MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by everforward | 2025-12-27 19:43:54+00:00
I don’t have an issue with HOT lanes, but I’m not a big fan of the toll roads in Texas.

I don’t like that it creates separate classes of infrastructure for citizens based on their ability to pay. Even the non-toll highways had an HOT-like lane you paid per-use to drive on that was often significantly faster than the free lanes.

It makes a system where I suspect many people won’t want to pay to upgrade the free infrastructure because they don’t use it, and people who can’t afford the daily tolls waste even more time in traffic. The fast pass lane are even worse because they cannibalize lanes that could be used to alleviate general traffic (and were typically sparsely used).

The tolls were substantial for some people. $3-$8 a day on toll roads (ie no fast pass lane). At $8 a day, that’d be $40 a week, ~$160/month. That’s nearly 20% of the weekly pre-tax income of someone making Austin’s $22/hr minimum wage.
by zahlman | 2025-12-27 19:44:20+00:00
> Random ML projects with hundreds to thousands of stars on GitHub may only work with a specific, rather ancient version of Python.

Can you name some?

> Do you compile your GCC every time before you compile your Python? Why not? It Just Works.

If I needed a different version of GCC to make Python work, then probably, yes. But I haven't yet.

Just like I barely ever need a different version of Python. I keep several mainly so that I can test/verify compatibility of my own code.
by tptacek | 2025-12-27 19:44:22+00:00
One of those WONTFIX's is on an insane vulnerability: you can bitflip known plaintext in a PGP message to switch it into handling compression, allowing attackers to instruct GnuPG packet processing to look back to arbitrary positions in the message, all while suppressing the authentication failure message. GPG's position was: they print, in those circumstances, an error of some sort, and that's enough. It's an attack that reveals plaintext bytes!
by baby_souffle | 2025-12-27 19:45:09+00:00
> I keep saying, the first cheap Chinese vendor that ships a SystemReady-compliant SBC is gonna make a killing.

Agree. When ARM announced the initiative, I thought that the raspberry pi people would be quick but they haven't even announced a plan to eventually support it.
I don't know what the hold up is! Is it really that difficult to implement?
by abigail95 | 2025-12-27 19:46:08+00:00
I'm sorry you didn't get a response yet. I'm not a lawyer and have no legal training but it seems to boil down to this:

It's part of the debate of whether (1) GPL is a contract, (2) GPL can be enforced by non-parties, (3) How Fair Use applies, (4) Methods to bully/shame companies to give up source code ...? (5) Who the actual parties involved are if the actual rights holder (Linux Kernel) tries to sue someone. (First Sale doctrine might apply).
by thegrim000 | 2025-12-27 19:46:41+00:00
I'd personally consider it infinite scroll as you can scroll through as many pages of stories as you want. There's only the slight friction of having to click the 'next page' button every now and then. In an app like Instagram or whatever, you'd also have the friction of swiping your thumb on the screen to see more. They seem pretty identical to me.
by qnleigh | 2025-12-27 19:46:50+00:00
No offense intended, just speaking by the numbers you shared above, but it sounds like you are at the lower end of the bell curve. Most day traders are, largely because they don't have access to priveledged information like the datasets that hedge funds buy. If they make better bets than you do, then they literally take your money. Those aren't good odds.
by theandrewbailey | 2025-12-27 19:47:00+00:00
I work at an e-waste recycling company, and I have some thoughts:

I've been seeing some interesting hardware that I wouldn't have otherwise. I have a Microsoft Surface Hub sitting around that I've yet to list. It's a 55" 1080p touchscreen videoconferencing monitor. It has an embedded PC (4th gen i5), but (if I recall) it was likely bricked several months ago by a firmware update that deleted the certificates it used to verify its bootloader.

We don't have a Windows distribution license (and little willingness to provide support), so we can't install Windows on anything we sell. We usually install Linux, and it's cool to think we're helping to move the needle on Linux usage.

If we can't sell something, we take the RAM and drives, because the AI rush drove up prices for those. The scrap gets sold to refiners who shred it and dissolve in acid to extract materials, like you would with mined ore.

