MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by xvector | 2025-12-27 17:18:18+00:00
Why don't we produce enough experts in the US to saturate our tech companies?

It's because American education culture is trash. American parents are fine with their kids getting Bs and Cs. Mediocrity is rewarded and excellence is discouraged in our schools, both socially and institutionally.

Meanwhile you have hundreds of millions of foreign born children pulling out all the stops to do the best they possibly can at school precisely so they can get into the US and work at one of our top companies.

It was never even a competition. Immigrants and children of theirs will continue to outperform because it is literally baked into their culture - and it is baked out of ours.
by camgunz | 2025-12-27 17:18:23+00:00
Well the other models are even less useful so I try and stick with the steelman version of these things. That IBM quote isn't ambiguity about what computers are for, but about who can afford them in their current, highly bespoke state. Finally, the railway boom wasn't $1.5 trillion in a few years. Also, again, we knew what railroads were for.

I'm not saying the tech isn't impressive. I'm impressed! Cursor bugbot has found some pretty gnarly bugs in my code, blessedly. But it's neither reliable nor economically viable, even if you don't think they owe anyone anything for training on their data (I do think they owe us).
by coffeecoders | 2025-12-27 17:18:29+00:00
I feel like being in a time loop. Every time a big company releases a model, we debate the definition of open source instead of asking what actually matters. Apple clearly wants the upside of academic credibility without giving away commercial optionality, which isn't unsurprising.

Additionally, we might need better categories. With software, flow is clear (source, build and binary) but with AI/ML, the actual source is an unshippable mix of data, infra and time, and weights can be both product and artifacts.
by tkzed49 | 2025-12-27 17:18:53+00:00
Appreciate the perspective. I've worked on projects where hooks are auto-configured, and pre-commit is just never something that's going to agree with me.

I prefer to be able to push instantly and get feedback async, because by the time I've decided I'm done with a change, I've already run the tests for it. And like I said, my editor is applying formatting and lints, so those fail more rarely.

But, if your pre-push checks are fast (rather than ~minutes), I can see the utility! It sucks to get an async failure for feedback that can be delivered quickly.
by dragonwriter | 2025-12-27 17:18:58+00:00
> If all these AI models were trained on copyrighted materials for which the trainers had no right to, is it wrong to steal their models and use them however we want?

If (which the courts seem to be pretty consistently finding) training models on copyright-protected works generally is fair use, though using models to produce works which would violate copyright if made by other means with reference to the source material is still a copyright violation, then training has no bearing on the legality of copying the models. (Even if it wasn't, then copying and using the models at all would violate the copyright of the original owners of the training material again and be illegal irrespective of the “license” offered by the model trainer.)

Morally? Well, pretty much the same dichotomy applies; if training the model isn't a violation of the source material's creators' rights, then the fact it was trained without permission has no bearing on the morality of using the model without the trainers permission, if it is a violation of the source material's creators' rights, then so is using the model irrespective of the trainer's “license”, as the trainer has no right to permit further use of the material they had no right to create.

The idea that the model is an intrusion on the rights of the creators of the materials used in training and that this makes use of the model more rather than less permissibly, legally or morally, takes some bizarre mental gymnastics.
by BeetleB | 2025-12-27 17:19:27+00:00
> It's incredible what lengths people go to to avoid memorizing basic ffmpeg usage. It's really not that hard

It's not hard - just not a good use of our time. For 99% of HN users, ffmpeg is not a vital tool.

I have to use it less than twice a year. Now I just go and get an LLM to tell me the command I need.

And BTW, I spend a lot of time memorizing things (using spaced repetition). So I'm not averse to memorizing. ffmpeg simply doesn't warrant a place in my head.
by _flux | 2025-12-27 17:19:35+00:00
> Open source means the source is available. Anything else is just political.

Where was that defined so? And most of all, given the domain of information technology, who understand open source to cover cases where the source is available ie. only for reviewing?

