MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by D-Machine | 2025-12-17 20:14:56+00:00
Yes, I didn't mention this because you sacrifice so much spatial resolution and/or info doing this that it hardly matters, unless you believe in some very extreme and implausible forms of localization of function. (EDIT: I mean looking at a single slice seems to imply some commitment to localization assumptions; this isn't relevant for reducing spatial resolution.)

For readers who don't know, we can measure at a higher temporal resolution better if we use some tricks, and also massively sacrifice spatial resolution ("reduce volumes") and/or how much of the brain is scanned (look at single slices), but the spatial resolution in most fMRI given e.g. a 0.5 TR (2 images per second) is usually already quite poor (generally already getting difficult to clearly even make out gyri and basic brain anatomy: see for example Figures 7 and on here, noting the TRs in the captions: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/neuroscience/articles/1...).

Still, it's a good point, and you're right of course newer and better scanners and techniques might improve things here on both fronts, but my understanding is that the magnetic field strengths needed to actually get the right combo of spatial and temporal resolution are, unfortunately, fatal, so we are really up against a physical/biological limit here.

And as you said, it isn't that useful anyway, because the BOLD response is already so slow, and obviously something just emerging from the sum of a massive amount of far more rapid electrochemical signaling that the fMRI just can't measure anyway.
by xorvoid | 2025-12-17 20:15:56+00:00
It sounds almost like you're saying that quality information shouldn't be accessible to anyone if it's not accessible to everyone?

That would be an unreasonably high standard and would set an incentive to withhold. Which is exactly the outcome we got here?

Wouldn't it be better to cheer the improved accessiblity? Then acknowledge shortcomings and ask for community contributions to improve things?

Why must perfect be the enemy of good?
by csb6 | 2025-12-17 20:16:24+00:00
One difference is that SPARK is intended primarily for safety critical, real-time software (often for embedded systems), while Dafny is meant for teaching purposes and non-real time applications (i.e. environments where a large runtime and garbage collection are permissible). Dafny compiles to C#/Java/Go/etc. and is meant to be interoperable with them so I think it aims at similar use cases as those languages.
by estimator7292 | 2025-12-17 20:16:36+00:00
That's not how physics works. Heat in and of itself does not contain usable energy. The only useful energy to be extracted from heat comes from the difference in temperature between two objects. You can only extract work from thermal energy by moving heat from one place to another, which can only happen by moving energy from a hot object to a cold one.

This is all fundamental to the universe. All energy in the universe comes exclusively from systems moving from a low entropy state to a higher entropy state. Energy isn't a static absolute value we can just use. It must be extracted from an energy gradient.
by mjr00 | 2025-12-17 20:16:52+00:00
> So I think that a lot of juniors WILL get replaced by AI not because they are junior necessarily but because a lot of them won't be able to add great value compared to a default AI and companies care about getting the best value from their workers. A junior who understands this and does more than the bare minimum will stand out while the rest will get replaced.

Again this is what people said about outsourced developers. 2008 logic was, why would anyone hire a junior for $50k/year when you could hire a senior with 20 years experience for $10k/year from India?

Reality: for 5+ years you could change careers by taking a 3-6 month JavaScript bootcamp and coming out the other end with a $150k job lined up. That's just how in demand software development was.
by evmar | 2025-12-17 20:16:59+00:00
This comment feels in bad faith. There are ~340 million Americans and you draw evidence about all of them from this one thing? It's not even an insight into its single American author. It was a quick weekend hack.

The purpose of the thing is to try to put things into perspective, like "Portugal is about the size of Indiana", or "California's economy is about the size of Germany". It compares three numbers, two of which are not money!
by RobinL | 2025-12-17 20:17:09+00:00
Feels like Google is really pulling ahead of the pack here. A model that is cheap, fast and good, combined with Android and gsuite integration seems like such powerful combination.

