MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pdntspa | 2025-12-12 18:29:26+00:00
I did, and that is very much not the case here.

I don't know how a "good" programmer opens the same gig+ file for writing in multiple threads (dozens sometimes) without any kind of concurrency management.

A "good" programmer doesn't give you a 2000+-line python script where every variable has no more than two characters in its name, with 0 comments or explanatory info.

A "good" programmer doesn't write a cluster that checks an "OK" REST endpoint on a regular interval, and then have that same cluster freak the fuck out and check 10-100x as often if that "OK" does not arrive exactly as it should.
by dekhn | 2025-12-12 18:30:02+00:00
One of my favorite sci-fi authors. Was never really appreciated for how ahead of his time he was.

My personal favorite: humans are kicked off earth by superpowerful aliens. They colonize the rest of the solar system. Genentic modification allows people to live in space as giant leaf-like organisms. Two religious cults are fighting to paint Saturn's rings completely red.
by microtherion | 2025-12-12 18:30:21+00:00
a) There are too damn many of them.

b) They have a complete lack of respect for robots.txt

I'm starting to think that aggressive scrapers are part of an ongoing business tactic against the decentralized web. Gmail makes self hosted mail servers jump through arduous and poorly documented hoops, and now self hosted services are being DDOSed by hordes of scrapers…
by iamwil | 2025-12-12 18:30:21+00:00
the context for "How the top %1 communicate" here is: "in our current media environment".

I made it all the way down, and I think it's not a bad way to start. If you're allergic to fluff, here's the core separated into three levels of skill (OP's levels, not mine):

Beginner:

- Problem – state a relatable problem that you’ve observed or experienced before. - Amplify – illustrate how that problem leads to a negative outcome if it is not solved. - Solution – state the solution to the problem.

Intermediate (kinda like the high school 3-pronged essay):

- Start with the main idea (the key conclusion or recommendation) - Support it with key arguments (usually 3-5 key points) - Provide detailed evidence (data, examples, analysis)

Advanced:

- Problem and amplify – your introduction should state a relatable problem - Cross-domain synthesis – note patterns or concepts from your other interests that help support your argument. - Unique process or solution – give a list of ideas or steps that best solve the problem you introduced at the beginning, solidifying the transformation.

If I had to sum it up, it's this: beyond knowing your audience, people like stories. Stories are the affordances of information, like the handle of a door. Stories have arcs, and in many domains they go something like this:

- Here's a problem. - Why it matters. - Here's addressing your objections. - Here's a solution.

All the different levels have an arc. It's not the only arc out there (hero's journey is another one), but this one is pretty typical. All in all, it's pretty basic advice for communication and storytelling. But it's the basics that are so crucial that most of us don't practice. I meet lots of people who don't really have a structure when articulating anything, even topics they know well. A bit of structure, and can probably go a long way to help them in their careers. Anyway, this is a nice reminder. Just ignore the preamble fluff.
by adrian_b | 2025-12-12 18:30:23+00:00
You are right, the implementation of the "compare" function should have used only comparison operators, not subtraction, because unlike subtraction the comparison operations are not affected by overflow (the hardware implementation of integer comparison handles overflow automatically).

When there is no overflow, the sign of the subtraction result provides the same information as a comparison operator, but this is no longer true when overflow happens.
by woodpanel | 2025-12-12 18:30:59+00:00
hehehe, this made me chuckle. 25 years of hard-core socialists running the show, and all of a sudden its the conservatives that ruined Berlin. that is rich. It's even funnier when considering the Länderfinanzausgleich (Equalization payments between federal states): Basically within those 25 years Berlin, under those financially savvy and responsible leftists, amassed 95 B € in payments from all other German Federal States. [0]

[0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A4nderfinanzausgleich
by clusterhacks | 2025-12-12 18:31:07+00:00
Wow, thanks for the link to Texerau. I had no idea a pdf was floating around and have wanted this book for some time. You video looks interesting, especially the part around Ronchi and Focault testing. I have 'Understanding Focault' but have to admit that reading it doesn't give me confidence.

One question I always think about is how much time and effort a "one-time" mirror maker should plan on making to exceed the quality of a generic 8" or 10" F/5-F/7 available from the Chinese mirror makers.

Zambuto seems to imply that whatever magic happens for his mirrors might be in very long, machine driven polishing to smooth out the final surface imperfections that cause scatter. With his retirement and with few mirror makers in the US, it seems like options for buying "high end" mirrors in the 6"- 10" size are very limited. I have been debating an 8" F/7 and would love to just purchase a relatively high quality mirror, but most of the mirror makers seem more taken with significantly larger mirrors.
by jamesgresql | 2025-12-12 18:31:18+00:00
Chinese, Japanese, Korean etc.. don’t work like this either.