The purpose of words and terms is so that people can exchange ideas effectively and precisely, without needing to explain the terms every time from the grounds up. Having different groups having divergent definitions on the same words is counterproductive towards that goal. In my view, labeling a release "open source" with very big limitations on how the source is used is just not about marketing, it's miscommunication.

If "open source" and "source available" (and "open weights") mean the same thing, the how come people have come up with the two terms to begin with? The difference is recognized in official contexts as well, i.e. https://web.archive.org/web/20180724032116/https://dodcio.de... (search for "source available"; unfortunately linking directly doesn't seem to work with archive.org pages).

It doesn't seem there is any benefit in using less precise terms when better-defined ones are available.
by jfreds | 2025-12-27 17:19:39+00:00
Your points about misquotes and language troubles are very valid and interesting. But a word of caution on your prompt: you’re asking a lot of the word “analyze” here; if the LLM responded that the thread had 15 comments by 10 unique authors, and a total of 2000 characters, I would classify that as a completely satisfactory answer (assuming the figures were correct) based on the query
by mxxc | 2025-12-27 17:19:45+00:00
this one technically doesn't have an ostree server because it would require dedicated infrastructure, but if you decide to either try out images (they're in ghcr) or fork the project and build your own, you can schedule nightly builds (as it's being done now) and use bootc rather than ostree. the problem is that you'd always have to pull a 2GB image rather than incremental updates.
by csar | 2025-12-27 17:20:17+00:00
Getting feedback on a plan or implementation is valuable because you get a fresh set of eyes. Using multiple models may help though it always feels a bit silly to me (if nothing else you’re increasing non-determinism because you know have to understand 2 LLM’s quirks).

But the “playing house” approach of experts is somewhere between pointless and actively harmful. It was all the rage in June and I thought people abandoned that later in the summer.

If you want the model to eg review code instead of fixing things, or document code without suggesting improvements (for writing docs), that’s useful. But there’s. I need for all these personas.
by samsolomon | 2025-12-27 17:20:21+00:00
Hard question to answer without more details, but I've got a bit of general guidance for B2B sales:

* Know your ideal customer (ICP)—or have a decent idea. Find companies that match that profile.

* Find the right people at those companies. Go on Linkedin and find 3-6 people you think could be decision makers at that company.

* Research those people and figure out how your solution might work for them (RHO).

* Reach out to those people. Communicate what you think their pain point might be and how your solution will help them. Try and get them to agree to a discovery call.

* If they are interested, you'll need to figure out who the decision makers are for buying. If the timing is bad, ask when they renew and reach out again 3-6mos to see how their currents solution is treating them. If they aren't interested, DQ them and move on. Guarding your time here is valuable.

I'm assuming you're a founder or early on. The other comments around MEDDPICC, MEDDICC and other sales methodologies are worth a look, but may be over optimizing if you're still trying to win your first deal.

A bit of background—I was one of the first product designers hired at Salesloft. I've spent a decade building software for sellers.
by echelon | 2025-12-27 17:20:25+00:00
The OSI definition and "open source purity" is designed by big tech to erode any value layer open source companies could use to threaten them.

New movements like "fair source", which is a form of source available + free use + expiring copyright is the ideal license. It's effectively unlimited use for customers and users, but has a baked in "non-compete" preventing low effort third parties from coming in and eating the market of managed services established by the authors.

We need to kill open source purity. Especially if we want to erode the hyperscalers that aren't even giving away the magic parts or valuable parts of their kingdoms.

Open source purity is a socialist dream while we're still living under the Empire. And it prevents the formation of a salient that can punch through. It's a very low suboptima.

I don't see any reason why you would want fair source authors to go "OSI" open other than taking their revenue stream as your own. The license bakes in contingencies in case the authors go out of business to open the license up for community ownership. That's good enough.

