruleset has action=”execute”, the “rule_result.execute” object will exist. However, because the rule had been skipped, the rule_result.execute object did not exist, and Lua returned an error due to attempting to look up a value in a nil value.

This is a straightforward error in the code, which had existed undetected for many years. This type of code error is prevented by languages with strong type systems. In our replacement for this code in our new FL2 proxy, which is written in Rust, the error did not occur."

The unit tests are for the source code. In this respect, the number of requests a second fielded by the system is irrelevant. Unit tests don't happen in production; that's the point of them.

It's a classic coding mistake, failing to check for nil, and none of your handwaving about "scale" changes that fact.
by arjie | 2025-12-06 01:08:24+00:00
There's nothing dirty about this deal. When making a large deal with one vendor he didn't disclose to them that he was making a deal with another vendor. That's pretty normal when you're trying to buy a lot of stuff. Otherwise, they can collude to shake you down.

I'm not thrilled about this genre of "guy I don't like does totally normal thing so it's bad". It's too engagement baity.

EDIT: Though even that may be wrong. TechCrunch reports that it was a joint meeting between the South Korean President, the heads of the two companies, and Sam Altman. I won't claim that TC is the bible but there's lots of stuff being reported that makes no sense, and this is a good deal for both these companies so it's more believable than news from someone that OpenAI is going to buy a bunch of wafers and stick it in a warehouse.

https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/01/openai-ropes-in-samsung-sk...
by mxfh | 2025-12-06 01:08:29+00:00
Secondary RAM Manufacturing Had Stalled. Budget brands normally buy older DRAM fabrication equipment from mega-producers like Samsung when Samsung upgrades their DRAM lines to the latest and greatest equipment. This allows the DRAM market to expand more than it would otherwise because it makes any upgrading of the fanciest production lines to still be additive change to the market. However, Korean memory firms have been terrified that reselling old equipment to China-adjacent OEMs might trigger U.S. retaliation…and so those machines have been sitting idle in warehouses since early spring.

My takeaway, this sounds like an comparably easy fix for the consumer market, if prices are somewhat guarenteed to stay mid term significantly above this years spring floor for someone to sweep up the margins and negotiate a somewhat reliable way to get the last gen production lines up and running again. Will take at least half a year to pick up, but this is not a longterm RAM doomsday scenario in any sense.

I'm more worried about the low to mid-end embedded systems, that a have a dollar budget for memory components, that could get unbearably slow for the current/next gen if manufactures just use the bare minimum of RAM the bloated TV or tablet OS can run on, if the 1GB raspberry move is any indication of that. And consumers stuck with no way to upgrade them to a reasonably usable state.
by energy123 | 2025-12-06 01:08:37+00:00
I think we are too quick to discount the possibility that this flaw is slightly intentional, in the sense that the optimization has a tight budget to work with (equivalent of ~3000 tokens) so why would it waste capacity on this when it could improve capabilities around reading small text in obscured images? Sort of like humans have all these rules of thumbs that backfire in all these ways but that's the energy efficient way to do things.
by kmeisthax | 2025-12-06 01:09:00+00:00
The only three blocs at the WTO who would meaningfully oppose renegotiating TRIPS to lower the copyright floor are the US, EU, and Japan. If all three of them say "let's lower the floor", it's getting lowered. The fact that they cannot unilaterally do this does not mean their hands are tied, especially not when they are the ones tying other people's hands.

> On the other hand, want to make it so that anyone can wholesale copy my photographs and sell them for pennies after a few years? No.

The Berne floor is way longer than "a few years".
by djoldman | 2025-12-06 01:09:38+00:00
> When you trade CME bitcoin futures, your settlement is guaranteed by the clearing entities of Chicago Mercantile Exchange which are bulge bracket firms of TradFi.

The CME clearinghouse itself is the guarantor. And below it are the clearing firms. The trading firms don't guarantee trades, the clearing firms do.