Microsoft has been fighting local accounts on Windows 11 very hard so MDM locking works more often. It locks a PC to a corporate domain, so when you install Windows, it forces you to login to a specific domain, and it won't let you get around it. Many of these machines we get are quite valuable otherwise (e.g. Dell Precision laptops with good GPUs), but we have buyers that will pay good money for them, even when MDM locked.

> Sure the hardware vendors love it. And it's all spun up as "we're keeping you secure and better."

Only for Microsoft to keep pushing AI harder and harder, and at some point your data will be stolen to train the model. (If they can't, they can unilaterally update the terms of use to allow it.) At least you can ask it for your credit card number.
by smj-edison | 2025-12-27 19:48:08+00:00
Sorry if that wasn't clear! I meant text as opposed to having verbal and physical coaching. My teacher would often demonstrate a technique by playing it on her piano, which was adjacent to mine. I even had a masterclass with one teacher who would grab my hand and guide it as she demonstrated what I needed to do.

An example of where text falls short: if I said "be sure to rainbow your wrist when jumping in that passage," it wouldn't make any sense unless someone had seen an explanation. I suppose I could try to explain "when moving higher, make an upwards arc, and loop around at the end, to prevent jerking your wrist around when going back and forth," but even then that's still way too ambigious, since there's also a certain way you need to pivot your wrist so you can hold onto the upper chord as long as possible. It's just much easier to demonstrate and see if the student did it correctly.
by fortyseven | 2025-12-27 19:49:00+00:00
Aside from money, I think one of the major issues I had with toll booths was... Well the booths. Stopping, having to fish out exact change, planning ahead to make sure you had enough change, etc.

Nowadays we have those boxes that we can put in the windshield that automatically bill us later. And that's made me far more willing to take a trip via the highway. Removes a lot of anxiety. And, so far, at least in my experience, they work.
by ccgus | 2025-12-27 19:49:06+00:00
> What's Really Happening

> (1) The PNG contains an embedded ICC color profile* (likely Display-P3 or another wide-gamut color space),

Why didn't you check? From what I can tell when I did, there is no color profile in the original image so it'll default to sRGB. This really looks like a gamma issue of some sort (see @perching_aix's comment).
by seg_lol | 2025-12-27 19:49:38+00:00
https://bellard.org/nncp/ https://bellard.org/ts_zip/

See also

FineZip : Pushing the Limits of Large Language Models for Practical Lossless Text Compression https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.17141v1

Using a LLM to compress text (o565.com)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40245261

https://searchthearxiv.com/?q=llm%20text%20compression&tab=p...
by zahlman | 2025-12-27 19:49:50+00:00
> That's a property of Python though. The fact that it isn't compiled (and that importing is very slow).

Bytecode compilation is compilation.

There are many things that could be used to improve import speed that I never even see discussed, let alone implemented.

But most importantly, pip doesn't need to have all these modules imported. They already proved they could defer the Requests imports; but the actual network calls aren't that hard to do with the standard library anyway. (As nice as it would be to have Requests in the standard library, but I digress.) Most of the stuff it imports up-front from Rich will go entirely unused.

> Which can easily be zero-cost in Rust.

Which is irrelevant to the point.

> This is the only example you've given that actually fits with your thesis.

No. My thesis is that pip doesn't have to be the way it is in order to actually solve the problem of installing Python packages. Everything I mentioned is an example of a thing pip doesn't have to do in order to install packages, and slows it down unnecessarily.
by libraryofbabel | 2025-12-27 19:49:55+00:00
You really think I didn't already know how LLMs are put together when I wrote my comment? I've implemented these things from scratch in PyTorch. Of course I know the building blocks.

And if you want to get pedantic and technical, you didn't even get the reductionism right! Modern LLMs don't use the logistic regression sigmoid function for network activation nonlinearity anymore, they use things like ReLU or GELU. You're about 15 years behind.