If these businesses were OSI open, the businessss become unsustainable and impossible to scale into something formidable that could chip away at entirely closed hyperscalers.
by andyjohnson0 | 2025-12-27 17:20:50+00:00
> > algorithmic feeds

> It does have these

If you consider "feeds" to be the home page, ask hn, etc. then afaik content is determined by user submission after spam/abuse filtering, and all users see the same content. Article position is largely determined by user votes, with some ageing. Again, everyone sees the same ordering (unless they choose to hid le articles).

Hard to see how this can be interpreted as "algorithmic".
by msla | 2025-12-27 17:21:03+00:00
Ah, so we're back to koolefant:

https://x42.com/koolefant/

> If you are using Netscape(*) you will probably see the happy cow above.
Internet Explorer-users on Windows and Mac, however, will see a dead flat elephant. And this is due to a strange browser-feature.

> (*) or MSIE for Solaris

Yes, Netscape and MSIE on Solaris. This goes back to the 1990s:

https://web.archive.org/web/19990222144857/http://x42.com/ko...
by omnicognate | 2025-12-27 17:21:38+00:00
The 4th edition of Linear Algebra Done Right has a much improved approach to determinants themselves (still relegated to the end, where it should be). From the list of improvements:

> New Chapter 9 on multilinear algebra, including bilinear forms, quadratic forms, multilinear forms, and tensor products. Determinants now are defned using a basis-free approach via alternating multilinear forms.

The basis-free definition is really rather lovely.
by avaer | 2025-12-27 17:21:59+00:00
Unfortunately not as significant as you'd think.

The output is not automatically metrically scaled (though you can use postprocessing to fix this, it's not part of this model). And you can't really move around much without getting glitches, because it only inferences in one axis. It's also hard capped at 768 pixels + 2 layers.

Besides depth/splatting models have been around for quite a while before this. The main thing this model innovates on is inference speed, but VR porn isn't a use case that really benefits from faster image/video processing, especially since it's still not realtime.

This year has seen a lot of innovation in this space, but it's coming from other image editing and video models.
Show HN: Voice-first todo list that updates live as you talk
by krschacht | 2025-12-27 17:22:20+00:00
I built a demo of a voice AI task manager. You speak naturally and it updates your visible task list in real time.

Try it here, no sign up: https://taskmaster.keithschacht.com

I find it useful to talk aloud to figure out priorities. With this, I can just ramble, “Mark that first task as done. Actually undo that. Add a task to proofread it. Move that to the top…”

It’s built on LiveKit with a Rails web UI. It listens continuously, maps speech to tool calls, and keeps full task-list state so it understands vague references like “the third item” or “the one with my kids.”

Voice feels much faster for input, but visual feedback is still higher bandwidth for output. This is intentionally rough—a demo focused on interaction, not features.

Curious how the interaction model feels for people?

Code: https://github.com/keithschacht/taskmaster
by DrewADesign | 2025-12-27 17:22:49+00:00
> How do the market regulators allow that?

Same way I reckon. Both are bad.

> Funny how everyone shits on Nvidia's monopoly when we've got Google walking around after winning a monumental antitrust case regarding their Android/Chrome/Google information monopoly.

... are you implying people around here don't give google flak for monopolistic business practices? That doesn't square with my experience, here.
by xp84 | 2025-12-27 17:23:00+00:00
The only way the database could be harnessed to do something useful is after all the people who were standing in the way in management for the last 18 years likely having been sacked. You can bet any useful project to put it to use was blocked by paper-pushers threatened by the spectre of automation, until most people had forgotten about it.

Nobody believes the database sprung forth from the earth or was created accidentally. The fact that 18 years later that project had borne no visible fruit, and that most people who could have used it, didn’t even know about it, is proof of the problem. It’s a problem of terrible management. That is what, regardless of your politics, is being slightly jostled by DOGE. Personally I have dealt with enough of our absurd government processes that I don’t think they can make anything much worse, and it cannot be less efficient.
by Teever | 2025-12-27 17:23:20+00:00
Labels on products designed to be addictive like modern social media isn’t a silver bullet but it’s an important first start.

