MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by objclxt | 2025-12-04 09:27:50+00:00
> Building physical buildings is a much simpler, much less complex process with many fewer degrees of freedom than building software.

I don't...think this is true? Google has no problems shipping complex software projects, their London HQ is years behind schedule and vastly over budget.

Construction is really complex. These can be mega-projects with tens of thousands of people involved, where the consequences of failure are injury or even death. When software failure does have those consequences - things like aviation control software, or medical device firmware - engineers are held to a considerably higher standard.

> The private market is perfectly capable of performing this function

But it's totally not! There are so many examples in the construction space of private markets being wholly unable to perform quality control because there are financial incentives not to.

The reason building codes exist and are enforced by municipalities is because the private market is incapable of doing so.
by asim | 2025-12-04 09:27:53+00:00
I recently saw this https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.11714 on conversational networks and it got me thinking that a lot of the problem with polarization and power struggle is the lack of dialog. We consume a lot, and while we have opinions too much of it shapes our thinking. There is no dialog. There is no questioning. There is no discussion. On networks like X it's posts and comments. Even here it's the same, it's comments with replies but it's not truly a discussion. It's rebuttals. A conversation is two ways and equal. It's a mutual dialog to understand differing positions. Yes elite can reshape what society thinks with AI, and it's already happening. But we also have the ability to redefine our networks and tools to be two way, not 1:N.
by coldtea | 2025-12-04 09:28:19+00:00
How does MC warm-up fit with LLMs? With LLMs you start with a prompt, so I don't see how "warm up" applies.

You're not just sampling from them like some MC cases.

> If you let the model run a bit longer it enters a region close to the typical set and when it's ready to answer you have a high probability of getting a good answer.

What does "let the model run a bit longer" even mean in this context?
by harry8 | 2025-12-04 09:28:38+00:00
Yeah. Nowadays I use pi-hole which is dnsmasq underneath and use it with unbound.

Works great. Minimal fuss, efficient setup, little maintenance, I don't have to understand the guts. Everything on my local network is addressable.

Ad blocking at the router is also something you don't want live without once you've gone there but pi-hole is a great solution even if you don't want that.
by andsoitis | 2025-12-04 09:29:46+00:00
> It's about enforcing single-minded-ness across masses, similar to soldier training. But this is not new. The very goal of a nation is to dismantle inner structures, independent thought

One of the reasons for humans’ success is our unrivaled ability cooperate across time, space, and culture. That requires shared stories like the ideas of nation, religion, and money.
by mieses | 2025-12-04 09:30:21+00:00
dnsmasq is great. The best part is that you can assign the same IP to multiple interfaces on the same device (to multiple MAC addresses) which drives network purists crazy and is no longer supported by systemd-networkd (because they are puritans). Separated DHCP/DNS can not do this. I will look into kea and whether they can do this.
by emsign | 2025-12-04 09:30:33+00:00
That's the plan. Culture is losing authenticity due to the constant rumination of past creative works, now supercharged with AI. Authentic culture is deemed a luxury now as it can't compete in the artificial tech marketplaces and people feel isolated and lost because culture loses its human touch and relatability.

That's why the billionaires are such fans of fundamentalist religion, they then want to sell and propagate religion to the disillusioned desperate masses to keep them docile and confused about what's really going on in the world. It's a business plan to gain absolute power over society.
by pbmonster | 2025-12-04 09:30:54+00:00
No, that's one reason why there's at least an order of magnitude wiggle room there. I just took the first number for J/Token I found on arxiv from 2025. Choosing the exact model and hardware it runs on is also making a large difference (probably larger than your one-time upfront costs, since those are needed only once and spread out across years of inference).

