MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Animats | 2025-12-20 09:46:18+00:00
Google has their own fleet of atomic clocks and time servers. So does AWS. So does Microsoft. So does Ubuntu. They're not going to drift enough for months to cause trouble. So the Internet can ride through this, mostly.

The main problem will be services that assume at least one of the NIST time servers is up. Somewhere, there's going to be something that won't work right when all the NIST NTP servers are down. But what?
by andai | 2025-12-20 09:47:25+00:00
The bit about o3 being the turning point is very interesting. I heard someone say that o3 (or perhaps the cheaper o4-mini) should have been called gpt-5, and that people would have been mind blown. Instead it kind of went under the radar as far as the mainstream goes.

Whereas we just got the incremental progress with gpt-5 instead and it was very underwhelming. (Plus like 5 other issues at launch, but that's a separate story ;)

I'm not sure if o4-mini would have made a good default gpt though. (Most use is conversational and its language is very awkward.) So they could have just called it gpt-5 pro or something, and put it on the $20 tier. I don't know.
by kubanczyk | 2025-12-20 09:48:17+00:00
> Well that's the point of the exercises I suggest - to learn recursion :-/

Then we must have been talking past each other. We are considering this problem here:

>> I never took affinity to computer science/math, but I love building real world products with software. [...] I am struggling with all the interviews that have these leetcode problems.

Then your advice to these interview problem is to learn some CS - the useful parts of it? E.g. recursion is CS.
by jenadine | 2025-12-20 09:48:32+00:00
In theory, a process could just return an error for that specific operation, which would propagate to a "500 internal error" for this one request but not impact other operations. Could even take the hint to free some caches.

But in practice, I agree with you. This is just not worth it. So much work to handle it properly everywhere and it is really difficult to test every malloc failures.

So that's where an OOM killer might have a better strategy than just letting the last program that happen to allocate memory last to fail.
by phil-martin | 2025-12-20 09:48:53+00:00
I was reading through the article genuinely looking forward to a methodical discussion on all the negative points raised about other protocols

For example this was about one of the other protocols

“ There is no key rotation that preserves your social connections. You would need to create an entirely new identity.”

It didn’t elaborate much, but briefly mention Marmot, but I thought it was about Nostr? It was confusing enough for me to shrug and move on. Which is a shame, because it feels like it might be important to understand.
by danielfalbo | 2025-12-20 09:49:59+00:00
> There are certain tasks, like improving a given program for speed, for instance, where in theory the model can continue to make progress with a very clear reward signal for a very long time.

This makes me think: I wonder if Goodhart's law[1] may apply here. I wonder if, for instance, optimizing for speed may produce code that is faster but harder to understand and extend. Should we care or would it be ok for AI to produce code that passes all tests and is faster? Would the AI become good at creating explanations for humans as a side effect?

And if Goodhard's law doesn't apply, why is it? Is it because we're only doing RLVR fine-tuning on the last layers of the network so all the generality of the pre-training is not lost? And if this is the case, could this be a limitation in not being able to be creative enough to come up with move 37?

[1] https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-12-20 09:50:01+00:00
This seems like the wrong end of the system to fix the problem. Someone saying "we don't log your IP address" isn't something you can easily verify, so the promise doesn't mean much because if they suck they're just going to lie about it.

What you need instead is to make it easy and common for people to use browsers that resist fingerprinting, VPNs/Tor, custom email addresses per-account, etc. Because then instead of claiming to not log your information, they simply do not have it.

The biggest thing we need is a better way to pay someone over the internet without them knowing who you are.
by zeristor | 2025-12-20 09:50:06+00:00
From Gridlock to Grid Power: The Promise of Superconducting Cables

https://ee.eng.cam.ac.uk/index.php/2025/09/22/from-gridlock-...

An interesting article, I’ll download the IoP report and maybe read it.

But it talks about doing the hard work to improve the Technological Readiness Level from 7 to 9. Although these cables need rare earths so might be problematic.
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-12-20 09:50:08+00:00
So my understanding is, what Mullvad is to VPNs, and what Tarsnap is to S3 (kinda), Servury is to entire VMs. It's a prepaid model, you get an account identifier, and that's basically it.

