MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kstenerud | 2025-12-16 13:20:49+00:00
America is, and always has been, an isolationist nation - behaving like an island nation even though it's not an island (although it might as well be, given it has only two neighbors of little consequence).

It was dragged into the first world war (despite strong public aversion) because J.P. Morgan Jr started lending money to Britain and France to buy American steel, thus setting in motion a cycle of investment and production protection that eventually required boots on the ground.

It was dragged into the second world war by Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor (and Germany's subsequent declaration of war, as it was obligated to do under its treaty with Japan).

It protected Europe and SE Asia in the post-war years in order to contain communism, which it feared more than anything else. Once that threat subsided, there wasn't much reason for it to continue with its overseas footprint other than inertia and protecting important trade routes.

Gulf Wars I was to protect oil prices (and because they already had the equipment for war), and Gulf Wars II was to be seen to be doing something about 9/11.

Now that Trump is in power, America is performing its "great reset" (which was going to come eventually), where it becomes isolationist again, sticking to the Americas (reinvigorating the Monroe Doctrine), and leaving everyone else to their own devices.
by mattmaroon | 2025-12-16 13:20:50+00:00
Most of us didn’t vote for Trump. A slim majority of voters did, many of them because he is generally anti-war. (I’ve never liked or voted for him, but his desire to end wars is sincere.)

Many of his ardent supporters are confused as to what we’re doing in Venezuela right now and feel it’s the opposite of what they voted for.

You certainly don’t expect this level of surprises from someone’s second term, but the unprecedented path of his political career has certainly made it much different.
by gradus_ad | 2025-12-16 13:21:06+00:00
The "world", implicit in your comment, is the liberal world order. This world order worked for America (ie Americans) until it became apparent that it did not, at least in a political and cultural sense (in a material sense it is of course still working perhaps even too well). The greatest champion of this world order, the EU bureaucratic class, views Americans' play for their sovereignty with bewilderment and casts it as renouncing its leadership in the world, yet leadership is not just blindly following a path to ruin but instead forging ahead down new and promising paths. In this sense the US is indeed still "leading" and it is the EU that stands firm in its intransigence and refuses to follow the leader. Yet it need not be this way and the EU very well could follow the US away from the excesses of hegemonic liberalism. There are signs of change in the air. This is politically interesting and the eventual outcome is not at all clear.

On the other hand, the emergence of China, India, and to a lesser extent Russia (as a puppet of the Chinese) upon the world stage as independent actors, out of the shadows of Western domination, is another way in which the US is "losing control" but this is much less politically interesting in the sense that it was an inevitable and expected outcome. There is nothing the US has done, is doing or could do that would diminish non-Western ambition and agitation for power.
by DiscourseFan | 2025-12-16 13:21:10+00:00
But charitable causes perpetuate the problems by creating an industry around them rather than trying to find solutions for them. You can’t trust industry to solve civil problems like healthcare or housing, since they shouldn’t be problems in the first place. Its like trying to trust the free market to keep people from raping and killing each other—people will rape and kill with or without the market! Some level of coercion is necessary that free market principles cannot employ.
by setopt | 2025-12-16 13:21:54+00:00
If you really only care about syntax highlighting then nearly any code editor will do. Even nano supports it, it’s just disabled by default.

If you want something powerful yet easy to pick up, you might want to look at e.g. Zed (GUI IDE), Sublime Text (GUI editor), or Micro (TUI editor). If you don’t mind a learning curve, Vim/Neovim and Emacs are excellent choices. But there’s a lot of other options out there, like Gedit, Kate, BBEdit, Notepad++, etc. depending on your platform of choice.
by renegade-otter | 2025-12-16 13:21:57+00:00
Gates cared about products deeply. This lot? They only care about the shareholder, not the customer, and we all know how that turned out for GE and Boeing. It's a long path, but it's a path of degradation.

I am pretty sure the the file explorer is "slow" because it's doing cloud sync crap in order to collect my data.
by disgruntledphd2 | 2025-12-16 13:22:09+00:00
> the code can be recreated with genAI, it is just a matter of resources.

Can it though? Most interesting things (for my values of interesting at least), cannot be re-created with generative AI.

