MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by versteegen | 2025-12-23 09:57:47+00:00
Yes, it's a great deal especially because you get access to such a wide range of models, including some free ones, and they only rate limit for a couple minutes at a time, not 5 hours. And if you go over the monthly limit you can just buy more at $0.04 a request instead of needing to switch to a higher plan. The big downside is the 128k context windows.

Lately Copilot have been getting access to new frontier models the same day they release elsewhere. That wasn't the case months ago (GPT 5.1). But annoyingly you have to explicitly enable each new model.
by ignoramous | 2025-12-23 09:57:55+00:00
> Google/hyperscalers as input to Spanner or other global databases?

Think Google might have rolled their own clock sources and corrections.

Ex: Sundial, https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi20/presentation/li-yul... / https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-research2023-media/pubto... (pdf)
by killme2008 | 2025-12-23 09:58:28+00:00
This thread overlaps a lot with "Observability 2.0 and the Database for It" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43789625). The core claim there is: treat logs/spans as structured "wide events", and build a storage/query layer that can handle high-cardinality events so many metrics become derived views rather than pre-modeled upfront. It also argues the hard part isn't "dump it in S3", it’s indexing/queryability + cost control at scale.

In an agentic AI world this pressure gets worse: telemetry becomes more JSON-ish, more high-cardinality (tool names, model/version, prompt/template IDs, step graphs), and more bursty, so pre-modeling every metric up front breaks down faster.
by ErroneousBosh | 2025-12-23 09:58:45+00:00
> (at a little backend complexity cost: now you've got the Arduino IDE around, hope it doesn't break!)

Doesn't really matter if it does break; just use gcc and a Makefile like you would for any other firmware.

You probably want to replace the Arduino libraries with your own ones eventually anyway, because there's so much cruft in there that you're never going to use.
by Canada | 2025-12-23 09:58:56+00:00
Yes, we need to openly discuss this. It's beyond ridiculous, and they are openly talking about their plans to censor us, which is exactly what Larry is doing. Fuck him.

And look at what they're talking about in Australia right now. This just isn't right, it makes me sick.

We, the majority, are being taken advantage of in the most disgusting and cynical way by this small group of terrible people and our traitor leaders who they bribe and blackmail, and I'm sick and tired of it, and it's long past time we stand up for our own interests.
by Arn_Thor | 2025-12-23 09:59:42+00:00
The takeover was deftly executed, with the kind of patience only a government not concerned with elections can exhibit. While local elections came and went, and the opposition parties valiantly fought in the public sphere, the institutional takeover was slow but steady. That is the only way the pro-China powers in government were able to outlast and suppress the protests in 2019. The government faced unprecedented public opposition, but enough people at all levels of government feared for their livelihoods that neither the bureaucracy nor the police reached a critial mass of sympathizers.

Another crucial factor that's part of the CCP's victory in HK is that China inherited a police force essentially structured as a colonial occupying force. Police staff get benefits that include segregated housing (such as the West Kowoon Disciplined Services Quarters), which maintains morale in the ranks and allows those so inclined to live quite separately from the rest of the populace.
by montroser | 2025-12-23 10:00:14+00:00
It's hardly an end-run around VCS to specify an external dependency's VCS sha, and resolve that at build time.

But okay, let's go further and use git submodules so that package.json is out of the picture. Even in that case we have the same problem.

Or, let's go even further and vendor the dependency so it is now copied into our source code. Even in that case too, we still have the same problem.

The dependency has been malicious all along, so if we use it in any way the game is already over.
by georgyo | 2025-12-23 10:00:45+00:00
In 2007 several people and I started NYC Resistor, a hacker space in Brooklyn, completely unaware of this resistors in New Jersey.

It was over 10 years later that any of us heard of this much older resistor. It's kinda it funny how similar we are to them, nearly shared a name, and completely unaware of each other.

The world needs more places where people can explore their curiosity of how things work.
by xg15 | 2025-12-23 10:01:44+00:00
What's the deal with that upside-down 2 on the title page? I first thought it would be one of the two additional digits, but those are visible on the "clock face" circle on the first page and look nothing like it.

(or are upside-down digits their way to mark icky base-10 numbers if they have to write them?)

Edit: ah, they explain it on page 23.
by epolanski | 2025-12-23 10:01:53+00:00
I'm just talking about my experience as a former researcher.

If you spend 10 years of your life working on dye sensitized solar cells and perovskite, the number of positions for those roles in your area/country might be limited or non existent and at the same time you may no longer find any funding at your current position.

Thus you need to look for jobs outside your sphere of conpetence and for those your PhD may not be that useful, if not even a malus.

I have a friend who has a PhD in applied mathematics, has spent the last 5 years of his life on deep and machine learning problems, and he's applied to several positions as an ML researcher and his CV is not considered often due to the lack of professional, non academic experience.