This is very cool. I have wondered for a very long time why such a site does not exist. What pops to mind is that you could get better unit economics reselling really small VMs to the privacy obsessed. I know some netizens who would pay a dollar a month for, say, a tiny NetBSD VM and 64 MB of RAM to serve their tiny static demoscene website of yore. There are some real wizards of there.

Not sure if that's in your roadmap but definitely something to consider in this space.
by andai | 2025-12-20 09:50:10+00:00
I first got into agentic properly with GLM coding plan (it's like $2/month), but I found myself very consistently asking Claude to make the code more elegant and readable. At which point I realized I was being silly and just switched to Claude code.

(GLM etc. get surprisingly close with good prompting but... $0.60/day to not worry about that is a no brainer.)
by aspenmayer | 2025-12-20 09:50:30+00:00
I'm not the person you asked, but it appears to be a direct quote from this page, previously on HN:

Exploring a space-based, scalable AI infrastructure system design - https://research.google/blog/exploring-a-space-based-scalabl... - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45813267 (Nov 4 2025, 44 points, 73 comments)

> Project Suncatcher is a moonshot exploring a new frontier: equipping solar-powered satellite constellations with TPUs and free-space optical links to one day scale machine learning compute in space.
by fakedang | 2025-12-20 09:50:37+00:00
Algotrading.

I don't actively write code these days though, as there are better quants working with me, but I do take the time to go through our strats every day and stress test them. Our codebase today is also wildly different from the one I started writing for initially 5 years back, so no point in me staying back and pulling down the rest of the team behind with me. So nowadays I mostly play around with building small toolkits for internal use within the company.
by metalman | 2025-12-20 09:51:06+00:00
essentialy no choice in putting infrastructure underground as the cost's and delays in putting a power corridor right of way through is unthinkable, they will almost certainly be useing old established locations for transformer substations that have the required set backs and other services, which must from time to time, come to the frenzied attention of developers, agast ,that they cant relieve someone of this "vacant" land
by ncruces | 2025-12-20 09:51:16+00:00
Considering Google Classrooms is used by a significant percentage of public schools, I have no idea why you think Portugal is special here.

Also, given the frequency of families having issues with the Cuco MDM used to lock out the Windows computers they handed to kids during COVID, and what kids do which such computers, I'm doubly unsure it was a smart idea to offer shitty Windows laptops vs. shitty Chromebooks.

Schools around the world give kids Chromebooks (or iPads) because they're harder to fuck and easier to unfuck. Windows still sucks at this, and no one came up with a coherent — locked down — Linux platform to achieve the same.
by panda-giddiness | 2025-12-20 09:52:14+00:00
Even this is too charitable. A short timeline of January 2025 would be something like this:

- Jan 16: The Supreme Court issues its opinion, upholding the legality of the TikTok ban. The Biden administration declines to enforce it, preferring to let the incoming Trump administration handle the matter.

- Jan 18: TikTok voluntarily turns off its services. Google and Apple remove the app from their respective app stores. Trump declares on social media that he will sign an executive order "to extend the period of time before the law’s prohibitions take effect".

- Jan 19: TikTok restores it service after being assured by the incoming Trump administration that TikTok would not face penalties.

- Jan 20: The Trump administration signs the aforementioned executive order.

However, Trump's executive order was untimely (the law already should have gone into effect), and at any rate it's dubious that the executive order would've been legal regardless. The TikTok ban (PAFACA) had a specific provision for when an extension could be granted. From Wikipedia:

> The president may grant a one-time extension of the divestiture deadline by as long as 90 days if a path to a qualified divestiture has been identified, "significant" progress has been made to executing the divestiture, and legally binding agreements for facilitating the divestiture are in place.

Notably, none of these requirements had been met. There were no identified buyers; there were no binding agreements. The Trump administration's refusal to enforce the TikTok ban might have been the first lawless act of the second administration, and it happened only within hours of Trump being sworn in.
by johndoh42 | 2025-12-20 09:52:53+00:00
... because the government is in the pocket of the big hotel chains, which are ruining the country.

Airbnb: World travelers who try to blend in. Hotel: Drunk Brits who puke all over the place.

