MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mschuster91 | 2025-12-12 19:05:33+00:00
> In 6 months you'll be able to get memory chips and GPUs for nothing.

I highly doubt that. Memory chip production takes years to scale up, which is partially a reason why the memory market (both RAM and solid-storage) is so susceptible to "pig cycles" - high prices incentivize new players to join the market (although less likely than decades ago, given just how much capital one needs and how complex the technology has gotten) and for established players to scale up their production, and then prices collapse due to oversupply.

For GPUs, the situation is even worse. During the GPU crypto mining craze, at least that was consumer GPUs so there indeed was an influx of cheap second hand gear once that market collapsed due to ASICs - but this time? These chips don't even have the hardware for rendering videos any more, so even if GPU OEMs would now get a ton of left over GPU chips they couldn't make general-purpose GPUs out of them any more.

Additionally, this assumption assumes that the large web of AI actors collapses in the next 6 months, which is even more unlikely - there's just too much actual cash floating around in the market.
by phantasmish | 2025-12-12 19:06:14+00:00
Thinking that making scribbles that we interpret(!!!) as perfectly describing a functioning consciousness and its operation, on a huge stack of paper, would manifest consciousness in any way whatsoever (hell, let's say we make it an automated flip-book, too, so it "does something"), but if you made the scribbles slightly different it wouldn't work(!?!? why, exactly, not ?!?!), is what's fundamentally supernatural. It's straight-up Bronze Age religion kinds of stuff (which fits—the tech elite is full of that kind of shit, like mummification—er, I mean—"cryogenic preservation", millenarian cults er, I mean The Singularity, et c)

Of course a GPU involves things happening. No amount of using it to describe a brain operating gets you an operating brain, though. It's not doing what a brain does. It's describing it.

(I think this is actually all somewhat tangential to whether LLMs "can think" or whatever, though—but the "well of course they might think because if we could perfectly describe an operating brain, that would also be thinking" line of argument often comes up, and I think it's about as wrong-headed as a thing can possibly be, a kind of deep "confusing the map for the territory" error; see also comments floating around this thread offhandedly claiming that the brain "is just physics"—like, what? That's the cart leading the horse! No! Dead wrong!)
by drdeca | 2025-12-12 19:06:19+00:00
It has delivered falsifiable postdictions though. Like, there are some measurable quantities which string theory says must be in a particular (though rather wide) finite range, and indeed the measured value is in that range. The value was measured to much greater precision than that range before it was shown that string theory implies the value being in that range though.

Uh, iirc . I don’t remember what value specifically. Some ratio of masses or something? Idr. And I certainly don’t know the calculation.
by narayanahari | 2025-12-12 19:06:27+00:00
We keep celebrating how fast we can code with vibe coding tools like Cursor and Copilot. What we rarely talk about is the cost. Constant context switching cost. The autocomplete feels fast but the tool keeps pulling me back for micro checks. Most of the time I feel like I am just staring at the screen waiting for it to finish a thought, then correcting it, then nudging it again. I am unable to queue new tasks up. It is reactive work, not deep work. I used to think attention was the bottleneck. Now it feels like the real issue is that these tools do not do true asynchronous work. They wait for me. I wait for them. The loop kills flow. This is why I am becoming convinced the current copilot model is a dead end for senior work. The next real shift is asynchronous coding agents. Not assistants that autocomplete while I steer but background contributors that take a task and produce a pull request while I move on. Some tools already hint at this. GitHub Copilot Agents, Jules, Codex and Claude Code for Web. You assign something like fix this UI bug and later you get a complete PR with a natural language summary, code diffs and even before and after screenshots. The unit of review becomes intent verified pull requests instead of line by line babysitting. But it's currently in a very primitive state. Overall this shifts us from human in the loop to human on the loop. We oversee the work at a higher level instead of being dragged into every micro decision. It frees up time to focus on the complex problems we do not trust AI to solve yet. I want to focus on more of those complex tasks while an agent upgrades dependencies or improves test coverage in a separate PR. That is real parallel work. Is anyone else feeling the distraction tax with current tools?
by baobun | 2025-12-12 19:06:49+00:00
> At the Electronic Frontier Foundation, we call this "privacy first": you can't solve all the internet's problems by fixing privacy, but you won't fix most of them unless we get privacy right, and so the (potential) coalition for a strong privacy regime is large and powerful:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/06/privacy-first/#but-not-ju...

