MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by halJordan | 2025-12-22 19:49:09+00:00
You're only saying that because it's a witch-hunt. These sorts of oversights are routinely made and forgiven daily at all levels of society. Citi regularly sends millions of dollars to wrong accounts and then says "my bad, give it back" and no one bats an eye.

But some ai gen'd placeholders beak through and suddenly we're all about punishing an oversight?

That's the definition of a witch hunt, and it's past time we admit it.
by spott | 2025-12-22 19:49:14+00:00
> there wouldn’t be different ideological factions in the first place.

Maybe I’m just very jaded, but I don’t think this is true.

Our values are significantly more aligned than we generally believe, however as long as there is power to be gained by creating the illusion of a difference of values, there will be factions dedicated to ensuring that illusion is maintained.
by Slow_Hand | 2025-12-22 19:49:14+00:00
Would love to see this, as someone who has been heavily using Live since 2006 and is finally getting into proper coding in middle-age. Having a way to augment Live in a text-based coding format would be greatly welcome.

While I'm not holding my breath, Ableton the company are transitioning into a steward-ownership model in which the stewards will have decision rights over the company. So I have hope that it will continue to grow in ways that are less affected by market considerations and that are a little more opinionated and specialized. Not to mention that Ableton own Cycling 74 (creators of Max/MSP).

So it's not out of the realm of possibility.
by zephen | 2025-12-22 19:49:23+00:00
People who make things don't make any money.

People who claim that they are disrupting with disintermediation, but actually simply replace the old intermediary with their own?

Those people get filthy rich.

People who _should_ be making things but are trying this intermediation technique themselves will most likely find that it's like other forms of lying. Go big or go home.
by tensor | 2025-12-22 19:50:30+00:00
Countries don’t outsource any research to the US. US funding lured many scientists to the US but this has never been seen as a positive thing outside the US. In Canada we call it brain drain. Now we’re capitalizing and the US science failing to strengthen our science sector.

Long term science is not at risk. Science doesn’t need the US. This is, however, a big problem for the US.
by caymanjim | 2025-12-22 19:50:44+00:00
Except kids already voluntarily gave up their own privacy to such an extent that they don't value it whatsoever. The government is lagging here. Kids will record you without consent anywhere and everywhere, post it online, live stream everything they do, overshare with no limits. They don't understand the idea of privacy. They don't even like the idea of privacy.
by nateb2022 | 2025-12-22 19:51:01+00:00
To be added to the Prohibited List, a substance must meet any two of the following three conditions:

1. It has the potential to enhance sport performance. (potential -> a theoretical mechanism, even if unproven)
2. It represents an actual or potential health risk to the athlete.
3. It violates the spirit of sport.

Most of these peptides haven't passed adequate human safety trials, and their long term side effect profile is unknown. Additionally, an attempt at using anything to gain an unfair advantage violates the spirit of sport, even if the effect is placebo or even negative.
by ImPostingOnHN | 2025-12-22 19:51:02+00:00
> Can it? In the same way? It feels like your argument comes down to handwaving. Circumstantial law is hardly a novel thing.

I think that was their point: your argument seems handwavey, because anything can be bad "in certain circumstances".

Hold the door for someone? Seems nice. But you could be insulting them by doing so. Or letting a virus in by having the door open too long. Or wasting energy and contributing to climate change by letting the conditioned air out. Indeed, under certain circumstances, it's bad.
by zamadatix | 2025-12-22 19:51:52+00:00
(Assuming "precision" really meant "accuracy") The network equipment I work on requires sub microsecond time sync on the network for 5G providers and financial trading customers. Ideally they'd just get it from GPS direct, but that can be difficult to do for a rack full of servers. Most of the other PTP use cases I work with seem to be fine with multiples of microseconds, e.g. Audio/Video over the network or factory floor things like PLCs tend to be find with a few us over the network.

Perhaps a bit more boring than one might assume :).
by zahlman | 2025-12-22 19:51:54+00:00
> Python gets a lot of grief from the perspective of people who are frustrated because they didn't start off using virtual environments and now their global python package namespace is a nightmare.

