MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-23 18:56:37+00:00
It's kind of saying we should only focus on the #1 mass-murdering dictator in the world, so while many of them are actively slaying people, lets just focus on #1 for now.

No, we can have many targets. People who hoard money for the benefit of themselves with the detriment of society and the population at large are all "destructive aliens who undemocratically ruin everyone’s good time" to borrow the words of parent commentator. If just 10% were slightly less evil and egoistic, it would lead to huge improvements, and only a slight reduction to their own lifestyles. That they don't, is a stain on the legacy of humanity.
by Mic92 | 2025-12-23 18:57:30+00:00
We work on GPU accelerated VMs, so that in future we can also bring NixOS + VPNs to desktops/end users to machines that don't run NixOS. We will use it as an application runtime where can control the whole stack. Just now we are mostly focused on managing distributed NixOS machines. The VPN helps to provide services on any kind computer, even if not running in a datacenter. You can read the description here for context: https://docs.clan.lol/
by aiiotnoodle | 2025-12-23 18:57:36+00:00
Having been trapped on a 2 day flight to Madeira via Madrid, Porto and Porto Santo, eventually your powerbanks and headphones run out of charge.

EU621 comp was denied because the aircraft could not land due to wind.

I did spend about 12 hours in a fancy all inclusive on ryanair's dime (a bus arrived at the airport un-announced to the airport staff or us customers) while some slept in airbnbs and on the floor.
by mdip | 2025-12-23 18:57:47+00:00
Wow, yeah, I picked up one of these a few months before the new generation came out for $350. Everything shot up after that.

My son is using that card, today, and I'm amazed at everything that card can still power. I had a 5080 and just comparing a few games, I found if he used the SuperResolution correctly, he can set the other game settings at the same as mine and his frame-rate isn't far off (things like Fortnite, not Cyberpunk 2077)

There are many caveats there, of course. AMD's biggest problem is in the drivers/implementation for that card. Unlike NVidia's similar technology, it requires setting the game at a lower resolution which it then "fixes" and it tends to produce artifacts depending on the game/how high those settings go. It's a lot harder to juggle the settings between the driver and the game than it should be.
by PunchyHamster | 2025-12-23 18:57:49+00:00
> So you try to produce B200 cores but some compute units are faulty. You fuse them off and now the chip is a GP102 gaming GPU.

B200 doesn't have any graphics capabilities. The datacenter chips don't have any graphical units, it's just wasted die space.

As long as gaming GPUs will compete for same wafer space that AI chips use, the AI chips will be far more profitable to NVIDIA
by makeitdouble | 2025-12-23 18:58:02+00:00
> VR games are not exactly the same thing as regular video games.

That might be the fundamental divide, for that category of games I'm more on the VR camp and will settle for 2D only for convenience or availability.

I see it with different expectations than games like Persona or Zelda (or GTA?) which could compete solely on the mechanics and a lot more, and I get the feeling you're comparing it more to these genres?

Biohazard on PS4 was very meh to me, at that level I feel it could get down to Switch graphics to prioritize better game mechanics and more freedom of play. I never loved the clunkiness, as an action games it's pretty frustrating, and the VR game is even worse in gameplay quality. The immersiveness in VR is the only redeeming quality IMHO.
by neonnomad | 2025-12-23 18:58:50+00:00
I've been running servers for the pool for years. They are checked regularly for accuracy/uptime or it's score goes down in the pool and eventually gets removed. I sync from 5 stratum 1 servers and use chrony these days.

Facebook had a really interesting engineering blog about building their own timeservers: https://engineering.fb.com/2020/03/18/production-engineering...

Really well written for anyone who is interested.
Show HN: A JSON API for YouTube Transcript with MCP Support
by nikhonit | 2025-12-23 18:59:05+00:00
I built this because running yt-dlp in production (especially on serverless/Vercel) is a nightmare of IP blocks, cold starts, and binary dependencies.

