MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by PaulHoule | 2025-12-27 18:26:47+00:00
(1) Meyers-Brigg is popular among laymen but it is not well-regarded by psychometrists, you can find so many scales on line that are better. I suspect personalization would have an impact, I bet my Copilot would score higher on O-LIFE [1] then it would at baseline.

(2) No wonder they lean against "J", I mean they are designed to follow instructions and be useful even if their "first law of robotics" guides them against superficially defined forms of harm (won't "help me make an atom bomb" but will help you fire up the FORTRAN compiler and get neutronics monte carlo up and running)

I hear Pat Gelsinger is trying to build a Christian model and I'd expect that to be a bit more "J" as was another biblically based model that didn't like my fox altar which both Google and Copilot will tell me to "continue to use".

(3) There's a viewpoint that it could be harmful for models to "pose" as humans [2] most notably something in the back of my mind bothers me when Copilot (GPT-5 based) says things like "I am happy that you said..." when I know it has no feelings at all... But on the other hand this could be seen as an act of pragmatics that makes them more relatable, effective in communication, useful, successful in the market, etc.

If you believed that, a model should give refusals at many psychological scale questions or answer "No" to any "Have you ever ... ?" questions.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09209...

[2] should it say "speak for yourself!" when I ask "don't fungi use ergosterol the same way we use cholesterol?"
Bloat in software is getting WAAAY out of hand
by sdrawkcabsti | 2025-12-27 18:27:24+00:00
I saw a Sudoku game the other day-SUDOKU you know a few numbers-that took 40 seconds to load, and then caused the phone to overheat while in play, while splashing ads here and there. Its sad. That was the very definition to me of "giving into bloat". Nobody cares about efficiency anymore, and in fact are going in the opposite direction. Substituting bloat for actual programming knowledge, many of these game developers never touched a single ounce of code nor would know how to begin with. Just downloaded some bloaty API and pump out games on an engine that requires 4TB to run (so basically it means spoiled brats are using it) I have given up on computer science which I used to love so much. Anymore its just...disappointing how the world adapted to it. very...very disappointing. All that potential yet it is all wasted on bloat, redundant security and moneygrubbing before the first pixel is ever drawn.
by data-ottawa | 2025-12-27 18:27:27+00:00
I think a lot of this is just crappy bonus and incentive structures.

The execs want to they're using+selling AI, the investors want to believe AI can theoretically fire all the workers/drop your fixed costs, and the middle managers need to justify that they're on it by myopically pushing out features that increase the AI adoption metric.

The rushed push of AI features obviously trains your users that your AI is useless crap that just gets in the way. If you're going to do it's, make it limited and high quality first.
by antonvs | 2025-12-27 18:27:56+00:00
A big part of what’s impressive about Noether’s theorem is that it’s not at all mysterious. At its core, it’s a mathematical proof that’s possible to fully understand. It doesn’t depend on any magic constants in our universe, or indeed anything in the universe at all. It should apply to all possible universes in any situation that satisfies its conditions. The PLA is similar.

Some people see a mystery at the point where these mathematical constructs are applied to our physical universe. Eugene Wigner wrote about “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences.”

There are explanations for many of the points he raised in that paper. Perhaps the one that remains most unresolved is the question of why universal law or behavior isn’t messier, more chaotic - why it should so often correspond so neatly to physical phenomena. Intuitively, this doesn’t seem surprising to me, but Wigner correctly points out that we don’t really know why this is the case.

Answering that gets deeper into philosophy: structural realism, the anthropic principle, and so on. But one possible explanation is an extension of ideas like Noether’s: that the various mathematical constraints collapse the space of possibilities enough to make it likely, if not inevitable, that the universe ends up embodying relatively simple mathematical structures.
by mvkel | 2025-12-27 18:28:32+00:00
Whenever I see headlines like this, I ask: what happened in 1994?

It was post-Cold War and central banks were trimming USD reserves to test alternatives.

Then, crises hit (tequila, Asian, Russian, dot com) and the world reconsolidated around USD, thanks to the immense strength of the Federal Reserve and IMF.

