MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kbolino | 2025-12-11 20:55:25+00:00
Until you get to super-high-res textures and the like, the throughput isn't nearly as important as the latency.

At 200 MB/s the way hard drives usually measure it, you're able to read up to 390,625 512-byte blocks in 1 second, or to put it another way, a block that's immediately available under the head can be read in 2.56 microseconds. On the other hand, at 7200 RPM, it takes up to 8.33 milliseconds to wait for the platter to spin around and reach a random block on the same track. Even if these were the only constraints, sequentially arranging data you know you'll need to have available at the same time cuts latency by a factor of about 3000.

It's much harder to find precise information about the speed of the head arm, but it also usually takes several milliseconds to move from the innermost track to the outermost track or vice versa. In the worst case, this would double the random seek time, since the platter has to spin around again because the head wasn't in position yet. Also, since hard drives are so large nowadays, the file system allocators actually tend to avoid fragmentation upfront, leading to generally having few fragments for large files (YMMV).

So, the latency on a hard drive can be tolerable when optimized for.
by baobun | 2025-12-11 20:55:46+00:00
Some underappreciated and forgotten tiling wms that are still viable today:

- ratpoison ("tmux for X11". Ultralight, great for kiosks and similar where you barely want a WM at all)

- stumpwm (ratpoison on steroids in Lisp)

- Xmonad (A bit different tiling dynamic that some prefer. I dig it despite Haskell, not because of it)

- Qtile (Very flexible and easily hackable in python yet reasonably stable and fast. You can reproduce for example the Xmonad or i3 experiences pretty easily)
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-11 20:56:02+00:00
I'm not just grumpy, I'm baffled. Suddenly, when there is an URL or number input, when the hold-on-spacebar UX doesn't work because there is no spacebar, how could you even move the cursor left or right? Tapping in-between tiny letters is borderline impossible, and it isn't always in the right place to do the hold-and-slowly-move thing either, because the magnifying glass doesn't show up, so you can't see where you end up... It seems to me like for the last 5-6 years, the people who do decisions at Apple doesn't actually use the products themselves, or actually understand functional UX. Jobs would be ashamed.
by robin_reala | 2025-12-11 20:56:29+00:00
I just double-checked my village. Every single road and cul-de-sac that I could find, with no exceptions, has full coverage on Apple. Google on the other hand, has coverage for maybe 50-55% of the roads. The worst example is a residential area on the outskirts where they’ve driven the car in, down one side-street, then given up and gone home.

On the other hand, they do have historical coverage, have to give them that.
by UltraSane | 2025-12-11 20:56:58+00:00
"Hezbollah did not do enough to protect civilians"

What an insane statement. Hezbollah was intentionally trying to kill as many civilians as possible with the missiles. The only reason they "only" killed 45 is because Israel has invested so much into the Iron Dome system.

Hezbollah isn't a political party. It is a proxy army of Iran. That is why they started shooting missiles at Israel after Oct 7 2023 even though it led to the killing of its leader Hassan Nasrallah
by sublinear | 2025-12-11 20:57:07+00:00
> There's no procrastination about organizing or perfect tags. Just brain dump the thought or notes and move on with life.

I keep my notes on paper and write them in real time, so I agree with this very strongly. I manage to keep up with the real world despite this.

My paper indexing system is two simple things.

1) Write in the next available space. When done writing I draw a dividing horizontal line straight across the whole page. Just above this line I assign it a serial number in a little box.

2) Starting from the back of the last page, I keep metadata for each entry. Usually topic tags, but sometimes it's more involved. I usually do this when I am under less time pressure. It doesn't even have to be the same day. I'm not strict about completeness because if I don't care... well I don't care.
by nostrademons | 2025-12-11 20:57:10+00:00
Age verification in general is not intended to defend against people lying or using stolen credentials. If you’re 13 but know the password to your dead grandpa’s account and the website in question has no idea he’s dead, there’s no way to defend against that, with or without a ZKP.