However, even though the approach is “old fashioned” it’s still widely used for English. I’m not sure there is a universal approach that semantic search could use that would be both fast and accurate?

At the end of the day people choose a tokenizer that matches their language.

I will update the article to make all this clearer though!
by SynapsFlow | 2025-12-12 18:31:22+00:00
Google's new AI verification for Gemini isn't about playing content police or just flagging fakes. It's actually creating a new layer of digital provenance that could fundamentally change how we trust information online.

The real story here is about building trust systems, not just detection systems. This approach focuses on establishing where images come from and how they've been handled, creating a more nuanced way to evaluate digital content.
by neutronicus | 2025-12-12 18:31:33+00:00
Well, there are some rural staples like BBQ, and Mexican to a degree.

But, yes. The sort of ... enduring narrative is that rural areas and suburbs have chain restaurants, diners, and fast food, because immigrants go to cities and open restaurants from their native cuisine, and that suburbanites think black pepper is spicy and sushi is gross.

In actuality I think immigrants are increasingly (a) enamored of the American big-car / big-house lifestyle (makes sense, they choose to come here) and (b) bought-in to the notion that cities are dangerous, with bad schools. So immigrants rent a place in a strip mall near the suburban school district some other immigrant said was good online and start restaurants there. Google maps exists, suburbanites think nothing of a 25 minute drive, so they ask around online after the best examples of a particular ethnic cuisine, and they drive there.

In Maryland, where I live, it's certainly true that the highly-regarded Chinese and Korean dining is in suburbs. Latin Americans, specifically Guatemalans and Salvadorans, are the only immigrant group moving in to Baltimore (where I live) with any sort of enthusiasm.
by danielvaughn | 2025-12-12 18:31:44+00:00
I have a 2 year old daughter and I'm about to have a son in February. Walking away from them is unfathomable. I can't imagine the regret I'd feel at my old age, having lost the few short years where I get to watch my children grow up, just so I can walk to some places.

There's far more depth and mystery to be explored in raising a human than there will ever be as a tourist. The deep stupidity it takes to think otherwise is depressing to behold.
by PoignardAzur | 2025-12-12 18:31:50+00:00
It's so frustrating that every other comment in this thread is people giving their pet opinion about the headline and what it means about the state of the world / the inherent authoritarianism of Germany / whatever, and nobody else is commenting on the contents.

The controversial measures the article lists are things like:

> Police may now install state-developed spyware, known as trojans, on personal devices to intercept messages before or after encryption. If the software cannot be deployed remotely, the law authorizes officers to secretly enter a person’s home to gain access.

> The revised law also changes how police use body cameras. Paragraph 24c permits activation of bodycams inside private homes when officers believe there is a risk to life or limb.

Those seem like... pretty reasonable things for the police to do, presuming it has a warrant? And if the law authorizes doing these things without warrants, maybe the article should have lead with that?

Ctrl+F-ing "warrant" in the article doesn't give me any result, which makes me feel this article isn't very serious.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-12-12 18:32:00+00:00
They have to consider China. Right now Z-Image Turbo lets you render stills of any popular cartoon character you like, at frankly-disturbing levels of quality, doing almost anything you like. That's a relatively-tiny 6G-parameter model. If and when a WAN 2.2-level video model is released with a comparable lack of censorship, that will be the end of Disney's monopoly on pretty much any character IP.

Also, notice how Disney jumped all over Gemini's case before the ink was dry on the OpenAI partnership agreement. My guess is that Altman is just using Disney to attack his competitors, basically the 'two' part of a one-two punch that began by buying up a large portion of the world's RAM capacity for no valid business reason.
by ericmcer | 2025-12-12 18:32:19+00:00
I mean your being a bit obtuse if you don't think there was a stigma around criticizing the vaccine in 2021/22.

Writing a LinkedIn/Facebook post about how the vaccine causes heart problems might result in you losing your job and would definitely cause you to lose a few friends. There was a massive stigma around pointing out flaws in vaccines at that time, it was not a nuanced issue, either you were all in or you were a psycho anti-vax nut.
by 1970-01-01 | 2025-12-12 18:32:51+00:00
>Its AI-powered search engine — available as an app and as a browser extension for Chrome and Safari — pulls listings from more than 40,000 retail and resale sites so users can compare prices, surface real-time deals, and determine whether an item’s cost is typical, high or fair.

So the AI part is superfluous? What part of the functionality requires AI?
by ekjhgkejhgk | 2025-12-12 18:33:30+00:00
You make an interesting point on binning vs randomization. I'm not an expert but to me your point is consistent with Tor having the "best protection" according to the website, because I know that Tor's strategy is binning. However, this is what actually makes sense for many variables though. For example, font sizes come in integers. If you're trying to be clever by "randomizing" and claiming to use decimal-sized, you might be the only person in the world to do so and immediately fingerprinted. So I think that randomization might indeed be a bad idea in many cases.

