MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jasonmarks_ | 2025-12-19 23:46:43+00:00
No, not really. If you are just looking to work with the data you want to read about extracting from grib2 format. One of the faster ways off the ground is to use the Pywgrib2_s python package and iterate against the model files using python to extract the fields that are interesting. I have a container on docker hub that has pywgrib compiled with all its dependencies if you want to tinker.

pywgrib https://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/people/lxu/cookbook/a... containerized https://hub.docker.com/repository/docker/jmarks213/container...
by throwawaySOMod | 2025-12-19 23:46:57+00:00
I'm a Stack Overflow elected moderator (one of these users: https://stackoverflow.com/users?tab=moderators)

First, a disclaimer: I do not speak for other elected moderators, nor for Stack Exchange Inc. My views are my own.

Site traffic has been declining for a long time and that's not a mystery. Empirically, the rise of Large Language Models has sped up the decline or at least did not reverse the trend. This is both good and bad. Good because LLM's capture the vast majority of questions that would be quickly closed — underspecified, unclear, duplicate, not actually about programming, and so on. This increases the signal-to-noise ratio and average usefulness of SO questions. Bad because of all the implications of declining traffic that everyone can imagine.

Is it dead? No. In fact, SO has a great opportunity to specialize in answering questions that LLMs cannot answer (bleeding edge technology, complex debugging problems, emerging issues, you name it.) The community is still alive. Whether Stack Exchange Inc. is able to understand and adapt to this shift is unclear.

Company aside, the biggest challenge we moderators are facing is to identify and remove LLM-generated content. Keeping SO free of LLM-generated content is critical in helping the site maintain an edge against AI tools that provide quick and confident-sounding answers to whatever problem you throw at them. It's an uphill battle though, and one that is probably unwinnable, but the community hasn't given up yet.
by sroussey | 2025-12-19 23:48:01+00:00
the probability distribution the model outputs is identical under identical conditions.

A local model running alone on your machine will 100% always return the exact same thing and the internal state will be exactly the same and you can checkpoint or cache that to avoid rerunning to that point.

But… conditions can be different, and batching requests tends to affect other items in flight. I believe Thinking Machines had an article about how to make a request deterministic again without performance going to complete crap.

I tend to think of things this way (completely not what happens though): what if you were to cache based on a tensor as the key? To generate a reasonably sized key what is an acceptable loss of precision to retrieve the same cache knowing that there is inherent jitter in the numbers of the tensor?

And then the ever so slight leak of information. But also multiplied since there are internal kv caches for tokens and blah blah blah.
by alwillis | 2025-12-19 23:48:08+00:00
> Personally, I use an 11-year-old machine and have had to add userscript hacks to certain major Web sites to work around bugs in CSS grid (not the "lanes" described here).

The version of CSS Grid we're using today didn't ship until 2017; a browser from 11 years ago would be using one of the non-standard versions of Grid. For example, Internet Explorer 11 was the first browser to ship a grid implementation.

> At least new JavaScript features can be "polyfilled" or whatever. Maybe sites could check for CSS feature support too?

First, not every site needs to look exactly the same in every browser; that's why progressive enhancement is a thing.

Second, there are multiple ways to create masonry-style layouts that don't require masonry support in the browser using multi-column layout or flexbox.

Third, masonry can be polyfilled using JavaScript [1].

[1]: https://masonry.desandro.com/
by clbrmbr | 2025-12-19 23:48:13+00:00
I wish I were more connected to the rest of industry. Most deep embedded (ESP32/stm32 and smaller) is still in C. There’s some Rust going on (Aura Ring for example).

Once you get up to embedded Linux basically any language can be used.

I have a really smart colleague who is interested in Zig but I’m hesitant to make such an investment without (1) the stronger guarantees of Rust and (2) the larger embedded dev community around Rust.