I never got to the "nightmare" stage before learning about venvs.

But it's still nice sometimes to have an environment ready to go full of popular, non-conflicting things to play around with a REPL in.
by tankenmate | 2025-12-22 19:52:04+00:00
`Not a forcing function unless you’re levered`; but every one is levered, you aren't born with all the housing, food, and water you'll need for the rest of your life. Everyone is born with a net negative of the necessities of life, the difference though is that a very small minority are bequeathed this by well heeled ancestors. But for the overwhelming majority there is a life long struggle to afford to live a suitable life.
by lanthade | 2025-12-22 19:52:10+00:00
Previously on HN:

The biggest CRT ever made: Sony's PVM-4300:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40754471

Overview of the KX45ED1 / PVM-4300 (Worlds Largest CRT) [video]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42588259

Interestingly that first link is to the same URL as today's yet it's from June 22 2024. The linked article however has today's date as the publish date. There's no indication that the article was updated from what was published originally.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-12-22 19:52:15+00:00
I haven't yet written a UI library so it's not something I can state confidently, but based on adjacent work I've done, I imagine that a significant deal of complexity can be avoided by somewhat paradoxically embracing complexity early on and designing for all the eventualities.

UI frameworks are one place where outside of toy projects, YAGNI doesn't really apply as much, and so things like focus systems and accessibility affordances should be factored in from day one. If you go in with the attitude of writing something "elegant", you're going to end up bolting these things on after the fact and writing contorted code to make it all fit together. It's like finding out that you need a skyscraper after building foundations and framing for a cottage.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-12-22 19:52:20+00:00
"Well, I wish you the best with this - but I really don't understand the target market."

"After years of SSH tunnels, IPsec headaches, and the ssh log horror movie, I wanted something simpler: install, sign in, get work done."

"Target market" could be the author

There's no good reason to discourage people from writing overlays, unless one is doing so for commercial (i.e., anti-competitive) reasons

A more interesting question might be, "In your opinion, what is unsatisfactory about XYZ that does essentially the same thing"

For example, one might be a Layer 2 overlay whilst the other is Layer 3

Maybe we'll never have web browser diversity (or meaningful competition) as the web browser has become an instrument of surveillance and advertising controlled by "Big Tech", but overlay diversity (and competition) is still a possibility

If everyone thought IPsec and OpenVPN was "good enough" then Wireguard and Tailscale would not exist

I still use an unpopular non-commercial L2 overlay from before Wireguard existed that is smaller and faster than anything else I have ever seen

IMHO, the more overlays that exist, the better
Best way to annotate large parquet LLM logs without full rewrites?
by platypii | 2025-12-22 19:52:22+00:00
I asked this on the Apache mailing list but haven’t found a good solution yet. Wondering if anyone has some ideas for how to engineer this?

Here’s my problem: I have gigabytes of LLM conversation logs in parquet in S3. I want to add per-row annotations (llm-as-a-judge scores), ideally without touching the original text data.

So for a given dataset, I want to add a new column. This seemed like a perfect use case for Iceberg. Iceberg does let you evolve the table schema, including adding a column. BUT you can only add a column with a default value. If I want to fill in that column with annotations, ICEBERG MAKES ME REWRITE EVERY ROW. So despite being based on parquet, a column-oriented format, I need to re-write the entire source text data (gigabytes of data) just to add ~1mb of annotations. This feels wildly inefficient.

I considered just storing the column in its own table and then joining them. This does work but the joins are annoying to work with, and I suspect query engines do not optimize well a "join on row_number" operation.

I've been exploring using little-known features of parquet like the file_path field to store column data in external files. But literally zero parquet clients support this.

I'm running out of ideas for how to work with this data efficiently. It's bad enough that I am considering building my own table format if I can’t find a solution. Anyone have suggestions?
by eightysixfour | 2025-12-22 19:52:25+00:00
> so any pedo can see when kids are there and not attended?

Sure. It also lets parents watch. Or others see when parents are repeatedly leaving their kids unattended. Or lets you see some person that keeps showing up unattended and watching the kids.

