MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by systemtest | 2025-12-12 14:48:14+00:00
A bit of a shame. I had a Nokia 6090 with 8 watt of transmit power on 900Mhz. Combined with a 33 centimeter antenna that phone had reception in nearly all of the European continent. And with a 70Ah 12v battery you had a battery life of weeks. Even with the phone consuming up to 25 watts during calls.

My fancy new 5G smartphone doesn’t work in rural parts of the country. We are going backwards.
by zamadatix | 2025-12-12 14:48:35+00:00
Presumably, but you don't really known until you pay to take it in for service and they tell you there is nothing wrong but they don't have a fix (gee, great experience). On the "know it's software" side e.g. I had what appeared to be random issues with audio crackling on my PC I assumed was software/driver related, it turned out there was a faulty USB hub causing an issues for the whole bus but it was just most apparent in the audio device.

Stuff like "Doors refuse to open" is vague enough it could be a similar kind of issue which needs physical service/replacement rather than just a software update, especially if other buttons are triggering completely separate actions with the windows. Or it could very well be 100% software issues, which could be more apparent with additional details like "only does it after transitioning from this screen or pressing things in this order" type problems.
by pydry | 2025-12-12 14:48:38+00:00
Spray painting a panzer tank in 1939 with "free the jews" would have been a pretty much identical form of "terrorism".

Nobody killed, no real damage done.

Obviously the Nazis back then would agree with modern far right that defacing weapons used to commit genocide fits the definition of terrorism and that voicing support for such a crime demands prison time.

And, modern liberals have always had an easier relationship with the far right than they have had with free speech.
by rapnie | 2025-12-12 14:48:53+00:00
From the website:

> Synit is an experiment in applying pervasive reactivity and object capabilities to the System Layer of an operating system for personal computers, including laptops, desktops, and mobile phones. Its architecture follows the principles of the Syndicated Actor Model.

> Synit builds upon the Linux kernel, but replaces many pieces of familiar Linux software, including systemd, NetworkManager, D-Bus, and so on. It makes use of many concepts that will be familiar to Linux users, but also incorporates many ideas drawn from programming languages and operating systems not closely connected with Linux’s Unix heritage.
by colechristensen | 2025-12-12 14:49:00+00:00
Eh, while that's true for many things, there are plenty of genetic diseases for which it is not ("diseases" or whatever you might call the human lack of vitamin C synthesis)

In this case the gene encoding L-gulonolactone_oxidase is broken, and that's the last step in the process. That gene catalyzes something into a substance which decays into vitamin C.
by milliams | 2025-12-12 14:49:02+00:00
https://peps.python.org/pep-0723/, e.g.:

# /// script # requires-python = ">=3.11" # dependencies = [ # "requests<3", # "rich", # ] # /// import requests from rich.pretty import pprint resp = requests.get("https://peps.python.org/api/peps.json") data = resp.json() pprint([(k, v["title"]) for k, v in data.items()][:10])
by mytailorisrich | 2025-12-12 14:49:15+00:00
Yes, I remember Wales received a lot of EU funding for infrastructure and there used to be those "funded by the EU" signs everywhere. They voted in favour of Brexit.

I think this sort of things does little to convince people. The road network was there and working before the EU, it is still there and working now.

Especially, people were well aware that the UK was a consistent net contributor to the EU budget so knew that EU funding for infrastructure was not reallly a benefit.
by bluGill | 2025-12-12 14:49:35+00:00
The only reason to grind a small mirror is because you want a very large mirror and need to practice first. This has long been the case, but the definition of large has gotten larger over time. Of course there is also the in between states where you buy a cheap workable mirror, and then make it higher quality. Unless you have a lot of land high on a mountain there is rarely any point in mirrors that you have to completely grind yourself - the telescope wouldn't be portable and the nearby light and atmosphere pollution means large sizes don't gain enough. (if you do live in such a place your telescope could be massive if you have the years to dedicate - can I come by and look through it one night after you build it?)
by phantasmish | 2025-12-12 14:50:01+00:00
Are you suggesting it's not noticeable in those movies? I found it distracting several times in I think every one of those (maybe the least in 1917? And I haven't seen Ford vs. Ferrari, but I have all the rest). A few entire scenes or sequences in TG:M look awful, and it's usually the mundane ones that wouldn't even have been effects in a pre-CG movie, not the aircraft action stuff. Alien: Romulus looks fake practically the whole movie (that one didn't ruin it for me or anything, but it had an effect like the Riddick movies, of being obviously mostly a cartoon, though of course not as awful about it as those were).