Every time I try to do anything a little bit out of distribution, they fall apart (and they're not great at in-distribution stuff either).

> I believe AGPL3 with CLA is the worst in 2025

I think that you mean best, as with both of these one can sell commercial licenses while remaining open.

Again, from the company's point of view you get both nerd-cred and a viable business (this is what MySQL did, I believe).

You don't get that with BSD/MIT.
by JoeAltmaier | 2025-12-16 13:22:40+00:00
Before WWII America was content with it's own company and business. Then we found ourselves holding the big stick and everybody looking to us to solve their problems.

If we go back to being peers, so what? Rich people who've capitalized on the favored position will cry and complain (and spend billions trying to keep control) but the world will go on.
by aa-jv | 2025-12-16 13:22:48+00:00
Yes, it is a very low-ball estimate. The more accurate estimate is that Iraq lost 5% of its population, and in many areas, Iraq continues to lose babies born with birth defects due to the use of depleted uranium.

https://psr.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/body-count.pdf

Note that this report was filed in 2010, and the fatalities have continued since then.
by victorronin | 2025-12-16 13:22:58+00:00
I know we (Westerners) are often fascinated by Eastern philosophies and all these "sounds of clap of one hand".

However, this article crossed a line... by a mile.

"turning a steering wheel.... all need exactly the amount of energy that they need"

In theory, it's true. In practice, there are activities like "holding a cup". if you do not have enough grip, you may unfortunately spill the coffee on the floor. If you don't have enough grip while doing a sharp turn, it could be literally fatal. As a result, it is wise for the absolute majority of people in high-risk situations to exert more power than necessary. The energy investments are small, but changes in probabilities are significant.

And the rest of the article pretty much prophesies a flow slate. Yeah, in this state, things feel effortless. However, it misses two things. To learn how to get to this flow state, like a lot of people pointed out, you need TONS and TONS and TONS of practice where you exert WAY more than you minimally need. Oh... And on top of that, in the flow state, you perceive that things are effortless. And this is mostly about a perception rather than reality. Yes, if you are extremely experienced and get to flow state, you are spending less energy than an absolute beginner, but not zero... again, by a mile.
by 5upplied_demand | 2025-12-16 13:23:27+00:00
> started trying to convince voters on their own merit

I'm not sure this is true anymore given the splitting of media and news sources. When everyone watched the same 3 news programs it was easier to speak to those people. It is very hard to penetrate the "other sides" messaging platforms.

> instead of simply trash-talking their opponents

This was the President's entire election platform (twice).

> we could actually solve real problems

If voters wanted the solve real problems, they would vote for people who present solutions to real problems. Instead, we vote for people who provide easy scapegoats and fake solutions, which ends up making things worse. Trump has the slimmest policy stance of any President ever elected.
by k4rli | 2025-12-16 13:23:55+00:00
I've seen new cheap LG tv-s with horrible port selection while their premium OLEDs have everything necessary (except Displayport).

I had my LG C9 audio via the headphone jack going to amp and it worked fine. On one of the cheaper LGs I set it up similarly with optical cable and a tiny optical->rca converter.
Show HN: Hera API – Text-to-Motion-Graphics Engine
by chialunhera | 2025-12-16 13:24:30+00:00
Hi HN, we've built an API that turns text prompts into professional motion graphics animations. Generative video models directly output pixels, producing a flat video file with no underlying structure and no way to edit individual elements. Hera, by contrast, uses LLMs to generate code that is then rendered into an animation. This approach enables far greater precision and control over every element, while ensuring clean edges, precise text, and transparent background support (alpha channels)

API Use Cases:

- AI Video Agents: Generating B-roll, lower thirds, and overlays to complement talking head avatars (e.g., HeyGen/Synthesia pipelines).

- Faceless Channels: Automating visual content for Reddit stories, trivia, or history channels on YouTube/TikTok.

- Data Storytelling: Programmatically turning datasets into animated charts, graphs, and map zooms.

- Marketing Automation: Scaling branded social assets, ads, and intros/outros without manual editing.

- EdTech: Automatically converting educational text or summaries into engaging visual explanations.