My point is mobility, especially commercial flight, is extremely energy intense and the average westerner will burn much more resources here than on AI use. People get mad at the energy and water use of AI, and they aren't wrong, but right now it really is only a drop in the ocean of energy and water we're wasting anyways.
by Antibabelic | 2025-12-04 09:31:21+00:00
You can believe the references the Wikipedia article is based off, such as BBC Scotland:

"They surveyed hundreds of fish and chip shops in Scotland to find out if "the delicacy" was available and if people were actually buying them. It found 66 shops which sold them, 22% of those who answered the survey. [...] Annie Anderson, from the Centre for Public Health Nutrition Research at the University of Dundee, used to send her medical students out into the city to see if they could find somewhere that sold deep-fried Mars bar. "It was not much of a challenge in Dundee," she says."
by fainpul | 2025-12-04 09:31:22+00:00
Didn't really work for me. I asked it for something I hacked together myself in the past, so I have an idea of what I want, and I also know that resources like this exist on the internet. So it seemed like a fair test.

Prompt:

"I want to build a V-plotter (carriage hanging from two points, connected by light chain or belts). How can I figure out the dimensions of the printable area that will have good print quality? Good quality requires that there is enough, but not too much pull on both chains."

Result:

https://www.phind.com/search/i-want-to-build-a-e402fb56-8e69...

Yes, it has some form elements to adjust values. But it's not really interactive and the "map" it talks about is not showing. Also "Keep both chains between 0.5 m g and 1.5 m g" sounds like nonsense.

You also get the usual LLM crap like "Loose belts cause skipped steps and misaligned layers" where "layers" clearly refers to 3D printers and has no meaning here.

What I expected:

https://jsfiddle.net/Lgmnv5t7/2/
by PaulRobinson | 2025-12-04 09:31:56+00:00
I'm more optimistic as I think about SBC manufacturers, plenty of other manufacturers wanting to service this market, and companies like Framework (warts and all - I don't think they're perfect) didn't really exist a couple of decades ago.

I'm actually a big fan of Apple hardware (when you crunch the numbers for base spec machine and when you're able to get discounts, the price/performance for the half-life you get is incredible), but I'm also planning to get back into home-brew builds a bit more over the next year: I need to build a NAS, a home lab, I might look at a gaming rig... and I'm far from alone.

So yes, it's a niche market, but a profitable one for a lot of players, and one that Micron will be glad is still available to them when the data centre bubble bursts.
by sph | 2025-12-04 09:32:03+00:00
> I actually live in Scotland. I have never seen anywhere that sells deep-fried Mars bars here

The link above literally has a picture of a shop in Aberdeenshire which sells deep-fried Mars and claims to have invented the delicacy.

Consider the possibility that your experience might not fully encompass the truth and you might not have seen the whole of Scotland. It's quite a large country.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-12-04 09:32:16+00:00
It's weird. The "records" in question appear to be those kept by the Smithsonian:

> The Smithsonian Institution’s Global Volcanism Program has no record of any eruptions of Hayli Gubbi during the Holocene, the current geological epoch, which began at the end of the last ice age, about 11,700 years ago.

But I'm fairly confident that the Smithsonian's records don't go back more than 700 years.
by pimterry | 2025-12-04 09:32:27+00:00
Totally agree. Chiming in as another React dev: I really regret the last few years of choices React has made. I don't want a React-integrated BFF layer, even on greenfield projects, hooks are awful and the whole thing just gets more awkward to solve tangentially related problems.

I really do want a good frontend framework that lets me expressively build and render dynamic frontend components, but it feels like 99% of React's development in the last few years has been just been creating churn and making that core frontend experience worse and worse. Hooks solve challenges around sharing component meta-functionality but then end up far worse for all other non-trivial cases, and it seems like RSC & concurrency just break things and add constraints instead of improving any part of my existing experience.

I guess this is cool if you're building mega-projects, but it makes React actively painful to use for anything smaller. I still use it every day, but as soon as I find a good off-ramp for my product (something similar, but simpler) I will take it. Moving towards Preact & signals currently seems like the best option for existing projects so far as I can tell.
by futuraperdita | 2025-12-04 09:32:34+00:00
> AI also has very powerful open models (that can actually be fine-tuned for personal use) that can compete against the flagship proprietary models.

It was already tough to run flagship-class local models and it's only getting worse with the demand for datacenter-scale compute from those specific big players. What happens when the model that works best needs 1TB of HBM and specialized TPUs?