You’re right though that it’s going to take far bigger things like antitrust action and fining companies for making misleading statements about the health consequences and purposes of their products.

Another way this problem can be attacked is by changing the cultural perspective around working at companies like Meta.

There was a time where it was socially acceptable to work at s tobacco company. People would proudly tell their family that they work in marketing for tobacco companies but now? When have you ever heard someone tell you they work for big tobacco?

If the government mandated that social media had to have pictures of neckbeard nests in people’s feeds with warnings that this could happen to you with repeated social media use I bet the people who work at Meta would be a laughing stock in their social circles which would go a long ways to disrupting the pipeline of people willing to destroy our society for a quick buck.
by elashri | 2025-12-27 17:23:52+00:00
> 25 years ago it seemed like physics was mostly complete, and the only remaining work was exploring the corner cases and polishing out all the imperfections

Around 125 years ago, many thought the same about physics, that physics is mostly complete and it just explaining and finishing some edge cases and polishing all our measurements. There was just two things that were a little bit puzzling, the "looming clouds" over physics (per Kelvin description) will later lead to both Quantum Theory and Theory of relativity (Black body radiation and Michelson–Morley experiment) and the fundamental change of our understanding for physics after that.

So I would not take this position. Does this mean we are in a similar moment? maybe, who knows?
by dheera | 2025-12-27 17:23:57+00:00
See also:

https://github.com/dheera/scripts/blob/master/helpme

helpme ffmpeg assemble all the .jpg files into an .mp4 timelapse video at 8fps

This evolved from an ffmpeg wrapper I wrote before:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40410637
by psychoslave | 2025-12-27 17:24:38+00:00
That's a difficult endeavor. First network effect plays agaisnt any new player. Second, established actors have already mastered all the arts of dark patterns to make people addicted to their crap. Paying for crap free alternatives can't be a garantee that policy won't change as incentives will change over time for the business behind it. Those who care for distributed FLOW solutions already have out of the box solutions, though polishing them into turn key options is certainly letting plenty of room for additional players.

Good luck!
by Cloudly | 2025-12-27 17:24:58+00:00
Just finished For Blood and Money - Nathan Vardi. Enjoyed the real world characters who drove the developments of cancer research forward and the messy business of pharma.

I enjoyed Ra - more than "There is not anti-mimetics division" which I felt lost itself in the second half.

I greatly enjoyed Anathem - though I have always been a sucker for Stephenson.

I found 2666 to be profound and tragic. Obviously the intention of the book - but given that the crime rate in my country is analogous to Mexico's - the pain of the femicide in the book and casual cover-ups felt tangible to me. I feel it is clear that is is incomplete due to the Author's death, but I don't think that takes away from the book.

In a similar vein, but in completely different genres I finally finished the wheel of time series which I started nearly 15 years ago. After getting to book 11 I pushed through the rest this year. Unfortunately I felt mostly underwhelmed. I think the Sanderson transition did not age as well as initially received. Maybe it's because I have read too much Sanderson before getting to him. His voice is noticeably different to Jordan's.

Finally I really enjoyed both the Wager and Pachinko.

I have started a slew of other books and not completed them but there are pending standouts. I am still halfway through Stalin by Monetfiore, and I enjoy returning when I can stomach the horrible history.

Honorable mention to Apple in China which I did not complete and might eventually. Don't think I will finish Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas though.

In the current growing pending pile I have 1493 - which I know I will enjoy, everything is tuberculosis and now it can be told. We shall see if I make any headway :)
by swiftcoder | 2025-12-27 17:25:52+00:00
> Open source means the source is available. Anything else is just political.

