MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Majromax | 2025-12-31 15:25:15+00:00
> They are the only ones mining on this particular chain, but that's not an advantage either. How mining on a hidden chain is an advantage?

It's easier to see the argument if you have a head start. Imagine you've somehow created a private chain that's 10 blocks ahead of the public chain. You could publish that now and earn 10 blocks of reward, or you could continue mining until the lead diminishes to 0 blocks, earning the same 10 blocks of reward plus however many blocks you've mined in the meantime.

If you have 50%+ε of the hash rate on the network, this argument would have you bully other miners out by almost always stranding their blocks, since in expectation you'll mine blocks faster than your competitors.

The insight is that this same situation can happen probabilistically with a finite but non-majority fraction of the hash rate on the network. With 49% of the hash rate you'll still be able to build a private chain some fraction of the time, so waiting a little bit to see if this occurs might have positive expected value.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-12-31 15:25:23+00:00
> There is no such thing as a defensive weapon

I agree if we reframe it as “purely defensive,” though there is a bit of tautology invoked with the “weapon” qualifier.

That said, there is legitimacy to developing defensive arms, even if one doesn’t like the ones doing it.

> the only reason a deeper conflict didn't develop with Iran this year was because Iran demonstrated they could overwhelm the various layers of Israel's missile shield

This hypothesis is not sustained by Iran’s reduced firing rate throughout the conflict. All evidence suggests Iran lost its war with Israel and would lose it again if they go for round 2.
by latexr | 2025-12-31 15:25:39+00:00
> Wait'll you hear about Dungeons & Dragons! As if backwards masking in rock and roll music weren't enough.

All ask you again to not engage in bad faith.

> If ChatGPT can convince you to kill yourself, you weren't mentally healthy to begin with, and something else would have eventually had the same effect on you.

That is false.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_barrier#Efficacy

> Research has shown suicidal thinking is often short-lived. Those who attempted suicide from the Golden Gate Bridge and were stopped in the process by a person did not go on to die by suicide by some other means. There are also a variety of examples that show restricting means of suicide have been associated with the overall reduction of it.

https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ195697

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC478945/
by Verdex | 2025-12-31 15:25:45+00:00
I get the allure of the hypothetical future of video slop. Imagine if you could ask the AI to redo lord of the rings but with magneto instead of gandalf. Imagine watching shawshank redemption but in the end we get a "hot fuzz" twist where andy fights everyone. Imagine a dirty harry style police movie but where the protagonist is a xenomorph which is only barely acknowledged.

You could imagine an entirely new cultural engine where entire genres are born off of random reddit "hey have you guys every considered" comments.

However, the practical reality seems to be that you get tick toc style shorts that cost a bunch to create and have a dubious grasp on causality that have to compete with actual tick toc, a platform that has its endless content produced for free.
by ahartmetz | 2025-12-31 15:26:29+00:00
Yeah, no. That is not a fair description of Rust. It's got far fewer mistakes than C++ and, get this, it has a mechanism for tentative features that can get revised and fixed based on usage experience. It doesn't always work especially for far-reaching decisions (I hear that async is considered problematic), but it prevents a lot of stupid mistakes that C++ is carrying along forever - with a few exceptions (e.g. garbage collection support, extern templates) and some very notable inclusions (the kind of botched module system, suboptimal unordered_map, std::string which is more of a byte/word array).

I like C++ because I like the fairly unique high performance low level feature set, not because I particularly like most of the detailed design decisions that went into it. Rust has the same goals, but is better thought out IMO. I'm sure that I will find some more trouble in Rust as I use it more, but so far the impression is quite good. I have become pretty good at writing C++ code that works after fixing one or two stupid bugs, and that works even better in Rust, mostly without the stupid bugs because you can't forget to null-check a pointer to another subsystem while starting up etc.
by herewulf | 2025-12-31 15:26:43+00:00
The not knowing is the point. From a security perspective, you have to assume the worst.

