MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zerofor_conduct | 2025-12-22 04:14:59+00:00
Anyone can develop a Zen attitude by committing to Zen meditation, or other forms of meditation. It may sound trite, but depression can come from managing the past, anxiety from managing the future. But the past is gone, the future is just a fantasy, what is real is what is happening now. The more time spent in the present, the less anxiety and depression. This is one of the benefits of meditation.
by jjj123 | 2025-12-22 04:16:34+00:00
Couldn’t you also say it’s largely unfactual, since the vast majority of strivers and grinders never escape their economic class?

I guess it depends on what opportunity means to you. Does it mean something that’s “likely” or “less than one in a thousand”? To me, a “one in a thousand” chance to strike it rich is not good enough to justify the immense suffering our economic system causes.
by triceratops | 2025-12-22 04:16:40+00:00
FTA: "Amjad Khan and his family were barred from multiple petrol stations around Blackburn for 19 months after he was accused of driving out of an Esso petrol station in Manchester without paying for £20.01 of fuel.

VARS Technology – which provides automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) cameras and debt recovery services to one in eight petrol stations across the UK – wrote to Nasim Khan, the registered owner of the couple’s car, in July 2023 and told her she had to pay for the cost of the fuel, plus a £30 admin fee: a total of £50.01.

Amjad, 58, was adamant he paid for the fuel with cash and was forced into a one-and-a-half-year battle with the company.

During this time the couple’s car was barred from the more than 1,300 petrol stations that VARS Technology operates at – leaving them struggling to refuel their car."
by ModernMech | 2025-12-22 04:17:17+00:00
It sure is a comfy tagline, but because it doesn't really mean anything you could say it about any language, and it only works if you already know what Ruby is. It's not that anyone would confused Ruby with an app to make friends, but it doesn't really say anything about Ruby at all. As other pointed out, the page doesn't even make clear that Ruby is a programming language.
by klooney | 2025-12-22 04:17:19+00:00
Looking at this list:

Standard Postgres compiled with some AWS-specific monitoring hooks A custom backup system using EBS snapshots Automated configuration management via Chef/Puppet/Ansible Load balancers and connection pooling (PgBouncer) Monitoring integration with CloudWatch Automated failover scripting

Every company I've ever on boarded at, that hosted their own database, had number one, and a lot of TODOs around the rest. It's really hard! Honestly, it could be a full time job for a team. And that's more expensive than RDS.
by jszymborski | 2025-12-22 04:19:05+00:00
I just got a RTX 5090, so I thought I'd see what all the fuss was about these AI coding tools. I've previously copy pasted back and forth from Claude but never used the instruct models.

So I fired up Cline with gpt-oss-120b, asked it to tell me what a specific function does, and proceeded to watch it run `cat README.md` over and over again.

I'm sure it's better with other the Qwen Coder models, but it was a pretty funny first look.
by davelaing | 2025-12-22 04:19:53+00:00
I like John Vervaeke's meaning-in-life questions (potentially mildly paraphrasing, because it has been a while since I came across them):

- what is it that I want there to be more of in the world, even after I'm gone?

- what am I doing right now that is trying to help there be more of it?

From memory most people don't have answers to them - and that's fine, but it is handy to reflect on them and perhaps work toward finding answers if you don't have them - and the people who do have answers to these questions typically have higher life satisfaction then the people who don't.
by SamDc73 | 2025-12-22 04:20:46+00:00
This older HN thread shows R1 running on a ~$2k box using ~512 GB of system RAM, no GPU, at ~3.5-4.25 TPS: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42897205

If you scale that setup and add a couple of used RTX 3090s with heavy memory offloading, you can technically run something in the K2 class.
by dlcarrier | 2025-12-22 04:20:46+00:00
It's the opposite; semiconductor design is so full of constraints that it's difficult to do manually. Usually individual transistors and gates are laid out manually, then manufactured in a test chip, and empirically analyzed in every way possible, then those measurements are fed into the router, and it creates a layout of those blocks that allows enough signal propagation to work at the high speeds used in modern semiconductors.
by cmrdporcupine | 2025-12-22 04:21:34+00:00
With RAM prices spiking, there's no way consumers are going to have access to frontier quality models on local hardware any time soon, simply because they won't fit.

