MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by properbrew | 2025-12-31 00:20:58+00:00
There's two main apps that I've built. It's been a hell of a journey but a fun one, I'll list them below, but the most fun was actually adding an "explore" feature to my site to make it a bit more fun and interactive over the christmas break - https://blazingbanana.com/ - I might keep it, might not but was cool to see what can be done in browser with WebGL.

https://blazingbanana.com/work/whistle - Whistle, which is a complete offline voice transcription app using whisper, available on all platforms, Linux, Mac, Windows (with CUDA builds), Android (and iOS as soon as my dev account goes through, who knew paying Apple £79 would be so hard!). To be honest the packaging part was probably the toughest bit and all the different ways each platform needs to build. - Probably my most "successful" one, at 450+ downloads on the Play store.

https://formait.app/ - Offline document formatting using LLMs to take a load of unstructured notes and give you a nice PDF output. Could actually load any GGUF model you throw at it as it's implementing llama.cpp. It's actually quite a useful combination with Whistle, so thinking of integrating voice to text in at some point. This is available on all platforms (except mobile) with CUDA builds available too.
by YorickPeterse | 2025-12-31 00:21:17+00:00
For Linux this will vary between distributions and configurations. For example, based on some testing I did today using mkosi [1] (for reasons unrelated to this discussion), a bare-bones Fedora 43 installation uses about 130 MiB of RAM, while a Debian installation uses a little more than 100 MiB.

IIRC last time I tried a bare-bones FreeBSD installation it used about the same amount of memory, maybe a little more based on how ZFS is set up.

[1]: https://github.com/systemd/mkosi
by MadameMinty | 2025-12-31 00:21:52+00:00
This notion always puzzles me. It's not a complex idea.

Just like, say, banning GMO bananas. But such regulation is a whole text which may need to define or refer to definitions of "GMO" and "banana", specify what's banned, exemptions, enforcement authority, penalties, and so on. Maybe 10 pages of legalese. It requires time, expertise, research. But it's still just a ban on GMO bananas.

Or a programmed UI button to show a message. Simple. The specifics of the execution are a separate matter.

It's not "indescribable", but no one will describe it to you ad hoc and expecting it is silly.
by mkozlows | 2025-12-31 00:22:11+00:00
I was going back and looking at timelines, and was shocked to realize that Claude Code and Cursor's default-to-agentic-mode changes both came out in late February. Essentially the entire history of "mainstream" agentic coding is ten months old.

(This helps me understand better the people who are confused/annoyed/dismissive about it, because I remember how dismissive people were about Node, about Docker, about Postgres, about Linux when those things were new too. So many arguments where people would passionately talk about all those things were irredeemably stupid and only suitable for toy/hobby projects.)
by tialaramex | 2025-12-31 00:22:37+00:00
Arguably the C ABI was one of those Worse is Better problems like the C language itself. Better languages already existed, but C was basically free and easy to implement, so now there's C everywhere. It seems likely that if not for this ABI we might have an ABI today where all languages which want to offer FFI can agree on how to represent say the immutable slice reference type (Rust's &[T], C++ std::span)

Just an agreed ABI for slices would be enough that language A's growable array type (Rust's Vec, C++ std::vector, but equally the ArrayList or some languages even call this just "list") of say 32-bit signed integers can give a (read only) reference to language B to look at all these 32-bit signed integers without language's A and B having to agree how growable arrays work at all. In C today you have to go wrestle with the ABI pig for much less.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-12-31 00:22:47+00:00
> Who wants to copy&paste prompts between ai agents?

An AI!

The specialist vs generalist debate is still open. And for complex problems, sure, having a model that runs on a small galaxy may be worth it. But for most tasks, a fleet of tailor-made smaller models being called on by an agent seems like a solidly-precedented (albeit not singularity-triggering) bet.
by fancyfredbot | 2025-12-31 00:23:05+00:00
You will probably end up in court. But you might not get convicted.

Shakeeb Ahmed was convicted of wire fraud for exploiting a smart contract bug.