Reductionism is counterproductive in biology ("human brains are voltage spikes across membranes, nothing more") and it's counterproductive here as well. LLMs have nontrivial emergent behavior. The interesting questions are all around what that behavior is and how it arises in the network during training, and if you refuse to engage beyond bare reductionism you won't even be able to ask those questions, let alone answer them.
Ask HN: I built a SaaS that nobody asked for, now what?
by ahmgeek | 2025-12-27 19:49:56+00:00
Hey, I built yet another VoIP SaaS business, registered it, and even handled the paperwork. In my head, it was a great product; in reality, I have no clue how to sell it or where.

Every day I say, maybe I need to add a feature or make the mobile app, but I know this is not the right thing to do; I need to find people who want it. It's just, I have no clue where...

For solo founders and software makers who are profitable, how did you sell it at the beginning?
by emptybits | 2025-12-27 19:49:57+00:00
Wild. My layperson mind goes to a simple example, which may or may not be possible, but please tell me if this is the gist:

Alice and Bob, in different reference frames, both witness events C and D occurring. Alice says C happened before D. Bob says D happened before C. They're both correct. (And good luck synchronizing your watches, Alice and Bob!)
by achyudh | 2025-12-27 19:50:17+00:00
This pivot sounds like VS Code is moving from a text editor to a thin client for AI services that Microsoft wants to push. It is one more step towards a future where our development tools (just like everything else on our computers these days) are just thin clients/wrappers around SaaS.

Emacs remains the antidote to this. I use Emacs because I want to remain the architect of my development environment, not become the consumer of a telemetry-gathering platform architected by PMs at a big tech company. It is also an absolute joy to use an environment that provides you with the same amount of power as the core maintainers, allowing you to fully inspect and modify the system even while it is running.
by caseysoftware | 2025-12-27 19:50:51+00:00
> The budget is voted on by Congress literally every single year.

A formal budget hasn't been voted on and passed by Congress in decades.

You're likely thinking of "continuing resolutions" and omnibus bills, neither of which are "budgets" by Congress's own defintions but function similarly:

The first - a continuing resolution - just continues spending as is, no chance to change or cut.

The second - an omnibus bill - is a big conglomoration of requests and projects with minimal chances to change things.

You are 100% correct on the lack of political will to be able to change things. Frankly, I believe that a) too many people have their hands in the pot or b) they fundraise off the real/perceived problems, so the motivation to fix anything is minimal.

Ref: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/10/01/congress-...
by anymouse123456 | 2025-12-27 19:51:14+00:00
Yah, also there is a huge difference between a minimal demo and actual, recommended, canonical deployments.

I’ve seen teams waste many months refining k8s deployments only to find that local development isn’t even possible anymore.

This massive investment often happens before any business value has been uncovered.

My assertion, having spent 3 decades building startups, is that these big co infra tools are functionally a psyop to squash potential competitors before they can find PMF.
by spwa4 | 2025-12-27 19:51:26+00:00
> I don’t like that it creates separate classes of infrastructure for citizens based on their ability to pay. Even the non-toll highways had an HOT-like lane you paid per-use to drive on that was often significantly faster than the free lanes.

But ... government income is largely dependent on the rich, and government spending largely benefits the poor. This is what is always forgotten about it. The reason debt is such a thorny issue is that debt really benefited the poor. And over time, so will these toll roads.

The reason toll roads benefit the poor is that the rich don't travel anyways, and this gives extra economic options to the poor. A large portion will figure out how to use this extra economic option (because that was thoroughly checked before the bridge was even built, and it wouldn't have been built if the answer wasn't that they would)

So both the building of the bridge, and the use of it almost exclusively benefit the poor.
by SilverElfin | 2025-12-27 19:51:28+00:00
The entirety of H1B workers is like 500k jobs, which isn’t even half a percent of all jobs. Why is this such a big deal to Groypers and the like? I also disagree on tax advantages - what specifically are you referring to? H1B workers are paid more on average, not less, and they cost companies a lot in time, legal costs, and fees.