> Or how it has become increasingly trivial to identify by face or license plate such that combining tools reaches "movie Interpol" levels, without any warrant or security credentials?

That already exists and it is run by private companies and sold to government agencies. That’s a huge power grab.

> The best defense is actually the glut of data and the fact nobody is actively watching you picking your nose in the elevator. If everyone can utilize any camera and its history for any reason then expect fractal chaos and internet shaming.

This argument holds whether it is public or not. It is worse if Flock or the government can do this asymmetrically than if anyone can do it IMO, they already have enough coercive tools.
by lateforwork | 2025-12-22 19:52:25+00:00
The Saudis have enormous influence over Trump through business deals. So does Qatar through the jet they gifted Trump, and the UAE through crypto deals.

These oil rich countries are no fans of clean energy.

Is it merely coincidence, then, that Trump is canceling wind and solar projects in the United States?

Previously Trump also canceled the largest solar project in the United States. Known as Esmeralda 7, the project planned in the Nevada desert would have produced enough energy to power nearly two million homes.
by WorldMaker | 2025-12-22 19:52:27+00:00
To prevent easy Reflection? It would make debugging harder and make writing a debugger harder, for maybe a small gain of avoiding some user code breaking an encapsulation boundary here or there. (But those serious about using reflection to break encapsulation boundaries would likely build complex workarounds anyway.)

It is the compiler's job to guard encapsulation boundaries in most situations, but it's also not necessarily the compiler's job to guard encapsulation boundaries in all situations. There are a lot of good reasons code may want to marshall/serialize raw data. There are a lot of good reasons where cross-cutting is desirous (logging, debugging, meta-programming), which is a part of why .NET has such rich runtime reflection tools.
by D-Machine | 2025-12-22 19:52:29+00:00
Seconding this, the terms "Query" and "Value" are largely arbitrary and meaningless in practice, look at how to implement this in PyTorch and you'll see these are just weight matrices that implement a projection of sorts, and self-attention is always just self_attention(x, x, x) or self_attention(x, x, y) in some cases, where x and y are are outputs from previous layers.

Plus with different forms of attention, e.g. merged attention, and the research into why / how attention mechanisms might actually be working, the whole "they are motivated by key-value stores" thing starts to look really bogus. Really it is that the attention layer allows for modeling correlations and/or multiplicative interactions among a dimension-reduced representation.
by Terr_ | 2025-12-22 19:52:49+00:00
> Good Guys [...] Our authoritarianism helps granny

That's quite a *whooooosh* of missing-the-point. Perhaps because you've confused me with another poster, and you're smushing a bunch of unfinished tu-quoque accusations together?

I'll simplify it further, you're acting like these are equivalent:

1. Yelling "Wolf! Danger!" ... because you were in downtown Chicago and saw a fur hoodie.

2. Yelling "Wolf! Danger!" ... because you were in rural Albania and saw a paw-print and a dead deer.

It's foolish to consider them the same just because the same two words were uttered. The accuracy or reasonableness of one does not reflect on the other.

> Who decides whether something is a good reason?

Well, in this case I decide that seeing a fur hoodie downtown is a bad reason to warn of an imminent wolf attack, and that seeing a paw-print in the European hinterlands is... a much-less-bad reason.

If I (or you) are somehow not permitted to make that decision about 1-vs-2, please explain why.
by qcnguy | 2025-12-22 19:52:56+00:00
Kotlin didn't target LLVM at all when it was designed, that feature came much later. The primary target for Kotlin is and always was the JVM. And Kotlin was designed with usability in mind from day one, that was the justification for it. Weird to say Kotlin define programming as serving the compiler. The compiler bends over backwards to serve the user.
by ArcHound | 2025-12-22 19:53:14+00:00
Consider this situation: security review before a project go-live.

I have never seen this team before and I'll "never" see this team after the fact. They might be contracted externally, they might leave before the second review.

Let's say I can sus out people doing this. I don't have the option of giving them the benefit of the doubt and they have the motivation to trick me.