Input: Text prompt (e.g., "Kinetic typography intro saying 'Breaking News'") Output: Rendered video (MP4/MOV/GIF/WebM) API docs: https://docs.hera.video

We're looking for feedback on the API structure and other potential automation workflows you might need.

Try our API for free ($5 credits) by doing these steps:

1. Go to http://hera.video/join/HACKERNEWS

2. Go to https://app.hera.video/settings/developers

3. Click "Create key" to generate a new API key

Thanks!
by reactordev | 2025-12-16 13:24:48+00:00
Voxels have been around since the 1980s. The smoothness came from that beautiful CRT and its inability to display crisp images. Normals weren’t really used until early 90s and used heavily by games like Comanche by NovaLogic.

The reason why Minecraft voxels are blocks is because Notch (Markus Persson) famously said he was “Not good at art”. He didn’t implement the triangulation and kept them unit blocks. Games that had voxels AND were triangulated that came before Minecraft were Red Faction, Delta Force, Outcast just to name a few.

The point is, voxels aren’t anything special, no more than a texel, or a vertex, or a splat, a normal, or a uv. It’s just a representation of 3D space (occupied/not occupied) and can just as easily be used for culling as it can for rendering. The Minecraft style because popular because it reminds people of pixels, it reminded people of legos, and Minecraft was so popular
by Const-me | 2025-12-16 13:24:54+00:00
> it cannot be faster than normalization alone

Modern processors are generally computing stuff way faster than they can load and store bytes from main memory.

The code which does on the fly normalization only needs to normalize a small window. If you’re careful, you can even keep that window in registers, which have single CPU cycle access latency and ridiculously high throughput like 500GB/sec. Even if you have to store and reload, on-the-fly normalization is likely to handle tiny windows which fit in the in-core L1D cache. The access cost for L1D is like ~5 cycles of latency, and equally high throughput because many modern processors can load two 64-bytes vectors and store one vector each and every cycle.
by NBenkovich | 2025-12-16 13:24:58+00:00
LLM agents struggle with PR review workflows when the context is noisy, fragmented, and spread across multiple tool calls. Raw endpoints include optional fields, URLs, hashes, and heterogeneous shapes. Each extra field inflates tokens and compounds error risk. The result: brittle chains, ambiguous parsing, higher cost, and slower iterations.

This post introduces gh pr-review, a GitHub CLI extension that collapses multi-step review tasks into compact, deterministic outputs. It’s designed for agents and developers to read, reply, resolve, and submit reviews with minimal JSON and GraphQL-only operations.
by trgn | 2025-12-16 13:25:59+00:00
Glad to see 2d mapping is still of interest. 20 years ago, information visualization, data cartography, exploratory analytics, etc.. was pretty alive, but it never really took off and found a reliable niche in the industry, or real end user application. Why map it, when the machine can just tell you.

Would be nice to see it come back. Would love to browse for books and movies on maps again, rather that getting lists regurgitated at me.
by Phelinofist | 2025-12-16 13:26:31+00:00
> This leads to authors having to re-explain their thinking in detail, covering points that they’d omitted for brevity or because they are obvious to those with a good understanding of the problem.

IMHO there should be no gaps like that. If you already thought hard and long about these problems, why not just write all your knowledge down, so other people can benefit from that? Also, this makes your work a lot more accessible to those who came after you. Of course, you have to assume a certain baseline of knowledge. But if you already have a good understanding of the problem, why not formulate that as part of the RFC?
by SanjayMehta | 2025-12-16 13:26:41+00:00
Unlikely.

Silicon Valley is great for innovating new "intellectual property," but they don't manufacture any real products any more.

China has entire cities which not only can develop IP, but they have the entire ecosystem collocated.

Catching up with them will be expensive and will need focus. Focus is not something the current president seems to excel in.
by pjmlp | 2025-12-16 13:27:20+00:00
It isn't until it is, how would you write it when ß isn't available on the keyboard?

Which is why we also have to deal with the ue, ae, oe kind of trick, also known as Ersatzschreibweise.

Then German language users from de-CH region, consider Mass the correct way.

