MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lanstin | 2025-12-21 00:08:13+00:00
The frequency is important and so is the answer to "could we have done something different ourselves to make the request work". For example in credit card processing, if the remote network declines, then at first it seems like not your problem. But then it turns out for many BINs there are multiple choices for processing and you could add dynamic routing when one back end starts declining more than normal. Not a 5xx and not a fault in your process, but a chance to make your customer experience better.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-12-21 00:08:40+00:00
>Keep everything hyper-partisan and every election is flipping a coin to see who got 1% more votes this time

No, we simply realize that 20 years of compromise for a party blatantly breaking the rules is not working. You can call it "flipping the coin" if you want, but in my eyes we've been trying to continue a game of chess after dozens of illegal moves.

Maybe continuing to play the game as if nothing happened isn't the solution this time.
by sunshine-o | 2025-12-21 00:08:54+00:00
To be honest I don't think there is gonna be a EU regime as we know it in 5 years:

- The leaders are rock bottom in terms of approval rating

- The only people who have a deeply rooted attachment to the project are the boomers and the elite. The boomers are dying at a rate of about 10% per years.

- The EU does not have any good relationship anymore with any great power anymore: not China, the US or Russia.

- Their market, the main source of power in negotiations is shrinking

- They have been stupid enough to voluntarily fully inherit the Ukraine war which is lost.

Last but not least, nobody elected the commission, Von Leyen or Kallas. The fact they do not have real legitimacy, they made an enemy of their own subject and antagonised other great powers at the same time shows how unwise they are.
by batiudrami | 2025-12-21 00:10:09+00:00
Crazy take, in the late 90s/early 00s your GPU could be obsolete 9 months after buying. The “optimisation” you talk about was the CPU in the ps4 generation was so weak and tech was moving so fast that any pc bought in 2015 onwards would easily brute force overpower anything that had been built for that generation.
by immibis | 2025-12-21 00:12:06+00:00
IPv6 is literally just IPv4 + longer addresses + really minor tweaks (like no checksum) + things you don't have to use (like SLAAC). Is that not what you wanted? What did you want?

And what's wrong with a newer version of a thing solving all the problems people had with it...?

There are more people than IPv4 addresses, so the pigeonhole principle says you can't give every person an IPv4 address, never mind when you add servers as well. Expanding the address space by 6% does absolute nothing to solve anything and I'm confused about why you think it would.
by Sniffnoy | 2025-12-21 00:12:09+00:00
> But choosing foundation has real implications on the mathematics. You can have a foundation where every total function on the real numbers is continuous. Or one where Banach–Tarski is just false.

I mean, mathematicians do care about the part of the foundations that affect what they do! Classical vs constructive matters, yes. But material vs structural is not something most mathematicians think about. (They don't think about classical vs constructive either, but that's because they don't really know about constructive and it's not what they're trying to do, rather than because it's irrelevant to them like material vs structural.)
by i_am_a_peasant | 2025-12-21 00:12:38+00:00
Privilege breeds privilege. Once you have at least a little bit of it. You can generate a little bit more with it.

The bar that you get to grow up in a relatively safe place, with non toxic friends or parents is quite high already. I haven’t been lucky to have grown up in a safe place or in a good family, but I did manage to make good friends, and if I had not been lucky enough to have positive experiences with some real smart resourceful people, I probably wouldn’t had been alive today. Not to sound too dramatic.

Every time I visited the US it was mostly to visit people who were in a very privileged position. They either rented an expensive apartment in new york city in an ok neighborhood, or they owned a 3 story house in the suburbs. When we drove to walmart I could already see in the parking lots the stark differences between people who called this country home.