Presumably a big motivation for them is to be first to get something good and cheap enough they can serve to every Android device, ahead of whatever the OpenAI/Jony Ive hardware project will be, and way ahead of Apple Intelligence. Speaking for myself, I would pay quite a lot for truly 'AI first' phone that actually worked.
by torginus | 2025-12-17 20:17:42+00:00
It's weird how the 'next-gen' APIs will turn out to be failures in many ways imo. I think still as sizeable amount of graphics devs still stuck to the old way of doing things. I know a couple graphics wizards (who work on major AAA titles) who never liked Vulkan/DX12, and many engines haven't really been rebuilt to accomodate the 'new' way of doing graphics.

Ironically a lot of the time, these new APIs end up being slower in practice (something confirmed by gaming benchmarks), probably exactly because of the issues outlined in the article - having precompiled 'pipeline states', instead of the good ol state machine has forced devs to precompile a truly staggering amount of states, and even then sometimes compilation can occur, leading to these well known stutters.

The other issue is synchronization - as the article mentions how unnecessarily heavy Vulkan synchronization is, and devs aren't really experts or have the time to figure out when to use what kind of barrier, so they adopt a 'better be safe than sorry approach', leading to unneccessary flushes and pipeline stalls that can tank performance in real life workloads.

This is definitely a huge issue combined with the API complexity, leading many devs to use wrappers like the aforementioned SDL3, which is definitely very conservative when it comes to synchronization.

Old APIs with smart drivers could either figure this out better, or GPU driver devs looked at the workloads and patched up rendering manually on popular titles.

Additionally by the early to mid 10s, when these new APIs started getting released, a lot of crafty devs, together with new shader models and OpenGL extensions made it possible to render tens of thousands of varied and interesting objects, essentially the whole scene's worth, in a single draw call. The most sophisticated and complex of these was AZDO, which I'm not sure made it actually into a released games, but even with much less sophisticated approaches (and combined with ideas like PBR materials and deferred rendering), you could pretty much draw anything.

This meant much of the perf bottleneck of the old APIs disappeared.
by delichon | 2025-12-17 20:18:01+00:00
> If you think the Roberts court would have let Joe Biden have this much power well then I have a bridge and some student loans to sell you

Yes, I do think the time horizon of every SCOTUS member is longer than four years. I believe Gorsuch when he says:

I appreciate that, but you also appreciate that we're writing a rule for the ages. -- https://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcripts/2023/23-939_3fb4.pdf

I think that they all have the hubris to see themselves as part of history and write their opinions for future generations. Not that they aren't biased by current events, but that they see themselves as larger than that.
by wkat4242 | 2025-12-17 20:19:04+00:00
To be fair, this is more a result of the EU not being specific about their censorship so the providers have started to scramble to make their own lists without any oversight (which the article indeed identifies as a big problem).

If we're going to do censorship, have a clear process on it under democratic control with challenge processes etc.

At least these aren't actual blocks anyway. It's just cosmetic, just change the DNS and voilà.
by MorehouseJ09 | 2025-12-17 20:19:07+00:00
Hey I'm Jon, founder of Nuon.

We decided to open-source Nuon after almost 4 years of operating as a closed-source company. As BYOC has become a more standard way to deploy software, we realized that critical infrastructure like we're building belonged to the community.

Our hope is that by building in the open, we can help create standards for BYOC deployments. Some of the hardest challenges we've found are around security, day-2 operations and supporting different customer environments.

AMA
by alwa | 2025-12-17 20:19:18+00:00
How do you suppose the old guard are filling their days now?

At some level, aren’t you describing the age-old process of maturing from junior to mid level to senior in most lines of work, and in most organizations? Isn’t that what advancing in responsibility boils down to: developing subtlety and wisdom and political credibility and organizational context? Learning where the rakes are?

I wish 3 months, or even 3 years, were long enough to fully understand the whys and wherefores and politics of the organizations I cross paths with, and the jungle of systems and code supporting all the kinds of work that happen inside…
by amitprasad | 2025-12-17 20:19:54+00:00
author here -- agreed on all fronts. Mentioned this in the other comment but I approached the topic from a relatively narrow perspective (I was working on a specific project at the time)

I think it's worth including these things in a future update to the post, but I didn't have the time / need to explore it back then.

