MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by runarberg | 2025-12-20 13:39:31+00:00
You are right, machine learning models usually improve with more data and more parameters. Open model will never have enough resources to reach a compatible quality.

However, this technology is not magic, it is still just statistics, and during inference it looks very much like your run of the mill curve fitting (just in a billion parameter space). An inherent problem in regression analysis is that at some point you have too many parameters, and you are actually fitting the random errors in your sample (called overfitting). I think this puts an upper limit on the capabilities of LLMs, just like it does for the rest of our known tools of statistics.

There is a way to prevent that though, you can reduce the number of parameters and train a specialized model. I would actually argue that this is the future of AI algorithms and LLMs are kind of a dead end with usefulness limited to entertainment (as a very expensive toy). And that current applications of LLMs will be replaced by specialized models with fewer parameters, and hence much much much cheaper to train and run. Specialized models predate LLMs and we have a good idea of how an open source model fares in that market.

And it turns out, open source specialized models have proven them selves quite nicely actually. In go we have KataGo which is one of the best models on the market. Similarly in chess we have Stockfish.
Show HN: HN Wrapped 2025 - an LLM reviews your year on HN
by hubraumhugo | 2025-12-20 13:39:47+00:00
I was looking for some fun project to play around with the latest Gemini models and ended up building this :)

Enter your username and get:

- Generated roasts and stats based on your HN activity 2025

- Your personalized HN front page from 2035 (inspired by a recent Show HN [0])

- An xkcd-style comic of your HN persona

It uses the latest gemini-3-flash and gemini-3-pro-image (nano banana pro) models, which deliver pretty impressive and funny results.

A few examples:

- dang: https://hn-wrapped.kadoa.com/dang

- myself: https://hn-wrapped.kadoa.com/hubraumhugo

Give it a try and share yours :)

Happy holidays!

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46205632
by mexicocitinluez | 2025-12-20 13:39:58+00:00
It's an objection to this:

> How many jobs do you see on the market that ask for Lisp? And yet, for what it is, this site is amazing! I don't see them rushing to migrate to a python backend and a react-based frontend, no matter how many jobs there are for those.

You pointing out that the dumb simple message board is written in LISP and doesn't need anymore more is a bit absurd.

No shit they aren't rushing to upgrade it. IT BARELY DOES ANYTHING TO BEGIN WITH.

Anytime a certain class of developer see the word "React" that end up saying the most ridiculous shit. Nobody, I mean nobody, thinks HN is a site worthy of replicating or achieving unless they're part of the .0000002% who couldn't find a prepackaged board from Google search results.
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-12-20 13:40:17+00:00
> I guess the lesson there is that if you don't want to be convicted of a crime, don't confess to a crime? They won't give you a lighter sentence for confessing.

Ever hear of moral integrity?

Unless the penalty is unjust (say, execution for a minor crime), a just man will confess and accept his punishment as right as just. He himself will want justice to be done and will want to pay for his crime.

A remorseful murderer knows he deserves death. He might ask for mercy, but failing that, he will accept the penalty with dignity and grace.
Show HN: A branching path and strategy guide for the game 'Dispatch'
by causalzap | 2025-12-20 13:40:51+00:00
Hi HN, I built a comprehensive guide for the narrative game 'Dispatch' (by the ex-Telltale team at AdHoc Studio). It maps out all critical choices, romance paths, and hero deployment strategies. Would love to hear your thoughts on the UI or if you've found any secret paths I missed!
by zelphirkalt | 2025-12-20 13:41:45+00:00
Do you know the concept of time passing? Could it be possible, that my stance regarding ebooks changed over time, and that I have become more aware of the associated issues? Hmmmm.

What is bizarre here is you posting these comments, trying to invalidate my all around terrible experience with Kobo. Your account is green behind the ears and all your comments are on Kobo, Kobo, Kobo. Go figure.
by delichon | 2025-12-20 13:42:26+00:00
A police officer walked into the office where I was stationed as a security guard for a high rise condo, and demanded the keys to a particular apartment. I declined and he got angry. So I turned the matter over to my boss, the manager, who lived in the building. He immediately gave up the keys, no questions asked.

