MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kiliankoe | 2025-12-12 12:02:12+00:00
They are, the model has no inherent knowledge about its confidence levels, it just adds plausible-sounding numbers. Obviously they _can_ be plausible, but trusting these is just another level up from trusting the original output.

I read a comment here a few weeks back that LLMs always hallucinate, but we sometimes get lucky when the hallucinations match up with reality. I've been thinking about that a lot lately.
by a96 | 2025-12-12 12:02:36+00:00
And these all pretty much came from an era before glass display were (affordable) in computers. A terminal was roughly a keyboard and a printer attached together, or a typewriter cut in half. Paper. No cursors. No arrow keys. Mostly after punched cards and mostly before transistors. And that was only a few decades ago, there's people still alive that have used these machines.

Funny that they are still some of the most efficient and powerful interfaces.
by fleischhauf | 2025-12-12 12:02:37+00:00
I'm always impressed how fast people get used to new things. couple of years ago something like chatgpt was completely impossible, and now people complain it something's does mit do what you told it to and sometimes lies. (not saying your points are not valid or you should not raise them) Some of the points are just not fixable at this point due to tech limitations. A language model currently simply has no way to give an estimate of its confidence. Also there is no way to completely do away with hallucinations (lies). there need to be some more fundamental improvements for this to work reliably.
by uhdhr | 2025-12-12 12:04:55+00:00
I am not convinced that the idea is recent, or rather, related ideas are not recent, going back thousands of years. It can be extremely complex, to put it very mildly. How well people that put their trust in some of those ideas fare, can likewise be an extremely complex topic, and can also be political. In some cases in some ways some of them might have fared well, in some other cases in some ways, maybe less so.
by Nextgrid | 2025-12-12 12:05:04+00:00
There are generally 2 angles to it:

* malicious: hostile actors want to gain footholds into companies - North Korea, etc

* benign: people in lower income countries want to do the job and can make good profit even when giving half the salary to you.

For the second option, some are scams and only want to pocket a month or two of salary without delivering before the company fires them. Others actually deliver and can keep the arrangement going long-term.
by BatteryMountain | 2025-12-12 12:05:40+00:00
Same here. I miss my N900 dearly. It was one of my most expensive items at the time, and I enjoyed this device more than the Galaxy S I9000.

It had the best slide-out keyboard of all the phones, nice and rubbery keys. Super smooth sliding motion.

It also had a FM Transmitter (not just Receiver), so I could blast audio in my first car back then without struggling with bluetooth kits & audio cable (neither was standard).

It also had an infra-red transmitter that was programmable, so you could use it as a remote in certain circumstances.

It the time, the 32GB storage was absolutely massive for a phone.

It also had stereo speakers & a kick-stand, so you could watch a movie on it without issues.

I really miss this phone & era. Maemo OS could've owned the market today, as at the time it was much better than early Androids. Nokia messed up so hard after this, the N9 was shitty in comparison.
by rcxdude | 2025-12-12 12:05:51+00:00
Both, usually. A language's semantics can limit how much a compiler can speed up the language. Python, for example, is extremely difficult to make fast due to the fact that almost everything has the semantics of a hashmap lookup. C, in comparison, has relatively little in it that can't be mapped fairly straightforwardly to assembly, and then most of it can be mapped in a more difficult way to faster assembly.
by illusiveman | 2025-12-12 12:06:09+00:00
Does stack overflow still exist?

I mean, it's there any genuine case you can cover with SO that you cannot with your favorite LLM?