Next to us parked a family, 3 kids, a car that looked like it was falling apart next to my friend’s huge modern SUV. I wonder if any of them will ever br able to afford an SUV, I wonder how many of them will be able to go to college. The father and mother were yelling a lot at those poor kids. Everyone looked overweight(no offense), the father literally obese. And we went on with our day. I bought a bunch of random stuff I didn’t really need and ate a lobster sandwich. And I kind of forgot for a long time that family ever existed, except for the couple of times I randomly remember them. Hope they’re alright.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-12-21 00:15:53+00:00
> This seems like a no-brainer, but there are people out there who truly believe that the vandalistic nature of graffiti negates any possible artistic merit. Though my appreciation for graffiti is not unconditional, I tend to take the opposite stance: graffiti’s transgressive qualities only enhance its aesthetic value. It’s art that bursts the seams, demanding that the world bend to it and not the other way around, refusing to comply with the arbitrary bounds of property law—those meaningless slips of paper meant to legally confer ownership of land, buildings, bridges, trains, and anything else that might serve as the artist’s canvas.

IMO, this is a complete misunderstanding of why we have rules about who can do what to things. It is true that most of the time, if you actually do a deep-dive, property ownership is arbitrary. It reflects a history of violence, domination, control, power and is rarely rooted in any kind of philosophy that anyone except a sociopath could defend. Yes, of course, there are the empty corner cases - someone makes something entirely by themselves from a resource who supply is not locally or globally constrained, and claims ownership of it based on the labor and conception they put in. But these are tiny subset of actual property ownership situations, and the big picture really doesn't support the sort of claims that propertarians like to make for "the rules".

However, it is not meaningless. Most of us do not want to live in a society where anyone can do anything to anything at any time. It can be simultaneously true that the rules we have are arbitrary and unfair AND ALSO that we do want some kind of rules and these are the ones we have right now.

So by all means propose, refine, campaign for, enact better rules that control who can do what to what and when and how. But pretending that any such rules are arbitrary and meaningless is destructive and doesn't help us move towards a more equitable (or art-filled) society.
by SecretDreams | 2025-12-21 00:16:45+00:00
I think LLM skeptics come in a variety of styles. I am skeptical of the current amount of capital flowing into AI vs expected returns on that capital. I use AI regularly. Often for free. I'm not clear what the path to profitability looks like a d justification of valuations. That's why it has dotcom vibes, not because I don't believe in the technology. I don't believe in the snakes pedalling the valuations.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-12-21 00:17:23+00:00
I have only worked for two large companies in my career - both Fortune 10 companies when I worked their - General Electric and Amazon.

At GE? Sure things are random. But it was also just another random enterprise company where it really didn’t make sense to work toward a promotion just to make $10-$20K more. You would be better off just getting another job (which I did after 2.5 years). There were no published leveling guidelines or procedures.

But I can guarantee you that a random mid level developer is not going to walk up to their manager with a competing offer and be handed a promotion at any of the large tech companies. The manager by themselves can’t determine a promotion. There are promo docs, committees, recommendation requirements. Etc

At 51, with just me and my wife, grown kids and already had the big house built in the burbs that sold for twice what we bought it for 8 years earlier and we downsized to a condo one third the size in state tax free Florida, the juice ain’t worth the squeeze.

But if I were 22 and had a choice between wallowing in enterprise dev making 90K doing CRUD apps or making $160K out of college and over $200K at 25, I would play the game with the best of them.

My own anecdote is that outside of BigTech now, I’m a staff consultant working at a 3rd party AWS consulting company making the same as a 25 year old SA that I mentored when they were an intern at AWS and the first year they came back
by BurningFrog | 2025-12-21 00:17:27+00:00
Maybe it's like this:

Sabine's has a day job as a Youtuber, and she makes her videos from that perspective. She speaks her mind, makes a decent living, and educates some science nerds on the way. Seems pretty nice.

From the perspective of accomplishing institutional change in the academic physics world, this is does nothing. The institutional powers don't react at all to a complaining influencer with an Einstein doll.