What the ZKP does is let you limit the information the site collects to the fact that you are under 18, and nothing else. It’s an application of the principle of least privilege. It lets you give the website that one fact without revealing your name, birthdate, address, browsing history, and all your other private data.
by doctorpangloss | 2025-12-11 20:57:32+00:00
> you have no privacy, get over it.

> privacy as the basic right it should be again.

See, this isn’t complicated. Privacy in the sense of Limiting Government Overreach is completely different than privacy in the sense of The Unwanted Dissemination of Embarrassing Personal Information.

The problem has nothing to do with the societal resignation you’re talking about. It isn’t even true. People are resigned that they cannot really prevent the dissemination of embarrassing information (some people would call that “growing up” ha ha). They’re not “resigned” that government overreach is inevitable.

The problem is that a lot of people WANT government overreach, as long as they perceive that it’s against the Other. That’s the problem. Advocates have failed because by conflating the two issues, they make no headway.
by dec0dedab0de | 2025-12-11 20:57:55+00:00
It is a way to signal to other developers that your code changed, which is better than not saying anything.

But it seems to make library developers more comfortable with making breaking changes. It's like they're thinking 'well it's documented, they can just change their code when they update and get errors in their type checker/linter.' When I think they should be thinking, 'I wonder what I could do to make this update as silent and easy as possible.'

Of course, we all have different goals, and I'm grateful to have access to so many quality libraries for free. It's just annoying to have to spend time making changes to accommodate the aesthetic value of someone else's code.
by rogerrogerr | 2025-12-11 20:57:55+00:00
> With an EV you might accelerate to 57 and then brake to 55 when you let off the accelerator.

No one with more than a few miles of one-pedal driving would do this; it’d be highly unpleasant.

What actually happens is you remap your pedal inputs: all the way off is braking, somewhere in the middle is coasting. Your brain will do it automatically and OPD is far more pleasant than two-pedal driving after a trivial learning curve.
by timschmidt | 2025-12-11 20:58:03+00:00
Don't forget "Rebuilding America's Defenses" a paper published by Project for the New American Century, a think tank who's founding statement of principles was signed by 25 individuals, 10 of whom went on to serve in the George W. Bush administration, which calls for "A New Pearl Harbor": https://www.visibility911.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/reb...
by killingtime74 | 2025-12-11 20:58:23+00:00
I think it's fair because AWS charges extra for it.

They are comparing the baseline product of all three platforms. Why should we take paid add ons into account for 1 platform.

As I mentioned, if you are ok with paying, then you should also compare Provisioned concurrency on AWSbas well, which has 0 cold start (they keep a prewarmed lambda for you).

Product comparisons are not purely technical in nature. As a user, if im paying extra, I would much rather the 0 cold start than just a reduced cold start especially with all these additional complexities.
by lazide | 2025-12-11 20:58:42+00:00
You seem profoundly confused about cause and effect, and even the meaning of your own prior words.

These things are all happening because enough people are turning into greedy short sighted idiots and overwhelmed/disengaged folks with no balls.

None of this is about ‘power in democratic institutions’ - they have plenty, which is why they are being turned into powering the authoritarianism. Same as in those prior examples.

‘Why doesn’t anyone do anything?!?’ they say, as they refuse to do anything, or allow anyone sane to do anything either.

Because the obvious thing - stand up and use the existing tools to do what needs to be done - requires effort and risk.

And the only ones willing to do that are the greedy or insane.
by pksebben | 2025-12-11 20:58:49+00:00
I'm not dismissing that idea. It is a perfectly reasonable thing to think about, part of why we have age verification techniques that already work well in critical places like online vape shops.

I'm even willing to talk about the possibility that we could use more robust systems deployed more broadly. A lot of folks here are talking about ZKPs in this regard, and that's not a bad idea at all.

