MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by debugnik | 2025-12-11 12:50:08+00:00
I assume asset reads nowadays are much heavier than 4 kB though, specially if assets meant to be loaded together are bundled together in one file. So games now should be spending less time seeking relative to their total read size. Combined with HDD caches and parallel reads, this practice of duplicating over 100 GBs across bundles is most likely a cargo-cult by now.

Which makes me think: Has there been any advances in disk scheduling in the last decade?
by baq | 2025-12-11 12:52:15+00:00
design patterns are a language, it's just that the programming language they're being implemented in doesn't support them natively.

e.g. observer pattern in java is what, [array of functions].forEach() in js? not worth calling that by name. another example, singletons - in Python, it's just a module (caveats apply obviously, but if we apply them, some also apply in java).

this is why designing a minimal language to make it 'simple' is misguided: you'll end up having to reinvent the design pattern language anyway. there are good reasons to design a simple language, but simple for the sake of simple is missing the point.
by patates | 2025-12-11 12:52:27+00:00
You'll probably think that I'm sort of maniac or that I'm messing with you but honestly, I feel like I'm part of the internet. I mean it. I'd probably feel like a screw that fell of a large ship. The ship is unaffected, while I'd be collecting rust at the bottom of the ocean.

My jokes sound like reddit. I give HN reactions to new startup ideas. I review code like I'm in front of a large crowd from GitHub. I make meme references. I don't play games, I watch other people play -> less stress.

On the other hand, I want to read books! I want to practice the piano! (See, I bought this nice YAMAHA keyboard that's collecting dust).
by pbmonster | 2025-12-11 12:54:26+00:00
> The issue is that now the government knows what you are doing online

There's zero technical necessity for this. You could do zero knowledge proofs with crypto key pairs issued together with the eID.

The Swiss proposal for eID includes stuff like that. If a service needs proof of age, you use an app on your phone to generate the response, which is anonymized towards the requester and doesn't need to contact a government server at all.
by businessmate | 2025-12-11 12:55:01+00:00
As organisations adopt large language models (LLMs) for discovery, decision support, research, and customer interaction, interest in monitoring AI system behaviour has increased. Many existing tools rely on high-volume, single-turn API queries to observe outputs in controlled conditions. These tools provide meaningful operational value but capture only one dimension of model behaviour. Real user interactions often unfold over multiple conversational turns, incorporating refinements, tone variations, emotional cues, and personalised context. This paper outlines: (1) what API-based monitoring reliably measures, (2) where its methodological boundaries lie, and (3) how multi-turn reasoning analysis provides a complementary lens for governance, drift detection, and behavioural assurance. The analysis does not prescribe specific regulatory obligations; rather, it clarifies methodological distinctions and presents the AIVO Standard as a structured framework that organisations may use when deeper behavioural analysis is required.
by NotNerdz | 2025-12-11 12:55:18+00:00
Hello Everybody,

As our InfiniaxAI "Free Day" Was a success with gaining over 150 platform users with over 1800 messages traversed, we are introducing free usage. Anyone forever will be able to used paid models, just with new daily limits. In order to get past these daily limits you will need to upgrade your plan.

https://infiniax.ai

These new daily limits include every single AI model excluding Claude 4.5 Opus and Gemini 3 Pro, but they include everything from Codex Max to Claude Sonnet 4.5, 2.5 pro and more.
by theshrike79 | 2025-12-11 12:56:00+00:00
I think the issue with "social media" is that it doesn't end.

If your entertainment is a movie or a book, there's definite progress to it. You can finish a movie in one or two sitting, the book has a beginning and an end (unless it's by GRRM or Rothfuss...)

Even TV shows end, no matter what kind of reality dreck they are, giving you a natural point for slapping your knees, getting up and saying "yep, that's it" and moving on to something else.