And I suspect she's perfectly fine with that. Overturning the Physics establishment is a near impossible task. I would leave that for those mad enough to try.
by XorNot | 2025-12-21 00:18:03+00:00
There is not a "huge chunk" of the theoretical physics community working on string theory, and their never was. For one, it is far less common a topic of research now then it was earlier when it was more popular, but even then "huge" was really "a lot of universities had a grant for string theory investigation because it looked promising".

It mostly hasn't worked out and now people are moving on to other things.

The single worst thing that happened though was the populism: a small group of people with credentials started putting out pop-sci books and doing interviews, well in excess of what their accomplishments should mean. People are like "so many people are working on this" because there were like, 3 to 5 guys who always said "yes" to an interview and talked authoritatively.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-12-21 00:18:50+00:00
Well proton isn't Eu but its switzerland and I think that proton is going to move some of their servers to germany after switzerland had this questionable decision which feared privacy services (including proton)

Proton recently got proton sheets/proton docs

Personally one of the largest issues I have with proton is the lack of extensibility. Like google has app scripts and similar api's but proton's lack of api's have frustrated me so much that I have built an api over scraping/using a puppeteer instance over it but its still in very finnicky state
by shevy-java | 2025-12-21 00:19:22+00:00
Hmm. This is actually not really something I need, I think; but I consider anna's archive etc... as about as important as the internet web archive. We need to preserve data, at the least important data, also historic data - how the original websites looked. Creativity of past generations. Same for games and books.

It may be only ~30 years for webpages to have emerged, but there are also many young people who may not have experienced that since they are too young to have experienced it. There is always a generational change; our generation has the opportunity to store more things.
by rogerrogerr | 2025-12-21 00:20:40+00:00
> The ownership class are the ones who invented things like time zones to stop their trains from running in to each other

In a world where this didn't happen, your comment would most likely read:

> The ownership class are the ones who had such indifference toward the lives of the lower class passengers that they didn't bother stopping their trains from running into each other.
by shevy-java | 2025-12-21 00:20:54+00:00
> The thing is, this doesn't even seem particularly useful for average consumers/listeners

Yeah. To me it is not really relevant. I actually was not using spotify and if I need to have songs I use ytldp for youtube but even that is becoming increasingly rare. Today's music just doesn't interest me as much and I have the songs I listen to regularly. I do, however had, also listen to music on youtube in the background; in fact, that is now my primary use case for youtube, even surpassing watching movies or anything else. (I do use youtube for getting some news too though; it is so sad that Google controls this.)
by versteegen | 2025-12-21 00:21:00+00:00
That's an interesting observation. I'd suggest modelling the LLM's behaviour in that situation as selecting between different simple strategies, each of which has its own transition function. Some of the strategies will be far more common than others. Some of them may be very simple and obey the detailed balance condition (meaning they are reversible Markov chains), but others, and the overall transition function does not.

The definition of the detailed balance condition is very strict and it's obvious that it won't be met in general by most probabilistic programs (sets of rules with probabilistic output) even if you consider only those where all possible outputs have non-zero probability (as required by detailed balance).

And the LLM+agent is only a Markov chain because of the limited state space of the agent. While an LLM is adding to its context window without reaching the window size limit, it is not a Markov chain, as I explained here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45124761

And, agreed that better optimisation would be incredible. (I would describe it as a search problem.) I'm not sure how feasible it is improve without changing the architecture, e.g. to a diffusion language model. But LLMs already predict many tokens ahead at once which is why beam search is surprisingly unnecesarr. That's how they're able to write coherent sentences (and rhymes), they've already largely determined at the beginning what they're going to write. (See Anthropic mech interp work.) So maybe if we could tap into that we search over vaguely-formed next blocks of text rather than next words.
by Mawr | 2025-12-21 00:21:08+00:00
> Creating something smarter than you was always going to be a sketchy prospect.

Sure, but not so sure that this has any relevance to the topic at hand. You seem to be taking the assumption that LLMs can ever reach that level for granted.