We have 3 Airbnb flats in our house for 2 years now. Never had an issue with any of the renters; But, the lights in the stairwell are working now, the door locks work, electricity is stable, and I haven't seen a cockroach in a long time.

Meanwhile the guests from the hotel across the street keep us awake every freakin' night.

Bonus: Those 3 flats had been sitting empty for nearly 10 years, just like the other ~30 thousand flats sitting empty in the city.
by gitprolinux | 2025-12-20 09:52:57+00:00
Of Books: It's almost out of a James Bond movie that books of quality code from books aren't considered anymore (the hype being llm output) because as if its a American rival, e.g. Chinese, plot to remove the American expert as the book author of the containers of such programming knowledge.

After all, China owes America for saving it from 1960s 1970s famine and lack of jobs because of its oligarchical status quo at the time. Sadly, America is now in its own form of oligarchical status quo and may need the saving that China was afforded to.
by honley | 2025-12-20 09:53:10+00:00
I got tired of spending hours configuring Prometheus + Grafana every time I needed basic server monitoring.

So I built CatOps — one curl command, 15 seconds, done.

curl -sfL https://get.catops.app/install.sh | bash

What you get: - CPU, memory, disk, network metrics - Auto-detection of services (postgres, redis, nginx, docker, etc.) - Alerts via Telegram/Email/Slack - Logs collection and search - AI assistant to analyze issues

Stack: Go agent (~50MB RAM), Python/FastAPI backend, ClickHouse for metrics, React frontend.

50 teams using it now. Free for 1 server.

https://catops.app

Feedback welcome - especially on what's missing for your use case.
by andai | 2025-12-20 09:54:17+00:00
I have only compared Claude Code with Crush and a tool of my own design. In my experience, Claude code is optimized for giant codebases and long tasks. It loves launching dozens of agents in parallel. So it's a bit heavy for smaller, surgical stuff, though it works decent for that too.

If you mostly have small codebases that fit in context, or make many small changes interactively, it's not really great for that (though it can handle it too). It'll just be spending most of its time poking around the codebase, when the whole thing should have just been loaded... (Too bad there's no small repo mode. I made startup hook that just dumps cat dir into context, but yeah, should be a toggle.)
by mort96 | 2025-12-20 09:54:18+00:00
I may be prematurely judgemental here but I just can not take a project named "floorp" seriously.

Your second paragraph is more important though: none of these let's call them Firefox distributions are proper forks. They're not developed by teams who could develop and maintain a browser independent of Mozilla. I believe that's what your parent comment means by a "serious fork". Floorp and Waterfox and LibreWolf are not that.
by user_timo | 2025-12-20 09:54:18+00:00
Built a small macOS memory benchmark for Apple Silicon.

Measures cache latency (pointer chase) and memory bandwidth (read/write/copy). ARM64-native.

Looking for feedback on methodology and results across different M-series chips. I have been able to test this on M4 Mac mini and M1 MacBook Air.

Can be installed with Brew.
by duskdozer | 2025-12-20 09:54:33+00:00
I've noticed some of this in recent months. I've also noticed people editing out some of the popular tells, like replacing em-dashes with commas, or at least I think so, because of odd formatting/errors in places where it sounds like the LLM would have used a dash.

But at this point I'm not confident that I'm not failing to identify a lot of LLM-generated text and not making false positives.
by Gabrys1 | 2025-12-20 09:55:21+00:00
Having clocks synchronized between your servers is extremely useful. For example, having a guarantee that the timestamp of arrival of a packet (measured by the clock on the destination) is ALWAYS bigger than the timestamp recorded by the sender is a huge win, especially for things like database scaling.

For this though you need to go beyond NTP into PTP which is still usually based on GPS time and atomic clocks
by maltelau | 2025-12-20 09:56:48+00:00
Water vapour absorbs the thermal radiation (heat trying to escape earth) better than it absorbs sunlight (heat trying to enter earth). Therefore, the more water vapour in the atmosphere, the stronger the greenhouse effect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_absorption_by_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_effect
by flowerthoughts | 2025-12-20 09:57:33+00:00
> If you live in a country where freedoms and due process are respected, there is no point in hiding, UNLESS you can really argue that due process and freedoms are eroding, but that's a different debate.