TranscriptAPI is a lightweight wrapper that handles the extraction, formatting, and proxy rotation. It prioritizes manual captions over auto-generated ones and returns clean JSON with timestamps, ready for RAG pipelines.

The MCP (Model Context Protocol) Integration: I recently added native MCP support. If you use Claude Desktop or other MCP-compliant agents, you can add this API as a tool to 'watch' videos directly in your chat context without manually copying transcripts.

Technical Stack:

Backend: Python (FastAPI) on AWS Lambda (for burst scaling)

Caching: Redis (to prevent hitting YouTube for the same video twice)

Challenge: Handling 'drifting' timestamps in long livestreams where the auto-generated captions lose sync with the video frame.

It has a free tier for hobbyists. I’m curious to hear how you’re handling the context-window limits when feeding full 3-hour transcripts to LLMs
by Nevermark | 2025-12-23 18:59:10+00:00
Let’s start with friend’s devices. Children have lots of devices and lots of friends.

Friend’s phones, home computers and devices of other family members.

Unattended PCs and laptops at school. According to a music teacher who has literally had to clean her work computer after it was used for erotic viewing by students when the music room in a temp building wasn’t otherwise in use.

Web browsers on game consoles, e-readers, VR headsets, smart TVs, tablets, …

Now throw in constant device turnover, software updates, including settings panel changes, and settings values that get reverted, across the board.

I am not sure why you wanted my opinion. That’s less of an opinion and more of a list of what counts as ordinary for the last decade or so.
Show HN: Draped – Virtual try-on to help people choose outfits they own
by rogimatt | 2025-12-23 18:59:12+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m building Draped, a virtual try-on product focused on helping people choose outfits using clothes they already own.

The idea came from a simple problem:
People have clothes, but still don’t know what to wear each day.

With Draped, users can:

Digitize their wardrobe

Get outfit suggestions based on context (weather, day, occasion)

Preview outfits via a lightweight virtual try-on (still early)

I’m currently iterating fast and validating use cases before scaling.

I’d really appreciate:

Feedback on the problem itself

Thoughts on the virtual try-on approach

Any similar products I should study

Website: https://draped.me

Happy to answer questions and share what I learn building this.

Thanks
by pron | 2025-12-23 18:59:16+00:00
I find this discourse about AI and formal verification of software very confusing. It's like someone saying, let's assume I can somehow get a crane that would lift that vintage car and place it in my 15th floor apartment living room, but what will I do with my suitcases?

All the problems mentioned in the article are serious. They're also easier than the problem of getting an AI to automatically prove at least hundreds of correctness properties on programs that are hundreds of thousand, if not millions of lines long. Bringing higher mathematics into the discussion is also unhelpful. Proofs of interesting mathematical theorems require ingenuity and creativity that isn't needed in proving software correct, but they also require orders of magnitude fewer lemmas and inference steps. We're talking 100-1000 lines of proof per line of program code.

I don't know when AI will be able to do all that, but I see no reason to believe that a computer that can do that wouldn't also be able to reconcile the formal statements of correctness properties with informal requirements, and even match the requirements themselves to market needs.
by zahlman | 2025-12-23 18:59:28+00:00
> A static type check doesn't stand in for "a" unit test; static typing stands in for an unbounded number of unit tests.

You have conflated "a static type check" with "static typing". Unit tests stand in, in the same way, for an unbounded number of states of real-world input. They're simply being subjected to a trial verification system rather than a proof system. It turns out that writing proofs is not very many people's idea of a good time, even in the programming world. And the concept of "type" that's normally grokked is anemic anyway.

> Put another way...

Rhetoric like this is unconvincing and frankly insulting. You pass off your taste and opinion as fact, while failing to understand opposed arguments.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-23 18:59:52+00:00
Just wish it was distributed instead of such a US-centric organization. For survival, I hope they're thinking about how to make it more decentralized, because eventually the arm of the law is gonna come after them (again), and probably with less mercy this time.