At the end of the day we don’t usually write our own peripheral drivers anymore, so it’s important to have good BSP support for your language. So whatever you use, you usually have to wrap the C. This is even true of using C! The vendors libs are usually pretty bad and need wrapping with safety checks, or to be made so you can run more than one instance, etc.
by aunty_helen | 2025-12-19 23:48:38+00:00
The biggest question for me is "Why?"

They're getting slaughtered by the more focused Anthropic team who decided they will have the best coding model.

Given how bad things have been going recently (5.2 chat bombing and being behind, opus being the code GOAT, G team dominating media, Grok existing and meta / the Chinese dominating opensource), they should niche to the general purpose llm before that's all they're left with by market forces.

I'm still pretty sour they didn't have the vision at the time to build an ecosystem around them and instead went for those building the ecosystem on them.
by jp8585 | 2025-12-19 23:49:05+00:00
I actually think things improved substantially when compared to last year. The latest batch of sota models is incredible (just ask any software engineer about what’s happening to their profession). It’s only a matter of time until other knowledge workers start getting the asphyxiating “vibe” coding treatment and that drama is what really fascinates me.

People are absolutely torn. It seems that ai usage starts as a clutch, then it becomes an essential tool and finally it takes over the essence of the profession itself. Not using it feels like a waste of time. There’s a sense of dread that comes from realizing that it’s not useful to “do work” anymore. That in order to thrive now, we need to outsource as much of your thinking to GPT as possible. If your sense of identity comes from “pure” intellectual pursuits, you are gonna have a bad time. The optimists will say “you will be able to do 10x the amount of work”. That might be true, but the nature of the work will be completely different. Managing a farm is not the same as planting a seed.
by dylan604 | 2025-12-19 23:49:11+00:00
I still prefer the layout look from something like justifiedGallery.js where the heights of each row are the same. Actual masonry with stacking stones would never stack directly on top of each other like this. Calling it masonry just feels unnatural as anything stacked like that would easily be knocked over. "Lanes" is definitely more appropriately named than "masonry". The layout look of a justifiedGallery would be more masonry than the grid-template-rows:masonry setting. yeah yeah, raw css vs js library blah blah
by zoklet-enjoyer | 2025-12-19 23:49:54+00:00
I was into the whole research chemical thing from maybe 2005 to 2011. People on message boards were doing like $30k+ group buys to get Chinese labs to synthesize new stuff. It was a really interesting time with a lot of money to be made and new chemicals to experience. I started hearing horror stories about people ODing on fentanyl and fentanyl analogues in 2011ish from middle men mixing up orders and mislabeling chemicals. That sketched me out enough that I didn't want anything to do with it anymore. It was very easy to buy fentanyl straight from Chinese labs until at least 2013 but maybe even as late as 2015 or 16. Fentanyl was legal in China until US pressure to ban it and that's when they started sending precursors to Mexico.
by edanm | 2025-12-19 23:50:11+00:00
I didn't love the opening caricature either.

But, to be fair, that wasn't the kind of critique it was talking about. If your critique guns is moral, strategic, etc, then yes, you can do it without actually trying out guns. If your critique is that guns physically don't work, don't actually do the thing they are claimed to do, then some hands-on testing would quickly dispel that notion.

The article is talking about those kinds of critiques, ones of the "AI doesn't work" variety, not "AI is harmful".
by WhyOhWhyQ | 2025-12-19 23:50:37+00:00
To each his own, but multi-tasking feels bad to me. I want to spend my life pursuing mastery of a craft, not lazily delegating. Not that everyone should have the same goals, but the mastery route feels like it's dying off. It makes me sad.

I get it that some people just want to see the thing on the screen. Or your priority is to be a high status person with a loving family etc.. etc... All noble goals. I just don't feel a sense of fulfillment from a life not in pursuit of something deeper. The AI can do it better than me, but I don't really care at the end of the day. Maybe super-corp wants the AI to do it then, but it's a shame.
by blindhippo | 2025-12-19 23:51:10+00:00
Might work for you, but if I multi task too much, the quality of my output drops significantly. Where I work, that does not fly. I cannot trust any agent to handle anything without babysitting them to avoid going off the rails - but perhaps the tools I have access to just aren't good (underlying model is claude 4.5, so it the model isn't the cause).

