MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by crazygringo | 2025-12-08 13:18:24+00:00
But your assertion is merely semantic. It doesn't say anything substantive.

I could also say a motorcycle "moves forward" just like a person "moves forward". Whether we use the same or different words for same or different concepts doesn't say anything about the actual underlying similarity.

And please don't call stuff "dumb shit" here. Not appropriate for HN.
by limagnolia | 2025-12-08 13:19:11+00:00
I haven't seen that happen, maybe it does in some places.

In my hometown, we had a grocery, but it closed in the earl 90s. They didn't get another on until the lat 00s. It was open a few years, had bare shelves most of the time and convenience store level prices when they did have something. In the late 10s, a Dollar General opened... so far, it has remained open, has much better prices than the previous attempts, and is generally much better stocked. The town hasn't grown in that time. But Dollar General is existing where no one had managed to survive before.

We'll see how it goes long term.
by mbesto | 2025-12-08 13:19:18+00:00
Everything you've said so far has been pretty spot on, however the Bain report says the average fund IRR does outperform the market: https://www.bain.com/globalassets/noindex/2025/bain-report_g...

IRR comparisons admittedly get a little fuzzy since the lack of liquidity and pegging values is difficult.

You're also correct to say that VC is a subset of PE, technically speaking, colloquially it's not really. If you put VC into the whole mix, then yes the asset class sucks versus the public market. PE is often synonymous with an MBO.
by gcr | 2025-12-08 13:19:31+00:00
Your workflow is fascinating! What languages do you work in, if you don’t mind me asking?

Both git and jj have sparse checkouts these days, it sounds like you’d be into that

Do you vendor the libraries you use? Python packages typically don’t include the testing or docs in wheels uploaded to PyPI, for instance

These days in Pythonland, it’s typical to use a package manager with a lockfile that enforces build reproducibility and SHA signatures for package attestation. If you haven’t worked with tools like uv, you might like their concepts (or you might be immediately put off by their idea of hermetically isolated environments idk)
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-12-08 13:20:30+00:00
The factuality problem with LLMs isn't because they are non-deterministic or statistically based, but simply because they operate at the level of words, not facts. They are language models.

You can't blame an LLM for getting the facts wrong, or hallucinating, when by design they don't even attempt to store facts in the first place. All they store are language statistics, boiling down to "with preceding context X, most statistically likely next words are A, B or C". The LLM wasn't designed to know or care that outputting "B" would represent a lie or hallucination, just that it's a statistically plausible potential next word.
by baq | 2025-12-08 13:20:36+00:00
a repo is a repo - you're describing what is nowadays known as a 'monorepo' and it's a perfectly reasonable and desirable even exactly for the reasons you mention, except the 'distributed' part makes it very inconvenient to handle on dev boxes if it grows a lot.

in a centralized VCS there are viable CICD options like 'check the compiler binaries in' or even 'check the whole builder OS image in' which git is simply not able to handle by design and needs extensions to work around deficiencies. git winning the mindshare battle made these a bit forgotten, but they were industry standard a couple decades ago.
by mistersquid | 2025-12-08 13:20:41+00:00
> One scenario floated internally by some executives involves elevating him into the role of chief technology officer. Such a job — overseeing a wide swath of both hardware engineering and silicon technologies — would potentially make him Apple’s second-most-powerful executive.

> But that change would likely require Ternus to be promoted to CEO, a step the company may not be ready to take. And some within Apple have said that Srouji would prefer not to work under a different CEO, even with an expanded title.

Possibly, Srouji wants top seat which on its face is not crazy given the chip team's outsize successes with A (iPhone) and M (duh) series chips followed on by R (Reality), C (cellular modem), N (wireless) series, but Apple is a consumer company and a deeply technical CEO just isn't in the cards.
by jcalvinowens | 2025-12-08 13:21:16+00:00
> The Linux kernel learned this the hard way. Early 2.6 kernels used spinlocks everywhere, wasting 10-20% CPU on contended locks because preemption would stretch what should’ve been 100ns holds into milliseconds. Modern kernels use mutexes for most subsystems.