Because where a LLM falls short is in the same topic SO fell short: highly technical questions about a particular technology or tool, where your best chance to get the answer you were looking for is asking in their GitHub repo or contacting the maintainers.
by tim333 | 2025-12-12 12:06:18+00:00
In headlines today

>EU set to indefinitely freeze Russian assets

https://www.rte.ie/news/europe/2025/1212/1548621-eu-russia/

You don't have to respond to provocations in a simplistic way that doesn't really effect the enemy

Shooting the drones would probably have Russia laugh and send twice as many next time. Financial actions can help. Blocading their oil might finish things.
by K0balt | 2025-12-12 12:06:38+00:00
Honestly, I don’t really remember. More than a decade ago, but I think maybe I was already working on my sailing adventures by then and working the summer in Fairbanks? Or maybe that was before, I’m not really sure. Too many relationships, kids, and big life changes between here and there to have a sense of the thing. I’m sure you can look it up? IIRC he was in Fairbanks for quite a while. Was a bit of a fixture at the coffee house.
by falcor84 | 2025-12-12 12:06:55+00:00
The ironic thing of course is that to the extent a distinguishing feature between human and LLM writing can be well-defined, it can be optimized against by the next version of LLMs, assuming a financial incentive.

At this stage, it's clear to me that we are indeed headed towards the "Mission. Fucking. Accomplished." world - https://xkcd.com/810/
by ssl-3 | 2025-12-12 12:07:19+00:00
It's all good. I'm largely "face-blind", myself, in that I don't often recognize others in person or online -- which is certainly not to say that I think I'm particularly memorable myself.

As to the bot: Man, I beat the bot to death. It's pretty brutal.

I'm profane and demanding because that's the most terse language I know how to construct in English.

When I set forth to have the bot do a thing for me, the slowest part of the process that I can improve on my part is the quantity of the words that I use.

I can type fast and think fast, but my one-letter-at-a-time response to the bot is usually the only part that that I can make a difference with. So I tend to be very terse.

"a+b=c, you fuck!" is certainly terse, unambiguous, and fast to type, so that's my usual style.

Including the emphatic "you fuck!" appendage seems to stir up the context more than without. Its inclusion or omission is a dial that can be turned.

Meanwhile: "I have some reservations about the proposed implementation. Might it be possible for you to revise it so as to be in a different form? As previously discussed, it is my understanding that a+b=c. Would you like to try again to implement a solution that incorporates this understanding?" is very slow to write.

They both get similar results. One method is faster for me than the other, just because I can only type so fast. The operative function of the statement is ~the same either way.

(I don't owe the bot anything. It isn't alive. It is just a computer running a program. I could work harder to be more polite, empathetic, or cordial, but: It's just code running on a box somewhere in a datacenter that is raising my electric rate and making the RAM for my next system upgrade very expensive. I don't owe it anything, much less politeness or poeticism.

Relatedly, my inputs at the bash prompt on my home computer are also very terse. For instance I don't have any desire or ability to be polite to bash; I just issue commands like ls and awk and grep without any filler-words or pleasantries. The bot is no different to me.

When I want something particularly poetic or verbose as output from the bot, I simply command it to be that way.

It's just a program.)
Show HN: Guftaguu – Anonymous Chat and Real-Time Games (No Login Required)
by SeeYouInHelL | 2025-12-12 12:07:53+00:00
I built an anonymous real-time chat app (think modern Omegle) from scratch — plus a bunch of built-in multiplayer mini-games — just because I thought it would be fun.

Try it here: https://guftaguu.vercel.app

What it does

• Anonymous chat: Instantly pair with a stranger and start talking. No account, no history — everything disappears when you leave.

• Play games together: If the conversation gets awkward (or you just want chaos), you can jump into:

Tic-Tac-Toe

Connect 4

Rock–Paper–Scissors

Dots & Boxes

Reaction-based games …and more coming.

• Zero friction: Just enter a display name and you're in.

A heads up (Mobile users)

The mobile UI still needs work. Games won’t run correctly unless you switch to desktop mode, so for now the best experience is on a laptop/PC.

Feedback welcome

This is very much a work in progress. There are bugs and I’d love help finding them or ideas for new features.

You can send feedback directly through the app:

1. Click “Report / Feedback”

2. Type your message

3. It shows up instantly in my Discord so I can fix things quickly
by MatteoFrigo | 2025-12-12 12:08:43+00:00
This post is restricted to the context of the European Union and is intended to be factual.

The EU age verification app is intended to be a pilot to the EU Digital Identity Wallet (EUDIW), which EU law requires to be deployed everywhere in Europe by the end of 2026. (Thus your "worry" is in fact the explicit plan of record.)