I've said this in the past and I'll continue to say it - until the tools get far better at managing context, they will be hard locked for value in most use cases. The moment I see "summarizing conversation" I know I'm about to waste 20 minutes fixing code.
by muldvarp | 2025-12-19 23:51:18+00:00
This to me is the most ridiculous thing about the whole AI situation. Piracy is now apparently just okay as long as you do it on an industrial scale and with the expressed intention of hurting the economic prospects of the authors of the pirated work.

Seems completely ridiculous when compared to the trouble I was in that one time I pirated a single book that I was unable to purchase.
by WolfeReader | 2025-12-19 23:51:28+00:00
Bad take. Kobo lets you know which books have DRM and which don't. And even with DRM, you can get them into Adobe Digital Editions and load them on to basically any e-reader. (Maybe not Kindle since it won't open DRM'd ePubs.)

I buy like 60% of my ebooks from Kobo and have never owned a Kobo-brand ereader.
by hackyhacky | 2025-12-19 23:51:45+00:00
> Developers deserve nice things.

I agree they do. But Python is a bad counterexample. You can upgrade your Python on your server and no one has to know about it. But if you want to use new CSS features, then every browser has to implement that feature and every user has to upgrade their browser.

The intent of my comment was to express a desire to stabilize the web API in particular, not to freeze all software development in its tracks.
by temp0826 | 2025-12-19 23:51:55+00:00
My current holy grail is my attempt to convert a Shipibo (an indigenous Peruvian language)-to-Spanish dictionary into a Shipibo-to-English dictionary. The pdf I have (available freely on archive.org) isn't a great scan (though I think it'd be a heck of a lot easier than some of the handwritten examples they show). Layout (2-columns) along with header/footers can cause some headaches, but it is all Latin script. This seems to fall on its face pretty badly (not even a couple of pages in), so my search continues. (The other major problem I'm having is trying to separate out Shipibo definitions/examples from the Spanish ones, and only translating the Spanish to English...so pretty complex I guess. I've been taking fresh stabs at this project every few months when I see OCR/LLM news pop up and continue to be disappointed)
by colesantiago | 2025-12-19 23:52:44+00:00
You failed realise that bookface is of much much more value than HN.

HN is just a free link aggregator, you can't make money from it.

bookface is only accessible to YC founders, which means YC founders have given a chunk of their company away to access it (as a bonus)