And we talking the very booming ML sector for someone who understands the ins and outs of the math and architecture behind the models (area: UK and northern Europe).
by latexr | 2025-12-23 10:02:08+00:00
This argument is getting old. Just because you don’t like something, it doesn’t mean everyone agrees and will take the same shortcuts you do. Fortunately not everyone in the world has the same disregard for their own work, and many of us understand the signal it sends when you’re unwilling to even write your own instructions.

If you want your READMEs sloppily written by LLMs, that’s your prerogative. Just like it’s the prerogative of everyone visiting your repo and bumping into a slop README to decide if they want to even give your tool a second look before abandoning it.

Slop READMEs suggest slop code. Soon everyone who’ll even look at your code are other sloppers and (if it ever gets popular) malicious actors who’ll exploit it in an afternoon because no users understand anything the code does.
by porker | 2025-12-23 10:02:58+00:00
> They’ve dropped the ball over the past five years. Part of me thinks it was the war in Ukraine that did them in.

I'm also a subsciber for over a decade, and came here to say the same thing. I don't know how their teams were distributed across eastern Europe and Russia but the war is when I pinpoint quality declining.

I've kept my subscription for now as for PHP and Symfony nothing comes close, but I'm actively looking to move away.
by Arn_Thor | 2025-12-23 10:03:41+00:00
Minor blip? First one million people marching. Then a week later nearly two. Street battles between police and protesters supported by many thousands of people. I saw a video of a guy being shoved out of a high-rise window. No doubt that was ruled "suicide" too, but it never broke out as a news story. A protester was shot but not killed by police. It's a miracle more lives weren't lost. To say it was a "blip" betrays a profound lack of understanding and knowledge about the events.
by bravetraveler | 2025-12-23 10:05:01+00:00
Heck, I'll lower the bar! I'm (mid-30s American) not so worried about 'safe'. A certain amount of danger is fine. Desirable, even, if it meant I could live in my home town, not in an unfamiliar city.

I could buy half of a house, right now, cash. I don't, because the moment I do, I'll be forced to sell/move/whatever. Again. Where I am [for work] and where I want to be are forever at odds. Leaders have found it fashionable to bundle us all together. Spin the wheel and see if we hit RTO, let's bid against each other [again].

All to say, I'd give half my salary to never negotiate it or my location, again. Clearly not an option, so what to do? Endure and save. You won't see me buying toys or status symbols, that's for sure. At Will employment, meet At Will spending.
by businessmate | 2025-12-23 10:05:06+00:00
Artificial intelligence systems now influence how organizations are represented to customers, partners, regulators, and the public. This influence often occurs outside the organization’s control, visibility, or ability to correct in real time.
The primary risk is no longer technical error. It is misrepresentation with potential legal, financial, and reputational consequences, occurring without preserved evidence.
This memo outlines:
1. The nature of the emerging risk
2. Why existing controls are insufficient
3. Why audit-grade evidence is becoming mandatory
4. A governance checklist for board-level oversight
Show HN: A place to make predictions that are worth surviving in the simulation
by danilofiumi | 2025-12-23 10:05:13+00:00
A couple of weeks ago I was listening to a conversation with Elon Musk where he mentioned something that stuck with me.

At Tesla, they don’t run every possible simulation. They focus on the ones that produce real signal.
The branches that generate learning. The boring ones get pruned because they teach nothing.

That idea kept rattling around in my head.

If we take the simulation hypothesis seriously (as he does), maybe the same applies more broadly: only timelines that produce learning are worth exploring. The ones where people take clear positions, make bold calls, and are willing to be wrong in public.

I built YourPrediction as a small experiment in that direction.

It’s a simple platform where people publish concrete predictions (for example, end-of-year takes), and then we track what actually happens over time.

There’s no algorithmic feed optimization or engagement tricks here, just predictions, outcomes, and discussion around why things played out the way they did.

At a minimum, it’s a tool to help us learn faster.
At best, maybe it nudges us toward more interesting intellectual branches.

Happy to answer questions and iterate based on your thoughts.
by Someone | 2025-12-23 10:05:59+00:00
> Rust has only succeeded in making a Memory Safe Language without garbage collection via significant complexity (that was a trade-off). No one really knows a sane way to do it otherwise, unless you also want to drop the general-purpose systems programming language requirement.

> I'll be Very Interested if they find a new unexplored point in the design space, but at the moment I remain skeptical.

They’re the somewhat sane “don’t allow dynamic allocations; just dimension all your arrays large enough” approach from the 1950s (Fortran, COBOL).

A variant could have “you can only allocate globals and must allocate each array exactly once before you ever access it”. That would allow dimensioning them from command line arguments or sizes of input files.