I guess I've answered my own question a bit, such an environment isn't built to foster trust at all.
by Empact | 2025-12-22 19:53:15+00:00
You act like guns some weird anachronism, but from my perch, it seems that the need for civilized people to maintain firearms is increasing, not decreasing.

Consider that we have a documented justice system in many places that is repeatedly releasing violent criminals onto the streets, such that they are going on to set people on fire on the train, knife innocents on the subway, swinging and hitting elderly women with nail-embedded boards on the sidewalk. Note these crimes happened despite their lack of firearms. Should we not have guns to defend ourselves from these barbarians?

If the justice system were perfect, and crime rates far lower, then firearms would be less necessary, but never unnecessary, because civilization in a local phenomenon, and it only takes one barbarian to disrupt civilized order for the peaceful people of the world. It takes one civilized person with a gun to restore order.

In many places in the west, immigration policy has given rise to rape gangs in England, gangs that bomb in Sweden, etc. Should these peaceful people not have guns to defend themselves from these barbarians?
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-12-22 19:53:22+00:00
You realize “pairing it back to 50 hours a week” is not a great outcome don’t you?

If I graduated post 2012 instead of 1996, I would have tied my horse to a safe BigTech company and made a lot of money in cash and liquid RSUs long before I joined a bullshit startup that statistically wouldn’t have gone anywhere.

Hell I made that choice at 46 when my youngest (step)son graduated. I chose to work at BigTech instead of getting a meaningless “CTO” founding engineer position at a startup.
by joe_mamba | 2025-12-22 19:53:31+00:00
Also from the article:

"Speaking at the European Science Diplomacy Conference in Copenhagen, she did not elaborate on exactly how the US was wrecking its reputation."

For someone in the top position of EU's research leadership, she sure does seem to suck at explaining and arguing her statements, which should be the no. 1 skill of academics in research.
by array_key_first | 2025-12-22 19:53:44+00:00
It should also just be obvious to people. The body, of course, has a choice in how it spends it's energy.

There have been studies on ababolics, synthetic testosterone, that demonstrate this. Taking steroids and doing absolutely nothing leads to more fat loss and more muscle gain than not taking steroids and working out. Which... yeah duh.

But people will still deny this, because of the implications. We all have different baselines, and nobody likes to hear that they got lucky in some ways. Everyone wants to believe the world and human condition is perfectly fair, so they feel that they deserve what they have.
by mattmaroon | 2025-12-22 19:53:47+00:00
That’s also a drastic misstatement that illustrates what I’m talking about. A poll showed that the average persons specifically designated “emergency savings fund” is $600. Many people have lots of money but don’t specifically refer to some as an emergency fund.

Also thanks to credit one does not need to have $600 to spend $600. That’s why we’ve got so many people with no savings.
by mk89 | 2025-12-22 19:53:53+00:00
The weirdest thing is that all fines from EU countries are about privacy and anti-competitive behavior, which literally every citizen can benefit from. The implementation might be something questionable sometimes, but this hatred is totally nonsense.

It strikes me as odd that the land of opportunity has become the land of bigX that must overtake everything and everyone just accepts it. This isn't the spirit of the Americans I know, who actually challenge and see opportunity everywhere. How can you just choose to bend to Apple/Google/Meta etc? I understand they are great companies, but they do really ugly things to push competitors out, to allow scam/phishing, etc.
by Ajedi32 | 2025-12-22 19:54:03+00:00
That's easy. Person gets kidnapped, government surveillance camera helps police find the car before the kidnapper kills them. Or, probably more common: murder happens, government surveillance camera helps police find murderer and jail them before they kill someone else.

That's why these cameras are so prevalent, the case for them is extremely obvious and easy to make (give police more tools to stop bad guys), while the case against them is a lot more subtle (human freedom, government abuse, expectations of privacy, risk of data breaches, etc).
by dheera | 2025-12-22 19:54:06+00:00
> giving life is seen as a cell in their life's financial excel sheet

It is, though. My own food, water, housing, heating, hobbies and things that make me happy, are all cells on that sheet as well. The numbers add up now. Money for kids would absolutely obliterate all the other cells on that sheet, and the numbers wouldn't add up.
by ProllyInfamous | 2025-12-22 19:54:10+00:00
I became a union electrician specifically to get away from tech and then found myself spending most of my apprenticeship wiring data centers.