You see, the network of bookface (and bookface its self as a part of YC) is more valuable than HN.
by huevosabio | 2025-12-19 23:54:05+00:00
``` Creatives have the highest struggle scores and the highest adoption rates. ```

Here is my guess for the puzzle: creative work is subjective and full of scaffolding. AI can easily generate this subjective scaffolding to a "good enough" level so it can get used without much scrutiny. This is very attractive for a creative to use on a day to day basis.

But, given the amount of content that wasn't created by the creative, the creative feels both a rejection of the work as foreign and a feeling of being replaced.

The path is less stark in more objective fields because the quality is objective, so harder to just accept a merely plausible solution, and the scaffolding is just scaffolding so who cares if it does the job.
by frmersdog | 2025-12-19 23:54:51+00:00
It's also wrong to think that company performance has anything to do with stock prices nowadays, anyway. Look at Oracle, supposedly an established company with a predictable runway for future earnings, jumping 40% (40%!) and then shedding that jump over the following months.

Or... wait for it... Gamestop. Not just what happened in 2021. What happened in 2024. What's happening now. (Compare its market cap to its cash, and then how it compares to competitors, and then price-to-earnings, and then again to competitors).

Look at the market as-a-whole. Falling earnings, stock prices going up.

I wouldn't be surprised to find that iRobot was simply just marked for death. Any company not named Apple that is manufacturing in China, Wall Street has decided that they're going to face headwinds from IP theft and competitors backed by the full faith and force of the Chinese Communist Party, and they get busy squeezing every ounce of value out, potential be damned (because, as far as traders and shareholders are concerned, such companies already are).
by paganel | 2025-12-19 23:55:33+00:00
I'm talking about the front page of this tech forum, where a lot of users have received money (as employees) from Microsoft and Alphabet.

And I know that this isn't the first time when the names of Gates and Brin were connected to Epstein (as I literally mentioned that in my first comment, see the reason of Melinda's divorce), but this is the first time when these connections are officialized via documents presented by the US authorities, not by private individuals.
by noumenon1111 | 2025-12-19 23:56:48+00:00
> Which new band will still be around in 45 years?

Excellent question! It looks like Two-Tone is bringing ska back with a new wave of punk rock energy! I think The Specials are pretty special and will likely be around for a long time.

On the other hand, the "new wave" movement of punk rock music will go nowhere. The Cure, Joy Division, Tubeway Army: check the dustbin behind the record stores in a few years.
by Terretta | 2025-12-19 23:56:56+00:00
There’s a sense of dread that comes from realizing that it’s not useful to “do work” anymore. That in order to thrive now, we need to outsource as much of your thinking to GPT as possible. If your sense of identity comes from “pure” intellectual pursuits, you are gonna have a bad time.

This is 180 degrees from how to think about it.

The more thinking you do as ratio to less toil, the better. The more time to apply your intellect with the better machine execution to back that up, the more profit.

The Renaissance grand masters used ateliers of apprentices and journeymen while the grand masters conceived, directed, critiqued, and integrated their work into commissioned art; at the end signing their name: https://smarthistory.org/workshop-italian-renaissance-art/

This is how to leverage the machine. It's your own atelier in a box. Go be Leonardo.
by makeitdouble | 2025-12-19 23:56:58+00:00
> Is there some sort of wide-spread belief that the world works like an episode of Law and Order and every crime is instantly solved by rolling up your sleeves and doing good old fashioned detective work?

There is to a point, and it's not some random organic sentiment: this is the image that has been crafted for decades, if not centuries. The police has a role in pushing it, but it's also has been a useful fiction for our societies as a whole.

"crime will somewhat get punished" has more weight with a competent agency with at least average intelligent people.
by Bender | 2025-12-19 23:57:39+00:00
The only problems I ever had with CIFS was using a NetApp in "mixed" mode meaning it shared the same volume over both CIFS and NFS. That tickled a kernel bug in RHEL4 that one of the kernel developers fixed right away. I feel guilty taking away time from him bicycling with his kids but was impressed with how fast he fixed it. Volumes that were only shared as CIFS worked fine for massive directories of PDF files that were then shared out over an application server to the customers.
by asdff | 2025-12-19 23:57:52+00:00
The sentiment is basically that the "all hands on deck" manpower effort is futile and if anything even a political/propaganda effort to dissuade others from having similar thoughts. What good is it to mobilize 1000 FBI agents if they aren't going to move the case forward at all? What good is having a budget capable of mobilizing that many people for a single case and not to bear any fruit with it? Is this outcome better than what might have happened if this were relegated to local PD? Surprisingly the answer is "no, not at all." That is a big indictment on federal law enforcement and their abilities to turn their budget into actionable effort that makes the population safer. And probably suggests that such resource draining manhunts might even come at the cost of whatever the FBI does in fact do well.