Everyone who said "A technical solution can not fix a social problem" needs to read this. In our technical society, for many things a technical part is required to enable social change. The proactive technical work is important and necessary, despite the fact that there is more to it. It may not be sufficient but it is necessary.
by johnnyaardvark | 2025-12-12 19:06:52+00:00
I've heard this take a few times, but I'm not convinced using general language is the new way to write code (beyond small projects).

Inevitably AI will writes things in ways you don't intend. So now you have to prompt it to change and hope it gets it right. Oh, it didn't. Prompt it again and maybe this time will work. Will it get it right this time? And so on.

It's so good at a lot of things, but writing out whole features or apps in my experience seems good at first, but then it turns out to be a time sync of praying it will figure it out on this next prompt.

Maybe it's a skill issue for me, but I've gotten the most efficiency out of having it review code, pair with it on ideas and problems, etc. rather than actually writing the majority of code.
by ekjhgkejhgk | 2025-12-12 19:07:03+00:00
> That’s just piggybacking on a prediction of special relativity itself.

Let me stop you right now to inform you you don't understand how scientific theories are structured. Special relativity is not a prediction of special relativity. Likewise, 1+1=2 isn't a predict of arithmetic, it's the starting point.
by nolito | 2025-12-12 19:07:10+00:00
Not enough. According to this article (https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/penge/pludselig-dukkede-nyhed-op-d... you probably need to translate) its enough to link to an authorative site that accepts a query parameter. Googles AI picks up the query parameter as a fact. The artile is about a danish compay probably circumventing sanctions and how russian actors manipulate that fact and turn it around via Google AI
by panarky | 2025-12-12 19:07:12+00:00
I watched from the sidelines with grim interest as my organization tried to decide between Oracle and SAP.

The team defined requirements, ran an RFP and demo process and did site visits to clients of each company. The SAP reference clients weren't exactly thrilled with SAP, the product was too complex and too expensive, but it was rock solid and SAP was a reliable partner. The Oracle reference clients had the usual complaints about features and flexibility, but their real beefs were that Oracle was a predatory and untrustworthy partner.

Oracle made claims in their RFP response that were proven false in the demos and site visits, confirming the claims from reference clients about the company's ethics. In contrast, SAP's RFP responses were validated by the team's due diligence.

So management decided to go with SAP. In response, a senior Oracle person tracked down all of the company's board members and made outrageous claims of incompetence against the company's executives, and alluded ominously about bad faith and conflicts of interest.

Oracle was completely hostile and off the rails when they figured out they lost the deal. I will never, ever do business with Oracle.

Unfortunately, while the SAP application seemed solid, the organization went with their HANA database which was astronomically expensive, and had a bad habit of returning different and provably incorrect results to the same deterministic SQL query every time it ran, and then the entire database would crash for all users.
by philo_sophia | 2025-12-12 19:07:53+00:00
Remember seeing this idea 13 years ago [1]

Glad they're finally coming online, though I think these iron-air batteries[2] will take most of the market share (room for all though!).

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sddb0Khx0yA

[2] https://sustainabilitymag.com/news/the-rust-revolution-can-i...
Show HN: Managed MCP Sandbox Environments for RL Training on Tool Use
by wirehack | 2025-12-12 19:08:09+00:00
Hi HN! We are Klavis AI (https://www.klavis.ai/) and we are launching a managed MCP Sandbox-as-a-Service for RL training on tool use.

If you want a model to learn tool use through RL, you need realistic environments where the model can take actions, you can observe the resulting state, and compute a reward. For SaaS tools, this means managing dozens of test accounts, handling OAuth and token refresh, seeding realistic data for each episode, resetting state between runs, and ensuring isolation when you're running concurrent training sessions. Most research teams spend months building this plumbing per integration.