AI computation looks a lot like early Bitcoin: first the CPU, then the GPUs, then the ASICs, then the ASICs mostly being made specifically by syndicates for syndicates. We are speedrunning the same centralization.
by paganel | 2025-12-04 09:32:35+00:00
> Electrifying the transportation sector is generally seen as a 15-25% increase in grid demand.

Quote on that? A developed country like the US has problems even now, see California (with the yearly fires there) or Texas. And how do you solve the "last-mile" connections without regularly starting fires everywhere? (on account of all those higher-voltage thingies being closer to residential units).
by xp84 | 2025-12-04 09:32:54+00:00
Through that API, the frontend is handed a high-privilege API key for Box. Not only was that a huge blunder on the backend, but it reveals what passes for architecture these days. Should our application's backend speak to the super sensitive file store? No, we should hand over the keys to that to the React app, because it literally did not occur to them that there's anything that physically could be driven by the frontend that shouldn't be.

My apologies to the frontend engineers out there who know what they're doing.
by georgefrowny | 2025-12-04 09:33:27+00:00
Quite right. "Grok/Alexa, is this true?" being an authority figure makes it so much easier.

Much as everyone drags Trump for repeating the last thing he heard as fact, it's a turbocharged version of something lots of humans do, which is to glom onto the first thing they're told about a thing and get oddly emotional about it when later challenged. (Armchair neuroscience moment: perhaps Trump just has less object permanence so everything always seems new to him!)

Look at the (partly humorous, but partly not) outcry over Pluto being a planet for a big example.

I'm very much not immune to it - it feels distinctly uncomfortable to be told that something you thought to be true for a long time is, in fact, false. Especially when there's an element of "I know better than you" or "not many people know this".

As an example, I remember being told by a teacher that fluorescent lighting was highly efficient (true enough, at the time), but that turning one on used several hours' lighting worth of energy for to the starter. I carried that proudly with me for far too long and told my parents that we shouldn't turn off the garage lighting when we left it for a bit. When someone with enough buttons told me that was bollocks and to think about it, I remember it specifically bring internally quite huffy until I did, and realised that a dinky plastic starter and the tube wouldn't be able to dissipate, say 80Wh (2 hours for a 40W tube) in about a second at a power of over 250kW.¹

It's a silly example, but I think that if you can get a fact planted in a brain early enough, especially before enough critical thinking or experience exist to question it, the time it spends lodged there makes it surprisingly hard and uncomfortable to shift later. Especially if it's something that can't be disproven by simply thinking about it.

Systems that allow that process to be automated are potentially incredibly dangerous. At least mass media manipulation requires actual people to conduct it. Fiddling some weights is almost free in comparison, and you can deliver that output to only certain people, and in private.

1: A less innocent one the actually can have policy effects: a lot of people have also internalised and defend to the death a similar "fact" that the embedded carbon in a wind turbine takes decades or centuries to repay, when if fact it's on the order of a year. But to change this requires either a source so trusted that it can uproot the idea entirely and replace it, or you have to get into the relative carbon costs of steel and fibreglass and copper windings and magnets and the amount of each in a wind turbine and so on and on. Thousands of times more effort than when it was first related to them as a fact.
by jackfranklyn | 2025-12-04 09:34:06+00:00
Same in the UK. We typically get 2 or 5 year fixed deals, then you're expected to remortgage or you end up on the lender's standard variable rate (usually painfully higher).

My first mortgage was a 2-year fix at 1.89% during covid. When that ended I had to remortgage at nearly 5%. That was a fun conversation with my partner.

The US system is genuinely unusual globally. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac basically absorb all that interest rate risk that would otherwise sit with borrowers. It's a massive implicit subsidy that most Americans don't fully appreciate.
by lenkite | 2025-12-04 09:36:04+00:00
> If Putin's regime is censoring western media, is it any less political?

Would like to point out that Russian bans came in response to the EU ban.