That's not accurate: the scalability improvements in Linux are a result of broadly eliminating serialization, not something as trivial as using a different locking primitive. The BKL didn't go away until 2.6.37! As much as "spinlock madness" might make a nice little story, it's just simply not true.
by level09 | 2025-12-08 13:21:22+00:00
Ha, good catch. That is an old deployment script that could use some love.

I'll work on a modern quick deploy option for ReadyKit. I have an Ansible playbook that handles single server deployments, the monolith old school approach I still prefer. It just needs a bit of cleanup before it's shareable.

Open to feature requests too. If one click deploys to Fly.io, Railway or similar would help, I can add that. Let me know what would be useful.
by pfdietz | 2025-12-08 13:21:29+00:00
> If you assume 170 wh/kg

I've wondered if thermal storage might be superior. Lower round trip efficiency if one uses resistive heating, but I think that would be ok.

Lithium hydride, heated to melting, stores something like 4 MJ/kg, more than 6x the specific energy of your assumption there (admittedly with loss on discharge due to the losses in the turbine.) If that is too expensive, graphite is another possibility, at even higher temperature.
by torginus | 2025-12-08 13:21:35+00:00
A lot of countries cracked down on merchants accepting bitcoin, and in a lot of places it's illegal to offer BTC->cash conversions without KYC.

I suspect authoritarian regimes would be the first to close this loophole. This is not theoretical - Russia did this in 2022 to stop people from offloading their rubles and/or fleeing the country with their money.
by throw0101d | 2025-12-08 13:21:39+00:00
> Not true by any means. Fiat is the tried and true way to commit crime.

Depends on the crimes, and up to certain values/volumes.

For 'consensual' transactional things for goods/services it could be useful (e.g., drug deals). But for ransom-like stuff, where one end of the 'transaction' is not thrilled with the 'deal', having to physically pick up the cash puts the perp at risk.
by DoctorOetker | 2025-12-08 13:21:45+00:00
Determinism is not the issue. Synonyms exist, there are multiple ways to express the same message.

When numeric models are fit to say scientific measurements, they do quite a good job at modeling the probability distribution. With a corpus of text we are not modeling truths but claims. The corpus contains contradicting claims. Humans have conflicting interests.

Source-aware training (which can't be done as an afterthought LoRA tweak, but needs to be done during base model training AKA pretraining) could enable LLM's to express according to which sources what answers apply. It could provide a review of competing interpretations and opinions, and source every belief, instead of having to rely on tool use / search engines.

None of the base model providers would do it at scale since it would reveal the corpus and result in attribution.

In theory entities like the European Union could mandate that LLM's used for processing government data, or sensitive citizen / corporate data MUST be trained source-aware, which would improve the situation, also making the decisions and reasoning more traceable. This would also ease the discussions and arguments about copyright issues, since it is clear LLM's COULD BE MADE TO ATTRIBUTE THEIR SOURCES.

I also think it would be undesirable to eliminate speculative output, it should just mark it explicitly:

"ACCORDING to <source(s) A(,B,C,..)> this can be explained by ...., ACCORDING to <other school of thought source(s) D,(E,F,...)> it is better explained by ...., however I SUSPECT that ...., since ...."

If it could explicitly separate the schools of thought sourced from the corpus, and also separate its own interpretations and mark them as LLM-speculated-suspicions, then we could still have the traceable references, without losing the potential novel insights LLM's may offer.
by mbesto | 2025-12-08 13:22:16+00:00
> The type of Private Equity that most here are referring to is the type that buys up existing businesses, squeezes as much money as possible out of them, and throws their desecrated corpses in the gutter.

And this type of PE represents a very small minority of what is actually considered "Private Equity". The vast majority of PE deals are about growth. This small minority of asset stripping PE groups gets the most headlines though.

Source: my firm works with ~400 PE firms.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-12-08 13:22:19+00:00
I work mostly in Swift (native Apple apps). Most of my libraries are Swift Package Manager modules.

You can see most of my stuff in GH. You need to look at the organizations, as opposed to my personal repos: https://github.com/ChrisMarshallNY#browse-away

Thanks for the heads-up. I'll give it a gander.
by sevensor | 2025-12-08 13:22:41+00:00
Hogwash. Find me a “lights out” factory. They don’t exist.

