MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rickdeckard | 2025-12-10 11:48:36+00:00
> From the consumer perspective, it seems simple; stop shipping the latest silicon in the iPhone. Nobody uses it.

From a vendor-perspective, ~200mn iPhones are sold each year, the end-user will pay for it. The scale of this is financing the entire development and supply-chain for the silicon itself, and it contributes not only to hardware but also service revenue of the entire company.

nVidia owns 94% of the GPU market and shipped 11.6mn GPU's in Q2/2025, let's say they ship 60mn GPUs in 2025 total.

--> Why should I stop shipping the latest silicon in the iPhone?

Even without stopping production, why should I enter and compete in a market that is currently dominated by a single player, has a total size of ~60mn units/year, with each product deprecating almost instantly as soon as a more efficient product is announced?

Apple's silicon is not magically more efficient than everything else, their products are efficient because they are vertically integrated.

I doubt that Apple Silicon is competitive to nVidia in a datacenter setting
by danparsonson | 2025-12-10 11:49:06+00:00
The point was not about your skin colour but your ideology - "some people are just better because nature".

To put your example in different terms - I don't have the physique of an olympic athlete, so I'll never be that fast or strong, but going to the gym absolutely improves on what I have already. I don't have to just live with whatever nature handed to me.
by iurbwdj | 2025-12-10 11:49:09+00:00
It involved large parts of the Rust community, and the famous Rust developer Hector Martin (with an alter ego of Asahi Lina, a female vtuber, which he appears irrationally embarrassed about), harassing others.

Even Linus Torvalds called out Hector Martin.

https://lkml.org/lkml/2025/2/6/1292

> On Thu, 6 Feb 2025 at 01:19, Hector Martin <marcan@marcan.st> wrote:

> > If shaming on social media does not work, then tell me what does, because I'm out of ideas.

> How about you accept the fact that maybe the problem is you.

> You think you know better. But the current process works.

> It has problems, but problems are a fact of life. There is no perfect.

> However, I will say that the social media brigading just makes me not want to have anything at all to do with your approach.

> Because if we have issues in the kernel development model, then social media sure as hell isn't the solution. The same way it sure as hell wasn't the solution to politics.

> Technical patches and discussions matter. Social media brigading - no than\k you.

> Linus

https://archive.md/uLiWX

https://archive.md/rESxe
by 1718627440 | 2025-12-10 11:49:23+00:00
> In making code readable, you should only use char* or unsigned char* for strings (character arrays). If you want a block of bytes/memory pointer, then you should use uint8_t* where uint8_t is part of stdint.h. This makes the code much more readable where memory is represented as an unsighned 8-bit array of numbers (byte array). Now you can trust when you see a char* that it is referring to a UTF-8 (or ASCII) character array (text).

I use uint8_t for 8-bit integers, unsigned char for memory and char for text. uint8_t for memory doesn't feels right.
by Tuna-Fish | 2025-12-10 11:50:00+00:00
Dumas was meticulously accurate, not to the world as it historically existed, but to how the French upper classes felt and wrote about. He was extremely well read in people's memoirs and diaries, and wrote his stories set in the world as the French aristocracy imagined it existed.

I believe he got this detail right in both ways; in that firearms were the most important weapons, and also the main characters would have done their very best to ignore that fact.
by IanCal | 2025-12-10 11:50:23+00:00
A few things here, one is that getting them mixed up isn't the same as them ending up in the wrong place. Looking fruitlessly for a missing user with id 9287dfn9384f that has some support ticket only to find out later that this was their order ID and the wrong thing was put in a form (particularly if you ask users for something, I see 4 different IDs floating around, which is my customer/user/product/order/shipping id?). If the user id is "order_1239123" I know to go and look at the orders table, not "dance around all tables trying to find what on earth the id could relate to".

However there are two other ways this happens which come to mind:

1. HTTP API calls. There's a whole untyped layer going on here. You could have a PUT to set some content, and create a new entry if one doesn't exist - there's a place for a call to go to the wrong place but succeed. If two entities have the same structure but are different things this can be harder to spot.

2. Manual entry. This is the bigger one. Vast amounts of workflows have somewhere that a human does a thing, and that will go wrong at times. An excel file uploaded to the wrong place, the wrong header, the wrong bit typed on a form.