The EUDIW will store more attributes than age. Think of it as a digital form of a passport (with name, address, etc.). The exact set of attributes is determined by local laws.

Thus, the DOCUMENT that you obtain is tied to you, and of course the state knows what is in the DOCUMENT since the state creates the document in the first place.

The state does not generate proofs. The phone generates proofs. Given a proof (and only the proof), nobody can associate the proof to the phone or to you.

Now I switch to less factual statements, which are still approximately correct.

Why would you trust the wallet software not to phone home to the state or us (Google)? The EUDIW regulations require that the wallet software be open source. However, states will only issue DOCUMENT to their own certified wallet software---you cannot just take the open source and recompile it, since the state won't issue DOCUMENT to your uncertified wallet. (Maybe your gym will issue a gym membership to your raspberry pi wallet, since it's not a big deal.)

The reason for this strictness is that the EUDIW is intended for official or semi-official uses. For example, you can open a bank account with it, or use it as ID to get a mortgage. The bank must by law accept DOCUMENT, the state guarantees that DOCUMENT is correct, and you get better privacy than handling over a piece of plastic that is then photocopied by who knows whom. This is the tradeoff of the current EU law. It would be inappropriate for this kind of official, passport-like documents to store attributes such as your profession (journalist or whatever), and nobody is talking about it.
C2PM(Color to Pixel Map)
by Yukesh_J | 2025-12-12 12:11:02+00:00
C2PM (Color-to-Pixel Map) is a new image representation format developed by Yukesh J. It stores image data using an inverted index structure rather than traditional pixel-linear ordering.

In C2PM, each unique RGB color is stored once, followed by a list of all pixel positions where that color appears. Formally, the format maps:

Color → {Pixel Indices}

This structure enables several properties:

Design Characteristics

Lossless representation of exact RGB images

Direct access to all pixels of a given color without scanning the entire image

Deterministic binary layout (header + entries + index arrays)

Simple linear decoding algorithm suitable for tooling or analysis

Potential Applications

Pixel-art workflows

Palette-based editing systems

Color-region mask generation

Image segmentation and inverse indexing research

Developer tooling that benefits from color-centric access patterns

Current Scope

C2PM is not a replacement for existing compressed formats (PNG, JPEG) and is not optimized for general photography or real-time rendering. It is intended as an alternative representation model focused on color organization rather than storage minimization.

Specification & Implementation

A reference implementation (encoder + decoder in C) and a description of the binary layout are available here:

https://github.com/yukeshj2006/C2PM-Color-to-Pixel-Map-Image-Format

Feedback on structural design, potential optimizations, or use-cases is welcome.
by 578_Observer | 2025-12-12 12:12:09+00:00
This deal establishes a clear dichotomy: Disney/OpenAI as the "Walled Garden" of premium IP vs. the "Open Bazaar" of mass distribution.

Google is now backed into a corner. To keep YouTube relevant against this alliance, they can't rely on tech alone—they need comparable IP. I expect them to immediately start courting Sony Pictures or Universal to fill that gap.

It’s essentially a battle between "Exclusivity" and "Scale".
by conartist6 | 2025-12-12 12:12:33+00:00
So the easiest strategy to hamper them if you know you're serving a page to an AI bot is simply to take all the hyperlinks off the page...?

That doesn't even sound all that bad if you happen to catch a human. You could even tell them pretty explicitly with a banner that they were browsing the site in no-links mode for AI bots. Put one link to an FAQ page in the banner since that at least is easily cached
by tetris11 | 2025-12-12 12:12:44+00:00
Another one just came to me, as I witnessed it yesterday on the train. A homeless man was walking down the train aisle, shaking a handful of coins and asking people for change in a long drawn out plead.

Everyone stared deeper into their phones until he went away, but when he came back a woman with a child handed him some change and he walked on without thanking her.

The kid asked "why did you give him money mummy?" and her response was simply "you see homeless, you give money" and that was the end of it. I just liked the implicit matter-of-fact decency in which she lived her life.
by chimprich | 2025-12-12 12:13:10+00:00
StackOverflow is moribund pile of junk. They've never managed to understand that software development is a highly fluid, constantly evolving space. Instead of embracing this, they've been trying to build a static encyclopaedia.