The type system then would have “pointer to an element of foo” types (could be implemented old-style as indices)

Yes, that would limit things, but with today’s 64-bit address spaces I think it could work reasonably well for many systems programming tasks.

It definitely would be significantly less complex than rust.
by ggsp | 2025-12-23 10:07:58+00:00
If you are not using iCloud, you could try activating it (you get 5 gigs for free IIRC) and switching off everything besides the Voice Memos app. Then you should see the recording on your Mac, and should be able to export it from there. Definitely a shitty workaround, but you might be able to make it work?
by cggvn | 2025-12-23 10:08:38+00:00
Of course I’m disturbed by both the proliferation of drones and our administration developing military equipment for a war department instead of defense or rescue.

However, I unfortunately am well-aware of a company that made these parts on U.S. soil.

I’d be wary of ANY manufacturer of significance within the U.S. that has never had and will never have foreign ties or be influenced by foreign powers that the U.S. in engaged against.

The manufacturer I’m aware of was a shitshow with everything that would be important to the military, except for the actual making of the parts, which they were excellent at, at least in certain parts of the company.

So because of this, I have to assume that this is a fundamentally ignorant plan to try to nationalize manufacturing for defense, and I’d expect nothing less from our current administration.
by littlestymaar | 2025-12-23 10:09:15+00:00
30-years old calculators are still good enough for basic arithmetic and in fact even in 2025 people have one emulated on their phone that isn't more powerful than the original, and people still use them routinely.

If Claude 3 Sonnet was good enough to be your daily driver last year, surely something that is as powerful is good enough to be your daily driver today. It's not like the amount of work you must do to get paid doubled over the past year or anything.

Some people just feel the need to live always on the edge for no particular reason.
by wiz21c | 2025-12-23 10:09:33+00:00
Belgium is not exactly low on corruption...

One hundred kilometers from there, there is this station: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li%C3%A8ge-Guillemins_railway_...

by the same architect, and budget exploded as well...

So either local governments or Calatrava is messing around :-/
by delusional | 2025-12-23 10:10:00+00:00
There's a bunch of caveats to that story. At one point (in one patch I recall) they got tired of passing around 3 floats separately for x, y, and z all the time, so they did what any reasonable programmer would do and created a "coordinate" structure.

This created one of the worst performing partches of the game ever, and they had to back all the way out. They ended up just passing the separate floats around again.

My takeaway is that GC doesn't have to be slow, it just imposes a bunch of new constraints on what can be fast.
by amluto | 2025-12-23 10:10:06+00:00
For most well designed projects, a source tarball can be generated cleanly from the source tree. Sure, the canonical build process goes (source tarball) -> artifact, but there’s an alternative build process (source tree) -> artifact that uses the source tarball as an intermediate.

In Python, there is a somewhat clearly defined source tarball. uv build will happily built the source tarball and the wheel from the source tree, and uv build --from <appropriate parameter here> will build the wheel from the source tarball.

And I think it’s disappointing that one uploads source tarballs and wheels to PyPI instead of uploading an attested source tree and having PyPI do the build, at least in simple cases.

In traditional C projects, there’s often some script in the source tree that runs it into the source tarball tree (autogen.sh is pretty common). There is no fundamental reason that a package repository like Debian or Fedora’s couldn’t build from the source tree and even use properly pinned versions of autotools, etc. And it’s really disappointing that the closest widely used thing to a proper C/C++ hermetic build system is Dockerfile, and Dockerfile gets approximately none of the details right. Maybe Nix could do better? C and C++ really need something like Cargo.
by foldr | 2025-12-23 10:10:25+00:00
> The human-designed architecture of an LLM makes no such prediction; but after training, the overall system including the learned weights absolutely does, or else it couldn't generate valid language.

It makes a prediction about whatever language(s) are in the training data, but it doesn’t make any (substantial) predictions about general constraints on human languages. It really seems that you’re missing the absolutely fundamental goal of Chomsky’s research program here. Remember that whole “universal grammar” thingy?

> -I'm an expert in the structure of the Japanese language, but I'm unable to hold a basic conversation. Would you not feel some doubt?

I expect anyone learning Japanese as a second language will get a chuckle out of this one. It’s in fact a common scenario. You can learn a lot about the grammar of a language, but conversation requires the ability to use that knowledge immediately and fluidly in a wide variety of situations. It is like the difference between “knowing how to solve a differential equation” and being able to answer 50 questions within an hour in a physics exam.

> I see your statement that Chomsky isn't attempting to model the "many non-linguistic cognitive systems", but those don't seem to cause the LLM any trouble.