Avi Eisenberg was also convicted for exploiting a smart contract bug, but he had his conviction overturned on appeal.

The Peraire-Bueno brothers were in court for exploiting a bug in the MEV mechanism but it ended in a mis-trial so we're going to have to wait to find out.

Not legal advice ;-)
by fc417fc802 | 2025-12-31 00:24:15+00:00
They might, but if they did they would presumably be prepared to retaliate against US seizures with their own. The only reason the US is able to credibly threaten to seize EU bank assets is because the EU governments are implicitly on board with the entire arrangement. As soon as it's no longer viewed as mutually beneficial it will crumble overnight.
by seba_dos1 | 2025-12-31 00:24:24+00:00
Not sure what you're talking about, Flatpak runtimes are easy to find and contribute to: https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/available-runtimes.html

I wasn't directly involved, but the company I worked for has created its own set of runtimes too and I haven't heard any excessive complaints on internal chats, so I don't think it's as arcane as you make it sound either.
by WaitWaitWha | 2025-12-31 00:24:32+00:00
For those who suggest the police came up with this list, why do you think so?

Asking because I believe the Block Party organizers likely just handed a list to the NYPD instead of asking them for input.

Also, what is the expected training to NYPD street cops what is a RasPi or Flipper? Both come in all kinds of shapes, colors, and general appearance.

Far stretch, but this could be a subtle ploy to do get technologist (i.e., here) talk about this make it go viral.
by fdr | 2025-12-31 00:24:58+00:00
Public Sans seems like a good candidate for a new "web safe" font. Perhaps one new web safe font per twenty five years is not too much. From there, it can percolate to the word processor and pdfs, and finally: government standard for government workers who just want to open their word processor and get to work, where sourcing even a free font to meet standard is just a snag to annoy.
by hexo | 2025-12-31 00:25:34+00:00
Because a lot of people have no clue about packaging or how to write compatible software, one that is actually installable as normal application. I suspect a lot of them learned stuff in node.js or ruby ecosystem first and this is the result. Same as requiring using docker to install or build an application. It isn't cool, funny or right way to do stuff. I still don't get what was so wrong about venv that anyone needed uv. I have no need to even try and i'm writing python stuff so long that i cannot even estimate it. To me it feels like reinvention for sake of rewrite in rust. If it is so good, ok, i get it, it might be - and all that good stuff needs to go back to python as python.
by otterley | 2025-12-31 00:26:14+00:00
uv solves many problems, but one textbook case is the problem of running some arbitrary Python-based command-line tool, where 1/you don’t have any Python interpreter installed, 2/your OS-provided Python interpreter isn’t compatible with the tool, or 3/you want to run single or multiple tools from any arbitrary folder where your data already is, as opposed to adapting your workflow to fit the virtualenv or running the risk that two tools have conflicting dependencies that would make the virtualenv not work well.
by QuiEgo | 2025-12-31 00:26:58+00:00
Well folks, there you have it, @onebigtime is the ultimate decider on what "unnecessary travel" is :).

On a serious note, being able to go face to face is sometimes a huge win, and can really help hammer through sticky problems, to the point where companies that are downright cheapskates on expenses still see enough value to justify paying for travel. I promise you, if it was really unnecessary, they wouldn't spend a dime they didn't need to.
by pbhjpbhj | 2025-12-31 00:27:19+00:00
>Breaking into a data center requires coordination and ensuring a lot of people with access and visibility stay quiet

Or just a warrant and a phone call to set up remote access? In the UK under RIPA you might not even need a warrant. In USA you can probably bribe someone to get a National Security Letter issued.

Depending on the sympathies of the hosting company's management you might be able to get access with promises.

I dare say F-Droid trust their friends/colleagues more than they trust randos at a hosting company.

As an F-Droid user, I think I might too? It's a tough call.
by userbinator | 2025-12-31 00:28:10+00:00
Those are actually Thermaltake Golden Orbs, although many companies made similar designs.