In the meantime, I'd point to the following post on Unicode that remains very nice to read >20 years later: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/10/08/the-absolute-minim...
by vee-kay | 2025-12-17 20:19:57+00:00
Firefox on Android mobile is also useful because it allows extensions - especially uBlock Origin (UBO), Ghostery, No script, etc. Some mobile browsers (e.g., Samsung Internet) used to allow extensions also, but they've become crap or dropped such support, so their usage has fallen.

I like Firefox (for safety) and Vivaldi (Chromium browser, it's easier to use) on Android mobile. On iOS, Safari is simple and sufficient, but I would prefer UBO there, however we all know Apple will never allow extensions for Safari.

Ever since Google moved to Manifest v3, Chrome is a no go.
by kunwon1 | 2025-12-17 20:19:59+00:00
It may interest you to know that pagers are still a thing, Motorola still makes them, and I know that one major use case is volunteer fire departments

I used to work on Motorola Minitor 5 pagers. Looks like they recently released their newest model, the Minitor 7

I wonder if pagers are still used in hospitals? I imagine so
by brandonin | 2025-12-17 20:20:14+00:00
During my experience as a software engineering we often solve production bugs in this order:

1. On-call notices there is an issue in sentry, datadog, PagerDuty

2. We figure out which PR it is associated to

3. blame the person that does the PR

4. Tells them to fix it and update the unit tests

Although, the key issue here is that PRs tell you where a bug landed and with agentic code, they often don’t tell you why the agent made that change.

with agentic coding a single PR is now the final output of:

prompts + revisions, wrong/stale repo context, tool calls that failed silently (auth/timeouts), constraint mismatches (“don’t touch billing” not enforced)

So I’m starting to think incident response needs “agent traceability”: prompt/context references, tool call timeline/results, key decision points, mapping edits to session events.

Essentially, in order for us to debug better we need to have an the underlying reasoning on why agents developed in a certain way rather than just the output of the code.
by throwaway613745 | 2025-12-17 20:20:20+00:00
Constantly Fantasizing? I was responding to a hypothetical based on interpretations of real statements made by the new CEO. It's a public forum for discussion. Firefox is something that is central and essential to my digital life.

I think the only person fantasizing here is you, about what random strangers on discussion forums do all day when not responding directly to topics at hand.
by Johanx64 | 2025-12-17 20:20:23+00:00
TVs are very large, very cheap screens that are subsidized by people connecting them to the internet.

I don't want this "predatory practice" to end, because that's how i get my dirt cheap massive screens.

And all you have to do is to stop connecting them darned things to the internet.

It's not that hard, i'm telling you!
by rendx | 2025-12-17 20:20:26+00:00
> This isn't really accurate from a strict reading of the Rome Statute, there are treaty obligations for party states

Which are members voluntarily, and are enforcing whatever law they want on their own, national territory; not outside of it.

> Since the US considers the ICC a serious threat to sovereignty

Again: Fact is, the ICC is writing policy recommendations. Member states decided to adopt/agree with them, and enforce them on their own territory. It is a US invention to claim this a threat to the US national sovereignty. Nobody is arguing to enforce ICC rulings on United States territory.

> Making friends is not really the end goal of foreign policy.

You can claim that it isn't, OK. But I don't get how you can write it as if that was a hard fact. You make it sound as if that was a universal definition, which it isn't. Nobody, and no country (as in "the sum of its citizens"), likes it when others enter their boundaries and act like they have permission to make or enforce rules there without a contract/agreement. It's fine if you don't like the friend/enemy wording. It still is a hostile act.
by al_borland | 2025-12-17 20:20:33+00:00
Averages in a place like Nunavut are below freezing 8 months of the year. Averages in Michigan are only below freezing 1 month of the year (according to wherever Apple Weather pulls their weather averages)

The population in Nunavut is 40,000 vs 10M in Michigan, despite Nunavut being 21x larger than Michigan. That ends up being 0.05/sq mi in Nunavut vs 174/sq mi in Michigan.

