MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gnarcoregrizz | 2025-12-19 20:30:42+00:00
I agree. I did most of my work in vim/cli (still often do), but the tight agent integrations in the IDEs are hard to beat. I'm able to see more in cursor (entire diffs), and it shows me all of the terminal output, whereas Claude Code hides things from you by default, by only showing you a few pieces and summaries of what it did. I do prefer to use CC for cli usage though (e.g. using aws cli, Kubernetes, etc). The tab-autocomplete is also excellent.

I also like how cursor is model-agnostic. I prefer codex for first drafts (it's more precise and produces less code), for Claude when less precision or planning is required, and other, faster models when possible.

Also, one of cursor's best features is rollback. I know people have some funky ways to do it in CC with git work trees etc, but it's built into cursor.
by deathanatos | 2025-12-19 20:31:00+00:00
This is quite the bold statement to make with RAM prices sky high.

I want to agree with the locality of errors argument, and while in simple cases, yes, it holds true, it isn't necessarily true. If we don't overcommit, the allocation that kills us is simply the one that fails. Whether this allocation is the problematic one is a different question: if we have a slow leak that, every 10k allocation allocs and leaks, we're probably (9999 / 10k, assuming spherical allocations) going to fail on one that isn't the problem. We get about as much info as the oom-killer would have, anyways: this program is allocating too much.
by owenversteeg | 2025-12-19 20:31:14+00:00
The history of Soviet electronics manufacturing is fascinating, but there are some huge differences and I actually don't think the private sector is the largest. One is the pace and type of innovation. In the 70s and 80s the landscape was incredibly dynamic and technology went through several huge changes. If you wanted to run a clone of the US tech industry then, you would need a distributed, dynamic effort across many fields and not a top-down directed Manhattan Project. In 2025 we do have rapid technological change, but things are much more consolidated. In terms of strategically important recent innovations I can only think of EUV and AI. That's much more Manhattan-Project-able.

The other difference - which is even more significant - is that China is already far ahead in advanced manufacturing. The US was lightyears ahead of the Soviets in advanced manufacturing, which is what allowed us to win in the 70s and 80s. Now, we're so far behind it's not even funny. Sure, the West still makes some ultra-precise machines for EUV, but look where most of the components in those machines are made...
by x0x0 | 2025-12-19 20:31:35+00:00
I dunno, clearly not.

I keep trying to use it. vs chrome:

1 - bad at returning memory to the OS; do they expect you to regularly restart the whole browser?

2 - shit at managing cpu usage: I'll regularly find the browser sitting at 20-100% cpu load doing nothing. Chrome handles this like a champ;

3 - it recently lost some bookmarks so hard I had to pull them from backup.

They clearly are not capable of splitting their focus.
by sunshine-o | 2025-12-19 20:31:38+00:00
> Why are all European countries interested in surveillance all of a sudden in the last 3-4 years?

Something I realized recently is how low the approval ratings of European leaders are:

- Macron and Starmer are about 18%

- Mertz is 25% (only 6 months in)

- Von Leyen is 23%

This is ridiculous.

We often perceive Trump as highly unpopular but he is cruising between 40 and 50%, that's double.

So those leaders, according to the numbers, are becoming illegitimate or the system is broken. So we are just waiting for a spark to put the house on fire.

Mass surveillance within your territory is really a weapon against your own population, it is not to catch spies (they are trained to evade them).
by pigpop | 2025-12-19 20:31:41+00:00
The question then would be whether to train it to respond to short prompts with longer correspondence style "letters" or to leave it up to the user to write a proper letter as a prompt. Now that would be amusing

Dear Hon. Historical LLM

I hope this letter finds you well. It is with no small urgency that I write to you seeking assistance, believing such an erudite and learned fellow as yourself should be the best one to furnish me with an answer to such a vexing question as this which I now pose to you. Pray tell, what is the capital of France?
by igor47 | 2025-12-19 20:32:03+00:00
If you're implying that my engagement with EA is so shallow as to stop at the name -- you're incorrect. Sorry if I'm unfairly reading this as an ad hominem, but that's how it's coming off.