Well, I guess it wasn't exactly distracting in Barbie because that's practically a marionette movie a la Thunderbirds, so it's not really trying not to look off.
by jerf | 2025-12-12 14:50:05+00:00
Humans don't understand their thought process either.

In general, neural nets do not have insight into what they are doing, because they can't. Can you tell me what neurons fired in the process of reading this text? No. You don't have access to that information. We can recursively model our own network and say something about which regions of the brain are probably involved due to other knowledge, but that's all a higher-level model. We have no access to our own inner workings, because that turns into an infinite regress problem of understanding our understanding of our understanding of ourselves that can't be solved.

The terminology of this next statement is a bit sloppy since this isn't a mathematics or computer science dissertation but rather a comment on HN, but: A finite system can not understand itself. You can put some decent mathematical meat on those bones if you try and there may be some degenerate cases where you can construct a system that understands itself for some definition of "understand", but in the absence of such deliberation and when building systems for "normal tasks" you can count on the system not being able to understand itself fully by any reasonably normal definition of "understand".

I've tried to find the link for this before, but I know it was on HN, where someone asked an LLM to do some simple arithmetic, like adding some numbers, and asked the LLM to explain how it was doing it. They also dug into the neural net activation itself and traced what neurons were doing what. While the LLM explanation was a perfectly correct explanation of how to do elementary school arithmetic, what the neural net actually did was something else entirely based around how neurons actually work, and basically it just "felt" its way to the correct answer having been trained on so many instances already. In much the same way as any human with modest experience in adding two digit numbers doesn't necessarily sit there and do the full elementary school addition algorithm but jumps to the correct answer in fewer steps by virtue of just having a very trained neural net.

In the spirit of science ultimately being really about "these preconditions have this outcome" rather than necessarily about "why", if having a model narrate to itself about how to do a task or "confess" improves performance, then performance is improved and that is simply a brute fact, but that doesn't mean the naive human understanding about why such a thing might be is correct.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-12-12 14:50:06+00:00
AI overviews likely aren't going anywhere. Techies complain about it, but from seeing average people use google - everyone just reads the overview. Hell I even saw a screenshot of an AI overview in a powerpoint this week...

Anyway, I'd really like to at least see google make the overview text itself clickable, and link to the source of the given sentence or paragraph. I think that a lot of people would instinctively click-through just to quickly spot check if it was made as easy as possible.
by simonw | 2025-12-12 14:51:11+00:00
This works really well in my experience, but it does mean you need to have a working internet connection the first time you run the script.

# /// script # dependencies = [ # "cowsay", # ] # /// import cowsay cowsay.cow("Hello World")

Then:

uv run cowscript.py

It manages a disposable hidden virtual environment automatically, via a very fast symlink-based caching mechanism.

You can also add a shebang line so you can execute it directly:

#!/usr/bin/env -S uv run --script # # /// script # dependencies = ["cowsay"] # /// import cowsay cowsay.cow("Hello World")

Then:

chmod 755 cowscript ./cowscript
by gpjt | 2025-12-12 14:51:31+00:00
Thanks re: gradient accumulation, I'm glad to hear my intuition was right!

As part of the upcoming post I'm running the DDP train on A100s with 40 GiB and 80 GiB, H100s with 80 GiB, and B200s with 160 GiB, so I'll have at least three loss vs. batch size points to plot. So that might be interesting.