And maybe that is F-Droid's point: Security through obscurity. If the build infrastructure with the signing keys is unknown, then it's that much harder for Bad Actor to do things like backdoor E2E encrypted communication apps. This is, of course, the weakness in E2E encryption in apps obtained from mainstream/commercial app stores. For all we know, these may already be backdoored depending on where it came from.

However, the obscurity makes F-Droid hard to trust as an outsider to the project.
by whstl | 2025-12-31 15:26:50+00:00
Agreed.

Most of the work brought to me gets done before I even think about sitting down to type.

And it's interesting to see the divide here between "pure coder" and "coder + more". A lot of people seem to be in the job to just do what the PM, designer and business people ask. A lot of work is pushing back against some of those requests. In conversations here in HN about "essential complexity" I even see commenters arguing that the spec brought to you is entirely essential. It's not.
by flurie | 2025-12-31 15:26:54+00:00
You're not necessarily wrong, but the phrase "push a narrative," the scare quotes around "qualitative data," and your initial comment suggest to me that you are not familiar with qualitative research but have a bias or mistrust against it (no judgment, just stating my observation). If you would like to know more about it, this[1] provides a reasonable overview, and if you would like to know much more, I can ask my spouse, who is a qualitative methodologist in medicine at an R1[2], for her recommendations. I can also tell you what I think of this specific paper, but I did not want it to color my initial comment.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualitative_research

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_research_universities_...
by bell-cot | 2025-12-31 15:26:55+00:00
> However, the carotid arteries may be a red flag for heart failure also. This is because, when the carotid arteries become less flexible, they do not expand properly to let blood through. This can raise blood pressure, which forces the heart muscle to work harder. Over time, this can lead to heart failure.

[...]

> A carotid ultrasound, sometimes called a Doppler scan, takes an average of 15 to 30 minutes for most people, although this can vary. A small handheld sensor is moved back and forth over the neck, generating sound waves which bounce off the arteries.

SO - why can't a simple blood pressure measurement screen for that "become less flexible" issue? Without needing any fancier equipment, higher-skill personnel, or longer test?
by foldr | 2025-12-31 15:27:31+00:00
GPT-4 was released in March 2023, so it pretty clearly comes under the heading of “two or three years” ago. It’s only three months shy of its third birthday.

I see that 2023 LinkedIn has (deservedly) gone down your memory hole, but it is very easy to find innumerable examples of people saying this kind of thing:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPTCoding/comments/11zu7l7/i_bu...
by throw310822 | 2025-12-31 15:27:41+00:00
"Slop" in English means "liquid junk, rubbish, tripe". No need to call for Merriam Webster's help.

The point is that AI can produce slop (as people do, too), but it's just silly to imply that everything it can produce is slop. That's just lazy, sloppy thinking.
by elcritch | 2025-12-31 15:27:45+00:00
Personally I think that defensive technology like this is fantastic. It means that innocent citizens will be protected from constant bombardment or thread of bombardment by cheap mass produced rockets or drones. Israeli civilians have faced bombardment by tens of thousands of rockets from Gaza for the last 20 years [1].

Outside the Middle East there's many areas threatened by combatants with similar cheap missiles. Perhaps Ukraine is an obvious one. We're seeing rises in conflicts across parts of Africa, Cambodia/Thailand, Pakistan/India. Many governments are looking into buying these to protect their countries.

This technology hopefully can protect populations from destabilizing forces funded on the cheap by foreign powers. Machine guns changed warfare [2] and drones have been a similar massive change in warfare making it cheaper and easier to attack and destabalize regions. Though of course there's downsides as well [3].

1: https://www.mideastjournal.org/post/how-many-rockets-fired-a...
2: https://online.norwich.edu/online/about/resource-library/how...
3: https://claritywithmichaeloren.substack.com/p/iron-dome-part...
by nickjj | 2025-12-31 15:27:52+00:00
I haven't tried a full desktop environment that's not niri yet.

With the direction of KDE, I don't know if it would change things because the latest upcoming version will be Wayland with no X11 support[0]. It sounds like it would still support XWayland in the same way niri supports it too, but the potential root cause (Wayland based compositor) would still be there? I'd also be using the same NVIDIA drivers.