In fact, for many products, the CME is the counterparty for both sides of a trade.
by triketazone | 2025-12-06 01:10:13+00:00
AI TL;DR of 500 Hacker News Comments Mostly complainers. A few useful nuggets. Useful:

Music streaming has universal catalogs; video doesn't. That's why one works and the other feels broken. Blu-rays keep working. Streaming licenses don't. WB has been cursed—AOL, AT&T, Discovery all saddled it with debt. Pattern worth noting. HBO is nearly impossible to access legally outside the US. Real issue.

Noise:

"Enshittification" with no specifics Piracy boasting Subjective quality debates Anti-trust speculation from non-lawyers Cable nostalgia
by thinkcontext | 2025-12-06 01:10:35+00:00
It made an impression on me when Musk invited the world's press to Texas and stood them in front of MK1, pointed at it and said it would go to space that year. It also made an impression when it and the next few fell apart on the ground.

After that I decided I wasn't going to count Musk's eggs before they are hatched. What has been accomplished with Starship so far is impressive, that should be acknowledged. But big todo items, heat shield, refueling and reusability are still to be proved and we'll have to wait and see if and when they are achieved.
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-12-06 01:10:50+00:00
> This is a wild test, because LLMs get really pushy and insistent that the dog only has 4 legs.

Most human beings, if they see a dog that has 5 legs, will quickly think they are hallucinating and the dog really only has 4 legs, unless the fifth leg is really really obvious. It is weird how humans are biased like that:

1. You can look directly at something and not see it because your attention is focused elsewhere (on the expected four legs).

2. Our pre-existing knowledge (dogs have four legs) influences how we interpret visual information from the bottom-up.

3. Our brain actively filters out "unimportant" details that don't align with our expectations or the main "figure" of the dog.

Attention should fix this however, like if you ask the AI to count the number of legs the dog has specifically, it shouldn't go nuts.

A straight up "dumber" computer algorithm that isn't trained extensively on real and realistic image data is going to get this right more often than a transformer that was.
by palata | 2025-12-06 01:11:34+00:00
> While Cloudflare blocks almost all AI crawlers, there’s one particular bot it cannot block without affecting its customers’ online presence — Google. The search giant combined its search and AI crawler into one, meaning users who opt out of Google’s AI crawler won't be indexed in Google search results. “You can’t opt out of one without opting out of both, which is a real challenge — it’s crazy,” Prince continued. “It shouldn’t be that you can use your monopoly position of yesterday in order to leverage and have a monopoly position in the market of tomorrow.”

Of course Google would do that.
by throw101010 | 2025-12-06 01:12:11+00:00
> It was supposed to be limited in supply unlike fiat, and yet Tether underpins the whole thing and they print that out of thin air all the time.

This is a joke right? Tether (USDT) is pegged to the dollar... and there is not really a limit to the USD printing machine, nobody ever claimed a stablecoin would have a limited supply. It's literally the main critique of the fiat system levied by crypto proponents.

The only asset which has made and still hold promises of not increasing its supply over its limit set through its consensus code is Bitcoin. And it is nowhere close to ever change... as a matter of fact if it changed, most people wouldn't call that fork Bitcoin.
by quotemstr | 2025-12-06 01:13:23+00:00
Yeah, but in the US I can buy pseudoephedrine over the counter and the sky doesn't fall. Believe it or not French regulations, but there's no epidemic of strokes among sufferers of the common cold. Yes, the US system is broken in places, but at least it's a lot less boneheadedly paternalistic about availability of obviously safe drugs.
by chermi | 2025-12-06 01:15:11+00:00
Can you just lay down exactly what mean in your apparently genius statement that went over our silly heads. "Life is decreasing entropy". I pointed a very direct counterexample that showed your definition needed refinement at the very least. So, one last chance to educate the commoners. What do you actually mean?

You were asked to make a distinction, the opportunity to provide some specificity to your fundamentally flawed You came back with snarkiness and

Yes, intimately familiar with England's work. My physics PhD was in statistical mechanics + biophysics.