It may be possible that all it takes is scaling up and at some point some threshold gets reached past which intelligence emerges. Maybe.

Personally, I'm more on board with the idea that since LLMs display approximately 0 intelligence right now, no amount of scaling will help and we need a fundamentally different approach if we want to create AGI.
by jibal | 2025-12-21 00:21:12+00:00
It's the point I made--it is not at all difficult to make an argument that we have not been visited by aliens.

> we might have been visited in forms that are completely incomprehensible to us

So what? That's not an argument that we have been. It's not a rebuttal to the arguments that we haven't been. It's like saying that President Trump might be a shapeshifting reptile from Aldebaran. "It MIGHT be, so it's difficult to argue to the contrary"--wrong. It's like saying to someone who notes that there's no elephant in their dining room that there might be one that's invisible and very nimble so no one bumps into it--"it's difficult to argue otherwise"--wrong. It's a child's (or theist's) "anything is possible" logic. It's hypocritical because no one uses this sort of nonsense outside of such special pleading--imagine a lawyer for a mass murderer with hundreds of witnesses telling a jury that actually it was done by aliens with incomprehensible technology who created the illusion that it was their client who did it--"it's difficult to argue otherwise"--wrong. This sort of "might have been" garbage has no place in rational good faith discussion.
by Brian_K_White | 2025-12-21 00:21:39+00:00
It's a lot of work to make models that are useful in real life, but for some things it's worth it because it's sooo nice having 2k of plain text that describes an entire object, and it's even fully parametric, and it even comes with a customizer panel for the parameters, so every model isn't just a model, it's a model generator app, and even has meaningful diffs in git.

The same model in freecad is like 6 megs of zipped xml and realistically not nearly as usefully parametric.

That couple-k of plain text is such a huge deal that it makes all the other difficulty worth it for mechanical/functional stuff.
by shevy-java | 2025-12-21 00:22:01+00:00
> I wouldn’t be so sure. There are already tools to automatically locate and stream pirated TV and movie content automatic and on demand.

It may be relevant for those people, but I lost all interest in current TV or streaming stuff. I just watch youtube regularly. What's on is on; what is not on is not really important to me. My biggest problem is lack of time anyway, so I try to reduce the time investment if possible, which is one huge reason why I have zero subscriptions. I just could not keep up with them.
by shevy-java | 2025-12-21 00:23:16+00:00
I see this more and more used. It seems companies want to fake stuff now, aka claiming to be open source when they are not.

DHH also claims he is super open source when in reality he already soul-sent to the big tech bros:

https://world.hey.com/dhh/the-o-saasy-license-336c5c8f

We also had this recently with arduino. I don't understand why companies try to get that way. To me it is not an open source licence - it is a closed source business licence. Just with different names.
by JK-Swizzle | 2025-12-21 00:23:27+00:00
I would expect there to be significant overlap between the demographics of those who more commonly get in accidents and those who use THC. Based on nsc.org, it seems like the majority of car accidents are with drivers 25-34 years old, and occur more frequently late at night on weekends. That generally matches the profile of the stereotypical THC user. It is hard to find good numbers of THC use.

Remember that not all the population drives, nor are accidents randomly distributed in the population.

https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/overview/age-of-dr... https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/overview/crashes-b...
by qouteall | 2025-12-21 00:23:32+00:00
In real-world business requirements it often need to read some data then touch other data based on previous read result.

It violates the "every transaction can only be in one shard" constraint.

For a specific business requirement it's possible to design clever sharding to make transaction fit into one shard. However new business requirements can emerge and invalidate it.