Northern Canada is much colder, has more fresh water, and has drastically lower population density, which should make it easier to find an area where people won't complain (other than environmentalists), and they would be able to better leverage nature for most of the year to help with cooling costs.
by vintagedave | 2025-12-17 20:20:55+00:00
In terms of feedback, you need people to actually try it out. Do you have testers, or people with existing companies or landing pages who have tried it? They can give you concrete feedback if it works or not.

I'd be happy to test like this - ping me at my username at gmail.

Re "didn't know what to fix without analytics", does this make use of analytics? Or does it purely analyse the page's visual look or structure or text?

One thing to be cautious of: AI often regresses to the average (think of all those ChatGPT conversations giving platitudes), yet for something like this you need insight. You can get that from AI, but being sure it is provided is IMO somewhere to focus.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-12-17 20:20:56+00:00
I don't get this. Nvidia didn't "bet the farm" on AI. They are simply allocating limited resources (in this case memory) to their most profitable products. Yes, it sucks for gamers, but I see Nvidia more reacting to the current marketplace than driving that change.

If/when the AI bubble bursts, Nvidia will just readjust their resource allocation accordingly.
by wrs | 2025-12-17 20:20:57+00:00
It’s hard to reach any conclusion from the quantitative code metrics in the first section, because as we all know, more code is not necessarily better. “Quantity” is not actually the same as “velocity”. And that gets to the most important question people have about AI assistance: does help you maintain a codebase long term, or does it help you fly headlong into a ditch?

So, do you have any quality metrics to go with these?
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-12-17 20:21:11+00:00
I agree with this observation. Gemini does feel like code-red for basically every AI company like chatgpt,claude etc. too in my opinion if the underlying model is both fast and cheap and good enough

I hope open source AI models catch up to gemini 3 / gemini 3 flash. Or google open sources it but lets be honest that google isnt open sourcing gemini 3 flash and I guess the best bet mostly nowadays in open source is probably glm or deepseek terminus or maybe qwen/kimi too.
by D-Machine | 2025-12-17 20:21:17+00:00
Precisely, if we restrict fMRI to investigating phenomena and theories of cognition and the mind that are plausibly measurable at the appropriate temporal resolution, it will potentially start yielding some fruit.

It will also require fMRI researchers to think more carefully about their theories as well (e.g. noting the speed of the mind / amount and kinds of thinking involved in certain tasks, and being realistic about whether or not fMRI could actually capture something meaningful there). Too often there is no theory, and too many studies are just correlating patterns with some task without actually carefully thinking about the task and deconstructing the components, testing activations in those (e.g. ablation studies in AI research) and etc.
Show HN: X Writer – VS Code extension to post tweets from your editor
by jawuilp | 2025-12-17 20:21:25+00:00
Hi HN,

I built this extension because the context switching was killing my productivity. Every time I switched to the browser to share a coding update (#BuildInPublic), I ended up doomscrolling for 20 minutes and losing my flow.

Since existing extensions broke with the X API v2 changes, I decided to build my own solution focusing on privacy and the Free Tier limits.

How it works:

BYOK (Bring Your Own Keys): It uses your own API credentials.

Security: Keys are stored locally using vscode.SecretStorage (never in settings.json).

Limits: It implements a local counter to respect the strict 17 tweets/24h limit of the Free API tier.

Write-only: It intentionally doesn't read your timeline to keep you focused.

It's open source and my first extension. Feedback on the code structure is welcome!

Marketplace: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Jawuilp.... Repo: https://github.com/Jawuilp/X-writer
by emp17344 | 2025-12-17 20:21:55+00:00
It’s unlikely sensory data contributes to intelligence in human beings. Blind people take in far, far less sensory data than sighted people, and yet are no less intelligent. Think of Helen Keller - she was deafblind from an early age, and yet was far more intelligent than the average person. If your hypothesis is correct, and development of human intelligence is primarily driven by sensory data, how do you reconcile this with our observations of people with sensory impairments?
by thephyber | 2025-12-17 20:22:09+00:00
I don’t think they are in short supply, but the vast majority of them aren’t the super-successful so we don’t see their names often.