As impressive as they look, and as effective as they were at the time, I believe even a modern stock Intel cooler would be more effective; CPUs of the time only had TDPs around 20-30W, in comparison to the 100W+ they are now at.
by didibus | 2025-12-31 00:28:16+00:00
Historically, institutions were widely believed to be selecting the best available candidates within the accepted social boundaries of the time. They did not call it meritocracy, but it was assumed.

AA advocacy exposed cracks in systems that claimed to be merit based and pushed reforms like anonymization and structured evaluation, which made selection more merit based, not less.

Merit is noisy and ties are unavoidable. When candidates are effectively equal, a tie breaker is required. The old default was incumbency and other status quo dynamics that favored the existing cohort. Random selection among equals would be defensible. Favoring candidates from groups historically denied opportunity is another possible tie breaker. You can disagree with that choice, but it is coherent to see it as pro merit rather than anti merit.

And that's just my point, some proponents of AA were arguing for better merit based systems, not all, but a lot did.
by Cleonis | 2025-12-31 00:28:28+00:00
As to understanding Hamilton's stationary action deeply: that is accessible.

I have created a resource with interactive diagrams. Move sliders to sweep out variation of a trial trajectory. The diagram shows the response.

https://cleonis.nl/physics/phys256/energy_position_equation....

About the form of the resource:

In physics textbooks the usual presentation is to posit Hamilton's stationary action, followed by demonstration that F=ma can be recovered from it.

Now: we have that in physics you can often run derivations in both directions.

Example: the connection between the Lagrangian formulation of mechanics and the Hamiltonian formulation.
The interconversion is by way of Legendre transformation. Legendre transformation is it's own inverse; applying Legendre transformation twice recovers the original function.

Well, the relation between F=ma and Hamilton's stationary action is a bi-directional relation too: it is possible to go _from_ F=ma _to_ Hamilton's stationary action.

The process has two stages:

- Derivation of the work-energy theorem from F=ma

- Demonstration that in circumstances such that the work-energy theorem holds good Hamilton's stationary action holds good also.

Knowing how to go from F=ma to Hamilton's stationary action goes a long way towards lifting the sense of mystery.

General remark:
Of course, in physics there are many occurrences of hierarchical relation. Classical mechanics has been superseded by Quantum mechanics, with classical mechanics as limiting case; the validity of classical mechanics must be attributed to classical mechanics emerging from quantum mechanics in the macroscopic limit.

But in the case of the relations between F=ma, the work-energy theorem, and Hamilton's stationary action: the bi-directionality informs us that the relations are not hierarchical; those concepts are on equal par.
by cesarb | 2025-12-31 00:28:35+00:00
> There’re quite a few mechanics they use for that. The oldest one, call a special API function on startup [...]

Isn't the oldest one... to have the API/ABI version in the name of your DLL? Unlike on Linux which by default uses a flat namespace, on the Windows land imports are nearly always identified by a pair of the DLL name and the symbol name (or ordinal). You can even have multiple C runtimes (MSVCR71.DLL, MSVCR80.DLL, etc) linked together but working independently in the same executable.
by sophia-martinez | 2025-12-31 00:28:44+00:00
We recently ran an experiment comparing real M&A due diligence documents (technical overviews, security controls, retention policies, and integration requirements) to see what inconsistencies and gaps surfaced automatically.

What stood out wasn’t missing documentation, but conflicting statements across documents that would normally pass a manual review. Things like architecture drift, unclear retention timelines, and control enforcement gaps that create post-close risk.

This write-up walks through a real diligence-style example, the kinds of issues that surfaced, and where automated comparison helped (and where human judgment still mattered).

Curious how others approach diligence at scale and whether automation has helped or hurt your process.
by cyberax | 2025-12-31 00:30:07+00:00
Yes, crime decreases tend to stick.

Chicago started with similar conditions as NYC (30 murders per 100000 in 1991), but they didn't have no-nonsense mayors like Bloomberg and Rudy. So its murder rate now is still 5 times that of NYC.

Broken window policing and stop-and-frisk absolutely worked. Stop-and-frisk was found to be unconstitutional, but it also was highly effective.
by TacticalCoder | 2025-12-31 00:30:45+00:00
War isn't terrorism. Terrorism is raping, torturing and killing 1200 civilians and Israel started a war in response.