On the merits, I think you're also wrong. Even beyond the money channeled by the movement, I think the philosophical discourse around how best to help people, what your obligations are to other people, and how to measure effectiveness has been useful and important.
by leephillips | 2025-12-19 20:32:41+00:00
Just rent a server with a good company (such as Hetzner) that’s likely to have clean IPs, install Linux and Postfix, and Dovecot if you want IMAP access, read and carefully follow the Postfix documentation, read any of many online guides for setting up DKIM, etc., and you’re good. Once up, it’s largely hands-off. Mine has been running smoothly for over a decade. Don’t believe the FUD.
by pzo | 2025-12-19 20:32:53+00:00
there has been so many open source OCR in the last 3 months that would be good to compare to those especially when some are not even 1B params and can be run on edge devices.

- paddleOCR-VL

- olmOCR-2

- chandra

- dots.ocr

I kind of miss there is not many leaderboard sections or arena for OCR and CV and providers hosting those. Neglected on both Artificial Analysis and OpenRouter.
by jcalvinowens | 2025-12-19 20:32:57+00:00
You're correct it doesn't prefault the mappings, but that's irrelevant: it accounts them as allocated, and a later allocation which goes over the limit will immediately fail.

Remember, the limit is artificial and defined by the user with overcommit=2, by overcommit_ratio and user_reserve_kbytes. Using overcommit=2 necessarily wastes RAM (renders a larger portion of it unusable).
by vin10 | 2025-12-19 20:33:00+00:00
For anyone feeling brave enough to disable overcommit after reading this, be mindful that default `vm.overcommit_ratio` is 50% which means that if no swap is available, on a system with 2GB of total RAM, more than 1GB of RAM can't be allocated and requests will fail with preemptive OOMs. (e.g. postgresql servers typically disable overcommit)

- https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/mm/util.c#L753
by Tiberium | 2025-12-19 20:33:36+00:00
From a tweet: https://x.com/i/status/2001821298109120856

> can someone help folks at Mistral find more weak baselines to add here? since they can't stomach comparing with SoTA....

> (in case y'all wanna fix it: Chandra, dots.ocr, olmOCR, MinerU, Monkey OCR, and PaddleOCR are a good start)
by nabla9 | 2025-12-19 20:33:52+00:00
> Snowden revealed PRISM meant the US government just had straight access

People read this and think that US government had unhindered access to all data in major providers.

According to Edward Snowden, PRISM allowed the government to compel internet companies to turn over any data that matched specific court-approved search terms. such as email addresses, all under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008.

At least some parts of it were likely unconstitutional as it could target U.S. persons, but it was not free for all as "straight access" indicates. It was straight access after FISA court approval.

NSA runs much more invasive MUSCULAR program in the UK without FISA or other type warrant.
by ternus | 2025-12-19 20:33:53+00:00
Are you sure? I took 6.814 Database Systems back when Stonebraker taught it, and it's still being taught as 6.5830. The first problem set was a nontrivial crash course in SQL, using SQLite. Current/modern version: http://db.lcs.mit.edu/6.5830/assignments/pset1/pset1.pdf

Example problem:

> Find every Orange Line station in Fall 2018 that, during time period 01 and the direction of 0, had a total ons passenger count greater than average for all Orange Line stations during that same time period, same season, and in the same direction. Report the station name and the total ons value. Sort the results by total ons in descending order and then station name in ascending order. Display the output like ‘Malden Center|21400’.
by Matticus_Rex | 2025-12-19 20:33:58+00:00
Expensive lawyers have better relationships with opposing parties, have more and better legal research both already on hand and available to be done, with more and smarter people doing research, with more and more experienced people available to consult, and may hire outside consultants when the situation calls for it.

They can also better afford to play dirty in various ways, from burying you in discovery documents to dragging things out with various motions.