Perhaps you don't know how thermo works? Your definition at the very least should define the environment to even be worth consideration. As is, I can either take it face value. In which case it's wrong. Or I can try to get a refined definition out of you, giving you the benefit of the doubt you know what you're talking about. Your attitude and answers don't give me confidence.

This is physics. Define things. We can't read minds.
by hamandcheese | 2025-12-06 01:15:12+00:00
> OpenAI isn’t even bothering to buy finished memory modules! No, their deals are unprecedentedly only for raw wafers — uncut, unfinished, and not even allocated to a specific DRAM standard yet. It’s not even clear if they have decided yet on how or when they will finish them into RAM sticks or HBM! Right now it seems like these wafers will just be stockpiled in warehouses

That is not "totally normal".
by JuniperMesos | 2025-12-06 01:16:08+00:00
The famous song White Rabbit by Jefferson Airplane uses an extended metaphor based on Alice In Wonderland, and has the lyrics:

> One pill makes you larger > And one pill makes you small > And the ones that mother gives you > Don't do anything at all > Go ask Alice > When she's ten feet tall

I've never read the Alice in Wonderland book, but the Disney adaptation of it from the 50s had cake and a drink I recall, and no pills.
by bee_rider | 2025-12-06 01:16:12+00:00
Err… is there any question that the US is trying to slow down China’s high-tech computer development? I thought that was our open goal.

Countries decided the extent to which they’d like to engage in free trade together. It is a knob that we’d hope our leaders would turn strategically. (Regardless of whether or not we think our leaders actually are doing a good job of it…).
Show HN: A Superscript Generator That Works with Any Text, Symbols Included
by 18272837023 | 2025-12-06 01:17:13+00:00
I built a lightweight superscript generator that lets you convert any characters — numbers, letters, or symbols — into superscript text using Unicode. No sign-up, no tracking, just instant copy & paste. Useful for math notes, scientific writing, usernames, markdown, and anywhere HTML isn’t supported. Feedback welcome.
by BoiledCabbage | 2025-12-06 01:17:23+00:00
> where trace amounts of our patented seeds or traits are present in a farmer’s fields as a result of inadvertent means.

That sounds like a very hollow commitment to me. Who defines what "trace" is. Monsanto?

And what is the normal cross pollination rate from doing nothing. 1% 5%? It sounds like it just means we won't sue you the first year, we'll wait until the second year then sue you.

The practice needs to be banned. It's Monsanto seeds that are spreading their genetics in the wind. If they don't want that, then make crops that can't. If they're unable to, then tough.

Saying nobody within pollination range can grow their own crops anymore once someone nearby purchases Monsanto seeds is absurd.

That's all aside from the fact that patenting things that reproduce still is somewhat of a weak concept to begin with.

Putting an absurd tech spin on it. If you made a robot/machinr that could replicate itself sure patent it. If you made a robot that sent out radio waves and every machine within receiving distance could/would suddenly replicate, you can't sue those owners for "stealing your technology".
by billy99k | 2025-12-06 01:18:18+00:00
"What do you propose to keep topical forums on topic? There's plenty of forums where pure capitalist sentiment is allowed or encouraged."

/r/antiwork is just an example. Much more general forums are moderated, without the average user knowing the difference. The end result is election interference (like when Google de-platforms and removes search results for candidates it doesn't like) and big tech shaping politics and general opinions, on a massive scale.

Until this practice stops, I have no problem banning Fact checkers and content moderators from the country.
by dmix | 2025-12-06 01:18:21+00:00
So the prosecution will gamble that OpenAI won't in fact use the RAM in a relevant timeframe and they only bought them to exclude the other swath of AI companies from competing?

From the article

> OpenAI isn’t even bothering to buy finished memory modules! No, their deals are unprecedentedly only for raw wafers — uncut, unfinished, and not even allocated to a specific DRAM standard yet. It’s not even clear if they have decided yet on how or when they will finish them into RAM sticks or HBM! Right now it seems like these wafers will just be stockpiled in warehouses – like a kid who hides the toybox because they’re afraid nobody wants to play with them, and thus selfishly feels nobody but them should get the toys!