Klavis is a managed sandbox service that handles all of that. You call our API to get an isolated sandbox backed by a real service instance (not a mock), initialize it with whatever data state you need, let your model interact via MCP, then dump the final state to compute your reward. One more API call resets everything for the next episode.

The key thing is these are real services, not static mocks. When your model creates a calendar event or updates a Salesforce record, that action actually executes against real infrastructure. The state changes are real. This matters because you want training to reflect production behavior exactly.

We currently support 50+ integrations across productivity tools (Google Calendar, Outlook, Slack), CRM (Salesforce, HubSpot), dev tools (GitHub, Jira, Linear), databases (Postgres, Snowflake), and others. We handle the account pooling, auth management, and lifecycle orchestration so researchers can focus on the actual training.

Technically, the workflow is: create a sandbox, call initialize API with a JSON payload defining your starting state, let the model interact via standard MCP tools, call dump API to get a typed snapshot of the final state, compare against your target for reward calculation, then call reset or delete. We use strict Pydantic schemas for all inputs and outputs so malformed data gets rejected immediately rather than causing silent failures mid-training.

Here is a quick demo: https://youtu.be/10C18rpCYcA.

We look forward to your comments. Thanks for reading!
by pu | 2025-12-12 19:08:09+00:00
pdsink was done for more advanced scenarios, when a simple "trigger" is not enough or not rational.

- When you need dynamic load control - When mcu already has embedded USPD (some stm32g/WCH and others)

See the link to the reflow table protect in the readme.

In other words, when a simple "trigger" is ok for you, use it and be happy :). If something more complex required - then pdsink may be a good choice.
by MomsAVoxell | 2025-12-12 19:08:11+00:00
My theory for your downvotes - even though you are directly over the target - is that folks in Europe would rather blame Russia than address the very real dysfunction in their own societies. In fact, I tend to think that the degree to which an individual blames Russia is directly related to their failure to take responsibility for the crimes and misdeeds of their own state.
by mikkupikku | 2025-12-12 19:08:23+00:00
Sounds like horrible overreach to me, even if such activities are legal in America (when did American police become the gold standard that Europe needs to emulate???!!)

Seriously, searching your home with a warrant is one thing. Doing it secretly without the homeowner knowing about it afterwards is some Stasi shit. Are they going to steal your dirty underwear too? And installing malware on the computers of people merely suspected of a crime is even more insane.
by jack_tripper | 2025-12-12 19:08:28+00:00
>This was a phone which was perfectly good also for average users

Not good enough to save it from the iPhone onslaught.

People on HN make this mistake to assume that they represent the "average user", the same mistake Steve Wozniak made. No, the average user wasn't interested in all the features of the N9. They much preferred the simpler iPhone and the proof is in the pudding.

>and it seems it sold very well in the few markets where it was actually sold

How do you know it sold well when Nokia never release official sales numbers for the N9?

Estimates put the N9 at less than 1 million sales in the 23 markets it was sold in. A drop in the ocean compared to total iPhone sales of the same timeframe in same 23 regions which estimate at 50 million total. Face it, the N9 was a sales flop no matter how you try to spin this, and launching in more markets would not have moved the needle significantly to make a dent in the iPhone.

>(sadly no major markets)

It launched in 23 markets mate, mostly EMEA and Asia. Not NA because even Nokia leadership realized the N9 won't stand a chance to compete with the iPhone and Blackberry on their home turf.

>A decision which many people called out for being stupid before the consequences had fully unfolded.

Nokia was already dead man walking even before that. Even their own employees said so when they got to play with the first iPhone in their HQ. The N9 was the band playing on the decks on the Titanic.

Blaming Nokia's inevitable failure on Windows Phone is historical revisionism. They would have failed either way since they lacked the software ecosystem beyond the phone that Apple and Google offered their users.