And in general, yes — they often also have at least slightly smarter lawyers (and more eyes on the case). That doesn't mean cheaper lawyers are dumb, and there are smart lawyers out there who aren't incredibly expensive, but the average intelligence goes up noticeably as you interact with more expensive firms (which tracks, because they hired people with the top performance in and possibly after law school).

AI may close the gap on some things, but not others.

FYI, even lawyers who represent themselves generally don't do well, no matter how smart they are or how much experience they have in that area. But that's not because the judge wants them to pay into the cartel -- it's because law is hard, there are a million factors affecting performance on a particular case, and one major factor is ability to keep perspective on your case. People are uniformly terrible at this when looking at their own cases.
by ActorNightly | 2025-12-19 20:34:21+00:00
>Why are all European countries interested in surveillance all of a sudden in the last 3-4 years?

Because they look at what happened US, at the rise of popularity of fascism throughout the world (which is mostly perpetuated by key media players under the mask of being "anti-woke"), and basically decide that the people can no longer be trusted.

And they are fully correct.

Ive said this before on here, but the whole idea of privacy from surveillance is not applicable anymore in todays world.

The standard line of arguing is that people should be able to speak the truth free from government knowing about it and trying to silence them. The problem with this

* Most of the "truth" that these people refer to has been literally false propaganda, or ability to say slurs on social media.

* Despite that fact, not a single public media person speaking these lies has been silenced in any way by the government, despite things like patriot act existing in US or equivalent things in EU. The only time people have been silenced in places like UK is when posting extremely out of pocket stuff.

Furthermore people also say that you don't want to give the government the power to do this now because a government that you may not like will want to do this. Well, to no one surprise, the people with this libertarian mindset (and the so called "centrists") overwhelmingly vote right wing, and consequently, right wing runs on a platform of freedom, but when those people get in power, they not only actively tries to silence actual truth and free speech, but also they just don't give a fuck about the law and do what they want anyways.

So as unfortunate as it is, its a much better outcome for the current state of administration in EU to take a more invasive role in policing the populace, because economic growth and stability over long term is worth way more than some idealistic approach based on above. Historically this has shown to be true over and over again, while the latter has shown to result in economic decline. So its wortwhile to sacrifice some personal rights in return for a better future - we already do this to a large extent so this is nothing new.

In terms of applicability to the regular person, please understand that the privacy ship for you has already long sailed. You already can be tracked and analyzed in extreme detail, by really any person or company that is willing to buy advertising data and do correlation. There are companies that literally do this and contract out to the government. Also, you aren't that important enough to care about.
by spectreflow | 2025-12-19 20:34:45+00:00
Data privacy is no longer a legal checkbox — it’s an architectural choice. It simply cannot just be bolted onto WordPress.

GDPR permanently changed how websites should handle personal data, yet most WordPress sites still rely on superficial compliance: banners, policies, and consent checkboxes.

That approach leaves real gaps. Cookie banners may reduce anxiety — but they don’t protect user data.

Compliance is dependent on how personal data is processed, secured, accessed and erased — not just on what the user clicks.

This article breaks down what GDPR really requires in practice for WordPress websites, and why technical safeguards matter just as much as legal wording.
by vin10 | 2025-12-19 20:35:09+00:00
> he way stuff fails when it runs out of memory is really confusing

have you checked what your `vm.overcommit_ratio` is? If its < 100%, then you will get OOM kills even if plenty of RAM is free since the default is 50 i.e. 50% of RAM can be COMMITTED and no more.

curious what kind of failures you are alluding to.
by mustache_kimono | 2025-12-19 20:35:22+00:00
> I think Rust is more unsafe than C due to supply chain issues in the Rust ecosystem

This is such an incredibly cheap shot. First, the supply chain issues referenced have nothing to do with Rust, the language, itself. Second, Rust's build system, cargo, may have these issues, but cargo's web fetch features simply aren't used by the Linux kernel.