I guess a full test would be to train at various batch sizes on the 160 GiB machine and plot the resulting loss. That would be very expensive as a hobby project (the bs=64 train cost a bit more than $40 excluding overhead) so I won't do it.

But perhaps a shorter train would still be of value? That is, train for 300M tokens for a tenth of the cost and see where the loss landed? The problem with that would be if the impact of batch sizes varied with the length of the train, eg. if batch size 64 was better than 512 for short trains but weaker at longer ones.
by smaughk | 2025-12-12 14:51:50+00:00
This project has made me think about more about the difference between TUI's and "command-line" (CLI) apps as categories. Traditionally CLIs were kind of run-and-exit tools, and "real" TUIs were long-running, stateful apps, but what we're creating seems to sit somewhere in between the to.

With richer terminals and libraries like this, the distinction feels more about interaction style than environment. Curious how others think about that boundary when designing tools that work in terminals.
by jasoneckert | 2025-12-12 14:52:06+00:00
It took me far too long to figure this out from their site, but when I did, the project looked far less interesting.

For a while there, I thought the "been in existence for 20+ years and our users represent an engaged, supportive and invested global community of users focused on sustainability and growth" was the Fedora Project extending their expertise in file organization and distribution to other use cases.

But on the bright side, I now have a link I can use to confuse my students with (to keep them out of their comfort zone and promote deep research).
by eudamoniac | 2025-12-12 14:52:50+00:00
Not really. The only expense that could lead to that is child care, so I'll assume you mean leaving preteens home alone as a nosy neighbor calls CPS. First of all that doesn't really happen and it's national news when it does. Second of all at least a few states have passed laws enshrining children's freedom.

But usually the "requirements" that get parents to spend too much money are entirely optional things, of which a few are college tuition, a car for the child, camps, tutors, music lessons, vacations abroad, innumerable toys, iPads, etc etc
by mapt | 2025-12-12 14:52:59+00:00
Gemini:

> Therapeutically, recombinant urate oxidase (like rasburicase or pegylated urate oxidase) is used as a medication to rapidly lower uric acid levels, treating tumor lysis syndrome, hyperuricemia, and gout, especially when other treatments fail or are contraindicated.

Wikipedia:

> It has been proposed that the loss of urate oxidase gene expression has been advantageous to hominoids, since uric acid is a powerful antioxidant and scavenger of singlet oxygen and radicals. Its presence provides the body with protection from oxidative damage, thus prolonging life and decreasing age-specific cancer rates.[15]

> Children with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (NHL), specifically with Burkitt's lymphoma and B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (B-ALL), often experience tumor lysis syndrome (TLS), which occurs when breakdown of tumor cells by chemotherapy releases uric acid and cause the formation of uric acid crystals in the renal tubules and collecting ducts. This can lead to kidney failure and even death. Studies suggest that patients at a high risk of developing TLS may benefit from the administration of urate oxidase.[17] However, humans lack the subsequent enzyme HIU hydroxylase in the pathway to degrade uric acid to allantoin, so long-term urate oxidase therapy could potentially have harmful effects because of toxic effects of HIU.[18]

> Higher uric acid levels have also been associated with epilepsy. However, it was found in mouse models that disrupting urate oxidase actually decreases brain excitability and susceptibility to seizures.[19]

> Graft-versus-host disease (GVHD) is often a side effect of allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT), driven by donor T cells destroying host tissue. Uric acid has been shown to increase T cell response, so clinical trials have shown that urate oxidase can be administered to decrease uric acid levels in the patient and subsequently decrease the likelihood of GVHD.[20]

> Urate oxidase is formulated as a protein drug (rasburicase) for the treatment of acute hyperuricemia in patients receiving chemotherapy. A PEGylated form of urate oxidase, pegloticase, was FDA approved in 2010 for the treatment of chronic gout in adult patients refractory to "conventional therapy".[21]