They are the teachers, coaches, and engineers. The problem is the anti- role models are the ones who get all of the media:

Andrew Tate (mysogenistic pyramid schemer and pimp / sex trafficker of high school girls),

Joe Rogan (his mind is so open that his brains fell out),

Jordan B Peterson (charlatan who dresses up banal self-help advice with pseudo-intellectual jargon to seem profound, drug addict who is still taking very big risks with his health, frequently argues strawmans by misrepresenting postmodernism, Marxism, atheism, etc).

Our heuristics of who we should look up to are skewed because too many young people revere wrath and fame over ethics, morals, and values which may hold us back from success.
by jmward01 | 2025-12-17 20:22:18+00:00
At this point I think we can clearly see that the interpretation of our laws is extremely partisan at the moment, to the point that what exact text says is basically irrelevant. The broader issue here is a massive, completely unchecked, power grab that is -deeply- troubling. Our checks and balances, are failing us and this is another sign of their deterioration.
by uint32_t | 2025-12-17 20:22:54+00:00
How can this in any way shape or form be considered "playing" an RPG?

Can you point to where the game is? Was there an interesting story crafted by a game designer for you to experience? Did you have to learn, through world-building and subtle cues developed over decades and your own experience with past games, what actions you can take with your character and how you can navigate the game world? Was there a skill gap that created a challenge and motivation for you to overcome and become good enough at the game to progress through the story and complete the quest? Finally, most important of all, did you have fun?

The answer to all of these questions is "no".

Is it impressive that Nano Banana can generate these images of a Legend of Zelda ripoff with just a few text prompts? Perhaps it is to some, but why not just play an actual Legend of Zelda game? They exist. They are good.

I'm not even saying that a game has to have all or even any of the qualities I mentioned above (they were just some examples off the top of my head). What I do think, however, is that whatever this is it's definitely not a game and you're definitely not playing it.
by jfengel | 2025-12-17 20:23:04+00:00
The Federalist Papers is not "the founders". It's Alexander Hamilton and James Madison. There were numerous factions running around the Constitutional Convention, and they negotiated the final document together.

I don't understand why the Federalist Papers gets cited as if it were part of the Constitution. It is not a definitive source of anything except the opinion of those two (three, with Jay) men.
by Sesse__ | 2025-12-17 20:23:08+00:00
Sure, not all posts want to be the end-all of the topic. :-)

And yes, the Joel post is a good introduction, if a bit old by now. Notably, of course, it doesn't say anything about _processing_ Unicode text. (E.g., don't sort by code point, don't break in the middle of a grapheme cluster, etc. etc.) But I believe that this is outside the scope of his intention.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-12-17 20:23:42+00:00
Oh yes! I had heard of pidgin but only had people use it for IRC/XMPP but I didnt know it was an universal chat client.

Yes you are absolutely correct, basically pidgin but with telegram's UI (or cinny's UI can be good too) but yea, thanks for pointing out to the resource again! I didnt know it was universal chat client, thanks for helping me know that.
by hadlock | 2025-12-17 20:23:42+00:00
We call ours "bombing-range"

We maintain an internal service that hosts two endpoints; /random-cat-picture (random >512KB image + UUID + text timestamp to evade caching) and /api/v1/generic.json which allows developers and platform folks to test out new ideas from commit to deploy behind a load balancer in an end-to-end fashion, it has saved countless headaches over the years.
by locusofself | 2025-12-17 20:23:43+00:00
This is definitely interesting information and I plan to take a deeper look at it.

What a lot of us must be wondering though is:

- how maintainable is the code being outputted

- how much is this newfound productivity saving (costing) on compute, given that we are definitely seeing more code

- how many livesite/security incidents will be caused by AI generated code that hasn't been reviewed properly
by estimator7292 | 2025-12-17 20:24:13+00:00
This is not a feature of passkeys, this is a feature of each and every individual provider building their own unique reset flow.

Not every provider does this correctly. Just yesterday I saw someone complaining on mastodon about their passkeys being locked and requiring a phone call to get reset.

Passkeys are exactly as resettable as passwords, which depends on your provider actually implementing things correctly.