Your link doesn't work though. I just get "file not found".
by martythemaniak | 2025-12-12 18:33:48+00:00
I half-jokingly believe that MAHA is the answer the Fermi Paradox.

As technology/civilization progresses gains become more demanding, it requires a species to exploit increasingly subtler, smaller-scale and longer-term aspects of reality itself. Feedback loops go from hours to months to decades. An abacus is large and accessible to all, a relay switch is still large but not very accessible, basic lithography already requires very fine control of light and EUV processes are just insane. It's not just that things get smaller, but the timelines get longer and you have to start relying on very specific analytical work to achieve anything. Whether computing, medicine, energy, etc, everything is subject to this trend.

Our brains haven't evolved for this kind of work, and being able to perform it is probably just a happy accident. To a lot of people small, subtle, long-term effects just aren't real. Only macro-scale effects and short feedback loops are real, which is why the current MAHA health crazy is heavily focused on weights, food etc. Simple things they can understand and control. A graph of infection rates between control and experimental groups are not real. Graphs of carbon concentrations are not real, graphs in general are not real. All that stuff is "fake email jobs".

There's no reason to think our savannah-produced monkey brains can cope with the demands of technology so advanced that we become "aliens".
by arjie | 2025-12-12 18:34:45+00:00
Google is blackboxy about this and I understand why. SEO is an arms race and there's no advantage to them advertising what they use as signals of "this is a good guy". My blog (on Mediawiki) was deranked to oblivion. Exactly zero of my pages would index on Google. Some of it is that my most read content is about pregnancy and IVF and those are sensitive subjects that google requires some authorship credibility on. That's fair.

But there were other posts that I thought were just normal blog posts of the form that you'd expect to be all right. But none of the search engines wanted anything to do with me. I talked to a friend[0] who told me it was probably something to do with the way MediaWiki was generating certain pages and so on, and I did all the things he recommended:

* edit the sitemap

* switch from the default site.tld/index.php/Page to site.tld/fixed-slug/Page

* put in json+ld info on the page

* put in meta tags

The symptoms were exactly as described here. All pages crawled, zero indexed. The wiki is open to anonymous users, but there's no spam on it (I once had some for an hour before I installed RequestAccount). Finally, my buddy told me that maybe I just need to dump this CMS and use something else. I wondered if perhaps they need you to spend on their ads platform to get it to work so I ran some ads too as an experiment. Some $300 or so. Didn't change a thing.

I really wanted things to be wiki-like so I figured I'd just write and no one would find anything and that's life. But one day I was bored enough that I wrote a wiki bot that reads each recently published page and adds a meta description tag to it.

Now, to be clear, Google does delay reinstatement so that it's not obvious what 'solved' the problem (part of the arms race), but a couple of days later I was back in Google and now I get a small but steady stream of visits from there (I use self-hosted Plausible in cookie-free mode so it's just the Referer [sic] header).

Overall, I get why they're what they are. And maybe there's a bunch of spammy Mediawiki sites out there or something. But I was surprised that a completely legitimate blog would be deranked so aggressively unless a bunch of SEO measures were taken. Fascinating stuff the modern world is.

I suspect it has to do with the Mediawiki because the top-level of the domain was a static site and indexed right away!

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jrhizor
by estebank | 2025-12-12 18:34:46+00:00
> For an example, if a function in no_std overflows, it can result in undefined behavior, no unsafe required. And stack overflows are easy in Rust, like they are easy in most other systems languages.

This is true, no_std has no Rust runtime so it doesn't provide stack protection. I am aware of efforts to address this for embedded, but they're not available at the moment.

> Steve Klabnik has lied about that in the past, as he is wont to do.

1) I don't know what Steve has to do with anything I asked so it is bizarre to bring up and 2) I find this is to be a ridiculous statement.
by neogodless | 2025-12-12 18:34:46+00:00
If the software has the same library as your phone, then I could why you see it as on par.

Android Automotive has a much smaller library than Android Auto, so the selection for audio apps, such as podcasts and music, are much more limited. The options for map software is smaller too. Also Android Automotive doesn't necessarily use your phone's existing internet connection. Depending on the maker, you have to subscribe to a separate data plan.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-12-12 18:34:50+00:00
When asked how to falsify their assertion, perhaps by explaining what exactly is "thinking" in the human brain that can and/or will be possible to emulate...

... someone else points out that the same models that can't "think" are somehow turning in gold-level performance at international math and programming competitions, making Fields Medalists sit up and take notice, winning art competitions, composing music indistinguishable from human output, and making entire subreddits fail the Turing test.
by lapcat | 2025-12-12 18:35:00+00:00
> The App Store was built on iTunes and used the same backend. The refund process hasn’t changed since then.

I'm not talking about the technical process. Like I already said, "There's of course a form to request a refund".