The issue I'm trying to sound the horn on is that the current push for AF in the US and EU has nothing to do with kids. I think you could put together a working group on ZKPs and Age Verification, write up a paper and run experiments, and when you bring it to the lawmakers they're gonna say something to the tune of:

"yeah but that's not trustworthy enough and too technical for people to understand so we're just going to serve legal notices to VPN providers instead to tell them that they can't anymore"

...or something to that tune. I'm not a mind reader, I've just read the reports (by lawmakers) mentioning VPNs as an "area of concern".

This is a political gambit and not a new one. The more we treat the current issue as having anything to do with protecting kids the more we legitimize what is an obvious grift.
by npinsker | 2025-12-11 20:59:02+00:00
I agree with you. I agree it's valuable work. I totally disagree with their claim.

A better analogy is: someone who's never taken the AIME might think "there are an infinite number of math problems", but in actuality there are a relatively small, enumerable number of techniques that are used repeatedly on virtually all problems. That's not to take away from the AIME, which is quite difficult -- but not infinite.

Similarly, ARC-AGI is much more bounded than they seem to think. It correlates with intelligence, but doesn't imply it.
by eyelidlessness | 2025-12-11 20:59:04+00:00
Disclaimer: I’m a strong advocate for static typing.

I absolutely see the connection. One of the advantages of static typing is that it makes a lot of refactoring trivial (or much more than it would be otherwise). One of the side effects of making anything more trivial is that people will be more inclined to do it, without thinking as much about the consequences. It shouldn’t be a surprise that, absent other safeguards to discourage it, people will translate trivial refactoring into unexpected breaking changes.

Moreover, they may do this consciously, on the basis that “it was trivial for me to refactor, it should be trivial to adapt downstream.” I’ll even admit to making exactly that judgment call, in exactly those terms. Granted I’m much less cavalier about it when the breaking changes affect people I don’t interface with on a regular basis. But I’m much less cavalier about that sort of impact across the board than I’ve observed in many of my peers.
by vilhelm_s | 2025-12-11 20:59:16+00:00
The idea is that e.g. the government would give you an app that lives on your phone. When you apply for the app you provide some documents to prove your age, but you don't say anything about what sites you plan to visit. When you want to visit an age-restricted site you use the app to generate a proof that you have it, but the site doesn't learn anything more than that, and the government doesn't learn that you used the app.
by smm11 | 2025-12-11 20:59:41+00:00
I have TXT files by week, and sum up each day to the bottom of each day of the week if that makes sense.

Then the next week's new file has the pasted-over to-do items on top.

These were OneNote/Sharepoint files forever until earlier this year. Now they live on my local network, backed up, glaciered.
by lotsofpulp | 2025-12-11 21:00:03+00:00
I always chuckle when discussions start comparing insurance premiums without defining the insurance itself.

Might as well compare the prices of apples and oranges and vacuums and space stations.

These comments could be quoting liability only insurance or comprehensive/collision for a kia or comprehensive/collision with bodily injury for a rivian R1S. The insured amount would differ by hundreds of thousands of dollars.

For reference, I have only ever paid for maximum liability only insurance including uninsured/underinsured coverage ($500k/$250k), but not bodily injury, and my premium for 10k miles per year is less than $50 per month. Used to be less than $40 per month before 2022.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-12-11 21:00:04+00:00
Given your intellectual resources -- which you've successfully used to pass a test that is designed to be easy for humans to pass while tripping up AI models -- why not use them to suggest a better test? The people who came up with Arc-AGI were not actually morons, but I'm sure there's room for improvement.

What would be an example of a test for machine intelligence that you would accept? I've already suggested one (namely, making up more of these sorts of tests) but it'd be good to get some additional opinions.
by benchly | 2025-12-11 21:00:20+00:00
I have the same experience, and my hands are pretty small. Some paranoid bell rang in my head about it being an intentional annoyance to start getting us to use voice-to-text more,

Even switching to the Hacker's Keyboard and tweaking some settings still has me smacking the "tab" key or whatever when hitting space.