Social media algorithm feeds just give you infinite amounts of content with no beginning, middle or end.
by perihelions | 2025-12-11 12:56:02+00:00
Pretty sure many of Meta's tech workers are furious about these actions, as they were in the previous story where 404media published a number of employee comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42651178 ("[flagged] Total Chaos at Meta: Employees Protest Zuckerberg's Anti LGBTQ Changes (404media.co)")

https://www.404media.co/its-total-chaos-internally-at-meta-r... ( https://archive.is/R1c7S )
by 47282847 | 2025-12-11 12:56:50+00:00
It is a collective issue, and as such also the responsibility of each individual indeed. And silence can be one of the psychologically most damaging forms of violence, leading even to physiological damage when persistent.

https://vipinbhasin.com/2024/10/21/the-impact-of-silent-trea...

https://www.royalblueheating.co.uk/08-164491-silent-treatmen...

etc.
by BlueTemplar | 2025-12-11 12:56:57+00:00
Normalizing ID and ID uploading (instead of banning it) is really what makes this bad.

A good law would just have completely banned these platforms from the country. (Even the Canadian Kik, because freeware, therefore closed source, therefore a platform.

EDIT : Looks like it's instead the Australian Kick, The Register had it wrong ? Same deal. (Especially with its owners having a gambling background.))

I wish the EU would be bold enough to do this, especially with Trump's bullying, but I have already been disappointed in the past, despite the situation clearly calling for strong actions like these...
by sandruso | 2025-12-11 12:56:58+00:00
I'm betting against wasm and going with containers instead.

I have warm pool of lightweight containers that can be reused between runs. And that's the crucial detail that makes or breaks it. The good news is that you can lock it down with seccomp while still allowing normal execution. This will give you 10-30ms starts with pre-compiled python packages inside container. Cold start is as fast as spinning new container 200-ish ms. If you run this setup close to your data, you can get fast access to your files which is huge for data related tasks.

But this is not suitable for type of deployment Cloudflare is doing. The question is whether you even want that global availability because you will trade it for performance. At the end of the day, they are trying to reuse their isolates infra which is very smart and opens doors to other wasm-based deployments.
by Xelbair | 2025-12-11 12:56:59+00:00
>These loading time projections were based on industry data - comparing the loading times between SSD and HDD users where data duplication was and was not used. In the worst cases, a 5x difference was reported between instances that used duplication and those that did not. We were being very conservative and doubled that projection again to account for unknown unknowns.

>We now know that, contrary to most games, the majority of the loading time in HELLDIVERS 2 is due to level-generation rather than asset loading. This level generation happens in parallel with loading assets from the disk and so is the main determining factor of the loading time. We now know that this is true even for users with mechanical HDDs.

they did absolutely zero benchmarking beforehand, just went with industry haresay, and decided to double it just in case.
by mschuster91 | 2025-12-11 12:57:16+00:00
> Our studio, LucasFonts, designed Calibri.

Damn, the diversity of people one can meet here on HN continues to amaze me. Even after almost 13 years.

> The decision to abandon Calibri on the grounds of it being a so-called “wasteful diversity font” is both amusing and regrettable.

The cruelty (in this case, against people with visual impairments) is the actual point, as always, and the appearance of "going back to the good old times" is the visual that's being sold to the gullibles.
by A_D_E_P_T | 2025-12-11 12:57:39+00:00
Okay, you guys are funny, because "it's not x, it's y" (or "it's not just x, it's also y) is probably the most characteristic post-2023 LLM writing quirk.

These days, though, it's not as common as it used to be. Kimi K2, in particular, is a weirdly good and stylistically flexible writer.
by Forgeties79 | 2025-12-11 12:57:39+00:00
No one said all freelancers are good, but either way none of the questions I gave as examples are indicators of my skill as a shooter/editor. The final product is all that matters. Whether I used Premiere, Resolve, FCPX, etc. to get there is immaterial.

If you pay me for a 30s highlight, you get a 30s highlight. If you don’t like the highlight itself that’s a different discussion.
by PapstJL4U | 2025-12-11 12:57:52+00:00
She is although simply a joy to read. Witty remarks and well written.