> Have you heard reports of Apple not granting refunds?

Yes, many. Indeed, I've heard it from my own customers, as I'm an App Store developer myself.
by roguecoder | 2025-12-12 18:35:11+00:00
HP did write their own operating system: HP RTE. It wasn't until decades later, after the platform became commodified and they stopped designing their own chips, that they went with someone else's.

And of course, Microsoft made their own cards back in the day, and they still make the XBox as integrated hardware.

This technology is way too early for commodification. Right now, Rivian is a data play.

Their platform means they have consistency other providers don't have. They have data from the existing trucks on the road, and they'll roll out these sensors long before they roll out self-driving. Cleverly they've also pitched these as "adventure" vehicles, which means they'll have some data from rarer situations, not just highways. Off-road performance, for example, will add anomalies that they can use to stress-test self-driving code. If a car could handle areas without roads, it is less likely to kill people if a mudslide happens. Or a shadow falls across the bridge.
by dangus | 2025-12-12 18:35:23+00:00
It should be pointed out that they have way less of a monopoly on the market and way more gaming alternatives exist than Apple and Google.

Apple, Google. Two app stores that are basically necessary for existing in the modern world with a smartphone, which include apps covering Japanese government services.

In the gaming space, you’ve got PlayStation Store, Xbox Store, Nintendo eShop, Steam, Epic Game Store, GOG, a bazillion publisher storefronts, Apple and Google (again), Itch.io, physical media for the big 3 consoles at dozens of brick and mortar retailers, or even installing games directly with no store at all (Minecraft originated from its own online purchase portal).
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-12-12 18:35:52+00:00
Indeed, the U.S. Government $8.9 billion investment in Intel common stock could be an indication the entire force of the political structure may drop a boot on competitors.

Regulatory capture is something people need to take seriously. Some may shelve product IP for a few years, or set-up parallel factories in other countries without the artificial trade/global-talent barriers.

A standard doesn't have to be perfect, but must be consistent over significant periods of time to matter. Consider what happened to OpenSparc, Cell, IA-64, dojo tiles, and early RISC (Windows NT prototype was ported off by Microsoft.)

The NVIDIA CUDA card kludge wasn't necessarily "better" than something like the M3/M4/M5 at every task. But was economical hardware due to volume pricing, has 92% of the ecosystem, and most software already worked given it isn't walled-off.

Note people tend to avoid buying work, or porting to short-lived hardware. Best of luck, =3
by frmersdog | 2025-12-12 18:36:27+00:00
War makes things a huge mess. It makes things an even bigger mess than resistance, by inuring the public to its devastation via distance from the front line, and by offering soldiers a respite when they're able to rotate out. The violence of occupation comes anyway, AFTER an initial bloody pitched battle. Might as well skip the traditional fighting and hash out the civil war that's inevitable once tanks start moving.
by adrian_b | 2025-12-12 18:36:33+00:00
Using only arithmetic operators would require explicit checks for overflow and this would be a very inefficient implementation, because the comparison operators handle overflow implicitly without any overhead (because the comparison operators do not use the sign of the subtraction result to decide their truth value, but they compute the true sign of the result, by the modulo 2 sum, a.k.a. XOR, of the result sign with the integer overflow flag; this is done in hardware, with no overhead).

The feature that integer comparison must be correct regardless of overflow has been a requirement in CPU design since the earliest times. Very few CPUs, the most notable examples being Intel 8080 and RISC-V, lacked this feature. The competitors and successors of Intel 8080, i.e. Motorola MC6800 and Zilog Z80 have added it, making them much more similar to the previously existing CPUs than Intel 8080 was. The fact that even microprocessors implemented with a few thousand transistors around 1975 had this feature emphasizes how weird is that RISC-V lacks such a feature in 2025, after 50 years and being implemented with a number of transistors many orders of magnitude greater.
by orwin | 2025-12-12 18:38:02+00:00
Gambling has been legal in those place, often limited in space, and/or in advertisements. In my country, betting is fully legal, but gambling ads can't be showed on TV to people under 18 (or is it 16?) since at least 2000. The law didn't target internet advertisement until more recently though.

And to be honest, i think lootboxes and "gambling" with fake (but real. but fake) money like on Roblox is worse.

[edit[ But it is absolutely a _moral_ debate. That's basically the only debate that is relevant.
by skybrian | 2025-12-12 18:38:05+00:00
It seems like “self-criticism” would be a better way to describe what they are training the LLM to do than “confession?” The LLM is not being directly trained to accurately reveal its chain of thought or internal calculations.

But it does have access to its chain of thought and tool calls when generating the self-criticism, and perhaps reporting on what it actually did in the chain-of-thought is an “easier” way to score higher on self-criticism?

Can this result in improved “honesty?” Maybe in the limited sense of accurately reporting what happened previously in the chat session.