That's not the same as discounting the open weight models though. I use DeepSeek 3.2 heavily, and was impressed by the Devstral launch recently. (I tried Kimi K2 and was less impressed). I don't use them for coding so much as for other purposes... but the key thing about them is that they're cheap on API providers. I put $15 into my deepseek platform account two months ago, use it all the time, and still have $8 left.

I think the open weight models are 8 months behind the frontier models, and that's awesome. Especially when you consider you can fine tune them for a given problem domain...
by CamperBob2 | 2025-12-22 04:21:52+00:00
Interestingly, it doesn't always condition the final output. When playing with DeepSeek, for example, it's common to see the CoT arrive at a correct answer that the final answer doesn't reflect, and even vice versa, where a chain of faulty reasoning somehow yields the right final answer.

It almost seems that the purpose of the CoT tokens in a transformer network is to act as a computational substrate of sorts. The exact choice of tokens may not be as important as it looks, but it's important that they are present.
by idiotsecant | 2025-12-22 04:22:07+00:00
We desperately need mass energy storage. Everyone gets excited about renewable generation, but it is counterproductive without investing 5x-10x what we spend on generation in improved transmission and storage. It would be better to build 1/10th the amount of solar we do and pair it with appropriate energy storage than it is to just build solar panels. This is a crisis that almost nobody seems to talk about but is blindingly obvious when you look at socal energy price maps. The physics simply doesn't work without storage!!
by lovich | 2025-12-22 04:22:10+00:00
Being capable of being applied everywhere doesn't mean they are compensated the same when comparing any two locations.

Even if that wasn't a factor and both locations paid the same, a dense city with many employers gives you a much better chance of finding a job when needed or seeking out better opportunities if you are being ambitious.

I grew up in one of these "great deal" towns with 2-3 employers that had more than 10 employees. Anyone who had a bad interaction with a single employer, which included asking for a raise, was blacklisted from employment and effectively homeless if they didn't leave town looking for work.

Whenever I visit my parents back home I notice how there appears to be no one in the town in their 20s to early 30s. Its either retirees or older parents who moved there to give their kids a country experience.

The few people I've kept in contact from growing up who are in that town currently make less money than an entry level McDonald's does near the city, and are only able to survive due to the help from their parents either in the form of free room and board or direct subsidizing.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-12-22 04:22:12+00:00
Cool. So lemme just take 4 more years of school for 3x what I paid for back in the day and I'll be good to work at those non-tech jobs. Tough luck to those new grads who didn't have 4 years of foresight (or me who is already a decade into my career).

>if you want a tech job, well there are quite a few in Alabama

Hiring or "had a job up for 2 years but seemingly can't find nobody"?

Seriously. Try applying to some of these jobs and see how far you get. It's tough out there. it's not like 2015 where half your apps get a response.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-12-22 04:23:06+00:00
Yep. I come from a rural area and my hometown has little to offer to nurses or welders. Be prepared for both a long commute and high chance of needing to switch to a different (likely longer) commute periodically to be able to stay employed without becoming hostage to a crappy employer. This is why all the young people (including myself) end up moving out and why the town is approaching being entirely elderly.

The countryside gets romanticized a lot but reality is not so rosy.
by jasonwatkinspdx | 2025-12-22 04:23:19+00:00
Yeah, that's just one of the essays he was on as a phd student, but he was really interested in the interaction of linear types and region inferencing as a general resource management framework. That grew into an interest in linear types as part of logical frameworks for modeling concurrency. But then like a lot of people he became disillusioned with academia, went to make some money on wall street, then focused on his family after that.

Anyhow, I just thought it might be a good jumping off point for what you're exploring.
by ursAxZA | 2025-12-22 04:24:25+00:00
Ultimately it just becomes a question of where you want the choke point to live — in a state actor, or in a private operator.

Neither option is risk-free; the failure modes simply differ.

A government can shut you off for political reasons, a corporation can shut you off for contractual or geopolitical ones.

As long as the system assumes centralized stewardship for safety or reliability, someone will inevitably hold the switch — the only variable is who.
by spopejoy | 2025-12-22 04:24:57+00:00
My conspiracy theory du jour is that AGI doomerism is a product of supremacist thinking. AGI futures are purely speculative right? So why are they always doom and gloom?