Yeah, localization and internalization is a mess to get right.
by jack_tripper | 2025-12-16 13:28:01+00:00
>Instead of being sarcastic you could be good faith

What was bad faith? I told you what happened. I was sarcastic because your comment was redundant and didn't add anything to the conversation, only instigating.

> and provide further information explore what happened

How does that change the situation? Are you the head prosecutor of Israel and looking to rectify the situation?

>what you think Israel should do differently?

Extradite them or put them in jail over there and stop being a safe heaven for criminals.
by skydhash | 2025-12-16 13:28:28+00:00
> I had tried many times to switch to vim/emacs and the initial barrier to get a workable system always kept me from pushing forward

What’s that initial barrier? Both Vim and emacs has great documentation that includes a tutorial, a guide, and a reference.

What people often defines as workable system is replicating their old editors instead of learning the current one. Like adding a file tree on the side
by unwind | 2025-12-16 13:28:38+00:00
Very cool and impressive performance.

I was worried (I find it confusing when Unicode "shadows" of normal letters exist, and those are of course also dangerous in some cases when they can be mis-interpreted for the letter they look more or less exactly like) by the article's use of U+212A (Kelvin symbol) as sample text, so I had to look it up [1].

Anyway, according to Wikipedia the dedicated symbol should not be used:

However, this is a compatibility character provided for compatibility with legacy encodings. The Unicode standard recommends using U+004B K LATIN CAPITAL LETTER K instead; that is, a normal capital K.

That was comforting, to me. :)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelvin#Orthography
by subhadipmitra | 2025-12-16 13:29:05+00:00
Hey HN, I built this because most LLM eval tools assume single-machine execution. When you need to evaluate against millions of examples (customer tickets, documents, etc.), they don't scale without significant duct-taping.

spark-llm-eval runs natively on Spark - not "Spark as an afterthought" but distributed evaluation as the primary design goal. Key features: - Distributed inference via Pandas UDFs, scales linearly with executors - Statistical rigor by default: bootstrap CIs, paired t-tests, effect sizes - Multi-provider: OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, vLLM - Delta Lake integration for versioned results with lineage pip install spark-llm-eval The main gap I'm filling: "I have 2M labeled examples and need to know if Model A is statistically significantly better than Model B." Most frameworks give you point estimates; this gives you confidence intervals and significance tests. Blog post with architecture details: https://subhadipmitra.com/blog/2025/building-spark-llm-eval/ Happy to answer questions about the implementation - rate limiting in distributed contexts was surprisingly tricky.
by ashvardanian | 2025-12-16 13:29:09+00:00
Yes — fuzzy and phonetic matching across languages is part of the roadmap. That space is still poorly standardized, so I wanted to start with something widely understood and well-defined (ICU-style transforms) before layering on more advanced behavior.

Also, as shown in the later tables, the Armenian and Georgian fast paths still have room for improvement. Before introducing higher-level APIs, I need to tighten the existing Armenian kernel and add a dedicated one for Georgian. It’s not a true bicameral script, but some characters are folding fold targets for older scripts, which currently forces too many fallbacks to the serial path.
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-12-16 13:30:28+00:00
> It's likely caused by the very same thing that causes human beings to

We’re not billiard balls. We have agency. Nothing causes a human being to choose to commit immoral acts vs. immoral acts. A human being may be put in a situation that may entice that person’s corrupt desires (we used to call this temptation), and responsibility while mitigating culpability is possible when someone’s rational faculties are overwhelmed, but the choice remains.

Blaming systems for theft is scapegoating and an evasion of responsibility. (To make this clearer by distinction: a starving man taking bread from an overstocked warehouse during a famine is not choosing to commit an immoral act; he isn’t stealing in the first place, as some share of that bread is his).
by joseda-hg | 2025-12-16 13:30:34+00:00
That works transversally accross languages though

You can always choose uncommon more descriptive words

In spanish you could say "repare algo" ("I fixed") or "parapetee algo" ("I Jury-rigged") and plenty would not know of the cuff what the second one means

People either know, look it up or figure it out via context
by kllrnohj | 2025-12-16 13:31:00+00:00
dbus-java exists, does that magically turn dbus into being primarily implemented in Java?