Similarly now, reserve share is falling as countries hedge sanctions and geopolitics, yet dollar usage in trade, debt, and crisis funding remains dominant, and unless a true full-stack alternative (liquidity, safety, yield, and crisis response) emerges, history will repeat.

Makes me wonder: is this just an artifact of the world being relatively "stable" right now?
by zjp | 2025-12-27 18:28:56+00:00
We do not agree on the system.

There is a clear difference between not calling your coworker a slur, which is about prejudice or hatred, and not saying words like 'grooming', which is about whether the least reasonable person you know could plausibly find a negative usage of the word and claim it "traumatized" them to hear.

"Don't use words that dehumanize people" and "don't use words that have some negative connotation, somewhere out there" are meaningfully different systems, and I don't want to work with people tedious enough to adopt the latter. I don't want them to set the corporate or academic culture of our society.
by alwa | 2025-12-27 18:29:02+00:00
This is the same OPM whose previous efforts at digitization were famously compromised by state espionage, right [0]? To the tune of… losing, to the US’ largest adversary, every security investigation into every Federal employee holding a sensitive position?

Since that enormous breach of their core responsibility became public more than 10 years ago, I wonder if there are reasons, beyond managerial incompetence, that over the past 18 years the federal HR department hesitated to expose processes—specifically ones that depend on careers’ worth of highly personal data, and that don’t NEED to move fast—to the world through a publicly-routed hairball of JS SPA crud...

They “discovered” this treasure of a data store as if it were some natural resource that just needed “exploring for.” What I’m missing is the part where they figured out why it had been left alone, and why its guardians were so reluctant to let the cowboys at it. Giving serious Chesterton’s Fence.

I get how it’s nice to see instantly what amount will be on your pension check, but that’s not exactly the only factor weighing into your decision to retire. You can reckon a fairly good guess yourself and from talking to peers, and it’s not like seeing the exact number instantly would let you do much to change it. And not to normalize mediocrity, but… I feel like federal employees by that point in their career have acclimated to long bureaucratic waits.

And it’s a nit, I know—but I sure wish they’d cleaned their phone cameras before they made photos for bragging to the public. On those… phones… which surely belong inside the secure document processing facilities where they were mugging for casual selfies…

I buy that it only takes 2 to cowboy, but in my experience, after said cowboys ride off in a triumphant self-celebratory blog post, it can take an army to clean up the mess they don’t even know they created.

[0] https://oversight.house.gov/report/opm-data-breach-governmen...
by robocat | 2025-12-27 18:29:23+00:00
I live in one - New Zealand is a modern western society.

Making marriage the norm would not fix any of the issues I see in my own society, and marriage causes other problems.

Many people I know (including solo mums) that I know would love to find someone worthwhile marrying... However they haven't (or can't) find someone worthwhile, so it is better to remain single than get married into a dangerous relationship.

I suspect you are mistaking cause and effect. Marriage isn't a cause, it is an outcome.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-12-27 18:31:24+00:00
> I can’t tell if you seriously think a random person writing code in their basement is equivalent to a company that has access to API docs, design specs

Are you saying not having those things is dangerous? They should be required to publish all of that for safety-critical devices then.

> actual test hardware

Why would arbitrary people be unable to buy test hardware? Again something to be addressed if true rather than used as an excuse.

> the expertise of a ton of engineers that have worked on the project and understand how it can go wrong

Do they not have internet access? If they don't even work for the company anymore then that could be the only way to access that information.

Literally something which is happening on the linked Reddit page.

> not to mention all the regulations and verifications they’re subject to.

Regulations are for preventing someone else from harming you. You don't need a government incentive to protect you from yourself, you already come with that incentive.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-12-27 18:31:44+00:00
What is the algorithm implementation when it comes to the physical world? Does the implementation extend to remote galaxies? Is the strong force part of the implementation? We don't know ... there appears to be no way to know.