All your stuff is made by people. Often people with fancy machines, but people nonetheless. And the higher the degree of automation, the more non fungible skills you require of those people.

The pump in a vat of yogurt is cavitating. You can’t slow it down without endangering food safety. You can’t adjust the mix without affecting the final product. Somebody who understands all that needs to install a new impeller.

Stamped aircraft parts are coming off the line 500 microns thick. Somebody has to recognize that there’s a problem with the hydraulic cushion and fix it.

I could go on and on and on. There are few things I get ranty about on the internet, but pretending that physical world problems are solved by automation is one of them. You’re replacing a hard problem with another hard problem, with a side effect of higher productivity. Pretending Morlocks don’t exist doesn’t make them go away.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-12-08 13:22:47+00:00
You forget that fuel is really expensive as well. And per gwh, electricity can be quite affordable if you don't do something as silly as pay grid prices for it. The mwh price is 80–90$, so 3 gwh (3000mwh) would be about 240K $. That's a lot of money. But filling up the tank of container ship is actually more expensive. Something like 5000 tons of fuel would be what you need. At 500$ per ton, you are looking at 2.5M $ in fuel.

Sourcing the electricity cheaper than that should be possible. E.g. wind and solar are closer to 20-30$/mwh.

The main issue is harbor infrastructure and battery production and scaling this. But from a cost point of view, sacrificing 20% cargo for an order of magnitude reduction in fuel cost is going to be very tempting.

> Transoceanic battery-powered cargo vessels are probably 100 years away - fusion will arrive first.

Or 3 years according to CATL. One of you is probably a few years off. I personally think 3 years is a bit ambitious. But ten years sounds like we might see some proof of concept at least. I have a hunch that CATL is going to be very eager to deliver such a proof of concept.
by latexr | 2025-12-08 13:22:59+00:00
I’m having a hard time parsing your comment.

> Article Context-free raw #'s

What does this mean?

> no comparisons to traditional grocery stores AFAIK.

So? The article is very specific from the beginning it was an investigation on two specific chains. That different stores may also do it does not invalidate the point.

> Dad journalism

Did you mean “bad journalism”, or is “dad journalism” a term with meaning (like “armchair psychologist”)? B and D aren’t that close on a typical QWERTY, but maybe it was a wrong autocorrect?

> You should not update on this article

Also here. I’m guessing “update” was meant to be a different word? I don’t understand what you mean.

> (…) a national report found that (…)

Which is useful information, but (again) does nothing for the article’s point. Because other stores do it, it doesn’t mean it’s not worth reporting that these ones do too. The article isn’t saying these are the only chains engaging the the practice. Furthermore, the point matters because the people who need to frequent dollar stores are the ones who are already cash strapped.

The article goes deeper than just presenting some numbers, it argues for why exactly this matters, why it happens, and why it isn’t being fixed.
by dicethrowaway1 | 2025-12-08 13:23:01+00:00
For email, I've had some luck just modifying the page with JS that's either indirect or obfuscated enough that the address can't be pulled directly from it - e.g. "var email" is the address encrypted with a fixed key, the JS decrypts it and then alters the HTML.

It can obviously be bypassed by using a JS runner, but it seems to be enough of a hurdle that few spammers bother. "You don't have to outrun the bear", as it were.
by fzeroracer | 2025-12-08 13:23:20+00:00
Agreed, 3 is the one that consistently annoys me in arguments I see across the internet. The reason why our welfare programs exist and are in such a disasterous place is partially because they are literal corporate subsidies so they can buy workers at a premium. If you were to kick out the ladder and fully remove the minimum wage and remove our welfare systems it would outright collapse the economy because A) working would be a full net negative in income generation and B) corporations would crash and burn realizing that they can no longer hire workers at their subsidized price.