This assumes usage of collected data stays the same forever. But regime changes do happen, and once the data has been allowed to be collected, you have no power. I think Trumpland was once considered a state where freedoms and due process were once respected.
by WebToolsCaE | 2025-12-20 09:58:27+00:00
If you’ve completed a Pathmind course and want to display your certificate on LinkedIn, the process is straightforward: 1. Finish the Course – Complete all modules and assessments. 2. Get Certificate Link – Once finished, Pathmind provides a link to your certificate. 3. Add to LinkedIn – Open your LinkedIn profile → “Add profile section” → “Recommended” → “Licenses & certifications.” 4. Enter Details – Add your certificate link, ID (if available), and the issuing organization (Pathmind). 5. Done – Your certificate is now visible on your profile.
by KronisLV | 2025-12-20 09:58:28+00:00
> App download event: A fixed fee (subject to periodic adjustments) per install based on the app category of the linked external app being installed. The linked app category must be declared as part of transaction reporting.

> Games: $3.65

> Apps: $2.85

Isn't this dangerously similar to what Unity did with their Runtime Fee? You know, the thing that soured public opinion of them so bad that a lot of devs quit using it altogether? Or is this more of a Google holding everyone hostage situation?
by defrost | 2025-12-20 09:58:45+00:00
London underground is prime real estate - to find a level and avoid

* the recent new massive and extensive sewer tunnels,

* the secret basement extensions of the ultra rich, multi story archival storage, vaults, etc,

* the new underground tunnels (rail / subway for US readers),

* old roman and other buried but still 'conserved' architecture,

* crypts, graves, plague pits,

* WWII UXB's etc. etc

is a hell of a 3D needle to thread - there's > 2,000 years of urban layering in that small area.
by pjmlp | 2025-12-20 10:00:21+00:00
I am Portuguese, have family ties with teachers still into the active, I guess.

That kind of stuff is mostly US school system, schools in countries that go with USA into G7 meetings, or wealthy enough for that kind of stuff maybe.

Not every country has the pleasure to enjoy a school system swimming in money to offer computers to kids, in every single school.

Not even during COVID was every Portuguese family granted the pleasure to have a device offered to them, some lucky ones did, a large majority only saw them on the news, and as usual the burden was on the family to come up with a solution to all their kids attending the various school levels.

And lets not even go to such great stuff like Magalhães, e-escola, and who got to profit from it.
by andai | 2025-12-20 10:01:24+00:00
The way to make AI not sound like ChatGPT is to use Claude.

I realized that's what bothered me. It's not "oh my god, they used ChatGPT." But "oh my god, they couldn't even be bothered to use Claude."

It'll still sound like AI, but 90% of the cringe is gone.

If you're going to use AI for writing, it's just basic decency to use the one that isn't going to make your audience fly into a fit of rage every ten seconds.

That being said, I feel very self conscious using emdashes in current decade ;)
by rkomorn | 2025-12-20 10:02:19+00:00
My anecdata is different: the Airbnb one floor above us in our last place earned us a visit from the cops (due to a misunderstanding about the definition of "bottom floor") due to how frequently they were occupied by people either having parties there or coming back from parties very loudly at all times of night.

The same floor/direction misunderstanding also got us so many incorrect doorbell rings that we ended up muting it at the cost of risking missed deliveries.

Whatever magical behavior these AirBnB guests have, they can still take it to a hotel.
by dns_snek | 2025-12-20 10:02:20+00:00
Wireshark is extremely powerful and useful but it lives in a completely different category of tools. It's not a proxy so it can't modify traffic or inspect HTTPS [1], it's used to passively capture and analyze general network traffic and troubleshoot networking issues.

[1] without an elaborate setup, your program needs to be instructed to dump TLS encryption keys for Wireshark to read
by adastra22 | 2025-12-20 10:02:31+00:00
Mostly scientific stuff like astronomical observations — e.g. did this event observed at one telescope coincide with neutrinos detected at this other observatory.