A counting up of numbers is a simple ID but awful for both of these, because now you have overlapping IDs across systems. Having larger random IDs takes you out of this risky area because at some point the chance of a collision is so low as to be not worth considering, however even small IDs with a prefix like "customer_001" and "order_001" quickly removes a source of problems.

I'm not saying any of this is the only solution, or that there aren't better ones, but I can see places where this kind of thing can easily happen in the real world and "prefix the ids with a type" is a very small and simple change that can help.

I would also note that this then becomes a front facing thing that ties you into something as well though, and not all types are as nice to make public.
by dontwannahearit | 2025-12-10 11:50:32+00:00
I like this approach. I am especially drawn to the idea of making custom components this way but every time I have experimented with this I get burned by the context which has to be passed down through all functions.

A jinja/django template has an implicit context but for nested functions you really have to pass that context down through every function call.

It inevitably ends up just a big dict blob.

You get some typing support in an IDE but nothing really for function parameters.

Maybe I am doing wrong?
by demarq | 2025-12-10 11:50:36+00:00
A lot of that innovation benefits only YouTube . Also these other innovations (recommendation system, translations etc) existed before YouTube.

There are definitely innovations from the big companies but not “key” innovations.

In the article it looks at innovation from a national level. I.e new products and services, and methodology.

The scaling you describe is great but its only impact is within YouTube, and it’s not unique. Every other company of that size has also figured their own way to scale. No one was depending on YouTube for this.

Almost everything can be termed innovation, but we need to be mindful that we are trying to justify the existence of monopolies. Ie “society needs them otherwise we couldn’t figure it out”. With that the threshold for innovation increases quite a bit.
by NicolaiS | 2025-12-10 11:50:37+00:00
TLS inspection can _never_ be implemented in a good way, you will always have cases where it breaks something and most commonly you will see very bad implementations that break most tools (e.g. it is very hard to trust a new CA because each of OS/browser/java/python/... will have their own CA store)

This means devs/users will skip TLS verification ("just make it work") making for a dangerous precedent. Companies want to protect their data? Well, just protect it! Least privilege, data minimization, etc is all good strategies for avoiding data leaking
by nephihaha | 2025-12-10 11:51:14+00:00
That's not really what Adam Smith proposes in "the Wealth of Nations" by the way.

Despite claims to the contrary, we live in a system where government and big business are coalescing. In fact, they make many decisions together behind closed doors at the World Economic Forum, which Yanis Varoufakis is a member of. (You don't get into Davos unless you are either a) invited from the inside or b) pay vast amounts of money to attend.)

https://www.weforum.org/stories/authors/yanis-varoufakis/
by metalman | 2025-12-10 11:51:15+00:00
high voltage transmission lines can and are built with a glass fibre core, and would be essentaily invisible

also a ditch witch and couple of support vehicles could run cable through most terrain, and in agrairian areas , not needing permits and such, would be indistinguisashable from other activity ,happen very quickly, and leave no trace

humanity has reached the point where our comunications net is a given for 90%+ of the population centers in one form or another, and if not for the slop, would have an order of magnitude, excess capacity. throw in peer to peer ,and the soon to be blanket coverage from sattelite swarms, and well, what? sonar relays for underwater, and seizmo transmitters
by Libidinalecon | 2025-12-10 11:51:42+00:00
I am not even a software engineer but from using the models so much I think you are confined to a specific niche that happens to be well represented in the training data so you have a distorted perspective on the general usefulness of language models.

For some things LLMs are like magic. For other things LLMs are maddeningly useless.

The irony to me is anyone who says something like "you don't know how to use the LLM" actually hasn't explored the models enough to understand their strengths/weaknesses and how random and arbitrary the strengths and weakness are.

Their use cases happen to line up with the strengths of the model and think it is something they are doing special themselves when it is not.
by braza | 2025-12-10 11:52:28+00:00
I like the general idea, and I owe so much for the talks and bloposts. That said, I really miss the old deep boring technical talks with speakers with an attitude of "I do not care if you meet the tecnical (and probably cognitive in some several cases) requirements to be in this room".