The sane way to approach a system like this is just UBI + socialized healthcare but I think we'll approach labor collapse before we see movement in this direction by out of touch bureaucrats.
by Yizahi | 2025-12-08 13:23:25+00:00
In practice all tokens including BTC are massively used for law evasion. Criminal don't need any fancy Monero for that, they only need to break the chain once, or maybe a few times an that is enough. That usually happens at the entry points, a criminal backe exchanges of any size will happily take your cash or digital money and exchange then for any tokens you like and vice versa. A politician then declares that his several BTC worth a few millions were "fairly mined" and nothing to see there. Or a corrupt government pays with tokens for some sanctioned wares. The whole Axis of Losers trade is propped up by mafia's USDT, which are used to trade between Axis countries and willing collaborators like India, to buy oil/rockets/chips/soldiers/anything, with central exchange in Dubai and other petrocratias.
by condiment | 2025-12-08 13:24:38+00:00
This approach kind of reminds me of taking an open-book test. Performing mandatory verification against a ground truth is like taking the test, then going back to your answers and looking up whether they match.

Unlike a student, the LLM never arrives at a sort of epistemic coherence, where they know what they know, how they know it, and how true it's likely to be. So you have to structure every problem into a format where the response can be evaluated against an external source of truth.
by yakkomajuri | 2025-12-08 13:24:45+00:00
I think Futureme "letters" are actually emails, no? Or at least they do both. I've sent my future self emails via Futureme (and they called it a "letter" on the email). Nevertheless, this is still cool, congrats OP!

I highly recommend people try this exercise. I got an email this year which I sent myself five years ago. It was tiny, and still mind-blowing.
by closewith | 2025-12-08 13:24:52+00:00
Even under the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS), where shipping companies already must buy allowances for CO2 emissions from large vessels calling at EU ports, costing roughly €80-€90 per tonne of CO2 emitted, batteries aren't remotely competitive with HFO/LSMFO.

Even if the electricity was free, the cost (both CAPEX and in mass/volume) is not close. We need an improvement in mass energy density and volumetric energy density of 200-1,000% and a complete redesign of all shipping and ports to migrate to battery transoceanic shipping.

SMRs, renewably cracked hydrocarbons, and fusion will all be mainstream beforehand.

Once again, this is one of those areas where HN commenters believe they can understand a complex industry based on Wikipedia-level stats.
by TheNewsIsHere | 2025-12-08 13:25:07+00:00
At least as of a few years ago, it was indeed still true.

Walmart is huge in online shopping as well. They use this position to essentially tell vendors what they can charge if they want the shelf space. If you don’t say “ok”, and they can reproduce your good, then they absolutely will if there’s enough demand to bother. This is one fantastic reason to hold a patent on your goods (if patentable).
by throw0101d | 2025-12-08 13:25:10+00:00
>> There is a difference between "Freedom to do something" and "Freedom to not have something happen to you". […]

> There's no difference. You can't formulate that distinction coherently.

The historian Timothy Snyder just wrote a book on the difference between Freedom from and Freedom to:

> Freedom is the great American commitment, but as Snyder argues, we have lost sight of what it means—and this is leading us into crisis. Too many of us look at freedom as the absence of state power: We think we’re free if we can do and say as we please, and protect ourselves from government overreach. But true freedom isn’t so much freedom from as freedom to—the freedom to thrive, to take risks for futures we choose by working together. Freedom is the value that makes all other values possible.

* https://timothysnyder.org/on-freedom

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Snyder

(The book was published in 2024, and there are a number of talks he gave on the subject online made during his book tour.)
by amorroxic | 2025-12-08 13:25:12+00:00
Thanks a lot for this. Also one question in case anyone could shed a bit of light: my understanding is that setting temperature=0, top_p=1 would cause deterministic output (identical output given identical input). For sure it won’t prevent factually wrong replies/hallucination, only maintains generation consistency (eq. classification tasks). Is this universally correct or is it dependent on model used? (or downright wrong understanding of course?)
by tuetuopay | 2025-12-08 13:25:43+00:00
> One issue in web hosting companies which I see is that to get support through ticket, you need a login page and you cannot complete the login process until you sign up with a credit card

> That literally annoyed me so much even on something like hetzner.

In one word: fraud. I've worked at a company similar to Hetzner, and the "add a credit card first" is the single most effective way to weed out 99% of abusers. People that will each up swaths of compute and mine crypto, ruining the service for everyone. Or hosting CSAM material. Or participating in botnets. Or sending spam. All those makes both the company AND the clients suffer.