Still a proud supporter of archive.org for many, many years. Their work is invaluable and I hope it stays around forever.
by ghc | 2025-12-23 19:00:07+00:00
As a child I lived near Gorey and accumulated a collection of little picture books signed by him. As a child I never knew what to make of them...they weren't anything like Calvin & Hobbes or The Far Side.

Until reading this I'd pretty much forgotten about them. I'll have to go pull them out to see if I understand them better as an adult.
by bilegeek | 2025-12-23 19:00:13+00:00
> The reason is that it would finally motivate game developers to be more realistic in their minimum hardware requirements, enabling games to be playable on onboard GPUs.

They'll just move to remote rendering you'll have to subscribe to. Computers will stagnate as they are, and all new improvements will be reserved for the cloud providers. All hail our gracious overlords "donating" their compute time to the unwashed masses.

Hopefully AMD and Intel would still try. But I fear they'd probably follow Nvidia's lead.
by zahlman | 2025-12-23 19:00:41+00:00
> Before type hinting tools for Python became popular, I worked on many projects where `TypeError` was the #1 exception in Sentry by a large margin.

My experience is radically different. `ValueError` is far more common in my un-annotated Python, and the most common cause of `TypeError` anyway is the wrong order or number of arguments after a refactoring.
by ffuxlpff | 2025-12-23 19:00:48+00:00
I've never understood what is so special about Starbucks. Visited once, the one near the Canary Wharf underground station. I saw it as pretty much an ordinary cafeteria.

Maybe it is the baristas. I sent my girlfriend to order - I usually do - because I avoid interacting with people trying to sell me anything for the same reason I use adblock while surfing and don't own a TV set. If buying coffee is anything like described in this conversation the experience would probably have been a lot more negative. Seeing someone acting as a friend for tips.

On a same trip we ate in KFC - my first and last time. I was like woah - who on earth would actually choose to eat this crap given about any choice... Compared to that the Starbucks coffee was ok, maybe a little bland.

Of course we didn't order any pint sized sugary things Americans seem to prefer because we enjoy being skinny and looking good.
by rhco | 2025-12-23 19:00:55+00:00
If Nvidia did drop their gaming GPU lineup, it would be a huge re-shuffling in the market: AMD's market share would 10x over night, and it would open a very rare opportunity for minority (or brand-new?) players to get a foothold.

What happens then if the AI bubble crashes? Nvidia has given up their dominant position in the gaming market and made room for competitors to eat some (most?) of their pie, possibly even created an ultra-rare opportunity for a new competitor to pop up. That seems like a very short-sighted decision.

I think that we will instead see Nvidia abusing their dominant position to re-allocate DRAM away from gaming, as a sector-wide thing. They'll reduce gaming GPU production while simultaneously trying to prevent AMD or Intel from ramping up their own production.

It makes sense for them to retain their huge gaming GPU market share, because it's excellent insurance against an AI bust.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-12-23 19:01:01+00:00
That sentence was the only part of the argument using the idea of something being "reasonable".

Whether you agree or disagree with their general stance, the word "reasonable" isn't load bearing.

In particular they didn't say that limiting cell phones was reasonable, or requires parents to be reasonable. They just wanted an example of parents enforcing boundaries.

The only load-bearing part of that sentence is the idea that parents do enforce those boundaries. Which they do. It's irrelevant if they are doing it because they're "reasonable".

TL;DR: I do know what the discussion is about. But your comment wasn't about the general discussion, it was about the quality of a specific point, and I'm defending that specific point.
by krainboltgreene | 2025-12-23 19:01:08+00:00
Engels is the one who wrote about it, not Marx, which you'd know if you knew what communism means. While Marx agreed with Engels words, he doesn't explicitly talk about it:

> State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The state is not "abolished". It dies out.