Of course they don’t, because researchers creating LLMs are (in the vast majority of cases) not attempting to model any particular cognitive system; they have engineering goals, not scientific ones. You seem to be stuck in the view that Chomsky is somehow trying and completely failing to do the thing that LLMs do successfully. This certainly makes for a good straw man (if Chomsky had the same goals, then yeah, he never got anywhere), but it’s a misunderstanding of his research program.

> "he is deliberately choosing not to produce any result evaluable by a person who hasn't spent years studying his theories"

You could say this of many perfectly respectable fields. Andrew Wiles has not produced any result evaluable by me or by almost anyone else. It would certainly take me a lot more than “a few years” of study to evaluate his work.

I’m afraid there are no intellectual shortcuts. If you want to evaluate Chomsky’s work, you will have to at least read it, and maybe even think about it a bit too! It seems a bit churlish to whine about that. All you are being deprived of by opting out of this time investment is the opportunity to make informed criticisms of his work on the internet.

(The good news is that generative linguistics is actually pretty accessible, and one year of part time study would probably be enough to get the lay of the land.)
by Arn_Thor | 2025-12-23 10:11:21+00:00
And to most Hong Kongers (at least judging by the last local election after the 2019 protests), anone who collaborated with pro-mainland forces to kill one-country-two-systems and stifle the free speech guaranteed under the handover could be considered traitors. You know what would settle Hong Kong's status once and for all? Free and fair elections. Then the people could choose to align with the mainland, or not. But I have a hunch you wouldn't be so keen on that.
by nextaccountic | 2025-12-23 10:11:36+00:00
Oh ok, thanks.

It would be so cool if LLMs could get the type of a variable when it's unclear (specially in languages with overloading and whatnot). Or could get autocomplete if they get stuck with a code. Really I think that agents and LSP should be hybrid, and maybe the agent could inform the LSP server of some things like things to warn (IDE diagnostics could be driven by a combination of LSP and AI agents)
by whazor | 2025-12-23 10:11:44+00:00
So you cannot compare it apples to oranges. There is much more regulation in EU.

In EU there is also more consumer protection by default, so charge backs can be rejected by merchants but a consumer can easily take a merchant to court. So capping card fees is also more reasonable.

Also, when a merchant goes bankrupt and customers perform charge-backs it would involve the entire payment chain. First merchant reserves, then acquiring bank, then MasterCard/Visa, then issuing bank (customer), and lastly the customer. With lower card fees, this has impact on the merchant reserves and their risk profile. Furthermore, acquirers can add additional fees on top if needed.

You can also get lower card fees in US if you have a low risk business model.
by aprilnya | 2025-12-23 10:12:10+00:00
On the other hand, there’s been a bug open to make a simple harmless change to fix this in Android for 9 months, with no response from Google other than asking for reproduction steps as far as I can tell.

https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/371713238

Some comments on the bug accuse Google of intentionally not fixing it to make people buy Pixel Buds instead of AirPods.

I wouldn’t say that myself, but then again I also wouldn’t say that Apple intentionally violated the spec just to make AirPods not work on Android.
by ljosifov | 2025-12-23 10:12:27+00:00
I imagine - and sure hope so - everyone trains on everything else. Distillation - ofc if one has bigger/other models providing true posterior token probabilities in the (0,1) interval (a number between 0 and 1), rather than 1-hot-N targets that are '0 for 200K-sans-this-token, and 1 for the desired output token' - one should use the former instead of the latter. It's amazing how as a simple as straightforward idea should face so much resistance (paper rejected) and from the supposedly most open minded and devoted to knowing (academia) and on the wrong grounds ('will have no impact on industry'; in fact - it's had tremendous impact on industry; better rejection wd have been 'duh it is obvious'). We are not trying to torture the model and the gpu cluster to be learning from 0 - when knowledge is already available. :-)
by SZJX | 2025-12-23 10:12:36+00:00
> It demands people ask: Do you prefer Hong Kong's past? Or its future?

Such a formulation is either sheer ignorance or worse, full-on deliberate cynicism.

Hong Kong's "past" was a typical colony where the governor was appointed by the British government with no local input whatsoever, and where any assembly of more than 6 people was deemed illegal and brutally suppressed. The type of thing that people like Gandhi (who are apparently heroes in contemporary narratives) fought against throughout their lives.

The British government only started changing the laws and handing locals more political freedom and freedom of speech once they knew that Hong Kong was returning to China no matter what (surprise, surprise).

In all such propaganda you see now, they try to construct a "past" that never existed, and apparently a lot of the young generation who never experienced the old days fell for it. But the older generation would tell them outright that "Hong Kong's past" is far less rosy than what's made out to be.

It's just astonishing when you see the amount of people waving British and American flags on the streets during the protests. What kind of "fight for freedom and independence" is that? Just imagine the reaction to protesters in a US territory or a European region (Catalonia etc.) waving Russian or Chinese flags.