Can't seem to escape from the tech gods.

Unfortunately blue collar labor takes its toll on bodies — probably best-left to hobby grunt work (and not full-time) unless you like back/knee/hip pain =D

I'm currently attempting to transition back into white collar tech (early 40s) but we all know how that's going (in this economy). Fortunately twisting wires together for decades has allowed me to stack enough savings that I'm not in a rush / desperate for re-training/employment.
by I-M-S | 2025-12-22 19:54:45+00:00
Hi, I'm the author of The Program audio series, a fairly successful fiction podcast that launched on HackerNews in 2018. Seven years later, this little sci-fi anthology is still ongoing, having released 37 (soon 38) episodes and surpasaing 1 million downloads.

I chronicle the ups and downs of creating a niche artistic product such as this in annual reports, the latest of which I just released last week. It offers a transparent view into what goes into making a creative project such as this, and also what you get out of it, because I share all the financial data down to specific revenue streams.

As such, I hope it can be of use to others who are undertaking a similar endeavour. Feel free to ask questions should you have any!

Cheers
by thedougd | 2025-12-22 19:55:37+00:00
I'll make up another one to pile on. Perhaps the police would have had a visible, deterrent presence if they weren't lazily relying on cameras, and that would have prevented the assault in the first place.

Anyhow, if you read the flock database, they're overwhelmingly not using them for the purposes of public safety or random crime.
by oofbey | 2025-12-22 19:55:46+00:00
Most systems I’ve worked with can go completely offline without ever logging a critical error. Some coding errors or misconfiguration or failure in a critical system - enough to log an error - and nobody can get any useful work done. I’ve never seen sobering that cash convert those into critical errors. I’m used to critical errors being rare - certain failures of a server to start. Or infra problems.
by scoofy | 2025-12-22 19:55:55+00:00
I mean, yes, if the Waymo's could safely pull over, or even know how to handle every emergency situation, I think that would be better. I'd say that's a big ask though. Training autonomous vehicles for blackouts, fires, earthquakes, tornadoes, hail storms, landslides, sinkholes, tsunamis, floods, or even just fog is not really feasible given that most humans won't even navigate the properly. I'll keep saying it: I'm glad the cars were set to fail-safely when they encountered a situation they couldn't understand.

I honestly wish the human drivers blowing through intersections that night would have done the same. It's miracle no one was killed.
by exceptione | 2025-12-22 19:55:57+00:00
Don't worry, countries didn't do that. Academia is quite strong outside of the US. Still a loss of course!

When we talk about innovation, hn has a narrow focus on the well-known monopolies. That is understandable, because they are well-known brands, not some obscure innovative Swiss company in a critical supply chain. Reality is more complex than we discuss about, fortunately enough.

But the focus on the winner-takes-all is also a bit unhealthy, because monopolies are the anti-thesis of a free market. A free market needs rules to keep it free and fair. I know, that conflicts with the sponsored narratives--how else can you get people to justify gatekeeper siphoning everyone of in their walled garden?
by zeroCalories | 2025-12-22 19:56:11+00:00
I always feel weird reading statements from the EU regarding this relationship. There's always talk of the U.S abandoning it's position, guilt tripping, etc. but very little about what the EU plans to do in retaliation. Cut off the U.S from the research? Retaliatory tariffs? Why is the U.S leaving NATO a concern for the EU, but not a concern for the U.S? The fact that these are not the top talking points makes me think the U.S isn't entirely wrong in their approach.
by array_key_first | 2025-12-22 19:56:15+00:00
> It’s a daily struggle trying to NOT eat until literally feeling pain in the belly, and even then, I know if I wait 30 minutes more I can keep eating

Yes, but this is sort of the point. If we can make it not a daily struggle, probably a lot more people would be successful.

Generally, I think the solution of "just suffer" is a bad one. If people's solution requires a certain amount of pain, it's probably just a suboptimal solution, and we can do better.