The cop left and the manager turned to me and said, "just do whatever they say, we have nothing to hide." I thought "but what about Mrs. Crenshaw in unit 566?" I didn't say it, but the manager seemed to think his argument covered that too.
by jfengel | 2025-12-20 13:42:29+00:00
I don't entirely understand where that comes from. The Standard Model and General Relativity are both tested to extreme precision. Any experiment unifying them will have to involve insane energies. It's not as if there is some other model with easy tests that we've agreed to ignore.

As far as I can tell, it seems to come from the developers of Loop Quantum Gravity, who feel left out of funding. And maybe that's true. But their theory doesn't offer practical tests, either. It would be weird if it did.
by usui | 2025-12-20 13:42:46+00:00
The Americn economy leans heavily on lack of price transparency and opaqueness. You're not allowed to know what you're buying until it delivers, at which point you can either accept it or complain loudly. Adding on a million junk fees and not selling things for prices as advertised is also really important. Food samples would be a huge 180 from all this, culturally speaking.
by jrgd | 2025-12-20 13:42:46+00:00
With Masonry and using the bin packing algorithm/layout, according to your visual requirements, you can (should?) use a system for sizes for the sizing element and get different widths for the underlying columns of the ‘grid’; ie: if the sizing element is a quarter of base width, you scale down some of the widest image to bring more homogeneity-or on the contrary balance it with some enlarged elements that brings some rythm.

Edit: doc has this first example https://masonry.desandro.com/layout that you could use but have to imagine images to be twice the size, similar to a Müller Brockmann grid
by jmyeet | 2025-12-20 13:42:48+00:00
There are going to be many, many questions about this because a lot of it doesn't make sense and doesn't fit any profile.

School shootings in particular and mass shootings in general tend to follow a particular pattern. Usually the shooter has no intention of escaping or otherwise leaving the scene. Usually they are killed at the scene either by the police or by their own hand. Some do escape but it's rare.

So this shooter allegedly escaped the scene and then a couple of days later went on to kill one particular researcher at a different college 50 miles away in what looks like it was targeted and planned.

These are two very different crimes.

And then the shooter commits suicide?

If the MIT researcher was a target, why commit a mass shooting prior? If the mass shooting was the goal, how do we explain the planning and intent of the second attack? And why wasn't that a mass shooting?

Was it the same gun in both attacks? If so, why weren't the incidents linked sooner? If they were different guns, that too raises questions.

In case it wasn't clear, the MIT attack was cased for at least 2 weeks prior.
by andsoitis | 2025-12-20 13:43:45+00:00
> Nonsense. Unilaterial tarrifs are not how trade agreements work. This is pure extractive rent.

What do you mean by "unilateral tariffs"?

> The reason the US is not able to extract the same rents from China is that they have digital sovereignty and the US cannot just pull the cloud plug from them.

The US has higher tariffs against Chinese imports than European imports.
by Certhas | 2025-12-20 13:43:47+00:00
Eh... mainstream physics by numbers is not HEP and definitely not HEP Th, and there are plenty of serious physicists somewhat critical of the field, and more so of the way it presented itself over the last decades.

And while I disagree with some of the criticisms and some of the style of the crtics, it's not like you get an honest appraisal from Greene (and Witten).
by einpoklum | 2025-12-20 13:44:02+00:00
There has also been some significant academic study of DBMS design for persistent memory - which SSD technology can serve as (e.g. as NVDIMMs or abstractly) : Think of no distinction between primary and secondary storage, RAM and disk - there's just a huge amount of not-terribly-fast memory; and whatever you write to memory never goes away. It's an interesting model.
by estearum | 2025-12-20 13:44:04+00:00
Can you state specifically what you think "isn't happening" so I can respond to it?

> Ice agents are [only] deporting people in the US that are here illegally.

Not only is this not true, but it's irrelevant to my point. I'm not talking about deportation. I'm talking about ICE's actions here in the streets of American cities.