Just out of curiosity, who here is a one-handed texter, like me? I just assumed my constant need for error correction was because I only use one hand (and thus, one thumb) to type, but this thread has me wondering.
by libraryofbabel | 2025-12-11 21:00:26+00:00
I like this framing; I think it captures some of the key differences between engineers who are instinctively enthusiastic about AI and those who are not.

Many engineers walk a path where they start out very focussed on programming details, language choice, and elegant or clever solutions. But if you're in the game long enough, and especially if you're working in medium-to-large engineering orgs on big customer-facing projects, you usually kind of move on from it. Early in my career I learned half a dozen programming languages and prided myself on various arcane arts like metaprogramming tricks. But after a while you learn that one person's clever solution is another person's maintainability nightmare, and maybe being as boring and predictable and direct as possible in the code (if slightly more verbose) would have been better. I've maintained some systems written by very brilliant programmers who were just being too clever by half.

You also come to realize that coding skills and language choice don't matter as much as you thought, and the big issues in engineering are 1) are you solving the right problem to begin with 2) people/communication/team dynamics 3) systems architecture, in that order of importance.

And also, programming just gets a little repetitive after a while. Like you say, after a decade or so, it feels a bit like "more of the same." That goes especially for most of the programming most of us are doing most of the time in our day jobs. We don't write a lot of fancy algorithms, maybe once in a blue moon and even then you're usually better off with a library. We do CRUD apps and cookie-cutter React pages and so on and so on.

If AI coding agents fall into your lap once you've reached that particular variation of a mature stage in your engineering career, you probably welcome them as a huge time saver and a means to solve problems you care about faster. After a decade, I still love engineering, but there aren't may coding tasks I particularly relish diving into. I can usually vaguely picture the shape of the solution in my head out the gate, and actually sitting down and doing it feels rather a bore and just a lot of typing and details. Which is why it's so nice when I can kick off a Claude session to do it instead, and review the results to see if they match what I had in mind.

Don't get me wrong. I still love programming if there's just the right kind of compelling puzzle to solve (rarer and rarer these days), and I still pride myself on being able to do it well. Come the holidays I will be working through Advent of Code with no AI assistance whatsoever, just me and vim. But when January rolls around and the day job returns I'll be having Claude do all the heavy lifting once again.
by aeonfox | 2025-12-11 21:00:46+00:00
The data doesn't bear that out. I remember the GFC well because my whole industry imploded during it. It certainly did recover by every measure.

US GDP: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDP

US unemployment: https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-une...

S&P 500: https://www.macrotrends.net/2324/sp-500-historical-chart-dat...

US inflation rate: https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/current-infl...
by bryanlarsen | 2025-12-11 21:00:47+00:00
> With an EV you might accelerate to 57 and then brake to 55 when you let off the accelerator.

No you don't; in fact you can't. Letting off the accelerator enough to apply regen is going to take far more than 2 mph off your speed.

If you want to drop from 57 to 55 in an EV its done the exact same way you do it in an ICE vehicle: you coast.
by bigbadfeline | 2025-12-11 21:00:50+00:00
> Capitalism's weakest point is that it can't account for the future.

That's different from "change as the original sin" and I'd address it differently, but first allow me to remove the poetry from your statement because it doesn't really contribute to clarity.

Basically you're saying "Capitalism allows unpredictable changes that can break things" as opposed to "Another system (e.g. socialism) plans the future and allows only planned changes".

Both of these may be true for some ideal models but aren't true in reality.

Macro changes under real capitalism can and are entirely predictable although you may not know how to predict them - that's a different issue. They can also be tightly controlled by methods different from socialism.

On the other hand, socialism allows only planned changes... until it doesn't, because of unintended consequences. However, I don't claim that the failure of the USSR's socialist model wasn't foreseen or planned at some level of their leadership, which brings the conversation into the realm of fundamental politics where real capitalism and socialism have a lot more in common than is assumed by their usual treatment as opposites.