But besides that, once someone is a citizen I feel strongly they’re no different than the rest of us. Directing hateful supremacist comments at American citizens based on their skin color or religion or national origin is completely antithetical to our constitution and values.
by digital-cygnet | 2025-12-27 19:51:29+00:00
This is normal for the Economist. I don't really understand why -- they clearly have an American edition (I get their print version in the US and its headlines and organization is totally different than the same edition in the UK), yet they leave all the "colours" and "boffins" in there, when it would be pretty trivial to regionalize the language same as they do the currencies and structure. My assumption is that being a bit eccentric and foreign-seeming is part of their brand.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-12-27 19:51:44+00:00
https://ewastemonitor.info/the-global-e-waste-monitor-2024/

> A record 62 million tonnes (Mt) of e-waste was produced in 2022, Up 82% from 2010; On track to rise another 32%, to 82 million tonnes, in 2030; Billions of dollars worth of strategically-valuable resources squandered, dumped; Just 1% of rare earth element demand is met by e-waste recycling

> The 62 million tonnes of e-waste generated in 2022 would fill 1.55 million 40-tonne trucks, roughly enough trucks to form a bumper-to-bumper line encircling the equator, according to the report from ITU and UNITAR.

> Meanwhile, less than one quarter (22.3%) of the year’s e-waste mass was documented as having been properly collected and recycled in 2022, leaving US$ 62 billion worth of recoverable natural resources unaccounted for and increasing pollution risks to communities worldwide.

https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/electronic-...

> Electronic waste (e-waste) is one of the fastest growing solid waste streams in the world (1). Less than a quarter of e-waste produced globally in 2022 was known to be formally recycled; however, e-waste streams contain valuable and finite resources that can be reused if they are recycled appropriately. E-waste has therefore become an important income stream for individuals and some communities. People living in low- and middle-income (LMICs), particularly children, face the most significant risks from e-waste due to lack of appropriate regulations and enforcement, recycling infrastructure and training. Despite international regulations targeting the control of the transport of e-waste from one country to another, its transboundary movement to LMICs continues, frequently illegally. E-waste is considered hazardous waste as it contains toxic materials and can produce toxic chemicals when recycled inappropriately. Many of these toxic materials are known or suspected to cause harm to human health, and several are included in the 10 chemicals of public health concern, including dioxins, lead and mercury. Inferior recycling of e-waste is a threat to public health and safety.

“Fake problem”
by smj-edison | 2025-12-27 19:52:10+00:00
For now, in most cases, yes. I think Khan Academy is a great example of moving in the right direction. They have a lot of interactive lessons in early math, where you drag and drop for counting and grouping. Another good example is the DragonBox series of apps where they make math more intuitive by providing immediate feedback and a new representation.

Dynamicland is pushing the state-of-the-art here too. I think you'd really like their essay "The Library"[1].

[1] https://dynamicland.org/2019/The_Library.pdf
by NietzscheanNull | 2025-12-27 19:52:49+00:00
This is completely incorrect. A flat tax has a constant tax rate, which is why it's often referred to as a "proportional tax." Under a true flat tax system, everyone pays the same percentage of their income.

A toll is absolutely regressive because the burden it imposes is constant, irrespective of income; poorer individuals will pay a proportionally higher percentage of their income than wealthier counterparts. As income increases the "effective rate" asymptotically approaches zero, which is regressive by definition.
by rasz | 2025-12-27 19:52:53+00:00
AMD didnt even clean room 386, nor even 486. AMD directly copied Intel microcode 100% 1:1 for 386, and later admitted to copying parts for 486 (smm? ice?). Sept. 4, 1993 LA Times article:

>AMD said Friday that its “independently derived” 486 microprocessor borrowed some microcode from Intel’s earlier 386 chip.

Borrowed hehe. Ended up in a 1995 settlement where AMD fully admitted copying and agreed to pay $58mil penalty in exchange for official license to 386 & 486 microcodes and infamous patent 338(mmu). Intel really wanted a legal win confirming validity of their patent 338 to threaten other competitors. 338 is what prevented sale of UMC Green 486 in USA. Cyrix bypassed the issue by manufacturing at SGS and TI who had full Intel license https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/8...