No, of course not, that'd be absurd. Same thing with Parcel & Binder. Java bindings existing does not change the simple fact that binder itself does not have any Java in it. It's regularly used in processes with zero Java at all, this isn't a hypothetical it's a basic reality. That's why binder is used for HALs and similar low-level systems.
by Gazoche | 2025-12-16 13:31:33+00:00
Cons of orbital data centers:

- Ludicrously expensive to setup

- Need radiation-hardened silicon

- Ludicrously expensive maintenance requiring highly specialized operators (a.k.a astronauts)

- High risk of losing the entire equipment to a rocket failure (not infrequent even for modern launch vehicles)

- Supplying enough electrical power would be extremely difficult

- Cooling would be extremely difficult

- Geosynchronous orbits have at least 200ms of communication latency

- Lower orbits means the data center would not stay in place and require complicated tracking antennae and/or a communication mesh a la Starlink, again increasing latency and complexity

Pros of orbital data centers:

- ??????

...why are we doing this again?
by sixtyj | 2025-12-16 13:33:05+00:00
Probably off topic: I once tried to find bad code in a WordPress theme. And it was hidden so deep and inconspicuously. The only thing that really helped was to do a diff.

In JS this can be much harder to find anything suspicious when the code can be minified.

But back to Firefox: My house, my rules. So let external developers set some more strict rules that discourage the bad actors a little.
by Wowfunhappy | 2025-12-16 13:33:15+00:00
I haven’t read/watched Clockwork Orange, but I can understand the dystopian image.

It’s just that, when I think about it, I don’t see a difference in kind between training the rat to play a video game and teaching a dog to roll over and play dead. Neither is natural animal behavior, and the animal doesn’t really have a choice in either case.
by dwd | 2025-12-16 13:33:30+00:00
Eric Weinstein made a good point about Trump and his use of language:

Trump was much closer to saying “The immigrants are taking your jobs.” Well, to a labor market analyst, that’s not remotely the same thing at all as saying “US employers and political donors are colluding to confiscate your most valuable rights without market-based compensation, while denigrating you as lazy and stupid, and hiding behind a veneer of excellence and xenophilia as they economically undermine your families.” But it’s much easier, isn’t it?
by arealaccount | 2025-12-16 13:34:14+00:00
I find tech leads to be the most difficult people in any organization to work with (always with exceptions), I think it’s because they are still learning the lead part, and at the same time are trying to prove themselves.

Coming in with a hexagonal overhaul is a great example. At least in this case it seems the writer didn’t dig his heals in too much.
by phpnode | 2025-12-16 13:34:21+00:00
It is impossible for people to write all their knowledge down, there will always be gaps, there will always be things taken for granted.

The point is that the author thought that they had captured enough information in their original draft - they can expand on that draft of course, but that's the issue - the task of writing the RFC can become much larger than just trying something out and getting real data.
by BoxFour | 2025-12-16 13:34:26+00:00
I thought this article was engaging. I think it taps into something many of us can feel at times, that collective sense that truly breakthrough ideas are significantly more difficult to come by. It piqued that sense of curiosity, even if I have some questions about the methodology.

The comments section here is also quite a study. Many of the responses are so quick to dismiss the article with basically a "Well of course, this is all obvious, it's clearly due to [insert dubious reasons]." Thankfully not all of them: Some of the top comments show some genuine curiosity and deeper reflection, rather than just a pithy shoulder-shrugging dismissal. But it's definitely a pattern.

It's a little funny to read this and then immediately see comments in other posts lamenting how LLMs are always "confidently incorrect." I suppose LLMs really are just mimicking what they've been trained on.
by vel0city | 2025-12-16 13:34:39+00:00
> I like Teslas a lot, but gave you ever been on a road trip in one?

Not a Tesla but a different EV. I've taken it on about a dozen road trips over the years. It's been fine. I pull off the highway, plug in, go grab a quick snack, get back in the car and go on my way. On a several hour drive it adds an extra 20 minutes assuming I'm not stopping at all in the ICE, not that big of a deal. And honestly I should be doing that stretch break, and I'm often stopping for a meal anyways.