I'm not deep into the woods yet in Linux on the desktop so I'm speculating a lot here.

Certainly worth a test before I go crawling back to Windows tho, however 95% of the reason I switched is because of niri, it's that good. With that said if Plasma ends up working as well as Windows of course I'd still choose that over my old Windows 10 set up.

[0]: https://www.phoronix.com/news/KDE-Plasma-2025-Wayland-Succes...
Show HN: Multimodal Search over the National Gallery of Art
by Beefin | 2025-12-31 15:29:01+00:00
We indexed 120K images from the National Gallery of Art for visual search. Text queries, image uploads, and "find similar" all in one retriever, fused with RRF.

Demo: https://mxp.co/r/nga

Stack: SigLIP (768-dim embeddings), Ray on 2× L4 GPUs, Qdrant. ~2 hours to process, <100ms queries.

Why SigLIP over CLIP: sigmoid loss instead of softmax means embeddings live in a global semantic space—similarity scores stay consistent at scale instead of being batch-relative.

The interesting part is the retriever. One stage, three optional inputs:

- text → encode → kNN
- image → encode → kNN
- document_id → lookup stored embedding → kNN

Pass any combination. If multiple, fuse with reciprocal rank fusion (RRF). No score normalization needed—RRF only cares about rank position.

Killer query: pass a document_id + text like "but wearing blue." RRF combines structural similarity with the text constraint.

Blog with full config: https://mixpeek.com/blog/visual-search-rrf/
by fwipsy | 2025-12-31 15:29:10+00:00
That's exactly what I said and at odds with your last comment. You take responsibility for making the sandwich if possible. If not, you're not responsible for the sandwich, but for refunding the customer or offering them something else.

If I'm required to write code using AI without being given time to verify it, then it's also not fair for me to be held responsible for the quality. Agency matters. I will not take responsibility for things that I'm not given the power to address. Of course if I choose to write code with an AI and it comes out badly, that's within my responsibilities.

It's a bad example because typically "whether to toast the sandwich" depends on customer preference (imposed externally) but "whether to use AI" is still mostly up to the worker.
by irishcoffee | 2025-12-31 15:29:11+00:00
> … into fighting the causes that make many fall into that?

A morbid thought that would probably address the bulk of this: male birth control.

The backlash would be profound, it’ll never happen. But if there were a way to make a “perfect pill/shot/procedure” boys had maybe at birth to prevent unplanned pregnancies… just think about it.

I’m not even sure I’m advocating for it. Everyone says “education will fix all the things!” I think raising kids where the parents wanted to be parents would fix a whole lot, at least on the incarnation side.
by gruez | 2025-12-31 15:29:37+00:00
>So just a loss for governments, or in other words, socializing the losses.

How's that different than any other sort of R&D incentive? Would you rather that companies return as much money as possible to shareholders, future growth be damned? What about other sorts of tax incentives, which by definition also "just a loss for governments"? Are tax breaks for people with kids also "socializing the losses", given that most households don't have kids?
by geertj | 2025-12-31 15:29:40+00:00
On the last day of the year, I am taking a few minutes to linger on this. At face value, most would agree with this, myself included. But I think we can dive one layer deeper. There are different schools of thoughts whether mankind is inherently good or evil. Over the years, I have become pretty firm believer that every person has the innate capacity for both good and evil, and the outcome is determined by both character and circumstances. Solzhenitsyn famously wrote (quote by Gemini):

"The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains … an unuprooted small corner of evil."

If you subscribe to this, then a weapons system can also be a force for good, if used by an entity for the purpose of "peace through strength". The strength keeps our innate capability for evil in check, as the consequences for evil would be guaranteed. A case in point is the MAD doctrine for nuclear weapons which has prevented a world war for the last 80 years.

I'd appreciate philosophical replies. Am I wrong, either in a detail or at the core of the argument? Are there additional layers? I would like to kindly ask to keep replies away from views on the specific players in this specific press release. We'd just be reiterating our positions without convincing anyone.