But even if you could know, it is just demonstrably wrong that the implementation must encode the goal. If you create selection pressure, and have a reproductive system that allows for mutations, then you may end up an "implementation" that encodes the goal implicit in the selection pressure. But anyone who messed around with genetic algorithms or artificial life in the 90s knows that you can trivially start out with no resemblance to "the goal" at all. Where life on earth in aggregate or any specific example of it in particular might be along that pathway is similarly impossible to say.

Finally, even defining "the goal" is tricky. Consider the well-documented case of moth evolution in industrial (and later, post-industrial) northern England. Their camouflaging wing tones changed to respond to the typical color on vertical surfaces, twice within a human generation or three. Was "the goal" flexible coloration across generations, or was it "light, then "dark" and then "light" again? That's a philosophical question as much as anything ...
by wkat4242 | 2025-12-27 18:31:55+00:00
Oh I wasn't aware of this actually being an intended usecase. And yes like the other poster said, pairing it with a phone infrastructure was more common (in the days before these went all IP of course).

It was a bit of my OCD being triggered as well. I love neat cabling at work (at home it is chaos funnily enough).
Show HN: Ssort – I got sick and vibe coded a stream priority sorter
by xlii | 2025-12-27 18:33:20+00:00
Hi HN,

I've been coding for over 20 years, and I've always had this specific annoyance: when I grep or rg through a codebase, the definitions or declarations I actually want to see are often buried in the middle of the stream.

I got tired of crafting magic regex sequences to find them, so when I came down with the (actual) flu this week and needed to occupy my brain, I built ssort.

It's a CLI tool that buffers input and bubbles specific matches (like "struct", "class", "func") to the top while flushing the rest later. It was partially "vibe coded" with Gemini during (ongoing) recovery.

It's simple, written in Go, and finally solves my search ordering problem. Hope you find it useful.
by GeoAtreides | 2025-12-27 18:33:39+00:00
Not insinuating anything, but when it comes to such a hot topic, and such a hot take, maybe you should disclose you worked at Meta (Instagram) for 3 years. Again, I'm not accusing anyone of anything, god forbid. Studies usually disclose source of funding and sources of conflict, and people disclose owning stocks when discussing economy, it seems like a good idea.
by crazygringo | 2025-12-27 18:34:22+00:00
OK, well hopefully you understand now! This part is key:

> Now, it seems like you were saying that the text layers are just the pixels from the page moved up to a new layer. I said that I think that's surprising.

That's indeed all it is. It may be surprising, but that's how it works. Absolutely nothing about the pixels are changed as part of the process of that text layer separation. Later when saving the final PDF there's normal lossy compression, same as any JPEG, but the layer process actually preserves the text edges better than JPEG.

So I do hope you're satisfied now that everything about this is just normal image processing, and that nothing has been destroyed, there's no "missing evidence" or anything. And that the whole idea that the layers imply some kind of manipulation or forgery is false. What you're seeing is just the scan itself, saved (presumably) at a lower resolution and with the normal image compression scanners produce.
by tptacek | 2025-12-27 18:34:39+00:00
Hey, it's the original article that compares it to Dead Can Dance. On the plus side, that suggestion did get me to put DCD on while me and my kids played Fishspan last night. They wanted to know why I was playing "spooky dungeon music" and kept saying things like "oh we just got to the desert level boss fight" when new tracks started playing.
by rini17 | 2025-12-27 18:34:41+00:00
If it's part of legislation, you can fight it. If the official ideology is equality and racial prejudices "don't exist", then any problems are suppressed and you can't do anything.

Soviet union was defacto an apartheid when you consider how non-white ethnics were treated in practice. They just were so good at suppressing everything that it was never "an issue".
by dajonker | 2025-12-27 18:35:28+00:00
At least CPython and CRuby (MRI), the most common implementations of each language, ignore all type hints and they are not able to use them for anything during compile or runtime. So the performance argument is complete nonsense for at least these two languages.