Terrorism is shooting 16 jewish people, including a 9 years old kid, on a beach in Australia. That's terrorism.

Now Israel may have committed warcrimes: which is what the ICC is condemning Nethanyaou for. The ICC is, as I understand it, not condemning Nethanyaou for terrorism. And, notably, I haven't seen israeli soldiers brining back young palestinian female who shat their pants into Israel and I haven't seen all of Israel applauding.

I also haven't seen Israel taking hundreds of civilian hostages.

Israel is at war for its survival: it's a tiny country surrounded by islamists who have a deep hatred for jews. And in addition to the very well known and obvious sheer hate many islamists have for jews, there are also a lot atheist anti-semitic people all around the world.

We're literally talking about billions of people around the world hating on 10 million jews in Israel.

Tell us what you really think: do you believe jews are allowed to have just one tiny country on earth where they can expect their teenagers to enjoy life at a music festival without getting raped and executed?

I'm not jewish but I know I'm next. I know those who are persecuting the jews won't stop there once they are done with the jews.
by lacoolj | 2025-12-31 00:30:58+00:00
Not seeing why this is a strange.

Also, not seeing why someone would care - why are you bringing your Raspberry Pi to an inauguration? Or worse, your blatantly suspicious "Flipper Zero", which, quote:

> The Flipper Zero is a portable multi-functional Security device developed for interaction with access control systems. The device is able to read, copy, and emulate RFID and NFC tags, radio remotes, iButtons, and digital access keys. It also has a GPIO interface.
by avalys | 2025-12-31 00:31:40+00:00
AI is going to be a highly-competitive, extremely capital-intensive commodity market that ends up in a race to the bottom competing on cost and efficiency of delivering models that have all reached the same asymptotic performance in the sense of intelligence, reasoning, etc.

The simple evidence for that is that everyone who has invested the same resources in AI has produced roughly the same result. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Deepseek, etc. There's no evidence of a technological moat or a competitive advantage in any of these companies.

The conclusion? AI is a world-changing technology, just like the railroads were, and it is going to soon explode in a huge bubble - just like the railroads did. That doesn't mean AI is going to go away, or that it won't change the world - railroads are still here and they did change the world - but from a venture investment perspective, get ready for a massive downturn.
by nine_k | 2025-12-31 00:31:56+00:00
We do not disagree about the essence, but rather in accents. Some might say that sloppy engineers were happy to pack their Ruby-Goldbergesque deployments into containers. I say that even the most excellent and diligent engineers sometimes faced situations when two pieces of software required incompatible versions of a shared library, which depended on a tree of other libraries with incompatible versions, etc, and there's a practical limit of what you can and should do with bash scripts and abuse of LD_PRELOAD.

Many of the "new" languages, like Go (16 years), Rust (13 years), or Zig (9 years) just can build static binaries, not even depending on libc. This has both upsides and downsides, especially with security fixes. Rebuilding a container to include an updated .so dependency is often easier and faster than rebuilding a Rust project.

Docker (or preferably Podman) is not a replacement for linkers. It's an augmentation to the package system, and a replacement for the common file system layout, which is inadequate for modern multi-purpose use of a Unix (well, Linux) box.
by whakim | 2025-12-31 00:32:39+00:00
Worth noting that the filtering implementation is quite restrictive if you want to avoid post-filtering: filters must be expressible as discrete smallints (ruling out continuous variables like timestamps or high cardinality filters like ids); filters must always be denormalized onto the table you're indexing (no filtering on attributes of parent documents, for example); and filters must be declared at index creation time (lots of time spent on expensive index builds if you want to add filters). Personally I would consider these caveats pretty big deal-breakers if the intent is scale and you do a lot of filtering.
by reallynattu | 2025-12-31 00:33:52+00:00
I built https://screenshot2charts.com, a tool that turns screenshots or CSV/JSON into editable charts. It solves the annoying problem of re-creating messy charts for reports and presentations, especially when all you have is a blurry screenshot of either a chart or some numbers.