You still get the occasional Pakistani bank that allows the emission of unlimited credit cards for fraudsters or the stolen cards (stripe goes a long way for this), but it simply makes the business bearable.

So yeah, we were not thrilled to enforce CC for signup. Believe it or not, even marketing or sales hated it, because it introduces friction in the signup tunnel.

As to re: logged in to open tickets, it is a necessity to avoid customer getting their account stolen. As a customer you receive fake "change your password now!" emails, as a company you receive fake "i've lost my password!" emails. That's the sad way the world is right now. Account theft for hosting providers is a real thing, because the stakes can be very very high.
by gcr | 2025-12-08 13:26:07+00:00
See there are users who like Liquid Glass, just as there are users who like TouchID. A lot of Apple’s best work turned out to be quite polarizing at the time.

iOS 7’s design language was almost universally panned, but if it were “the wrong decision,” other phones wouldn’t have adopted similar design language. Material appeared just a year later in 2014. It wasn’t bad, it was just arbitrary.

(“I like Liquid Glass! I like Liquid Glass!” I insist as i slowly shrink down into the size of a corn cob)
by saubeidl | 2025-12-08 13:26:16+00:00
Again, I would recommend you familiarize yourself with the Paradox of Tolerance, written up by an Austrian philosopher after the horrors of WW2. Honestly, the entire book - The Open Society and its Enemies - might be a good read.

We've been here before. We learned our lesson. We can't wait for Americans to catch up.
by tialaramex | 2025-12-08 13:26:22+00:00
So, people start pretty early with rafts. A raft isn't a boat it's just a collection of stuff which floats ie is buoyant - so, with care, you can board the raft and cross a stretch of water without swimming, which is convenient. Boats incrementally improve on this by having a distinct "inside" of the boat which needn't be buoyant, separated from the outside by waterproofing. A canoe or a coracle would be examples of boats you can easily invent once you've seen rafts.

Most easy to invent types of boat are great if there are no waves. On a river there are basically never waves (yes rapids exist, no that's not common)

However at sea waves are commonplace. Situations where waves are minimal are extremely rare, usually occurring seasonally, when tides are smaller than usual and weather is calm. Sea Lion (the never attempted German invasion of mainland Britain) was predicated on absolutely calm sea because it would have used towed river barges to land troops. If there's a moderate sea but you green light the operation anyway, all your infantry drown and you've just lost the war immediately.

To be successful at sea you want even more buoyancy, to put the top of the waterproof outer parts of the boat above the waves, and you probably also want a keel, rather than having the vessel's bottom flat and sort of resting on the water which won't work well with waves. None of this is impossible, or even especially difficult with quite ancient technology, but it's not trivial, you definitely won't go from rafts to ocean-going freight transport in one attempt.
by tomhow | 2025-12-08 13:27:31+00:00
We just banned b16m.

Several users have particular aspects of HN they pay a lot of attention to. It doesn't warrant personal attacks or the use of snarky epithets. We often find it helpful when they alert things to us, but we don't always accept the action they advocate. It's no big deal. If you think any of their comments are in breach of the guidelines, you can flag them and if others do the same, their comments may be killed. Or if they're not breaking the guidelines but you disagree with their comment, you can just downvote and/or reply explaning why you think they're wrong.
by skeledrew | 2025-12-08 13:27:36+00:00
> a serf class

Not possible once we pass a some point in global automation, say (arbitrarily) 95%. The financial flows would've ceased to exist by then with the vast majority of humans being unable to contribute value, and hence having no earned income to participate in markets. And there's no deliberate prevention or slowing as the race is global and highly competitive at the political level (the US is very afraid of China getting (too far) ahead).
by sweezyjeezy | 2025-12-08 13:27:41+00:00
You could make an LLM deterministic if you really wanted to without a big loss in performance (fix random seeds, make MoE batching deterministic). That would not fix hallucinations.

I don't think using deterministic / stochastic as a diagnostic is accurate here - I think that what we're really talking is about some sort of fundamental 'instability' of LLMs a la chaos theory.