As a general rule though, you can effectively treat/prevent gout by significantly increasing consumption of water and by replacing proteins with cereal grains (or fruits and vegetables or vegetable fats). These are inexpensive, fairly safe solutions.
by zzbn00 | 2025-12-12 14:53:53+00:00
Interesting. In UK, I think the big construction companies would hire these bean-counters then use them to out-manoeuvre the ones that are hired to replace them. Quickly nobody knows what a reasonable price is, and the govmnt has to go with choice of one out of two overpriced bids. (I have no direct experience, this is just what it looks like from an observers perspective)
by danaris | 2025-12-12 14:54:09+00:00
Any on-device solution that simply sends back a yes/no result as you describe is guaranteed to have one of two problems:

1) It is vulnerable to modifications and hacks on the local device that get it to send back a "yes" result without actually verifying anything

OR

2) It requires the device to use some kind of closed, proprietary system that allows the service to guarantee that #1 cannot happen

Now, in general, the tech world is pretty happy to accept #2, but many of the people around here would object to it on very reasonable grounds.
by anarticle | 2025-12-12 14:54:55+00:00
I can't help but feel like some product manager is behind all this...

Why would it go from what felt like a predictable error to what feels like someone moving the keys around? I am guessing someone presented aggregate research that showed higher accuracy overall, but ignored the case that the errors feel like the voices are getting louder :D.

Hopefully they come up with a setting to change this, but knowing apple it probably won't happen. Is it time for custom keyboards to come back?
by Forgeties79 | 2025-12-12 14:55:09+00:00
I feel like people dance around this a lot because idk it hurts nerd credibility or something. The fact is on a moment to moment basis, the iPhone is just a better experience generally. They also hold their value a lot longer. I consistently trade in my phone or sell it to other people for easily 80% of what I paid for it. Usually this is 3-4yrs out

Remember how long it took for Instagram to be functional on android phones?
by b0vinat-- | 2025-12-12 14:55:22+00:00
That part of Europe has historically loved its trains. The train is more than transportation there. It’s an institution and part of the culture. Have you been to a toy store and looked at the precision and cost of the train sets? They don’t just ride the train, the train is part of who they are and what they love, starting when they’re small children. The trains run on-time, they’re clean, and overall they tend to be more modern. In addition, people walk.
by doodlebugging | 2025-12-12 14:55:26+00:00
If he made it all the way he would beat the record set by by Plennie Wingo in 1931-1932 when he walked from Santa Monica, CA to Istanbul, Turkey backwards. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plennie_L._Wingo

It was a challenging walk.
by EastLondonCoder | 2025-12-12 14:55:33+00:00
I think of it like improvising with a very skilled but slightly alien musician.

If you just hand it a chord chart, it’ll follow the structure. But if you understand the kinds of patterns it tends to favour, the statistical shapes it moves through, you can start composing with it, not just prompting it.

That’s where Gärdenfors helped me reframe things. The model isn’t retrieving facts. It’s traversing a conceptual space. Once you stop expecting grounded truth and start tracking coherence, internal consistency, narrative stability, you get a much better sense of where it’s likely to go off course.

It reminds me of salespeople who speak fluently without being aligned with the underlying subject. Everything sounds plausible, but something’s off. LLMs do that too. You can learn to spot the mismatch, but it takes practice, a bit like learning to jam. You stop reading notes and start listening for shape.
by K0balt | 2025-12-12 14:55:38+00:00
Iirc he was there for more than a year, flew home for a while, came back? Not sure. I do remember him being there during a summer and also during winter. I think one year the ice was impassible and he was waiting. But I don’t really remember, such things might have been mere conversation crystallized into memories. He seemed a kind and pleasant man , though, of that I am sure.
by ekjhgkejhgk | 2025-12-12 14:55:47+00:00
OT on Tor:

Recently this link was on HN[1]. It ranks your browser on regular tracking and fingerprinting separately. "Tor without JS" was the only option I found to be completely fingerprint resistant. Even Tor "with JS on strict settings" ranked it as only "partly fingerprint resistant". (Interestingly firefox without JS never returns)

Scary stuff.