"Elinor agreed with it all, for she did not think he deserved the compliment of rational opposition". - from S&S

Who wasn't in a situtation where they felt arguing would do nothing? John Green asked: "Who doesn't want a friend as witty as Jane Austin to comment on life?
by greeniskool | 2025-12-11 12:58:28+00:00
There was actually an unauthorized third-party CD-ROM drive for it, the Bung Doctor V64[1]. It didn't actually expand the available ROM space beyond what was possible with cartidges, but its still interesting in that it was allegedly used by licensed Nintendo devs as a lower-cost alternative to the devkits officially provided to them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_V64
by cess11 | 2025-12-11 12:58:30+00:00
And East Jerusalem and the Gaza strip. I'd also argue that the occupations of Lebanon and Syria are illegal, and that taking control over the Philadelphi corridor was an act of war against Egypt.

If you think such crimes of occupation and aggression are "very much needed", then I'll have to consider you morally impaired beyond the ability to take part in a reasoned discussion.
by dlubarov | 2025-12-11 12:58:45+00:00
> ICJ found the accusation plausible

This is still not accurate. What ICJ found plausible was "some of the rights claimed by South Africa and for which it is seeking protection". The then-president even clarified explicitly that the plausibility finding was about the existence of these rights, not the occurrence of genocide [1].

Noone is saying things are "jolly fine and dandy", but it's important to stick to facts when making such accusations.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3g9g63jl17o
by 9rx | 2025-12-11 12:58:56+00:00
The point of laws is to document what everyone in a community has come to agree on, assuming a democracy. Or, in a dictatorship, what the dear leader has decided upon. Any punishments encoded into those laws may serve as a counter-incentive, I suppose.

But baked into that is the idea that enforcement isn't perfect so you can still disappear into the night when you have that urge to do whatever it is that is technically illegal. This allows acceptance of laws that might be considered too draconian if enforcement was perfect. However, it seems in the case of these digital-centric laws that enforcement will become too close to being perfect as, without the need to hire watchful people, there is strong incentive to make it ever-present.

Or maybe not, but that is why the question was asked.
by lII1lIlI11ll | 2025-12-11 12:59:03+00:00
In discussions similar to this I often see parents expressing their happiness with a state taking the role of a "bad cop" so that the parents can just wash their hands off telling their children it is state's fault they can no longer use TikTok ("I can’t express how much easier it is to restrict it and not seem like a kook when authorities are also on board." from OP) instead of having a proper conversation about harms of social media with the children. This is literally a cop out for them from a proper parenting.

From my point of view I'm already paying for their brats with higher taxes, now I will also have to gradually give my documents to random web sites more and more just to reduce the "burden" of parenting on lazy parents...
by wongarsu | 2025-12-11 12:59:44+00:00
Tables as a layout primitive are fine. Lots of modern layout engines are based around vstacks and hstacks, which are just single table rows and columns. Most paper forms use a 2d table layout, and newspapers arrange their articles in a 2d table layout.

There were some reasonable concerns. Using tables for both layout and literal tables removes semantic meaning, nested tables can get complicated to layout, and layout the whole page as a giant table makes it difficult to adapt to screen size. But the first could easily be solved by adding a tag that works exactly like table but is for layout, the other two are about overuse of tables in the absence of viable options. We could have easily kept table layouts for the parts where it makes sense and augmented it with something css-like for the parts where it doesn't.
by mananaysiempre | 2025-12-11 13:00:40+00:00
Reflecting sunlight from orbit is an idea that had been talked about for a couple of decades even before Znamya-2[1] launched in 1992. The materials science needed to unfurl large surfaces in space seems to be very difficult, whether mirrors or sails.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Znamya_(satellite)
by JetSetWilly | 2025-12-11 13:01:07+00:00
No, you're just falling into the sort of left wing "people who disagree with me can only do so because they are a bad person" trap. You can read the full text of the actual memo (and a reasonable interpretation of it) below, but it appears to me that the principle reason as stated is that Calibri is less professional, inconsistent with all other government communications and even inconsistent letterheads on the very same department's material, and that appearance matters. It isn't in fact about "sticking it to the woke", but it does seem like the original decision to use Calibri was not based on anything and just about appearing to be woke.

https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/full_text_of_marco_rubio_...
by jennyholzer | 2025-12-11 13:01:15+00:00
I am staunchly anti-Republican.