So -- we can have a debate about which is a better a world to live in, one with or without cargo, but it really has nothing to do with the Linux kernel security.
by reify | 2025-12-19 20:35:27+00:00
its an abbreviation fof; english (en), gin (gin), earing (eering).

learnt that at uni when I was doing my degree in aerospace en-gin-earing

basically, as my professor explained, the english were very prone to the odd glass of gin, while wearing earings and high heels, to the crossdressing parties around Oxford back in the day, hence the bastardisation of the word engineering.

most of us undergrads thought he was crazy. though we did catch him in wearing platform shoes, womens knickers and a bra, wandering through the halls of residence when he was pissed.

Oxford uni, those were the days
by rsync | 2025-12-19 20:35:36+00:00
Their CEO states:

"(proton fraud detectors) are looking for certain patterns in use. And they collect clues on the dark web. For example, if you find Proton mail addresses in criminal Internet forums, the accounts behind them will be blocked."[1]

I've never participated on a "dark web" or .onion forum but I could imagine doing so for a variety of reasons ... are there not very interesting discussions occurring there ?

I would be classified as a criminal for being part of that discussion ?

Should I be retroactively classified as such for my discussions on cypherpunks in the nineties ?

[1] https://www.nzz.ch/technologie/proton-ceo-andy-yen-wer-geset...
by hparadiz | 2025-12-19 20:36:45+00:00
That's a normal failure state that happens occasionally. Out of memory errors come up all the time when writing robust async job queues. There are a lot of other reasons a failure could happen but running out of memory is just one of them. Sure I can force the system to use swap but that would degrade performance for everything else so it's better to let it die and log the result and check your dead letter queue after.
by dang | 2025-12-19 20:36:52+00:00
Please don't editorialize titles. It's against the site guidelines: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but do it by adding a comment to the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
by the_mitsuhiko | 2025-12-19 20:36:52+00:00
> Yeah, hard disagree on that one, based on recent surveys, 80-90% of developers globally use IDEs over CLIs for their day-to-day work.

I have absolutely no horse in this race, but I turned from a 100% Cursor user at the beginning of the year, to one that basically uses agents for 90% of my work, and VS Code for the rest of it. The value proposition that Cursor gave me was not able to compete with what the basic Max subscription on anthropic gave me, and VS Code is still a superior experience to Claude in the IDE space.

I think though that Cursor has all the potential to beat Microsoft at the IDE game if they focus on it. But I would say it's by no way a given that this is the default outcome.
by BeetleB | 2025-12-19 20:38:14+00:00
Sigh.

OK:

https://goodereader.com/blog/kindle/amazon-changes-licensing...

"Amazon has revised the text when purchasing a Kindle e-book on its online store. You do not own the book you bought but are licensing it. It used to say “By clicking on above button, you agree to Amazon’s Kindle Store Terms of Use.”"

...

"This is not a policy shift from Amazon for the US; they are more upfront about it now. Amazon has always licensed the digital content to users, so anything purchased does not mean the user owns it, they just bought a license"

As the article points out, the change in verbiage was because of a new California requirement that this should be made explicit. It was always a license. They merely changed the verbiage on the button to conform to state rules.

Edit: I have to say, after a bunch of rather pointless arguments today and yesterday on HN, it disappoints me that the average commenter is quick to jump to unsubstantiated conclusions. Both times the facts were trivial to lookup.

Not the HN of yore.
by igor47 | 2025-12-19 20:38:37+00:00
I think the whole point of EA is to avoid the misery contest and funnel philanthropy dollars in the most effective way, though there's a lot of disagreement inside the movement on what constitutes effectiveness.

On the radical statism -- I guess maybe? At least the in the US right now, we certainly don't have a government that's good at directing money to the most needy. See e.g. the while USAID fiasco. Even if we had a government willing to fund international aid, I still think there is room in the world for people donating to causes they care about. If nothing else, this is how new causes rise to prominence, to be recognized by the official channels.
by mrandish | 2025-12-19 20:39:06+00:00
Because I don't follow CPUs constantly and only check in from time to time, all the code names (for cores, CPUs and platforms), generations, marketing names, model numbers, etc make it hopelessly confusing. And it's not just Intel but AMD and other companies have been doing this chronically for >10 years. It seems almost like intentional obfuscation yet I can't really think of a long-term reason that creating confusion systemically is in the company's interest. Sure, every company occasionally has a certain generation they might like to forget but that's too unpredictable to be the motivation behind such a consistent long-term pattern.