Note I didn’t say they are more important than the Internet. That’s a value judgement in any case. I said that NIST level 0 NTp servers are more important to these use cases than they are to the Internet.
by bfkwlfkjf | 2025-12-20 10:03:52+00:00
Speaking of mullvad. I recently learned about mullvad browser, which is basically tor browser minus connecting via the your network. This is interesting because the tor project has put the most effort into fingerprinting resistance. If you care about privacy and you have a customized browser, you're likely uniquely finger printable [1]. If you don't want to connect via tor, there's no excuse not to use the mullvad browser. (Doesn't require you to use mullvad VPN; comes with the mullvad plugin, disabled by default, to optionally use mullvad encrypted DNS. Last point, I wrote to the tor project and asked "is it possible to use tor browser minus tor network", and they responded "that's the mullvad browser", so this isn't just my recommendation)

[1] https://coveryourtracks.eff.org
by ssl-3 | 2025-12-20 10:05:56+00:00
That's a ton of good information about the YMF724.

You know, I don't think I ever played with the synth on that card at all. I was even a bit surprised earlier: I was trying to jog my memory about what the card looked like, and found the XG branding again (a quarter of a century after ignoring it the first time) and said to myself "Oh! That. I probably should have played around with that."

But MIDI music was never really my thing. I'm not much of a musician, and I found myself enjoying downloaded mod/669/s3m a lot more than any of the various notation-only formats. The games with revered synth work just never really crossed my radar. By the time I got into shooters, CD-ROM was definitely a well-entrenched concept -- along with PCM soundtracks. I still have the shareware Quake CD that I bought from a local record shop (which they only stocked because Trent Reznor did the soundtrack -- software wasn't their thing at all).

In the 1990s, I really hoped that SPDIF would become a common audio interface, with preamps and receivers and source devices (like computer sound cards) using it for IO. One cable. Perfect signal integrity using digital audio and affordable fiber optics -- at home! In a marketplace that was driven by buzzwords, it could have been a huge hit.

Instead: Even though it was common on things like MD, DCC, and unobtanium DAT gear, it was barely known amongst regular folks -- and receivers with digital IO didn't really become common until DVD.

But CRTs ruled during the peak DVD era, and many of those TVs had perfectly-adequate speakers for casual use that folks were content with. So the likelihood of them just happening to have two bits of kit in the same pile that could talk together with SPDIF was always very low, even then.

It seemed very much like a Catch-22: People didn't know about it because it was uncommon, and manufacturers didn't take it seriously because people didn't know enough about it to select gear that used it. It thus defaulted to remaining uncommon.

Its greatest market success seems to have been its utility in plugging a sound bar into a flat TV with terrible built-in speakers. Which is great, and all: It's a perfectly-cromulent use. But that started a decade or two too late.

I myself didn't own a CD player with an SPDIF output until 2012 or so, which is just bizarre in retrospect. What's even weirder is that it was an $8,000 Krell (that someone gave to me), and I found that I consistently preferred the sound of its internal DAC over that of anything else that I could connect it to digitally.... so I wound up never using the SPDIF outputs anyway. (But as experiences go, that's definitely in the realm of an outlier.)
by fleebee | 2025-12-20 10:07:03+00:00
> The fundamental challenge in AI for the next 20 years is avoiding extinction.

That's a weird thing to end on. Surely it's worth more than one sentence if you're serious about it? As it stands, it feels a bit like the fearmongering Big Tech CEOs use to drive up the AI stocks.

If AI is really that powerful and I should care about it, I'd rather hear about it without the scare tactics.
by glkindlmann | 2025-12-20 10:11:40+00:00
Of the various internet .+P, NTP is one I never learned about as a student, so now I'm looking at its web page [1] by its creator David L. Mills (1938-2024). I've found one video of him giving a retrospective of his extensive internet work; he talks about NTP at 34:51 [2] and later at 56:26 [3].

[1] https://www.eecis.udel.edu/~mills/ntp.html

[2] https://youtu.be/08jBmCvxkv4?si=WXJCV_v0qlZQK3m4&t=2092

[3] https://youtu.be/08jBmCvxkv4?si=K80ThtYZWcOAxUga&t=3386