In my opinion, the sole cultural domain in which Republicans are far stronger than Democrats is graphic design.

If you do not have a strong graphic design background, I'd urge you to avoid taking sides on this matter on the basis of party affiliation.

This is good politics from the Republicans.

In my opinion it is disastrous for Democrats to align themselves with mediocre cultural products.

Microsoft has a very close relationship with the US government and over the last 20+ years has demonstrated extremely low quality standards. The US government's shift to using Calibri is clearly a consequence of this close relationship.

Claims about the "readability" of Calibri in comparison to Times New Roman are spurious and unverifiable; very seriously type foundries say things this about every single new typeface released.

Frankly, Calibri is an ugly and poorly designed typeface. It is Microsoft's Vista-era Helvetica dupe. It is inferior to Times New Roman.

If you're defending Calibri over the most popular typeface of all time, I hope it's (somehow) coming from an aesthetically minded place
by kamaal | 2025-12-11 13:01:36+00:00
>>lots of quality (to me) content that I find educational (history, science) and entertaining.

This seems to be a tug of war- that is- information vs distraction

I remember in the 1990s India it was quite common to view kids from homes that had TV/Cable TV as kids who were bad at academics, and distracted without focus.

OTOH, as time passed people realised those kids had better english speaking skills, vocabulary and general awareness of the world. So extreme focus didn't quite work out as well as people though it would.

In the modern context I know quite a few people with laser sharp productivity and get lots of work done. But here's what 'wasting' time on Twitter has led me down rabbit holes in the Stock market that has opened up newer earning opportunities. So its not as simple as saying social media is distracting.

Extreme focus does work when your work is individually measured and judged. And the pay off is immense. Other wise you are better off doing something to keep the wheels spinning while finding more things that can be rewarding.
Ask HN: Can someone explain why OpenAI credits expire?
by jemiluv8 | 2025-12-11 13:01:43+00:00
I was surprised to find out only recently that some credits I bought about a year a go were unusable because they had expired. I find this a bit concerning because it seems as though I'm being forced to use the credits.

In my part of the world, that tactic is used by telcos to sell "broadband data". You buy internet bundle of about $1 and they give you expiry of about a week. This drives up the "real" price of these purchases because of the time constraint. Ultimately, if you had 1GB of data left after a week, it is all gone and you have to purchase again - further driving sales. Since this is a third world country we're talking about and telco's tend to be oligopolies and tend to also do some form of price collusion among themselves, it was generally accepted as "just how things were".

But I always found it to be unfair because people should be allowed to take their time consuming whatever product they purchased.

I wonder if this is general practice for all llm apis? Am I missing something? Is this really how things should be? I can't seem to fathom why "purchased" llm credits should have an expiry date - however generous. Especially when the same credits can be used to access any of their available models.
by rtp4me | 2025-12-11 13:02:30+00:00
What a sad, sad take. Do you even know what the word “enemy” means? Just because I don’t like my neighbor doesn’t make them my enemy. We are not going to war with each other, we just don’t like each other’s company. Just because I don’t like your comments on HN doesn’t mean I hate you. Good grief.

Note: I do like my neighbor!
by ig0r0 | 2025-12-11 13:03:28+00:00
I managed to create a new Apple id with new email, new phone number, I had to use it on a real device to be able to get through payment. So far so good, lets see if I can actually publish the app.

For anyone interested in testing the app and providing feedback here is a TestFlight link https://testflight.apple.com/join/SHngHsGk
by theshrike79 | 2025-12-11 13:03:47+00:00
What you read is also a big thing. There's no need to read that new pseudointellectual tome everyone is talking that could've been a blog post. It's a boring slog to read anyway.

You can just grab a book where a space-wizard stops an orbital bombardment with his willpower[0]. Or one that's Top Gun but Grimdark WH40k[1]. Whatever is fun for you specifically. Books can be fun, they don't need to have any "value" past entertainment.

And get an ebook reader. An actual one with an e-ink screen. It moves the barrier from going "I'm bored" to "I'm reading" to near zero. Just open the smart cover and the book is exactly where you left it. And if the book is 15 or 1500 pages, it weighs the same.