Volunteer admins with nothing better to do get their dopamine by closing questions for StackOverflow points, regardless of whether the supposedly duped question from 8 years ago is actually still the best answer and covers the nuances of the question now being asked.

There probably is still a space for a SO-style site to exist, but they'd need a drastic change of approach. LLMs (+ Reddit I suppose?) have taken over most the engineer support role.
by watwut | 2025-12-12 12:13:51+00:00
I noticed google not being able to find smaller blogs a few years ago. The sort of blogs I used to like and read a lot - small irregular blog of an expert in something like cryptography, sociology etc kind of disappeared from the search. Then they disappeared for real.

Even when I knew the exact name of article I was looking for google was unable to find it. And yes it still existed,
by lucideer | 2025-12-12 12:14:01+00:00
The wording & framing of these things is an interesting topic in the context of the W3C's decision to drop WebSQL.

A "rewrite" softly implies a replacement (intent that SQLite users would all migrate to Turso eventually & SQLite would cease to exist as a project). This isn't the strict definition of a rewrite but the implication is there in the language.

OTOH the W3C shut down that spec because it required competing implementations to exist. This imagines a world where Turso & SQLite coexist actively.

E.g. micropython isn't a rewrite of cpython even though they both target compatible python, Chrome isn't a rewrite of Firefox even though they both target a range of compatible languages & formats (but Firefox was a rewrite of Netscape - the word depends heavily on context).

I realise this usage isn't coming from you, it's coming from the Turso devs themselves, but it does feel like an overstep on their part.

The Turso guys can use whatever words they like in their blogposts, they're not the authority on whether it constitutes a rewrite.
by jorams | 2025-12-12 12:15:26+00:00
That's a different situation. The browser decides what to do depending on the situation and what was communicated about caching. Sometimes it sends a request to the server along with information about what it already has. Then it can get back a 304. Other times it already knows the cached data is fine, so it doesn't send a request to the server in the first place. The developer tools show this as a cached 200.
by ineedasername | 2025-12-12 12:16:32+00:00
If that’s the way things go, subscription, there aught to be insurance coverage built into that. It’s required anyway and the extent to which a driver relies on SD, and has to pay a sub, then it’s the SD responsible for accidents, not in full but part, and insurance can reflect that as well. But if the two are inextricable as a requirement anyway, there should be baked in standardized procedures for “things have gone wrong, which was a known inevitability, and this is the framework for handling it.”
by falcor84 | 2025-12-12 12:17:56+00:00
The main benefit for me is of the upvotes and comments telling me which solutions/approaches are better than others and why. Present day LLMs on their own don't have that context, nor the critical thinking.

As I see it, the next step is a synthesis of the two, whereby StackOverflow (or a competitor) reverses their ban on GenAI [0] and explicitly accepts AI users. I'm thinking that for moderation purposes, these would have to be explicitly marked as AIs, and would have to be "sponsored" by a proven-human StackOverflow user of good standing. Other than that, the AI users would act exactly as human users, being able to add questions, answers and comments, as well as to upvote and downvote other entries, based on the existing (or modified) reputation system.

I imagine for example, that for any non-sensitive open source project that I'm using Claude Code for, I would give it explicit permissions to interact on SO: for any difficult issue it encounters, it would try to find an existing question that might be relevant, if so, try the answers there, and upvote/comment about those, or to create a new question, and either get good answers from others, or to self-answer it, if it later found its own solution.