I suggest you give Anti-Dühring a read, it's not that dense and has some valuable insight into society even if you don't agree with Marxism or communism.
by simonw | 2025-12-23 19:01:10+00:00
Down to -4. Is this generic LLM-dislike, or a reaction to perceived over-self-promotion, or something else?

No matter how much you hate LLM stuff I think it's useful to know that there's a working proof of concept of this library compiled to WASM and working as a Python library.

I didn't plan to share this on HN but then MicroQuickJS showed up on the homepage so I figured people might find it useful.

(If I hadn't disclosed I'd used Claude for this I imagine I wouldn't have had any down-votes here.)
by bitwize | 2025-12-23 19:01:31+00:00
Look.

Most of the consumer market computes through their smartphones. The PC is a niche market now, and PC enthusiasts/gamers are a niche of a niche.

Any manufacturing capacity which NVIDIA or Micron devote to niche markets is capacity they can't use serving their most profitable market: enterprises and especially AI companies.

PCs are becoming terminals to cloud services, much like smartphones already are. Gaming PCs might still be a thing, but they'll be soldered together unexpandable black boxes. You want to run the latest games that go beyond your PC's meager capacity? Cloud stream them.

I know, I know. "Nothing is inevitable." But let's be real: one thing I've learned is that angry nerds can't change shit. Not when there's billions or trillions of dollars riding on the other side.
by Nevermark | 2025-12-23 19:01:37+00:00
I don’t have a full design out of the blue.

But as design criteria go, that is certainly a sensible one to include.

Just a random first idea, the key effectively auto updates, I.e it’s a time varying key chain. I can think of several ways to do that, so the time varying nature can’t be replicated by someone else without the same originating account. But couldn’t say if any were good or not. It is something to design carefully, as all cryptographic systems need to be.

Other criteria would be easy revocation by the original key holder. Keys that are created from any multiple number of independent accounts, blind to each other, that the key recipient chooses.

Again, just throwing out first thoughts.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-23 19:01:53+00:00
I think the general idea/flow of things is "numbers go up, until $bubble explodes, and we built up smaller things from the ground up, making numbers go up, bloating go up, until $bubble explodes..." and then repeat that forever. Seems to be the end result of capitalism.

If you wanna kill corporate IT, you have to kill capitalism first.
by the8472 | 2025-12-23 19:02:42+00:00
> looks at TCP congestion control literature

> closes tab

Eh, there are a few easy things one can try. Make sure to use a non-ancient kernel on the sender side (to get the necessary features), then enable BBR and NOTSENT_LOWAT (https://blog.cloudflare.com/http-2-prioritization-with-nginx...) to avoid buffering more than what's in-flight and then start dropping websocket frames when the socket says it's full.

Also, with tighter integration with the h264 encoder loop one could tell it which frames weren't sent and account for that in pframe generation. But I guess that wasn't available with that stack.
by Sean-Der | 2025-12-23 19:02:55+00:00
Doesn’t matter now, but what led you to TURN?

You can run all WebRTC traffic over a single port. It’s a shame you spent so much time/were frustrated by ICE errors

That’s great you got something better and with less complexity! I do think people push ‘you need UDP and BWE’ a little too zealously. If you have a homogeneous set of clients stuff like RTMP/Websockets seems to serve people well
by tekacs | 2025-12-23 19:03:09+00:00
That's the funny thing about those here in the spirit of Hacker News. We want to build – to hack.

It's all well and good for us all to use Linux to side-step this, but sometimes (shock, horror), we even want to _share_ those hacks with other people!

As such, it's kinda nice if the Big Tech software on those devices didn't lock all of our friends in tiny padded cells 'for their own safety'.
by PunchyHamster | 2025-12-23 19:03:35+00:00
I can't name one in last 5 that has been "pushing the envelope" that would actually wow me. And the ones that did, did it by artstyle, not sheer amount of polygons pushed to the screen.