"The EU first banned Russian state media outlets like RT and Sputnik on March 1, 2022, as part of sanctions against Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Russia then restricted access to Western outlets, such as the BBC and Deutsche Welle, on March 4, 2022, in response. A more recent cycle occurred in 2024, with the EU banning Voice of Europe, RIA Novosti, Izvestia, and Rossiyskaya Gazeta on May 17 (effective June 25), followed by Russia's ban on 81 EU media outlets, including Politico and AFP, on June 25. In both cases, Russia's actions came after the EU's."

Personally, I think this is stupid but domestic politics sadly always trump international common-sense.
by jacquesm | 2025-12-04 09:37:01+00:00
That's a risk-return issue. Bezos plays it safe within Amazon, and quite unsafe outside of that. By the time he acquires something from Amazon it is because it has proven long-term revenue generation and the shake-out period is done and consolidation is about to start. With AI the shake-out is still to come. So he can afford to wait to eventually acquire the winner or to copy it if he can't buy it. Having very deep pockets enables different business strategies.
by SCdF | 2025-12-04 09:37:24+00:00
I've only read the abstract, but there is also plenty of evidence to suggest that people trust the output of LLMs more than other forms of media (or that they should). Partially because it feels like it comes from a place of authority, and partially because of how self confident AI always sounds.

The LLM bot army stuff is concerning, sure. The real concern for me is incredibly rich people with no empathy for you or I, having interstitial control of that kind of messaging. See, all of the grok ai tweaks over the past however long.
by ExoticPearTree | 2025-12-04 09:37:24+00:00
Here, I googled it for you: "The European Union generally has higher road safety standards than the US, resulting in significantly lower fatality rates. The EU mandates stricter vehicle safety features, including automated emergency braking, and has more stringent traffic laws regarding speed, seat belts, and drunk driving. In contrast, the US has higher average vehicle weights and a less consistent application of safety regulations." and it proves my point: the EU just regulates stuff to death.
by phba | 2025-12-04 09:37:34+00:00
Apparently X11 has a security extension [1]. There was a discussion some months ago [2].

Xenocara (X on OpenBSD) improves security by dropping privileges and using features like pledge [3], but I don't know how this affects the feasability of keyloggers.

[1] https://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.6/doc/xextproto/security.ht...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44768745

[3] https://man.openbsd.org/pledge.2
by misswaterfairy | 2025-12-04 09:37:38+00:00
Instead of anti-cheat on the client side, which 'kernel level' anti-cheat still gets beaten, why not look at a wholly server-side statistical analysis of player stats?

Make the anti-cheat follow one of the key tenets of cybersecurity: never trust user input.

Should work reasonably well for first-person shooters.

You're ranked based on the game's inner metrics, calculated on the server, rather than player-visible ones:

- time from observation to target contact with crosshairs (inc. standard deviation, standard error)

- % of time successfully striking specific hit boxes

and so on (depending on the game).

These rankings don't affect your public rankings but do affect who you're match-made with, or games that don't have private server options. Eventually you'll only be match-made with other cheaters, or players so good they give cheaters a genuine run for their money.

For games that do have private server options it could be configurable to:

- flag the player to admins as 'suspicious' for investigation

- Start ignoring hits that would've otherwise been successful for statistical outlier behaviours (where the statistical analysis indicates a significant disparity between observed and known-human-like reaction times and behaviours).

Even if cheats were used on the server, their
by Yujivus | 2025-12-04 09:38:38+00:00
Author here. I have been working on catastrophic forgetting on transformers. And I found a potential solution with strong results. I have a weird attention free encoder that treats embeddings as waves instead of vectors. Motivation and summary of solution is below.

Pretrained embeddings starts to learn faster, this is a known thing and used for low resource NLP. So, if we could scructure the embedding "map" faster, decoder should learn a lot faster.

So, we isolated the alignment cost of this map with a method we call ISMR. We found 20 layered model with 14.5% embeddings does not learn faster than 1 layered model with 80% embeddings.