>were able to achieve better performance

Every single Am386 instruction executes at same cycle count as Intel counterpart, difference is only official ability to work at 40MHz.
by crazygringo | 2025-12-27 19:52:54+00:00
I swear I want this as a general tool for all command-line tools.

Start the tool, and just list all of the options in order of usage popularity, with a brief explanation, and a field to paste in arguments like filenames or values. If an option is commonly used with another (or requires it), provide those hints (or automatically add the necessary values). If a value itself has structure (e.g. is itself a shell command), drill down recursively. Ensure that quotes and spaces and special characters always get escaped correctly.

In other words, a general-purpose command-line builder. And while we're at it, be able to save particular "templates" for fast re-use, identifying which values should be editable in the future.

I can't be the first person to think of this, but I've never come across anything like it and don't understand why not. It doesn't require AI or anything.
by nis0s | 2025-12-27 19:53:24+00:00
It’s not “just 500K” jobs. It’s a pipeline of hiring managers who set up outsourcing to their home countries at the expense of Americans, and this doesn’t change when they naturalize. Immigration is a tool for supplementing the deficiencies of your home country with outside assistance. In America’s case, immigration has been weaponized by both the left and right. The left wants to settle the entire Global South in western countries at the expense of never building the countries where people have to immigrate from. The right scapegoats immigrants for whatever issue ails them. Should there be incentives for creating businesses in America that support work that gets outsourced? Definitely. Will that happen while there is a preserve incentive offered by H1Bs and biased hiring managers? Of course not.
by shkkmo | 2025-12-27 19:53:53+00:00
> What kind of bullshit argument is this? Really? Works created using illegally obtained copyrighted material are themselves considered to be infringing as well.

That isn't true.

The copyright to derivative works is owned by the copyright holder of the original work. However uaong illegaly obtained copies to create a fair use transformative work does not taint your copyright of that work.

> Even if not, you agree that they infringed on copyright of something close to all copyrighted works on the internet and this sounds fine to you?

I agree that they violated copyright when they torrented books and scholarly arguments. I don't think that counts at "close to all copyrighted works on the Internet".

> The consequences and fines from that would kill any company if they actually had to face them.

I don't actually agree that copyright that causes no harm should be met with such steep penalties. I didn't agree when it was being done by the RIAA and even though I don't like facebook, I don't like it here either.
by aiahs | 2025-12-27 19:54:03+00:00
Yea as I said, the award can reject them, I still think that this award doesn't actually represent the best indie games then, and therefore it will fade into obscurity. Funnily enough, this year's game Awards (the actual game Awards), were basically swept by small studios with tiny budgets compared to AAA studios. That's because these Studios had a coherent vision for their game, people that really cared about making it good, corporate AAA games are bad not because of usage of AI, but because monetization is more important than the gameplay.

To play devil's advocate, AI helps small studios with a limited budget actually way more, because they can bring a game to market, that maybe would've needed 10 people before, but needs only 3 people now. I'm not saying this is good or bad, just that that's the new reality, whether we like it or not. As I said, I'm against GenAI in many fields, e.g. I absolutely despise AI generated "Music", cancelled my Spotify subscription because of it (they insist on putting it into playlists and you can't disable it), but that doesn't mean, anything which was produced with 0.1% AI is bad, unethical, etc.
by firesteelrain | 2025-12-27 19:54:58+00:00
Yes, PATH-driven interpreter selection is the source of the detours. uv eliminates interpreter ambiguity but requires uv as a prerequisite. This improves portability inside environments that standardize uv; it’s not “portable to machines with nothing installed.”

Though, this isn’t about avoiding installs; it’s about making the one install (uv) the only thing you have to get right, instead of debugging whatever python means today.

I was advocating for containers as the “hard isolation / full stack” solution which eliminate host interpreter ambiguity and OS drift by running everything inside a pinned image. But you do need podman and have the permissions set right on it.