(edit: grammar, slight rewording)
by the_overseer | 2025-12-31 15:30:08+00:00
It absolutely does. I cannot believe I am reading this on HN... Do you think the idea of a pointer changed? That you need locks when accessing variables when doing multithreading? That principles like "Be conservative in what you send, and liberal in what you accept" have changed? In fact, almost nothing changed from 2005 to now in any conceptual form.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-12-31 15:30:18+00:00
> It sounds like they both suck

They both suck and they both have legitimate grievances.

They’re also both proxies on like four major axes (Iran vs Saudi Arabia, America vs Russia, America vs China and whatever Turkey is up to) and more minor axes than I’ve seen anyone even bother keeping track of.

It’s a deep and deeply fucked conflict that doesn’t lend well to armchair border drawing from an ocean away from first principles.
by MangoToupe | 2025-12-31 15:30:33+00:00
> As another commenter wrote "how do you allocate memory without an allocator?"

You call these things something other than an "allocating" and "allocators". Seriously, few people would consider adding a value to a hashmap an intentionally allocational activity, but it is. Same with adding an element to a vector, or any of the dependent actions on it.

Seriously
by ranger_danger | 2025-12-31 15:30:44+00:00
I'm confused... what does DVD, SD or any arbitrary frame size have to do with the shape of pixels themselves? Is that not only relevant to the display itself and not the file format/container/codec?

My understanding is that televisions would mostly have square/rectangular pixels, while computer monitors often had circular pixels.

Or are you perhaps referring to pixel aspect ratios instead?
by ur-whale | 2025-12-31 15:31:06+00:00
OpenAI is exactly what happens when a company finds itself in such a far, far away blue ocean strategy that there are no more traditional "economic anchors" (to call it that) to reason with.

It usually ends in blood and tears, for both employees and investors.

BUT: the SOTA has been greatly advanced, which matters a great deal more than the destiny of a particular corporation or the social status of sam-i-am.

So, overall: good news.
by voidhorse | 2025-12-31 15:31:07+00:00
I wouldn't put so much stock in a mathematical model like game theory.

Humanity has accomplished a lot with the notion of number, quantity, and numerical model, but in nearly all these cases our success relies on the heavy use of assumptions and more importantly constraints—most models are actually quite poor when it comes to a Laplacean dream of fully representing everything one might care about in practice.

Unfortunately I think our successes tends to lead individuals to overestimate the value and applicability of abstract models. Human beings are not automatons and human behavior is so variable and vast that I highly doubt any mathematical model could ever really account for it in sufficient detail. Worse, there's a definite quantum problem. The moment you report on predicted behaviors according to your model, human beings can respond to those reports, changing their own behaviors and totally ruining your model by blowing the constraints out of the water.

I actually believe that many of humanity's contemporary social issues actually stem from overreliance on mathematical models with respect to understanding human behavior and making decisions about economics and governance. The more we can directly acquire insight into individuals rather than believe in their "revealed preferences" the better off we'll be if we really want a system in which people's direct wants are represented (rather than telling them "you say you want X but when I give you only Y as choice you choose Y so you must want Y"—it's totally idiotic).
Show HN: OpenCode plugin for interactive plan annotation
by ramoz | 2025-12-31 15:31:13+00:00
I found myself constantly wanting to annotate verbose plans. I've also wanted to copy and share plans on occasion - gathering others' feedback. So I built this. Sharing plans is private and was inspired by the recently featured textarea.my

Markup your plans like a google doc.

Plannotator works via hooks and therefore it's fully integrated with the OpenCode planning mode capability.

If you're on desktop, play here: https://share.plannotator.ai/

Or watch a video demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_N7uo0EFI-U

https://github.com/backnotprop/plannotator
by louiereederson | 2025-12-31 15:31:36+00:00
this is not accurate. microsoft recognizes openai losses on their income statement, proportionate to their ownership stake. this has created a huge drag on eps, along with a lot more eps volatility than in the past. it's gotten so bad that microsoft now points people to adjusted net income, which is notable as they had always avoided those games. none of this has been welcomed
by JKCalhoun | 2025-12-31 15:32:51+00:00
"Here, passive consumption becomes active and creative: the performer reacts with individual spontaneity while summoning sounds of orchestral heft."