> but your post is entirely meaningless

To you. Let's steer clear of wild generalizations, the devil is still in the details. I'd appreciate if you use a clear language instead of me trying to guess the details necessary for a meaningful conversation.
by xxmarkuski | 2025-12-11 21:01:40+00:00
I use ChatGPT to compress SVGs, in particular QR codes. Many QR code SVG generators produce inefficient SVGs, and conventional SVG compressors often lack the understanding required for some compression techniques. ChatGPT can replace alignment indicators with <use> elements.

Is there a way to embed the data encoded in the QR code directly within the image? This would allow the data to be parsed directly by the browser, eliminating the need for computer vision to decode it again. Going further, for web images QR codes could be efficiently encoded and rendered by the browser.
by sunaookami | 2025-12-11 21:01:47+00:00
This comment section is strange, a lot of people trying to discredit Snowden, saying he shouldn't have released the files, should be in prison, etc. 12 years ago this was HUGE news and had a major impact on the internet and everyone thanked Snowden for these documents! I certainly am thankful. Disappointed in my country that they literally said that "spying between friends is a no-go" but then did nothing and intimidated journalists and legalized it instead. And thanks to the author for giving the documents another look, found it very interesting. There is also part 2: https://libroot.org/posts/going-through-snowden-documents-pa...
by SamDc73 | 2025-12-11 21:02:41+00:00
The Wyden–Daines Amendment in 2020: a huge privacy amendment that would’ve limited surveillance missed the Senate by literally one vote. It would’ve stopped the government from getting American's web browsing and search history without a warrant. And honestly, I still have zero respect for anyone who voted against it. If you need a warrant to walk into my house, you should need a warrant to walk into my digital life too.

What Snowden exposed more than 10 years ago, none of that was addressed, the surveillance machine just got worse if anything
by timschmidt | 2025-12-11 21:03:04+00:00
"A former senior U.S. intelligence agent described Alexander's program: "Rather than look for a single needle in the haystack, his approach was, 'Let's collect the whole haystack. Collect it all, tag it, store it ... And whatever it is you want, you go searching for it.""

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_B._Alexander#NSA_appoint...
by tomhow | 2025-12-11 21:03:21+00:00
Thanks! Macroexpanded:

My productivity app is a never-ending .txt file (2020) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39432876 - Feb 2024 (264 comments)

My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file (2020) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29661167 - Dec 2021 (202 comments)

My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22276184 - Feb 2020 (402 comments)
by perihelions | 2025-12-11 21:03:25+00:00
> "is this considered a violation of free speech?"

There were major Supreme Court rulings on the topic recently, see

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44397799 ("US Supreme Court Upholds Texas Porn ID Law (wired.com)"—5 months ago, 212 comments)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Speech_Coalition_v._Paxto...
by markatlarge | 2025-12-11 21:03:28+00:00
I’m not a CSAM-detection expert, but after my suspension I ended up doing a lot of research into how these systems work and where they fail. And one important point: Google isn’t just using PhotoDNA-style perceptual hashing.

They’re also running AI-based classifiers on Drive content, and that second layer is far more opaque and far more prone to false positives.

That’s how you get situations like mine: ~700 problematic images in a ~700k-image dataset triggered Google to delete 130,000+ completely unrelated files and shut down my entire developer ecosystem. Hash-matching is predictable.

AI classification is not. And Google’s hybrid pipeline: isn’t independently vetted isn’t externally audited isn’t reproducible

has no recourse when it’s wrong

In practice, it’s a black box that can erase an innocent researcher or indie dev overnight. I wrote about this after experiencing it firsthand — how poisoned datasets + opaque AI detection create “weaponized false positives”: https://medium.com/@russoatlarge_93541/weaponized-false-posi...

I agree with the point above: if open, developer-accessible perceptual hashing tools existed — even via bloom filters or ZK membership proofs — this entire class of collateral damage wouldn’t happen.

Instead, Big Tech keeps the detection tools proprietary while outsourcing the liability to everyone else. If their systems are wrong, we pay the cost — not them.