We don't have to have this debate again. Folks have tried this rhetorical tack so often there is an entire wikipedia page[1] dedicated to explaining the difference between source available and open source...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available_software
by vtomole | 2025-12-27 17:26:51+00:00
Quantum theory predicts this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_theorem. An experiment can show that this prediction is false. This is a scientific problem not an engineering one. Physical theories have to be verified with experiments. If the results of the experiment don't match what the theory predicts then you have to do things like re-examine data, revise the theory e.t.c.
by killerstorm | 2025-12-27 17:27:17+00:00
Hmm, looking through how-exedev-works, it seems like what you call VM is more like a container, i.e. it doesn't run its own kernel?

Sort of a container which "feels like" a VM? Reminds me of Virtuozzo / OpenVZ VM approach which was popular ~20 years ago when RAM was expensive...
by dheera | 2025-12-27 17:27:39+00:00
See my more generalized CLI helper which does exactly this:

https://github.com/dheera/scripts/blob/master/helpme

Example usage:

helpme ffmpeg assemble all the .jpg files into an .mp4 timelapse video at 8fps
helpme zip my-folder into my-zip.tar with compression level 9
helpme git delete commit 1a4db4c
...

This originated from an ffmpeg wrapper I wrote but then realized it could be used for all commands:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40410637
by dylan604 | 2025-12-27 17:27:47+00:00
"Chrome was not wrong. it's doing proper color management by respecting the embedded ICC profile"

That's not how color management is meant to work. The color profile tells you how the data is saved. If you are displaying it using a different color profile, then it needs to be converted. Displaying P3 in sRGB is doing it wrong. How can you conclude Chrome "was not wrong"?
by stevenjgarner | 2025-12-27 17:28:05+00:00
Human-readability is the ultimate error correction for the most expensive link in the system: the human-in-the-loop.

The information-theoretic justification is that binary's efficiency assumes a perfectly known codec, but the entropy of time destroys codecs (bit rot/obsolescence). Text sacrifices transmission efficiency for semantic recovery - it remains decodable even when the specific tooling is lost, making it the most robust encoding for long-term information survival.
by CommenterPerson | 2025-12-27 17:28:06+00:00
"The Emperor of All Maladies" by Siddartha Mukhejee.

He is a medical doctor, researcher .. plus writes great science / medical books. This one won a Pulitzer prize. Check out his other books "The song of the Cell" and "The Gene". The books take some work to read but every page is a treat.
by quasse | 2025-12-27 17:28:08+00:00
> Every time I think about EVs, I become filled with dread thinking about what will happen if an area loses power for an extended period of time

A mid-size EV battery can easily store 60kWh of energy. That's enough to power a domestic refrigerator for ~12 days (assuming 200w average power usage, which is on the higher end).

I lost power for about a day last year and was very happy to be able to keep my fridge and some emergency lighting powered from an EV battery.
by bilbo0s | 2025-12-27 17:28:21+00:00
I know no one wants to hear this, but this “acquisition “ is nothing of the kind. It’s just Nvidia hiring the four or five guys they need without having to take on the rest of groq. Which, as it turns out, is worthless without those four or five guys.

This is what happens when companies figure out they don’t have to buy out other companies. They just need to pay off shareholders for the right to hire key employees. Which is convenient, since the key four or five guys are usually pretty big shareholders.

It’s no longer necessary to monopolize a market. You can monopolize intellectual capital by just paying ungodly sums of money. The rest will take care of itself.
by avaer | 2025-12-27 17:28:34+00:00
It doesn't but it's pretty trivial to do if all you want is a pinholed mesh.

I managed to one-shot it by mixing in the mesh exporter from https://github.com/Tencent-Hunyuan/HunyuanWorld-Mirror but at that point you might as well use HWM, which is slower but much better suited to the level design use case.

Note that the results might not be as good as you expect, because this does not do any angled inpainting -- any deviation from the camera origin and your mesh will be either full of holes or warped (depending on how you handle triangle rejection) unless you layer on other techniques far outside the scope of this model.

And note that although HWM itself does support things like multi-image merging (which ml-sharp does not), in my testing it makes so many mistakes as to be close to useless today.

If you want something different that is designed for levels, check out Marble by World Labs.