[0] https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/421831/policy-gener...
by codedokode | 2025-12-12 12:19:15+00:00
To be fair, in 90s-10s the West invaded multiple Soviet and Russian allies (Yugoslavia, Iraq, Syria, as an example) using weakness of Russian economy an inability to help the allies at the time. That was not a friendly act. USSR withdrew from Eastern Germany in the end of 80s as a gesture of good will in hope to improve the relations, but it was never reciprocated.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-12-12 12:19:23+00:00
> the model has no inherent knowledge about its confidence levels

Kind of. See e.g. https://openreview.net/forum?id=mbu8EEnp3a, but I think it was established already a year ago that LLMs tend to have identifiable internal confidence signal; the challenge around the time of DeepSeek-R1 release was to, through training, connect that signal to tool use activation, so it does a search if it "feels unsure".
by throwaway2037 | 2025-12-12 12:20:36+00:00
First, this is a massive accomplishment. When I looked at the Wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koralm_Railway

... it looks like a multi-multi-multi-phase project. Hats off to making this work.

Second, I noticed how long it took to build this tunnel: Koralm Tunnel -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koralm_Tunnel

It is 33km, and it took from 2008 to 2025 to build it. That is a damn long time! The Toei Oedo line in Tokyo is 40+km and was built in about 10 years. My guess about the wild difference: The geoengineering of the Koralm Tunnel is way more complex, and/or the rock is much harder. Can anyone with experience in this area comment? I would like to learn more. I guess that most of central Tokyo is aluvial plains (Shanghai is similar), so you are basically digging through clay and sand -- easy stuff for modern tunnel boring machines.
Ask HN: Are you building internal Lovable/v0-like tools for your PMs/etc.?
by altras | 2025-12-12 12:21:02+00:00
With the rise of tools like Lovable, v0, Replit and Bolt, the ability to spin up full-stack prototypes via natural language is becoming a commodity (IMO)

I’m curious if any engineering teams are building internal versions of these tools specifically for their Product Managers/Non-tech roles to self-serve?

We are currently debating whether to build a lightweight wrapper around an LLM that has context of our design system and internal APIs, allowing PMs to:

- Generate high-fidelity prototypes without bothering designers.

- Build simple internal dashboards (CRUD apps) without engineering tickets.

If you are doing this:

- How "production-ready" is the output?

- Are you using a generic model (Claude 4.5) or fine-tuning?

Do you let PMs deploy, or is it strictly for prototyping? And another tangent question: are software engineers moving from "coding an app" to "coding a platform that codes the app", lol
by mapt | 2025-12-12 12:21:13+00:00
Mirror grinding is still a thing. Just not a thing that young people generally do. Distribution got easier and real estate got more scarce. Those of us who have garages, have filled them up.

In my understanding it's gotten considerably easier over the years with better availability of diamond and CBN abrasives, and with more electronic control of the grinding hardware. Slumping glass and bonding a thin sheet to ceramic foam reduced the costs and weight a great deal as well. Mastering these techniques make it easy to start a small business rather than to do a one-off in your garage, though.

As a sidenote: The Celestron RASA astrographs are so effective and so inexpensive of a wide-field instrument that it's a lot harder to justify the DIY activity that existed in the 2000's.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-12-12 12:22:15+00:00
Pascal is probably the most sensible name, as far as traditional naming schemes go. Names after Blaise Pascal, mathematician and one of the two inventors of the mechanical calculator. Pretty fair association and tribute.

Git as a name is our daily reminder that pre-mainstream programmers were rebellious against the mainstream (to put it as generously as I could) before corporate interests took over. but i encourwge you to look up that story yourself.
by brnt | 2025-12-12 12:22:28+00:00
Is there any design? It's just the flag and a title + subtitle.

Also, the EU is the most efficient government in terms of overhead, and having seen some of it up close not wasting time or money on "unifying design languages" for every single funding billboard is very much EU style. Just copy-paste by some local authority in Powerpoint in most cases, I bet.
by littlecranky67 | 2025-12-12 12:23:42+00:00
> The point about foreign bases in Canada or Mexico gets repeated a lot online, but what is the ultimate point? The USA would not like it, but it's also not a political reality.

The point is, that the US would do actually the very same as russia, and break international law. And regarding political reality, this already happened in history with the Cuba crisis. The point is actually, that the west uses a moral highground to condemn russias aggression, while it would be doing the very same. It falls in the "rules for thee but not for me" category. And if you hold somebody accountable on standards that would you wouldn't be able to hold up for yourself, your are - by definition - a hipocrite.