As for the rest of your comment: lol, lmao even
by nephihaha | 2025-12-20 13:44:11+00:00
Have mostly read novels this year, but when I have read non-fiction it was mostly extracts for my personal research, not necessarily cover to cover.

I will try to give a wide range:

* "The New Wild: Why Invasive Species Will Be Nature's Salvation" by Fred Pearce. A very different view of ecosystems.

* "In the Land of Invented Languages" by Arika Okrent. Very entertaining.

* "Bully Inc." by Peter Burnett

* "The Radium Girls" by Kate Moore

I have also read a lot of Biblical Pseudepigrapha and some works from the Ethiopian canon.
by zimpenfish | 2025-12-20 13:44:15+00:00
I'm slightly confused by the "New Cross substation in Southwark" whilst the map immediately above clearly shows it in Lewisham[0][1].

Best I found was a page talking about vertical boreholes on Old Kent Road (opposite Commercial Way which is just inside Southwark) but nothing about a substation there on any page.

[0] Estimating off the National Grid map, it's roughly vertically centred between Lewisham and Greenwich DLR stations - absolutely not in Southwark!

[1] I feel like I'm going mad - the number of pages I found whilst trying to find the exact location that said the same thing under the same map is honestly discombobulating.
by JamesSwift | 2025-12-20 13:44:33+00:00
Skills are the matrix scene where neo learns kungfu. Imagine they are a database of specialized knowledge that can an agent can instantly tap into _on demand_.

The key here is “on demand”. Not every agent or convention needs to know kung fu. But when they do, a skill is waiting to be consumed. This basic idea is “progressive disclosure” and it composes nicely to keep context windows focused. Eg i have a metabase skill to query analytics. Within that I conditionally refer to how to generate authentication if they arent authenticated. If they are authenticated, that information need not be consumed.

Some practical “skills”: writing tests, fetching sentry info, using playwright (a lot of local mcps are just flat out replaced by skills), submitting a PR according to team conventions (eg run lint, review code for X, title matches format, etc)
by omnicognate | 2025-12-20 13:45:23+00:00
Perhaps you could elevate the discussion by providing an actual argument against this view of string theory, which has indeed percolated through social media?

For my part, I know a little bit more than "shit" about physics but I know very little about string theory and know better than to have strongly held opinions about things I don't understand. I've heard quite a lot about the criticisms and would like to hear a defense of it.
by klabb3 | 2025-12-20 13:45:28+00:00
> it is prudent to not depend on those who have a fundamentally different and incompatible world view.

Like Saudi Arabia and formerly the Saddam regime (when he sold oil in USD)?

While compatible world view is used as an argument against diplomatic and economic relations, in reality it’s just a bonus, not a requirement. What’s important is plain old cost benefit and national interests. The US is still a better ally for EU than China, but it’s gotten drastically worse fast. And while China has territorial ambitions, they are nowhere near EU. The US is the good old status quo ”devil you know”, but it’s abundantly evident now that nobody really knew them, including many of their own political elites domestically.

On diplomacy timescales, ignoring China because of human rights concerns is exceptionally short-sighted, both for EU if US continues current path, and for global stability in case conflicts escalate between China and US. There is no choice that guarantees EU will have a strong ”human rights” ally in 10 years.
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-12-20 13:45:43+00:00
Whilst there's some valid responses to "I've got nothing to hide" such as "drop your pants", "what's your bank PIN?" etc., there's a lot of people missing out far more insidious examples where privacy is required. e.g. A woman escaping from an abusive relationship will often be in direct danger if her location is given out. Also, consider a whistleblower leaking essential information about wrong-doings at an organisation - they should be able to do so anonymously if their livelihood would be in danger for performing such a public service.

It's a position of privilege to be able to state "nothing to hide" and depends on other people not being racist/sexist/classist etc. It's such a blinkered and sheltered view to hold.
by andsoitis | 2025-12-20 13:46:49+00:00
> Isn't it exactly the opposite, and it was the EU that attempted to overthrow democracy in the US (and failed)?