I'd like to hear other people's experiences/experiments here.

[1] https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/
by nulbyte | 2025-12-12 14:56:40+00:00
> This take is really detached from reality, I get down voted for this whenever I ask, but do you have kids? If not sorry, but your opinion means nothing.

The reason you get down voted is likely because you are neither sorry nor correct. Just because someone doesn't have children does not mean their opinion of technology that affects them just the same is invalid. You will get better results engaging others in meaningful debate without dehumanizing folks simply because they aren't like you.
by YeGoblynQueenne | 2025-12-12 14:56:43+00:00
>> You’re always going to look at the Costco chicken and wonder why you are doing it.

It depends. My friend's dad has chickens and the meat is tough and grey-dark, very much not like the supermarket white and soft meat. Also the meat tastes of... chicken; I guess. And you can see even the bones are significantly harder (I can't snap them with my fingers like the supermarket chickens' bones). I always assumed this is because of the way they're raised, allowed to roam freely (within an enclosure, but it's a big one) and feed on scraps and everything they can forage for, in addition to grain.

What does your chickens' meat look and taste like? If it's the same as supermarket chicken then, I don't know, but if it's the other kind then it's definitely worth it. Although it takes a couple hours cooking to soften it :)
by taeric | 2025-12-12 14:56:55+00:00
The data clearly shows that if you keep cars cheap, people use them. That is literally the point of this entire article. When they started making driving into the city more costly, more people started taking transit. Is literally the data.

Even in places like Tokyo, you will find that the wealthy neighborhoods have cars. The catch is in Tokyo, this is enforced by law. If you can't show that you have a legal parking spot, you aren't allowed to register a car. That is a very steep hurdle that makes the vehicle far more than just 10x. And is a large part of why even the largely confusing mess of major transit offerings that will require different tickets works, there.

In spite of that, commute times in Tokyo are, on average, still HIGHER than SF and NYC commute times. My commute time even on public transit in Atlanta was better than the average commute in Tokyo. I don't know how you want to start quantifying "worse" or "better." Are they "workable?" Yes. Absolutely. Will people use if they can afford to get and operate a car? No.
by dfxm12 | 2025-12-12 14:57:22+00:00
Some brands are better than others. I bought a Sony Bravia TV less than a year ago. The nags are infrequent (maybe every fifth time I turn it on) and unobtrusive (a toast notification pops up in the upper right corner of the screen for a few seconds; it's gone by the time the Fire Stick UI comes up).

Getting rid of ads on the streaming stick and various streaming services is an interesting challenge though...
by potato3732842 | 2025-12-12 14:57:58+00:00
It's a numbers game. Those people basically don't exist compared to cheapskates who want to drive old cars and people who crash cars driving distracted. It's gonna come down to how many people who want to text and drive or do other sketchy stuff want to make the jump to autonomous cars. Classic car insurance is already stupid cheap just because it implicitly excluded a bunch of risky demographics.
by buellerbueller | 2025-12-12 14:58:30+00:00
>I just don't understand why it would be a virtue to deliberately make things harder for [some] people

Yes, obviously, you have stated this before. You are clear on that. I agree with you.

What you don't seem to have done (because you keep saying you don't understand why it would be a virtue) is steelmanned the argument of the other side. Only by doing that can you 1) understand why their plan would be considered virtuous by them, 2) understand what the costs of the calibri font are, and 3) make an informed and rational decision.

Maybe you're right and there is nothing that supports their decision except the parts you see as cruelty, but my suspicion is that you havent investigated that.
by chantepierre | 2025-12-12 14:58:35+00:00
Small mirrors with a very low F-ratio are also something that you need to grind yourself. I have a 6" f/2.8 telescope and a 8" f/3.5 hyperbolic + ross telescope, and both aren't commercially available while being small mirrors !

Progress on my 16" f/3.2 is currently stalled though.. a multi-year project indeed.