Fanboys praising the N9 as something that would have magically saved Nokia even they have done X or Y or Z with various Linux spins, are huffing some top end copium.
by lunias | 2025-12-12 19:08:34+00:00
Less mass will yield longer range. I know you're referring to the battery accounting for a large percentage of the weight, but a smaller vehicle will get the same range with a smaller battery, and the weight savings compound. If the vehicle weighs less, then all the components supporting that weight can weigh less as well. Unsprung mass can be reduced significantly. Acceleration, braking, handling, and top speed all improve as a result. Components will also generally cost less, reducing the price of the vehicle and making it cheaper to maintain.
by mike-cardwell | 2025-12-12 19:08:35+00:00
> You're suggesting that the only alternative to autonomous self-driving cars is public transit?

No. But hopefully one day. I don't mind if you want to subsidise my choice or not. I want self driving tech to get to the point that it is safer than manually driven cars, and I then want people who want to still drive manually to be slowly priced off the roads and then outright banned from doing it.

My preference is that you stop being allowed to drive manually, and as far as I can see, that's the future, as long as the technology works out.
by d-lisp | 2025-12-12 19:08:41+00:00
Yes, that's a problem of me not being a native english speaker. "All x aren't y" may mean "not all x are y" in my tongue. Not a single x is y is more what we would say in the previous case. But in our case we would say there are x that aren't y.

If thinking is definable, it is wrong that all statements about it are unverifiable (i.e. there are statements about it that are verifiable.)

Well, basic shit.
by kev009 | 2025-12-12 19:09:40+00:00
They have some funny accounting like Google and Microsoft where everything is "cloud" but the revenue streams are certainly diversified from straight Oracle DB such that PostgreSQL equivalence or superiority does not affect the viability of the company or the stock price. Communities like this often over index technical and personal opinion with reality.

I worked at a midsize that was core internet infra, where we had an in house OS and ODM hardware and FOSS DBAs. The one Oracle DB and Oracle HW was slipped in the door through finance for ERP as you say. Although I suspect that would be cloud hosted these days.
by jfengel | 2025-12-12 19:09:44+00:00
No Theory of Everything is going to make realistically testable predictions. That's a problem of the domain, not the theory. The unification energy between the graviton and quantum field theory is on the order of 10^19 GeV, over a dozen orders of magnitude beyond anything we can generate.

We might get lucky that some ToE would generate low-energy predictions different from GR and QFT, but there's no reason to think that it must.

It's not like there's some great low-energy predictions that we're just ignoring. The difficulty of a beyond-Standard-Model theory is inherent to the domain of the question, and that's going to plague any alternative to String Theory just as much.
by jameshart | 2025-12-12 19:10:32+00:00
Generic drug names don’t describe chemical structure, they allude to purpose but that’s all. ‘-afil’ is used to apply to a particular class of drugs, although when it was discovered, ‘sildenafil’ was the only example of that class, so it didn’t mean anything already.

This is like having the first tool of a particular type come along and call itself ‘Mosaic’ and then someone makes another tool of the same kind and calls it ‘Mozilla’.
by lucb1e | 2025-12-12 19:10:33+00:00
Where possible, I've stopped picking fonts that don't distinguish lowercase l and uppercase I. Words virtually always have redundancy (or context in the sentence) and it's fine in 98% of cases, but too often someone sends a token, password, name, or other string where you need to copy it out to another application to see it and just... why? Why bother?

I/O test for Sans Flex: https://snipboard.io/wXCQq5.jpg

It passes the O0 distinction but not the Il one

Example of a font that passes, Ubuntu: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Ubuntu?preview.text=10%20I... (custom license but looks similar to GPL in that you can do what you want besides relicensing it as proprietary or removing credits)

Another one, Nunito Sans, using the Open Font License: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Nunito+Sans?preview.text=1...

IBM Plex Sans is another Open Font License option: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/IBM+Plex+Sans?preview.text... (it has an unusual capital Q style though)
by 5upplied_demand | 2025-12-12 19:10:35+00:00
> Parents are supposed to be parenting, without the help of the Government.