Everyone should get a chance to see a silent film projected in a theater to live accompaniment. When I was a teenager I was given that opportunity (even in Kansas City) for the silent, The Thief of Bagdad (1924). It was indeed magical.
by UniverseHacker | 2025-12-31 15:34:09+00:00
I think it’s little appreciated that high CO2 levels cause cognitive impairment, and with the same amount of (often very poor) air exchange, higher outdoor concentrations can push indoor spaces to levels that cause impaired cognition and poor sleep. I’ve already been seeing this in my home, and will often open windows even when cold just to keep co2 levels reasonable. One solution that can help is an external air heat exchanger, which can exchange air with the outdoors without compromising your homes heating and cooling like an open window will do.

Noticeable cognitive impairment starts in the 700-1000ppm range, whereas it is very common for homes to reach 2000-3000ppm, especially when in a closed bedroom.
by mcsniff | 2025-12-31 15:34:32+00:00
This is a pretty interesting claim...I have a few C110 and C200 that work just fine offline after null routing them.

You may need to enable RTSP (https://www.tp-link.com/us/support/faq/2680/) to get a feed off them directly, it works fine in Frigate and any other viewer that can consume RTSP.

I am not defending TP-Link, but it's a pretty big claim for you to say their devices don't work offline and will immediately power down, without any supporting technical evidence.
by marcosdumay | 2025-12-31 15:35:56+00:00
> The ease of releasing CO2 is the key advantage of the new compound.

I have no idea why the journalist that wrote this article choose to highlight the carbon density of the sub-header. It's almost completely irrelevant for carbon capture plants.

Another clear benefit is that it's a liquid.

Today people mostly use the substances that you called non-reversible in research plants (AFAIK, all plants are research right now). They are perfectly reversible, but that uses a lot of energy.
by O5vYtytb | 2025-12-31 15:36:12+00:00
How many batteries is that? If we're talking solar and you have say a 300MW datacenter and you need it to operate for 12 hours without sun you need at least two of the largest battery install in the world[1] at 1700MWh. That doesn't factor cloudy days.

[1] https://www.heise.de/en/news/850-MW-World-s-largest-battery-...
by cogman10 | 2025-12-31 15:36:57+00:00
Yeah, I see this as ultimately a wash.

In Russia/Ukraine, drones have proven to be a very real threat to deal with (arguably also in Iraq).

What this means is wealthy nations will snatch up or recreate this and deploy it. That will stop smaller resistance forces from either defending or attacking. Depending on the nation in question this could both good or bad. Just like drones, guns, or tanks.

Effectively, this puts the status quo back to where it was before mass drone deployments.
by 28304283409234 | 2025-12-31 15:37:03+00:00
I'm fully convinced that dishwashers are a hoax. Doing the dishes manually is far more efficient, both in water used, energy and time spent. Things to consider: time spent determining if the item is dishwasher proof, time spent playing dishwasher tetris, time spent filling and emptying, time pre-cleaning before putting things in the dishwasher, time spent re-washing after it turns out that the dishwasher did not clean your as well as it advertised on the box.

I can do the dishes after a family meal just as fast, and with better and more consistent results en less water, than when using the dishwasher.
by pixl97 | 2025-12-31 15:37:29+00:00
capital E engineers have numerous other laws that protect their position.

Civil/mechanical/electrical have countless codes that must be followed with the force of law.

When we say we want engineering standards for software developers we are also asking for standards and codes to be applied to software and all that entails.

I'm not saying this is good or bad, just to consider the ramifications of this at all levels.
by koito17 | 2025-12-31 15:37:31+00:00
Happy New Year from Japan!

The perfect square year is now over...next one is 2116. Silly thing to note, but I am thankful for being able to live in such a year. Additionally, 2025 was quite transformative to my life. Where I am today, in terms of career and personal connections, I wouldn't have expected to be here even two years ago.