VR, sure, you want a lot of frames on 2 screens, that requires beef so the visual fidelity on same GPU will be worse than on screen, but other than that if anything graphical part of games have flatlined for me.

Also, putting the money literally anywhere else gonna have better results game quality wise. I want better stories and more complex/interesting systems, not few more animated hairs
by fjfaase | 2025-12-23 19:04:25+00:00
The idea of bootstrapping is that you start with nothing, or at least with almost nothing. In case of stage0 (the first stage of live-bootstrap) this a small program that converts a file with hexadecimal characters (in pairs) to a binary file. From there you have to build everything. To compile Rust, you need a Rust or C compiler, I understand. I have no idea how hard it would be to build a minimal Rust compiler that could compile itself, one that not necessary performs all the checks that the (full) Rust compiler would do.

I think that Rust is build as part of live-bootstrap, but at a much later stage when the latest version of the GNU C compiler has been build.
by Jach | 2025-12-23 19:04:36+00:00
Indeed, Adobe continues shipping their slop and by all accounts of those who keep using it continue to make it worse, this was all in motion well before modern AI tools. If anything, I bet AI tools are more likely to make things better. I read an anti-AI opinion recently where they had a sense that a small open source project was using AI (and were right, it was easy to see by noticing Claude in the commit history) but what tipped their sense was there were too many "professionalisms" in the code base. Oh no, more code that has documentation and tests and benchmarks, the horror! I also just can't take these "it's stinking up the commons" posts all that seriously -- like where have you been the last couple decades? The baseline seems as likely to improve as to degrade more than it already has. Even the spam of useless pull requests isn't new, the peak of that was probably with peak MOOC popularity some years ago when classes would require submitting pull requests to some open source project as an assignment.
by mccoyb | 2025-12-23 19:05:00+00:00
No, you weren't clear, nor are you correct: you shared FUD about something it seems you have not tried, because testing your claims with a recent agentic system would dispel them.

I've had great success teaching Claude Code use DSLs I've created in my research. Trivially, it has never seen exactly these DSLs before -- yet it has correctly created complex programs using those DSLs, and indeed -- they work!

Have you had frontier agents work on programs in "esoteric" (unpopular) languages (pick: Zig, Haskell, Lisp, Elixir, etc)?

I don't see clarity, and I'm not sure if you've tried any of your claims for real.
by gspr | 2025-12-23 19:05:20+00:00
I don't believe that. I don't necessarily love capitalism (though I can't say I see very many realistic better alternatives either), but if HN is full of people who could do corporate IT better (read: sanely), then the conclusion is just that corporate IT is run by morons. Maybe that's because the corporate owners like morons, but nothing about capitalism inherently makes it so.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-12-23 19:05:48+00:00
A base LLM that has only been pre-trained (no RL = reinforcement learning), is not "planning" very far ahead. It has only been trained to minimize prediction errors on the next word it is generating. You might consider this a bit like a person who speaks before thinking/planning, or a freestyle rapper spitting out words so fast they only have time to maintain continuity with what they've just said, not plan ahead.

The purpose of RL (applied to LLMs as a second "post-training" stage after pre-training) is to train the LLM to act as if it had planned ahead before "speaking", so that rather than just focusing on the next word it will instead try to choose a sequence of words that will steer the output towards a particular type of response that had been rewarded during RL training.

There are two types of RL generally applied to LLMs.

1) RLHF - RL from Human Feedback, where the goal is to generate responses that during A/B testing humans had indicated a preference for (for whatever reason).

2) RLVR - RL with Verifiable Rewards, used to promote the appearance of reasoning in domains like math and programming where the LLM's output can be verified in someway (e.g. math result or program output checked).

Without RLHF (as was the case pre-ChatGPT) the output of an LLM can be quite unhinged. Without RLVR, aka RL for reasoning, the abilty of the model to reason (or give the appearance of reasoning) is a function of pre-training, and won't have the focus (like putting blinkers on a horse) to narrow generative output to achieve the desired goal.