Why wouldn't we want the government to support parenting in similar ways the Government support's retirement, personal security, entrepreneurship, education, health, and other societally important activities?

> These are all straightforward solutions that don't require government-mandated age verification systems with their inevitable privacy nightmares and implementation overreach.

Yes, they are. They all also stop being effective as soon as a child is outside of your wifi network, which was my entire point.

> whether parents are willing to invest a few hours to implement it rather than demanding legislation to do their job for them.

Framing it this way doesn't really help your point. It proves that you don't understand what parents are actually dealing with. It is the same response that people on HN have when a non-developer writes a technical article in NYT.
by Bender | 2025-12-12 19:10:41+00:00
Or Waymo going into an active crime scene, loads of cop cars, guns drawn? [1] Cops yelling to get away and instead Waymo pulls over closer to the crime scene causing the passengers to panic.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2XoMKwZE3o [video][1m42s]
by palmotea | 2025-12-12 19:10:57+00:00
> Your bosses are political, they shape politics to mold the environment around you. Unions form the bedrock of worker power, and workers should advocate for a more democratic society against the oligarchs. We are some of the best positioned in society to do so because we control the means of production.

I should clarify: I totally agree with being "political" in that area. The stuff I'm thinking about are things like Gaza, BLM, etc. They may be very worthy causes, but there's controversy about them too, and they don't really seem to be in-scope for a union.
by seneca | 2025-12-12 19:11:13+00:00
> If the company's existence depends on the unfair exploitation of its staff, its foreclosure is inevitable and justified, and that is simply the price everyone involved must pay to maintain equilibrium.

Claiming that all non-union companies are inherently operating via "unfair exploitation of its staff" is ridiculous. It's entirely possible for a labor union to go too far and drive a company to become noncompetitive.

These sort of canned answers are empty claptrap and not really fit for an honest discussion.
by chasd00 | 2025-12-12 19:11:48+00:00
> Now imagine you save $10M a year doing it

only after the move is complete and assuming it's as successful as you think it would be. What usually happens is the migration takes on a life of its own and is a multi-year if not multi-decade project. It sucks up so much money and effort that a business could be using to actually build their business vs migration to a different database. Meanwhile, the account execs of the old system know you're moving off of it so say good bye to any kind of contract discounts or special treatment during emergencies.

There's entire graveyards of failed enterprise system migrations. The most likely outcome is eventually a compromise has to be made and now you have two systems to maintain and license, the legacy one, and the new one. With the promise of eventually getting off the old one but it never happens.

I'm on a project with a client that has 24 ERPs across their enterprise around the globe from acquisitions. Half of them are ERPs that were meant to replace another one but the transition was never completed. A big part of this project is integrating all of their sales pipelines, analytics, and history into, yet another, enterprise system.
by crackez | 2025-12-12 19:11:51+00:00
That's about how much it cost my company to move the flagship off of z/OS. That kept the language (Cobol) and DB2 intact (moved to DB2LUW); just a new build target basically.

It took like 5 or 6 years and that $10M represents the cost of only 10 months of operations on Z.
by mikkupikku | 2025-12-12 19:12:07+00:00
Have you ever noticed how often Germans online like to say "That's not how we do it in Germany..." "We don't do that in Germany..." "In Germany we..." ?

Germans seem to have a cultural thing going on where they think the way they do things is the most logical and correct way, and think they're doing everybody else a favor by telling them how things are meant to be done. In fairness, so do Americans. But, for instance, I never hear this shit from the French.
by grandiego | 2025-12-12 19:12:24+00:00
In my experience, it is from technical management in medium/big companies you'll listen some good things about Oracle as a database product (regardless of its actual merits), like stability, scalability, compliance checks, and other "enterprisy" features (like database encryption). Also, it is offered as a default database option for many enterprise applications from their vendors. While many people points to Postgresql as "the alternative", in many places outside USA its commercial support is not available, or too limited. Other commercial alternatives (like MSSQL) have the (more or less) the same bad reputation regarding licensing costs.