From my experience, the biggest difference between vibe-coded projects that go somewhere and the ones that don’t isn’t code quality, it’s whether the builder keeps talking to users after the first version. The “vibe” gets you to ship, but iteration discipline is what turns it into something real.
by knuckleheads | 2025-12-31 00:33:53+00:00
Thank you! Here's my take on it https://threeemojis.com/en-US/play/globs/en-US/demo . What I feel like you nailed is adding up the groups one by one. This is different enough from existing connections like games that it really caught my attention, enough that I wanted to take a stab at it.
by gottorf | 2025-12-31 00:33:59+00:00
> The distribution of wealth is already vastly suboptimal, heavily skewed to the most greedy 0.1%-5%.

> the reality of wealth and income distribution that the taxation is far below the misallocation

How do you or anyone else know what's optimal and what's misallocated?

> it also ignores the fact that Federal Income Taxes are only a small portion of our total tax burden

Income tax is roughly half of federal receipts and is the single largest source, with payroll taxes the next largest at about a third.
by senshan | 2025-12-31 00:34:23+00:00
Not really. It was the collapse of insurance companies that was at the core of 2008 crisis.

The same can happen now on the side of private credit that gradually offloads its junk to insurance companies (again):

As a result, private credit is on the rise as an investment option to compensate for this slowdown in traditional LBO (Figure 2, panel 2), and PE companies are actively growing the private credit side of their business by influencing the companies they control to help finance these operations. Life insurers are among these companies. For instance, KKR’s acquisition of 60 percent of Global Atlantic (a US life insurer) in 2020 cost KKR approximately $3billion.

https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/global-financial-stabili...
by throw4847285 | 2025-12-31 00:34:30+00:00
Popular Mechanics is like Popular Science right? Extremely bullish on new technologies to the degree of taking one study and turning it into a breathless article about how we're 1 year away from flying cars?

Sorry for the cynicism, but I grew up subscribing to Popular Science and I gained a very jaundiced view of this kind of science/technology popularizing
by jfil | 2025-12-31 00:35:48+00:00
No, Meta doesn't get a pass on this one after "Jedi Blue" and faking video viewing metrics. These guys are criminals.

Generally, media buyers/advertisers are clueless when it comes to ad fraud. The big platforms have made a lot of money by abusing this fact. (I have over 15 years of experience in online marketing, on the advertiser, publisher and ad-network side. )
by numpad0 | 2025-12-31 00:35:49+00:00
The problem with that kind of feature/benefit based thinking is that it won't correlate with code or computational footprints well. That's like justifying price of cars with seatback materials. That's not where the costs are.

Modern chat apps like Slack, Discord, Teams, etc. are extremely resource intense solely by being skinned Chrome showing overbloated HTMLs. That's it. Most of the "actual" engineering of it is outsourced and externalized to Google, NVIDIA/Intel/AMD, Microsoft/Apple, etc.
by rendx | 2025-12-31 00:36:37+00:00
It's still going. NGI ("Next Generation Internet") is a Horizon Europe program, part of the EU's mission to strengthen European economy. It doesn't mean that any of the projects that receive subgrants from that pot are officially adopted for anything. It is the NGI grantees who decide which subgrantees receive funding, not the EU (in this case, NLnet Foundation). Hundreds of open source projects have received financial support from this pot.
by 9029 | 2025-12-31 00:37:24+00:00
> For a lot stuff on my local network I don’t want the hassle and there are loads of use cases in local networks for normal people to just have port 80 no certs on something like 192.x.x.x because there is no easy way to set up public certificates for that and I don’t want everything hostem on cloud - some stuff I want to still host for myself in my local network.

Tbh I don't see what's hard about this. All you need is an A record pointing to your 192.x.x.x, acme capable dns host and a modern reverse proxy. You can even use a free ddns service if you want. Wouldn't bother with this for development, but anything hosted for longer than a few days absolutely yes. Imo not getting browser warnings is alone worth the few minutes it takes nowadays.