Why can't an AGI be inherently classless, unconcerned with profit or scarcity, and inherently "arc-ing toward justice"?

Because that isn't good news for nerds who think they rightly sit at the top of a meritocracy. An evil AGI is one that confirms tech is the ultimate unconquerable power that only the tech elite can even hope to master.
by aw1621107 | 2025-12-22 04:25:07+00:00
> I rarely see this mentioned in the way that you did, and I'll try to paraphrase it in my own way: Rust restricts what you can do as a programmer. One can say it is "less powerful" than C. In exchange for giving up some power, it gives you more information

Your paraphrasing reminds me a bit of structured vs. unstructured programming (i.e., unrestricted goto). Like to what you said, structured programming is "less powerful" than unrestricted goto, but in return, it's much easier to follow and reason about a program's control flow.

At the risk of simplifying things too much, I think some other things you said make for an interesting way to sum this up - Rust does for "ownership flow"/"dataflow" what structured programming did for control flow.
by apatheticonion | 2025-12-22 04:25:13+00:00
Tell that to airport check-in staff haha. A laptop and charger are around 3kg and there's only so much clothing I can take out of my suitcase and wear to make it passed check-in.

But I hear you. It's annoying that I can't reuse perfectly good hardware, but it's fine - we make do.
by loaderchips | 2025-12-22 04:26:21+00:00
Thank you for the thoughtful comment. Your questions are valid given the title, which I used to make the post more accessible to a general HN audience. To clarify: the core distinction here is not kernelization vs kNN, but field evaluation vs point selection (or selection vs superposition as retrieval semantics). The kernel is just a concrete example.

FAISS implements selection (argmax ⟨q,v⟩), so vectors are discrete atoms and deletion must be structural. The weighted formulation represents a field: vectors act as sources whose influence superposes into a potential. Retrieval evaluates that field (or follows its gradient), not a point identity. In this regime, deletion is algebraic (append -v for cancellation), evaluation is sparse/local, and no index rebuild is required.

The paper goes into this in more detail.
by ccapitalK | 2025-12-22 04:26:58+00:00
I'm asking this question purely out of curiosity, and not as a snark, is there any particular reason why you don't capitalise the beginnings of your sentences? It seems strange to go to the effort of capitalising STEM and putting a hyphen in college-level without capitalising the letters. Is it something like the push towards sans-serif fonts because some groups of people find it easier to read?
by GMoromisato | 2025-12-22 04:27:43+00:00
I like this insight, even though I think they are pushing Kernighan's quip a little too far.

I take away two ideas:

1. Always be learning. I think everyone believes this, but we often come up with plausible reasons to stick to what we know. This is a good reminder that we should fight that impulse and put in the effort to learn.

2. Always be fearless. This, I think, is the key insight. Fear is easy. We fear the unknown, whether they be APIs or someone else's code. We fear errors, particularly when they have real-world consequences. And we fear complexity, because we think we might not be able to deal with it. But the opposite of fear isn't recklessness, it's confidence. We should be confident that we will figure it out. And even if we don't figure it out, we should be confident that we can revert the code. Face your fears and grow.
by sseagull | 2025-12-22 04:27:44+00:00
> a commuter plane where the wings iced up a bit and the airplane stalled. The crew kept trying to pull the nose up, all the way to the ground.

There’s probably a lot that match, but sounds like Colgan Air 3407 in 2009 (the last major commercial airline crash in the US before the mid-air collision earlier this year in DC)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colgan_Air_Flight_3407
by yoavm | 2025-12-22 04:28:14+00:00
It's not a good point. One year from now, every browser is going to be an "AI browser". If Firefox will make it harder to use features that are expected of every browser, it will lose. This is akin to saying that JavaScript should be opt-in. If you want to disable these things, you're clearly a power user, and you should at least be comfortable with clicking "Edit" and then "Settings".
by selcuka | 2025-12-22 04:28:27+00:00
> Imagine buying hardware that will be obsolete in 2 years

Unless the PC you buy is more than $4,800 (24 x $200) it is still a good deal. For reference, a MacBook M4 Max with 128GB of unified RAM is $4,699. You need a computer for development anyway, so the extra you pay for inference is more like $2-3K.