I guess we'll have to see if they in fact just keep "unfinished" RAM in warehouses like the article says and not roll them out into datacenters for a legitimate use as they are finished.
by jasonwatkinspdx | 2025-12-06 01:19:01+00:00
The practical answer is you use a combination of queries and compensating actions to resemble idempotency with the external service. Some people additionally constrain things to be a linear sequence of actions/effects, and call this pattern Sagas. It's sort of a bastardized distributed transaction that lets you handle a lot of real world use cases without getting into the complexity of true distributed transactions.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-06 01:19:10+00:00
> Cloudflare has had some outages recently. However, what’s their uptime over the longer term? If an individual site took on the infra challenges themselves, would they achieve better? I don’t think so.

Why is that the only option? Cloudflare could offer solutions that let people run their software themselves, after paying some license fee. Or there could be many companies people use instead, instead of everyone flocking to one because of cargoculting "You need a CDN like Cloudflare before you launch your startup bro".
by nerdponx | 2025-12-06 01:20:18+00:00
The article even says that they don't have an obvious plan for how to use the wafers they bought, and very clearly suggests that this is purely an anticompetitive tactic to force everyone else to eat a price increase that OpenAI doesn't need to face. It's clever though because if any regulatory agency starts asking questions (not that they would do that in the current USA political climate) then OpenAI can just say it's a strategic reserve, we have plans to do something with it, etc. etc. What are you going to do? Take them to court and force them to auction off some % of the stock? Set an industry-wide limit on wafer inventory? Fine them? You'd need to find some evidence that it was done maliciously, and good luck with that.

There are some negative elements of captialism that we might simply have no reasonable regulatory apparatus to deal with. Preventing indivduals and companies from having so much market power in the first place seems to be the only thing that can work consistently.
by roadbuster | 2025-12-06 01:21:00+00:00
> To be clear - the shock wasn’t that OpenAI made a big deal, no, it was that they made two massive deals this big, at the same time, with Samsung and SK Hynix simultaneously

That's not "dirty." That's hiding your intentions from suppliers so they don't crank prices before you walk through their front door.

If you want to buy a cake, never let the baker know it's for a wedding.
Ask HN: Modern C# book for experienced developers?
by Fire-Dragon-DoL | 2025-12-06 01:21:21+00:00
I worked with C# about 15 years ago. Due to some circumstances at work, I have the opportunity to use it again.

What are some great books that could help me learn to write *modern* C#?

I will mostly work with web and .NET Core, are there books specifically about using .NET Core on Linux?
by swatcoder | 2025-12-06 01:22:42+00:00
> This was not the "free and global market" I thought we were supposed to have at this point.

Perhaps you haven't noticed but the pendulum has been swinging the other way for a while already and has a lot of momentum behind it. It's mentioned off-hand because the ongoing return to a multi-polar global order is covered elsewhere already, across dozens of articles every day.
by Wowfunhappy | 2025-12-06 01:22:59+00:00
> (That's probably partly why music streaming services don't compete on content; most people don't care exactly which funky music they're listening to as long as it is funky, and had most of the popular stuff. But they definitely care if they want to watch Stranger Things and they can't watch Stranger Things but maybe you're interested in these other crap knock-offs?)

Idk. I can imagine an alternate universe where Taylor Swift's new album was exclusive to Spotify. All the Swifties using Apple Music probably aren't interested in "Taylor Swift knockoffs".

It's not entirely obvious to me why this hasn't happened.
by hyeonwho4 | 2025-12-06 01:23:23+00:00
Was $10k before or after the insurance negotiated discount? Pre-discount prices mean nothing: I had the same tests ordered twice (needed the results urgently), once through my PCP/HMO and once paid to a walk-in doctor's office in cash. The cash price was $700. My PCP claimed a price of insurance $3500, who then negotiated it down to a "discounted" $710. So the worst of both worlds would have been a high deductible plan.
by konmok | 2025-12-06 01:23:45+00:00
Yeah, that's a good breakdown. I mean, he definitely brought this on himself by leaning so hard into Omarchy in the first place, but maybe he was just ignorant of DHH's views and thought that was a "neutral" thing to do.