Both Python and Ruby (the languages themselves) only specify the type hint syntax, but neither specifies anything about checking the actual types. That exercise is left for the implementations of third party type checkers.
by xorvoid | 2025-12-27 18:35:45+00:00
Indeed. I'd suggest Susskind's Theoretical Minimum: Classical Mechanics if someone wants an introduction. He doesn't explicitly prove Noether but he demonstrates the connection between symmetry and conservation laws building the intuition to properly appreciate Noether.

I've also written a series on Abstract Algebra for computer programmers if you're serious about learning it:

https://xorvoid.com/galois_fields_for_great_good_00.html
by wredcoll | 2025-12-27 18:35:53+00:00
Ok, give me biden. Where are his lists of corruption scandals[1]? His public statements about taking bribes?

I'm not quite sure how to explain this very obvious point: biden and his government was not corrupt in any meaningful sense and trump and his government is extremely corrupt and pretending that they're the same is both factually wrong and has the effect of protecting trump and his corruption.

The point isn't that anyone is above reproach, the point is that all you're doing is normalizing the increased awfulness of the republican corruption. And normalizing it means that it is more likely to continue happening and less likely to be punished.

If you're supposedly unhappy about clinton "corruption" why aren't you really mad about trump?

This whole "oh everything is the same nothing can improve" attitude is literally a favored tactic of the most corrupt governments. They want you to think that way because it means they'll never be held accountable. Any time people start talking about improving things they're met with an endless deluge of "oh it's all the same nothing can change" which is, of course, a self-fulfilling prophecy.

[1] The best the fairly obvious house republican "investigation" into joe biden could manage was some vague statements about his son getting paid for having the last name biden, which may or may not be illegal, but certainly seems unethical, but more importantly, ISN'T THE SITTING PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. Like, it is so incredibly obvious that words fail me that the president being corrupt matters A LOT MORE than his son being corrupt. Like, a lot a lot a lot more.
by idatum | 2025-12-27 18:36:32+00:00
This is my experience as well. I have a couple PINE64 devices, a Rock64 (Rockchip RK3328) and a RockPro64 (RK3399). And an N150 device.

Both ARM64 devices run headless, make use of GPIO, and have more than enough CPU. In fact, these are stable enough that I run BSDs on them and don't bother with Linux.

The Rock64 runs FreeBSD for SDR applications (e.g. ADS-B receiver). FreeBSD has stable USB support for RTL-SDR devices.

The RockPro64 runs NetBSD with ZFS with a PCIe SSD. NetBSD can handle ARM big.LITTLE well. I run several home lab workloads on this. Fun device.

I also have an N150 device running the latest Debian 13 as my main home lab server for home automation, Docker, MQTT broker, etc.

In short: SBCs are cheap enough that you can choose more than one, each for the right task, including IoT.
Show HN: Litmus – Specification testing for structured LLM outputs
by lukecarr | 2025-12-27 18:36:35+00:00
Over the holidays, I've been working on a small side-project that includes some LLM prompting from the end user. Admittedly, I struggle to keep track of the latest and greatest models, and I've also never bothered to read up on "prompt engineering," so I built a little testing utility to solve both of these problems at the same time.

Enter Litmus. I'm pitching it as "specification testing" for LLMs. You define test cases (input prompt -> output JSON), as well as your system prompt and structured output (JSON Schema). All of this gets chucked at OpenRouter, and you get some nice terminal output summarising the test results (with a breakdown per-field for any failing cases) to see how well the model performed.

Although it's framed as an LLM testing tool, it also serves as a model comparator. You can pass the `--model` CLI argument multiple times, and this will let you run the test cases against multiple models, with a comparison table generated in the output at the end for evaluating latency, throughput, tokens, and accuracy (tests passing vs. failing).

The GitHub README contains a full example output of what a test report from Litmus looks like.

With this, I've managed to get my system prompt for my side-project whittled down to the point where the accuracy is acceptable and it's not an exorbitant amount of tokens. I've also found out, through model comparison, that I didn't need anywhere near as large of a model as I had originally envisioned.