So I suspect maybe it's just a perverse effect of successive generations of marketing and product managers each coming up with a new system "to fix the confusion?" What's strange is that there's enough history here that smart people should be able to recognize there's a chronic problem and address it. For example, relatively simple patterns like Era Name (like "Core"), Generation Number, Model Number - Speed and then a two digit sub-signifier for all the technical variants. Just two digits of upper case letters and digits 1-9 is enough to encode >1200 sub-variants within each Era/Gen/Model/Speed.

The maddening part is that they not only change the classifiers, they also sometimes change the number and/or hierarchy of classifiers, which eliminates any hope of simply mapping the old taxonomy to the new.
by storus | 2025-12-19 20:39:29+00:00
M3 Ultra has a crappy GPU, somewhere around 3060Ti-3070. Its only benefit is the memory throughput that makes LLM token generation fast, at around 3080 level. But token prefill that determines time-to-first-token is extremely slow, and coincidentally all those tasks you mentioned above would be around 3060Ti level. That's why Exo coupled DGX Spark (5090 performance for FP4) with MacStudio and sped it up 4x. M5 Ultra is supposed to be as fast as DGX Spark at FP4 due to new neural cores.
by tobyjsullivan | 2025-12-19 20:39:38+00:00
> agree with authors, every game older than 10 years, and that is not in active development, should be made open source so that community

Note that GTA V is now 12 years old and still sells ~20M copies per year. So that’s going to be a tough sell in some cases.

You could argue it’s still actively developed, particularly due to online, so fair enough.

But that’s also sort of true for Vice City. They’ve released mobile version (playable on Netflix) over the past few years at least.

Nevertheless, I’d be thrilled if that was a standard practice.
by bikenaga | 2025-12-19 20:39:58+00:00
Abstract. We present a new gridded data set of air temperature change across global land and ocean extending back to the 1780s. This data set, called the GloSAT reference analysis, has two novel features: it uses marine air temperature observations rather than the sea surface temperature measurements typically used by pre-existing data sets, and it extends further into the past than existing merged land and ocean instrumental temperature records which typically estimate temperature changes from the middle to late 19th century on- wards. New estimates of diurnal-heating biases in marine air temperatures have enabled the use of daytime observations, extending the data set further into the past compared to nighttime-only marine air temperature data. The data set uses an extended version of the CRUTEM5 station database over land areas, incorporat- ing newly available bias adjustments for non-standard thermometer enclosures used prior to the adoption of Stevenson screens and new climatological normal estimates for stations with limited data in the 1961–1990 baseline period. Land and marine temperature anomalies are combined to produce a gridded data set following the methods developed for HadCRUT5. The GloSAT global and hemispheric temperature anomaly series show close agreement with those based on sea surface temperature for much of the overlapping period of their records but with slightly less warming overall. The GloSAT reference analysis is available from https://doi.org/10.5285/a2519624a593402a83246bd359d098be (Morice et al., 2025b), the GloSATLAT data set is available from https://doi.org/10.5285/ef237f578329487eb02fb42f9db56bb2 (Morice et al., 2025a), and the GloSATMAT data set is available from https://doi.org/10.5285/e6251bf935304cfbb9c9269dc7757a35 (Cornes et al., 2025b).
by dpark | 2025-12-19 20:40:10+00:00
Centrist ideas like abducting people off the street and sending them to deportation camps without due process under the assumption of guilt? Or centrist ideas like sending troops into politically opposed states out of spite? Or sweeping tariffs imposed without congressional approval? Or centrist ideas like the president having virtually unlimited authority and freedom from criminal prosecution for effectively any act?

What centrist ideas do you believe are going to come from any of this? Because this stuff isn’t centrist.