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/series/124536-starship-s-mage

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58912.Double_Eagle
by afavour | 2025-12-11 13:04:17+00:00
But if your neighbour actively and deliberately makes your life worse then they certainly could be your enemy.

If I’m queer and Facebook is actively censoring queer content then that’s more significant to me than just being a difference of opinion. The company is actively suppressing my way of life.

Maybe the word “enemy” is too much but if so I think describing the idea as “sad” is equally as so. Giving a corporation a pass on behaviour you consider abhorrent simply because it’s a company and not a person seems pretty sad to me.
by irishcoffee | 2025-12-11 13:04:18+00:00
> Do you not talk to ordinary people? They are not intelligent conversationalists. They tend to be more of the "lol" variety.

Stating that easygoing people are not also intelligent conversationalist sounds like a _you_ problem dripping with ignorance.

Maybe get off the socials for a bit or something, you might need a change of perspective.
by 9rx | 2025-12-11 13:04:39+00:00
Looks like the opposite of generics. Go's generics story is intrinsically linked to Java. It was the Java team that told the Go team to not implement generics until they were perfectly satisfied with the solution, and it was the same guy who ultimately designed both Java's and Go's generics. You cannot take a closer look at Java's generics than that.
by laurieg | 2025-12-11 13:05:10+00:00
Cycling in Japan is really interesting. The rules say cycle on the road, following traffic rules, helmets are compulsory.

The average cyclist doesn't wear a helmet, cycles on the pavement and will probably cycle on the incorrect side of the road fairly frequently. Cyclists also routinely ignore stop signs, traffic lights and crossings. I'm over a decade in the road I have only ever seen a cyclist use a hand signal once

Part of the problem is cyclists get almost no infrastructure, while cars get multiple lanes.
by PranayBatta | 2025-12-11 13:05:42+00:00
TL;DR: Diffusion-based TTS models sound amazing but break down for real-time streaming because they require full-sequence attention. StreamFlow introduces a block-wise guided attention scheme that lets diffusion transformers generate speech chunk-by-chunk with near–SOTA quality and predictable low latency.

Why this matters: Current diffusion speech models need to see the entire audio sequence, making them too slow and memory-heavy for assistants, agents, or anything that needs instant voice responses. Causal masks sound robotic; chunking adds weird seams. Streaming TTS has been stuck with a quality–latency tradeoff.

The idea: StreamFlow restricts attention using sliding windows over blocks:

Each block can see W_b past blocks and W_f future blocks

Compute becomes roughly O(B × W × N) instead of full O(N²)

Prosody stays smooth, latency stays constant, and boundaries disappear with small overlaps + cross-fades

How it works: The system is still a Diffusion Transformer, but trained in two phases:

Full-attention pretraining for global quality

Block-wise fine-tuning to adapt to streaming constraints

Generates mel-spectrograms; BigVGAN vocoder runs in parallel.

Performance:

~180ms first-packet latency (80ms model, 60ms vocoder, 40ms overhead)

No latency growth with longer speech

MOS tests show near-indistinguishable quality vs non-streaming diffusion

Speaker similarity within ~2%, prosody continuity preserved

Key ablation takeaways:

Past context helps until ~3 blocks; more adds little

Even a tiny future window greatly boosts naturalness

Best results: 0.4–0.6s block size, ~10–20% overlap

Comparison:

Autoregressive TTS → streaming but meh quality

GAN TTS → fast but inconsistent

Causal diffusion → real-time but degraded

StreamFlow → streaming + near-SOTA quality

Bigger picture: Smart attention shaping lets diffusion models work in real time without throwing away global quality. The same technique could apply to streaming music generation, translation, or interactive media.
by Timwi | 2025-12-11 13:06:11+00:00
A lot of the behaviors should just have a toggle to turn them off. For example, there are many situations where margin collapsing is in the way and I keep wondering why there isn't simply a `margin-collapse: none`. It would also be nice to have something like `default-styles: none` that will remove all the default styling for h1/h2/etc. and em/strong/cite/etc. so I don't have to deal with browsers having differing defaults.