In any case, I think it's important for consumers to confront companies when they pull stunts like this. Also, I'm not certain that #4-type CEOs actually have better outcomes - maybe in the short term, but when the creeping technofascism becomes more obvious, that causes real problems (see e.g. NixOS, Tesla)
by rubyfan | 2025-12-06 01:24:03+00:00
While I agree with the sentiment one statement jumped out that grinds my gears.

>Why does technical debt exist? Because requirements weren't properly clarified before work began.

I hate this line of thinking and the expectations that come along with this style of work. The idea that developers need to be spoon fed requirements and only then can they start working because they fundamentally lack an understanding of the desired business outcome and their work output is so valuable that it can’t evolve as their understanding of the problem evolves _is problematic_. To be clear I’m not blaming developers but the style of work that often goes by names like waterfall, agile, SAFE, agile 2.0, transformation, etc. is all hot garbage.
by arjie | 2025-12-06 01:24:33+00:00
It's not really that different from Apple reserving wafer starts on TSMC's next node and so on. It's just that this kind of capacity requirement has rarely shown up in DRAM before. Vendors prefer this kind of capacity reservation over a more variable finished product requirement. It allows them to know that they can build at the bottleneck rather than having to start up more capacity and then having that lie idle while everything downstream in DRAM packaging and DIMM production can't actually consume anything.
by doopp | 2025-12-06 01:25:58+00:00
A codec that uses AI isn't necessarily going to be using it to synthesize content. It could use it for things like improving rate-distortion optimizations and early-skip heuristics.

Modern video codecs are complex beasts. It's not as simple as "take a macroblock and find some motion vectors that minimize residual below a certain threshold, else code as intra-block". They have hundreds of mutually-exclusive techniques to compress a certain area of the frame. Determining which technique will require the smallest residual is done with fast early-skip heuristics that often make the wrong decision. The official manual for x265, the H.265/HEVC encoder (https://x265.readthedocs.io/en/master/cli.html), has literally hundreds of options, almost all about tuning these myriad of heuristics for your particular input.

AI can be used to enhance things like early-skip heuristics. "This block looks like it'll benefit from a really-detailed motion search in this particular area" or "we'll save bits if we bypass the DCT step and quantize the block directly" or "this frame should definitely be a B-frame". Encoders already use heuristics to do this (brute forcing all possible decisions to find which is optimal is too slow), but they don't always make the best decision. An AI could be used to improve that.

Now when I say AI, I'm not talking about massive, multi-billion weight monstrosities that synthesize nonsense, but extremely simple neural networks with a few thousand weights. The popular Opus codec uses a simple NN to estimate whether or not a frame of audio is speech or music, and uses that determination to decide whether to use their speech-optimized algorithm (SILK) or their music-optimized algorithm (CELT) to encode that particular frame. It's a short read but a very good one: https://jmvalin.ca/opus/opus-1.3/

This could be extended to video encoders without being used for interpolation where they would be liable to synthesize things that aren't there, DLSS-style.
by hamandcheese | 2025-12-06 01:26:24+00:00
That's not the dirty part. This is the dirty part:

> OpenAI isn’t even bothering to buy finished memory modules! No, their deals are unprecedentedly only for raw wafers — uncut, unfinished, and not even allocated to a specific DRAM standard yet. It’s not even clear if they have decided yet on how or when they will finish them into RAM sticks or HBM! Right now it seems like these wafers will just be stockpiled in warehouses
by didibus | 2025-12-06 01:26:41+00:00
What they mean is that they bought 40% of all RAM production, they managed to do that by simultaneously making two big deals at the same time. It's buying up 40% of all RAM production with the intention to have most of it idle in warehouses that is "dirty". And in order to be able to do that, they needed to be secretive and time two big deals at the same time.