Besides, it will still run the same model(s) at the same speed after that period, or even maybe faster with future optimisations in inference.
by eigen | 2025-12-22 04:28:50+00:00
> Windows XP sold for $200 in 2001. In 2025, that's $364

I assume you used the overall CPI rate rather than the software rate. but using the Software CPI its more like $58. and that seems like an easier sell (for the user, maybe not the developer).

http://data.bls.gov/dataViewer/view/timeseries/CUUR0000SEEE0...

Software CPI-U

2001 Oct 77.0

2025 Nov 22.182
by h0rmelchilly | 2025-12-22 04:31:17+00:00
I get mad at semantic arguments that distract from creative output.

Aside from the obviously humorous content the rest is useless allegory (I want a recipe not a story and need some code, not personal affection for software engineering) and no true scotsman (no true adherent of my native language would call it a robotic maid!)

As social creatures humans are pretty repetitive.
by Animats | 2025-12-22 04:31:50+00:00
> the cost is really high per audience member.

Disney has problems with that. Their Galactic Starcruiser themed hotel experience cost more to the customer than a cruise on a real cruise ship, and Disney was still losing money on it. The cost merely to visit their parks is now too high for most Americans.

It's really hard to make money in mass market location-based entertainment. There have been many attempts, from flight simulators to escape rooms. Throughput is just too low, so cost per customer is too high.

A little mobile robot connected to an LLM chatbot, though - that's not too hard today. Probably coming to a mall near you soon. Many stores already have inventory bots cruising around. They're mobile bases with a tall column of cameras which scan the shelves.[2] There's no reason they can't also answer questions about what's where in the store. They do know the inventory.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars:_Galactic_Starcruise...

[2] https://www.simberobotics.com/store-intelligence/tally
by bsder | 2025-12-22 04:32:49+00:00
> The leftmost lane on an interstate highway is reserved for passing.

Sadly, in most states, this is not true anymore. Most of those laws have been repealed.

I was very pleasantly surprised when I was in Colorado that they had explicit signs saying that if you had 5 (I think) or more cars behind you that you were supposed to pull right and let them pass.

However, I wasn't really thinking about a Waymo cruising in the left lane but simply 4 or 5 Waymo's in the right lane going right at the speed limit with proper following distance. That's going to effectively lock the right lane to the speed limit which then means that even a single other car would lock the left lane to the speed limit as well. Basically, even a couple of Waymos in the right lane would drop freeway speeds dramatically.
by arjie | 2025-12-22 04:33:55+00:00
I am. I know it’s not free but I think it’s important for humanity to move forward.

E.g. my genome variant report https://viz.roshangeorge.dev/roshan-genvue/

My wife’s pregnancy as logged by me https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Pregnancy

I think it's important to have real-world actual experiences written down because a lot of online information is just people repeating what other people say and it's not true. I'm hoping that by just writing the truth of what I've seen with my own eyes, people will have real information to work with, and maybe LLMs will have this in there somewhere and we'll move a little closer to fact.

I talked a little bit about the risks in another comment on a similar post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46336356
by Forgeties79 | 2025-12-22 04:34:26+00:00
This piece could be infinitely long trying to address every single angle that is relevant, big or small. Or it could just cut to the heart of the matter and ask us all to fill in the rest. I’m fine with the latter, personally, as the “why” is not really what they’re debating. Whatever the cause(s), the end result is currently undesirable and necessitates action. We can unpack the “why” as we try to fix it.
by wahnfrieden | 2025-12-22 04:35:45+00:00
Sure. The Nebula tripod is also tall enough to be just high enough to use while sitting on typical chairs, if you're ok with somewhat low keyboards / have long arms. It's a great at both lower and mid-range heights which makes it quite versatile as a portable tripod, aside from desktop use (although it would also be useful with "standing desk" laptop risers that go on top of other surfaces). It helps to rotate the tripod legs appropriately for stability when tented.
by usr1106 | 2025-12-22 04:37:33+00:00
Good read. Completely off topic: He traveled by sleeper train and mentioned that he slept reasonably well and very well on the return trip. In the beginning of my career I made nearly the opposite trip to Brussels by sleeper to a completely useless lobbying/networking event with little tangible content. Often sleep in sleepers is not very good. But on the return trip I only wake up when the train had already stopped at my destination and had to get off very hastily. Not only CS was more fun without AI slop, but traveling, too ;)
by RatchetWerks | 2025-12-22 04:37:50+00:00
I have similar feelings as the author. I aim to be as public as possible while maintaining personal privacy. I *want* to meet other like-minded people that enjoy the same topics I do.