Then, we invented a weird encoder we call "PRISM". It treats embeddings as waves instead of vectors. It teleports embeddings to relevant frequencies rapidly. It looks like it can learn new concepts 5-shot with nearly no forgetting (-0.7 to -0.84 BLEU) while standard transformer encoder decoder suffers catastrophic forgetting (more than 10 BLEU loss).
by aperture147 | 2025-12-04 09:40:06+00:00
Then... don't use GHA and move to other CI/CD/Workflow platform.

If you try it, don't like it then don't use it, GitHub does not force you to use GHA anyway, and moving away from GitHub due to their direction sounds like a political movement. It's like someone who stop shopping from Walmart, not because they sells bad product but because they support the Republic, then going to a local shop that sometimes close unexpectedly sound unreasonable.
by ides_dev | 2025-12-04 09:40:57+00:00
The biggest difference that stood out to me was that the fuel compositions are almost exactly opposite; 85/15 ethanol/gasoline for Indy and 10/90 for F1.

I was able to find plenty of articles saying that next year F1 will move to a "100% sustainable fuel", but none that actually mentioned the composition. Is it likely to move closer to the make-up of the Indy fuel?
by jrowen | 2025-12-04 09:41:04+00:00
No, the employees would not pay. Think of it like AWS. Each company rents only as many spaces as they need in that area. There would be employees of hundreds of companies working out of the same building. There might be a small Facebook team, an individual Microsoft employee, people from random startups, whatever. Hiring a guy in Alberta? See if you can requisition a space in a nearby center. Don't need to build your own entire office or have that person move or work from home. Having worked at a big company with a nice campus, the remote workers I interacted with largely felt like they missed out on a lot of the perks that were generally considered part of the compensation, even those in satellite offices.

The supporting services and amenities would likely not be entirely free in this case, since it's not all sponsored by one employer, but they would still be useful.

This whole thing is designed to empower and facilitate remote work....but hey, if Starbucks and the guest room work for you, that's perfectly fine, your employer appreciates the savings.
by 0xEF | 2025-12-04 09:41:34+00:00
> you can't believe anything that's on Wikipedia

Anything

God, how ridiculously hyperbolic. But we're in the midst of a debate about the origins of a deep fried candy bar with strangers on HN and just supposed to believe that you live in Scotland and have seen every possible offering in every possible shop.

Sounds stupid to decry something that people can verify to some extent then proceed to offer information that nobody can verify, doesn't it? This tired drum of Wikipedia being able to be edited by any wad off the street needs to be laid to rest, especially now in an age where misinformation is insanely prevalent in our general media and trusted sources who get paid to spread it.
by MobiusHorizons | 2025-12-04 09:41:42+00:00
> like there is an inherent flaw with the x6-64 ISA that means a chip that provides it can never be competitive with ARM on power consumption.

This is only one of many factors, but I know that high performance instruction decoding doesn't scale nearly as well on x86-64 due to the variable width instructions as it does on ARM. Any reasonable performance OoO core needs to read multilpe instructions ahead in order for the other OoO tricks to work. x86-64 is typically limited to about 5 instructions, and the complexity and power required to do that does not scale linearly since x86-64 instructions can be anywhere from 1 byte to 15 bytes making it very hard to guess where to start reading the second instruction before the first has been decoded. Arm cores have at most 2 widths to deal with and with ARV v8 I think there is only one leading to cores like M1 firestorm that can read 8 instructions ahead in a single cycle. Intel's E cores are able to read 3 instructions at two different addresses (6 total, just not sequential) that can help the core look at predicted branches but doesn't help as much in fast optimized code with fewer branches.

so at the low end of performance where mobile gaming sits you really need an OoO core in order to be able to keep up, but ARM really has a big leg up for that use-case because of the instruction encoding.
by A_D_E_P_T | 2025-12-04 09:41:58+00:00
> The main factor behind this shift appears to be the acquisition of Fontworks by the US-based Monotype in 2023.

When I read the headline, my bet was that the culprit would be US Private Equity, and that there's no way a Japanese or Chinese company would pull such a move. That kind of destructive rent extraction is just not in their normal playbooks.

Yeah, I wasn't entirely correct, but pretty damn close.