"Every transaction can only be in one shard" only works for simple business logics.
by zrn900 | 2025-12-21 00:23:37+00:00
Big companies arent suffering any of those. But small businesses and individuals are. Just see the enforcement lists. They are fining small flower shops that sent emails to 20-30 people, some of whom subscribed to it decades ago, then forgot. Or small internet startups for missing one subscription record and whatnot. Like all other corporate moat-building efforts, GDPR has been successful in destroying small businesses in favor of big ones.
by karlshea | 2025-12-21 00:23:49+00:00
There are a total of 8 groups of 4 hex digits, so 8 minus however many groups you already have.

google.com: 2607:f8b0:4009:819::200e (5 groups) -> 2607:f8b0:4009:0819:0000:0000:0000:200e (3 groups of added zeros)

a ULA address: fd2a:1::2 (3 groups) -> fd2a:0001:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0002 (5 added)

localhost: ::1 -> 0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0001
by prmph | 2025-12-21 00:24:23+00:00
I don't know. I actually find it harder and more stressful to write code in a way that does not meet a certain quality level. it require me to actually think more.

It's king of weird, but I have tried over the years to develop a do-just-what-is-necessary-now mindset in my software engineering work, and I just can't make my mind work that.

For me, doing things right is a way for me to avoid having to hold too much context in my head while working on my projects. I know the idiomatic way to do something, and if i just do it that way, then when I come back to it I know it should and is architectured.
by wat10000 | 2025-12-21 00:25:19+00:00
The older I get, the less I want GUIs. If I want to rotate something, I want to type “rotate,” not find the rotation icon or menu item or remember the keyboard shortcut or whatever.

I know this is not typical, and nothing against folks who see it the other way. But OpenSCAD fits the way I think and want to work better than the more “normal” tools.
by bigbadfeline | 2025-12-21 00:25:46+00:00
> rather than get to use the atmosphere as a free sewer

The only way not to do that is to stop breathing and breeding. Or go back to the trees but that the same thing.

> it will be because customers now have to pay for the pollution that their products cause.

Pay to whom? And for what purpose? This excuse for another tariff isn't going to reduce pollution at all, it just adds another tax to be consumed by some newly minted private and public bureaucrats whose only contribution the world will be flavored methane.

"Tax the people to save the world" is a vicious lie.

> Meanwhile Trump's tariffs are capricious

Bad or good excuses don't change the facts or effects of tariffs, tariffs aren't a tool for preventing pollution and haphazardly using them for that purpose triggers other economic and political consequences without doing anything for the stated objective.
by kgeist | 2025-12-21 00:26:11+00:00
I tried making something similar a while ago, and the main problem was that long-term memory makes it easy to move the AI into a bad state where it overfixates on something (context poisoning), or decides to refuse talking to me completely. So in the end, I added a command that wipes out all memory, and ended up using it all the time.

Maybe I was doing it wrong. The question is: how do you prevent the AI from falling into a corrupt state from which it cannot get out?
by loeg | 2025-12-21 00:26:24+00:00
Even if you could cool the full TDP in a micro PC, in a full size desktop you might be able to use a massive AIO radiator with fans running at very slow, very quiet speeds instead of jet turbine howl in the micro case. The quiet and ease of working in a bigger space are mostly a good tradeoff for a slightly larger form factor under a desk.
by qingcharles | 2025-12-21 00:26:42+00:00
Forget documenting it. I want an army of robot idiots who have never seen my app before to click every interface element in the wrong order like they were high and lobotomized. Let the chaos reign. Fuzz every combination of everything that I would never have expected when I built it.

As NASA said after the shuttle disaster, "It was a failure of imagination."
by ncruces | 2025-12-21 00:27:03+00:00
Go strings are supposed to be immutable.

I see that fiber goes behind your back and produces potentially mutable strings behind your back: https://github.com/gofiber/utils/blob/c338034/convert.go#L18

And… I actually don't have an issue with it to be honest. I've done the same myself.

But this mutability should never escape. I'd never persist in using a library that would let it escape. But apparently… it's intentional: https://github.com/gofiber/fiber/issues/185

Oh well. You get what you ask for. Please don't complain about maps if you're using a broken library.