What are you talking about? According to US intelligence agencies, bipartisan Senate reports, and federal prosecutions, Russia, China, and Iran have been singled out at running disinformation campaigns. The EU has never been accused by the US of trying to topple democracy in the US.
by tormeh | 2025-12-20 13:47:45+00:00
I hesitate to call Hetzner "cloud". Hetzner is an EC2+S3 competitor, not an AWS one. IMO the minimum for being a real cloud is you need hosted Postgres, hosted Kafka, hosted Kubernetes, and S3-compatible object storage. Without the first three Hetzner is just not in the same product category. Nobody sensible buys AWS for the comically overpriced EC2.
by jonrosner | 2025-12-20 13:48:25+00:00
I am thinking of distributing skills that I build to my clients. As my clients are mostly non-technical users I need this process of distribution to be as easy as possible. Even adding a .env file would probably be too much for most of them. With skills I can now finally distribute my logic easily, just send the raw files and tell them to put it into a folder - done. But there is no easy way for them to "setup" the credentials in those skills yet. The best UX in my opinion would be for Codex (or Claude, doesn't matter) to ask for those setup-parameters once when first using the skill and process the inputs in a secure manner, i.e. some internal secret storage
by magicalhippo | 2025-12-20 13:48:30+00:00
Oscillators of all kinds are temperature dependent.

That's why the most stable ones are insulated and ovenized[1].

So an AC failure which would lead to higher room temperatures would lead to stronger or more frequent correction by the NTP client, as the local oscillator would drift more.

Not sure about the fire case though. I mean the same applies there but I'm not imaginative enough to think of a realistic scenario where NTP would be useful for averting a fire.

[1]: https://blog.bliley.com/anatomy-of-an-ocxo-oven-controlled-c...
by sallveburrpi | 2025-12-20 13:48:36+00:00
Regardless of the legality (which I can’t comment on being on the other side of the pond) - masked anonymous people snatching people from the street and disappearing them in unmarked vehicles sounds A LOT like what the nazi party did in my country. I know it’s a tired trope by this point but the parallels are definitely there.

And you know how the saying goes: first they came for xyz, by the time they came for me nobody was left to speak out for me.

US America was always a place for me to look up to, for free speech and a humane society that welcomes everyone — even if that was always an unreal ideal but at least it was something most US citizens took seriously; really sad to see it being dismantled so quickly in the years after 9/11 leading up to the situation now
by slaugh | 2025-12-20 13:48:39+00:00
The hardcore supporters of the current U.S. administration (e.g. those that go to the rallies, give to the NRA, participate in some militant group), had been very distrustful of government in-general, and I suspect they still are.

You may feel that you’re supporting some radical left-wing group you think is cool that just wants people to let everyone be free to think and act how they want, but privacy / hiding communication goes both ways.

You may also be supporting terrorists that would rather be spitting on you and bombing your family and friends than reading your manifesto on the right to watch freaky crap.
by Balgair | 2025-12-20 13:49:36+00:00
There are many backup clocks/clusters that NIST uses as redundancies all around Boulder too, no need to even go up to Fort Collins. As in, NIST has fiber to a few at CU and a few commercial companies, last I checked. They're used in cases just like this one.

Fun facts about The clock:

You can't put anything in the room or take anything out. That's how sensitive the clock is.

The room is just filled with asbestos.

The actual port for the actual clock, the little metal thingy that is going buzz, buzz, buzz with voltage every second on the dot? Yeah, that little port isn't actually hooked up to anything, as again, it's so sensitive (impedance matching). So they use the other ports on the card for actual data transfer to the rest of the world. They do the adjustments so it's all fine in the end. But you have to define something as the second, and that little unused port is it.

You can take a few pictures in the cramped little room, but you can't linger, as again, just your extra mass and gravity affects things fairly quickly.

If there are more questions about time and timekeeping in general, go ahead and ask, though I'll probably get back to them a bit later today.
by nephihaha | 2025-12-20 13:51:41+00:00
There is a big anti-tourism movement being built up across the world which is also being pushed by mass media. In Barcelona and Venice this has turned physical in a few instances. Flying is going to be made more expensive in the near future, I've no doubt of it. The environmental lobby will call for it.