by sshine | 2025-12-19 23:57:53+00:00
I’m a CS teacher these days, but my previous 4 jobs:

- Kubernetes consulting - On-prem CI for hardware-in-the-loop for radio transceiver firmware using NixOS - Firmware for high-power EV chargers in Rust - Zero-knowledge cryptography for a blockchain

Before that I was a full-stack web developer with all kinds of tech stacks. Next year I’m going back to being a full-stack web developer.
by tomwheeler | 2025-12-19 23:58:23+00:00
> It'd be an interesting experiment to take memory snapshots after each step in a workflow, which an API like Firecracker might support...I think some durable execution engines have experimented with this type of system before, but I can't find a source now - perhaps someone has a link

Trigger.dev currently uses CRIU, but I recall reading on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45251132) that they're moving to MicroVMs. Their website (https://feedback.trigger.dev/p/make-runs-startresume-faster-...) suggests that they're using Firecracker specifically, but I haven't seen anything beyond that. It would definitely be interesting to hear how it works out, because I'm not aware of another Durable Execution platform that has done this yet.
by uniq7 | 2025-12-19 23:59:52+00:00
Maybe this will be an unpopular opinion, but I really dislike the lane layout, because it is not possible to efficiently take a glance at all elements in the list, one by one.

If you try to go left-to-right, you will quickly realize that at the end of each "line" it is really difficult to know where the next line starts. It is easy to accidentally start again on the same line (and inspect the same elements), or skip one accidentally. Then navigating through the elements one by one requires a considerable amount of cognitive effort, your eyes bounce up and down constantly, and you end up inspecting the same elements multiple times.

If you try to go top-to-bottom, lane by lane, you will then realize that the page also has infinite scroll and you will never go past the first lane.
by MangoToupe | 2025-12-20 00:00:01+00:00
Everyone knows sequoia can't invest... but this is too far

> Maguire, acting as a self-appointed digital detective, has shared posts suggesting that an entirely different man was behind the crimes—a Palestinian student at Brown University...

> On July 4, Maguire made inflammatory comments calling New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani an “Islamist.”

Jokes aside, maguire does seem like an emphatically despicable person
by derbOac | 2025-12-20 00:00:23+00:00
Maybe this is naive on my part but I find an argument like "the EU and FTC raised their metaphorical eyebrows at us and so we had to fold rather than merge" sort of pathetic.

I think the idea of Amazon buying Roomba causing monopoly concerns is kinda weird. But I also think it's absurd for anyone to blame the FTC for this. Amazon had enough leverage and money to take on the FTC over this, and probably could have made the FTC look laughable in the process, if they pushed antitrust. The fact that they didn't says everything about the actual value of Roomba.
by delichon | 2025-12-20 00:00:29+00:00
> I like this version of the meme for pointing out that human intelligence is also jagged in its own different way.

The idea of jaggedicity seems useful to advancing epistemology. If we could identify the domains that have useful data that we fail to extract, we could fill those holes and eventually become a general intelligence ourselves. The task may be as hard as making a list of your blind spots. But now we have an alien intelligence with an outside perspective. While making AI less jagged it might return the favor.

If we keep inventing different kinds of intelligence the sum of the splats may eventually become well rounded.
by quickthrowman | 2025-12-20 00:01:58+00:00
The press release is 100% political.

As someone who lives in Minnesota, I wish the US Attorney’s office would provide data about the alleged Medicare fraud to the MN state government, like they have requested.

Instead, they speculate about a ridiculous amount of money being stolen ($9B) that is likely an order of magnitude larger than the actual loss, providing no proof, and sharing zero information with the relevant agencies in Minnesota’s government.

If there is fraud, please prosecute it and collaborate with my state’s government to uncover it so our tax dollars can go towards medical care for real people.

Actual fraud has happened here in MN, an organization called Feed Our Future stole hundreds of millions of dollars by claiming to provide food to students. [0], [1] We’d appreciate any actual help the federal government can provide, instead we get politicized press releases.

[0] https://www.irs.gov/compliance/criminal-investigation/minnea...

[1] https://www.justice.gov/usao-mn/pr/78th-defendant-charged-fe...
by oats | 2025-12-20 00:02:13+00:00
Is this a joke? Am I going crazy?

I don't like this future we're going towards where we have to trick our software (which we can no longer understand the workings of) into doing what we tell it to by asking it nicely, or by putting another black box on the end to "fix" the output. This is the opposite of engineering. This is negotiation with a genie trapped in silicon.