You can grab it on GitHub as a single-file, zero-dependency executable (written in Go). Admittedly, I've not tested the pre-built binaries that are created via GitHub Actions, but there's no reason why they shouldn't work.
by seg_lol | 2025-12-27 18:36:55+00:00
Dude is giving what many have wanted for years, the largest of which is a massive reduction in US hegemony. Restarted militarization of Europe, accelerated the expansion of China into Africa. Causing Five Eyes to curtail the flow of intel.

But at the same time, utterly burning US soft power with the shuttering of USAID and most likely causing 14M excess child deaths world wide.

Bro just drove the US empire off a cliff. Manufacturing will have to come back if they succeed in burning US currency. Good thing the rich have so much of it, Elon at 1/10th is still 40-70B.
by derangedHorse | 2025-12-27 18:37:29+00:00
Groq is not a publicly traded company and has no legal reporting requirements. Sure, their projected revenue numbers they gave to investors dropped from $2b in February to $500m in July, but a later funding round in September showed it wasn't significant to how insiders saw the company. Contrary to what this article would imply, their valuation more than doubled from $2.8b last year to $6.9b this year after Groq's latest round of investment in September (after their revenue adjustment). Considering they increased revenue from $90m to $500m and got a $1.5b commitment from Saudi Arabia, I really don't see this being 'hype'.

src: https://www.reuters.com/business/groq-more-than-doubles-valu...
by woodruffw | 2025-12-27 18:37:31+00:00
Can you provide a source this? To my understanding, the GnuPG project (and by extension PGP as an ecosystem) considers itself very much alive, even though practically speaking it’s effectively moribund and irrelevant.

(So I agree that it’s de facto dead, but that’s not the same thing as formal deprecation. The latter is what you do explicitly to responsibly move people away from something that’s not suitable for use anymore.)
by 827a | 2025-12-27 18:38:02+00:00
In some ways, this effect can have a positive impact on US citizens; demand for the US dollar requires supply to satisfy the demand. Where does that supply come from? Oftentimes: Printing. The US generally does not make a habit of telling US dollar buyers "no, we don't have any US dollars to sell you", so less demand on the dollar for reserve holdings can have a deflationary impact on its value. This can be combined with lowering interest rates, which creates more domestic demand for dollars, to help balance out the inflationary impacts from that.

Many economists take the stance that being the world's reserve currency is something of a two-edged sword; a curse that does come with geopolitical advantages, but bundles those advantages with significantly more difficult global financial responsibilities.
by rzerowan | 2025-12-27 18:39:01+00:00
I think youre conflating 2 different things, share as a payment currency and share as reserve.

Share as a payment/trade currency is not going away though it will be greatly reduced especially with CIPS that bypasses SWIFT.Andmost data showing no change is usually from SWIFT - with zero visibility to the volumes in CIPS.

Share as reserve is more visibly viz central banks stacking gold and hedging on treasuries , with most tresurie bids coming in from offshore financial hubs likethe Caymans.So could be a whole shellgame there to inflate the volumes.

So yeah the $ isnt going away anytime soon (cross border trade still requires it in many places),the exorbitant privilege it enjoyed is.
by p_wood | 2025-12-27 18:39:19+00:00
> In my experience pre-commit hooks are most often used to generate a starting commit message.

The `prepare-commit-msg` hook is a better place to do that as it gives the hook some context about the commit (is the user amending an existing commit etc.)

> To put it even more bluntly, if you are trying to enforce proper formatting, pre-commit hooks are absolutely the wrong tool for the job, as hooks are trivially bypassable, and not shared when cloning a repo, by design.

They aren't a substitute for server post-receive hooks but they do help avoid having pushes rejected by the server.
by rpcope1 | 2025-12-27 18:39:55+00:00
The exception (even those are questionable as running plain Debian did not work right on Pi 3B and others when I tried recently) proves the rule. You have to look really hard to find an x86 computer where things don't just basically work, the reverse is true for ARM. The power draw between the two is comparable these days, so I don't understand why anyone would bother with ARM when you've got something where you need more than minimally powerful hardware.