By the way, I have not flown for over a decade. I can't stand airports...
by eichin | 2025-12-20 13:53:56+00:00
I knew of some experiments in this space back in the late 1980s or early 1990s - but it was specifically with DECstation hardware that had terrible clocks (not used for alerting, just "this graphs nicely against temperature".) https://groups.csail.mit.edu/ana/Publications/PubPDFs/Greg.T... (PDF) 4.2.1 does talk about explaining local clock frequency changes with office temperature changes (because they overwhelm a clock-aging model) but it doesn't have graphs so perhaps they weren't clear enough to include (or just not relevant enough to Time Surveying.)
by vovavili | 2025-12-20 13:54:06+00:00
The author is a bit uncharitable. "I have nothing to hide" usually is a shorthand for "it would be imprudent and inconvenient to dedicate my limited time and resources to an abstract good like privacy. This would not be the case if I had something illegal or reputation-ruining to hide." Nobody denies the value of privacy, but practicality beats purity in the eyes of a person who doesn't have a particular ideological conviction.
by Wowfunhappy | 2025-12-20 13:54:35+00:00
...hmm, at some point we'll need to find a new place to draw the boundaries, won't we?

Until ~2022 there was a clear line between human-generated code and computer-generated code. The former was generally optimized for readability and the latter was optimized for speed at all cost.

Now we have computer-generated code in the human layer and it's not obvious what it should be optimized for.
by cesarb | 2025-12-20 13:54:36+00:00
> Do those boxes really still exist?

Yes, they do. You'll be surprised by how many places use out-of-support operating systems and software (which were well within their support windows when installed, they have just never been upgraded). After all, if it's working, why change it? (We have a saying here in Brazil "em time que está ganhando não se mexe", which can be loosely translated as "don't change a (soccer) team which is winning".)
by gethly | 2025-12-20 13:54:52+00:00
Empty struct is good for representing non-nil zero-length information, for example this is ideal for many use cases where channels are involved. Or of you have a http route and you want to return empty response(200 OK or 204 No Content, instead of error).

Boolean on the other hand inherently contains two information: either true or false. ie. there will always be information and it will always be one of two values.

This is similar to *struct{} where we can signal no information, or false, by returning/passing nil or initiated pointer to empty struct as true/value present.

For maps, bool makes more sense as otherwise we just want a list with fast access to determine whether value in the list exists or not. Which is often something we might want. But it should not detract form the fact that each type has its own place and just because new implementation for maps ignores this, in this particular use, case does not make them worse than previous version.

tl;dr it is good to know this fact about the new swiss maps, but it should not have any impact on programming an design decisions whatsoever.
by goku12 | 2025-12-20 13:55:07+00:00
> I feel that I have nothing to hide

Though you made the right determination later on, this is what you need to correct first. You don't have to be a murderer to have something to hide. Everyone does, no matter how innocent you are.

Imagine that you're a young girl. Is it safe to expose the GPS tracks of your daily commutes? Let's cut to the other end of the spectrum. Imagine that you're the chief of a law enforcement agency. How about exposing your GPS tracks now? Even information about newborn babies should be kept private.

Always be aware of the consequences of sharing your information, when you must do so. The narrative 'I have nothing to hide' actively discourages such concerns and precautions, even if it's just a feeling. It encourages bad security practices at an individual level throughout the society. That's why this article is so pertinent. It's justifiably hostile towards that claim.
Show HN: Concepts Reader, a Backup Plan for My Life
by modulovalue | 2025-12-20 13:56:00+00:00
I manage my life in Concepts (iPad drawing app) using dependency graphs. My boards grew to gigabytes and I got worried - what if the app stops working for my use case? So I built a viewer as a backup plan. It's Flutter Web, open source, and runs in the browser.
by the__alchemist | 2025-12-20 13:56:08+00:00
Not having put it into practice yet, there is a pattern I use regularly which I plan to replace with the labeled one: I set a flag at the top of the loop I have an inner loop. The inner loop can set this flag. Directly past the inner loop, I check for the flag, then break. I am pretty sure this is exactly what the labeled break is for.