I treat any of my public facing information as a honeypot for nerds (i.e like-minded people). In real life, if I meet interesting people, I point them to my website. If they reach out with questions, I know I found "one of my people".

On a similar note, if I an idea, project or thought of mine could benefit someone else and allow them to learn and gain from it. I'd like to publish it with my privacy in mind.
by waybarrios | 2025-12-22 04:39:40+00:00
I built a toolkit to fine-tune LLMs using LoRA + native 4-bit quantization on NVIDIA's new Blackwell GPUs (DGX Spark with GB10).

Key features: - NVFP4 (4-bit) via Transformer Engine - fastest option - MXFP8 (8-bit) for higher precision - bitsandbytes FP4 fallback for any CUDA GPU - ~240MB LoRA adapters instead of ~6GB full models Tested on DGX Spark (128GB VRAM). Training SmolLM3-3B takes ~70GB VRAM with NVFP4.
Show HN: Spring AI Playground – No-code MCP tool studio and agentic chat
by hjm1980 | 2025-12-22 04:41:20+00:00
Hi HN — I just shipped the first feature update for Spring AI Playground since it became an official Spring AI Community incubating project.

The goal is to treat MCP tools as runtime entities you can build, inspect, and iterate on live—without rebuilds or redeployments.

What’s in this update:

- No-code / low-code Tool Studio: create AI-callable tools in the browser using JavaScript (ECMAScript 2023) and run them sandboxed in the JVM (GraalVM Polyglot).

- Live built-in MCP server: tools are evaluated and registered dynamically to an embedded MCP server, becoming immediately available (no restart).

- MCP inspection & debugging: inspect registered tools, schemas/parameters, and execution results to understand agent behavior.

- Agentic chat: test end-to-end flows that combine LLM reasoning, MCP tools, and optional RAG context in one UI.

It also ships with working example tools meant to be copied/modified as templates:

- googlePseSearch - Google PSE web search (API key)

- extractPageContent - Extract clean text from URLs (RAG prep)

- buildGoogleCalendarCreateLink - Generate calendar add links

- sendSlackMessage - Slack webhook messaging

- openaiResponseGenerator - OpenAI API calls (API key)

- getWeather - wttr.in weather

- getCurrentTime - ISO-8601 time

Everything runs local-first with Ollama by default (OpenAI-compatible APIs supported). No cloud required.

Local-first by default using Ollama and OpenAI-compatible endpoints/config, so it can run without required cloud services.

GitHub: https://github.com/spring-ai-community/spring-ai-playground

Question for folks building with MCP/agents: what inspection/debugging workflows do you wish every MCP client/UI supported (e.g., clear schema views, tool-call tracing, reproducible runs, etc.)?
by dotancohen | 2025-12-22 04:41:36+00:00
> things that can withstand the wear-and-tear of millions of guests.

In the video, one of the presenters removes and reattaches Olaf's nose. The robot laughs and loves it. I thought to myself, how many kids tearing at that wear item will this survive? I think the answer is significantly less than the thousands of kids who are expected to see this attraction every day.
by arthur2e5 | 2025-12-22 04:42:45+00:00
> Meanwhile in just about every other area that uses fp computation it's been the defacto standard for decades.

Not that strongly for more parallel things, quite similar to the situation with atomics on cuDNN. cuBLAS for example has a similar issue with multi-stream handling, though this can be overcome with a proper workspace allocation: https://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/cublas/index.html?highlight=Rep....

Still better than cuDNN where some operations just don't have a reproducible version though. The other fields are at least trying. DL doesn't seem to be.

On that note Intel added reproducible BLAS to oneMKL on CPU and GPU last year. https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/archive/tr...