I used to go in talks in the late 2000s and the difference with talks now in the mid-2020s is that the speakers now are so good and well-crafted, the slides way more professional, and the storytelling is so compelling, and... that's the issue(?) for me.

The strange loop maybe was the last bastion of tech conference where I could check in those kinds if speakers.

There are so many aspects of topic accessibility and formatting that some of the open-ended parts of a technical argument or some not-said parts are not in the presentations anymore.

Beforehand I used to go to some talks and literally take notes on 90% of the things, and back home I started to do some research about it, and eventually I learned 70% of it, and I started to have at least 2% that made some difference in my daily work.

Now the talks are so well structured that I do not see most of the time the open-ended unsaid topic that could be an intellectual side quest, given how well the presenter placed it and made it uninteresting for me, or they do not talk about this open-ended aspect at all, and it never sparked my curiosity.

Maybe it's not such a sophisticated analogy, but the old format would be like reading a book and piecing together a lot of not-explicit points from the author, and the other one is like having the same book in a cinematic experience with a well-crafted screenplay, costumes, dialog, and so on.
by forinti | 2025-12-10 11:52:28+00:00
Let's entertain that idea. Suppose they did invade most of Europe.

How would they keep everyone under control? You won't find that many people eager to participate in satellite regimes or new social experiments, like you had in post-WWII.

I don't think Russia will even consider invading western Ukraine. They'll keep the Russian speaking part which they can easily govern.
by pbhjpbhj | 2025-12-10 11:53:09+00:00
I wouldn't use that adjective but I think it fits in the strict definition - it's the style of someone overly willing to please, like a servant currying favour with their master.

I'd probably describe it as saccharine. Or dare I say it [USA] "American"? Over the top, gushing, enthusiasm. It's off-putting to me (from UK) as it's, well, more the sort of thing you'd hear from a toady or, yes, a sycophant. It just seems insincere -- and it is in this case because there is literally no emotion behind it.
by robtherobber | 2025-12-10 11:53:14+00:00
It's unclear who you're asking and whether you're actually engaging with the contents of the article, but speaking of Larry's own views:

> George Orwell’s 1984 warned of a future where Big Brother watches every move. Today, modern technology is making that vision a reality, and Oracle founder Larry Ellison—the world’s second-richest person—sees a growing opportunity for his company to help authorities analyze real-time data from millions of surveillance cameras.

https://fortune.com/2024/09/17/oracle-larry-ellison-surveill...

> Larry Ellison, in what was the most expansive and clearly unscripted section of Oracle’s hour-long public Q&A session last week, talked at some length about his vision for AI as a tool of mass surveillance. And, of course, he also suggested that, if one were to build an AI-powered surveillance state, Oracle (a company with a significant track record as a contractor for the US government) was the strategic partner best-suited to help realise that vision. [...] Ellison’s almost throwaway point at the end of the call is by far the most alarming part of his answer. “Citizens will be on their best behaviour because we’re constantly recording and reporting,” he said.

https://interface.media/blog/2024/09/17/ai-powered-surveilla...

> Professor Diamond catalogued the multiple fronts of authoritarian encroachment. Independent media face unprecedented threats from concentrated ownership by Trump-aligned billionaires, such as the Ellison family’s acquisitions of TikTok and Paramount (including CBS News). Once pillars of journalistic independence, these outlets risk being transformed into regime mouthpieces. The trend mirrors patterns in Turkey, Venezuela, and Hungary, where businessmen allied with ruling parties purchased media outlets to neutralize dissent.

https://www.populismstudies.org/from-populism-to-fascism-int...

> TikTok is being sold to an investor consortium that includes Oracle, the tech company of pro-Trump billionaire Larry Ellison. The move is yet another big step in the consolidation of major media sources under right-wing control. [...] Ellison is a big Trumper, joining in the reactionary denial of the 2020 presidential elections. Like some of the others in the deal, he is part of the inner circle of Trump’s favorite corporate ideologues. This TikTok deal is not just about money. It’s about control of the political narrative.

https://jacobin.com/2025/09/trump-ellison-tiktok-media-conso...
by exasperaited | 2025-12-10 11:53:47+00:00
Some of my recollection is reinforced by the movies, I must confess, because I remember them more than the book, which I think I read a bit too young. I should read it again now I am an old bloke.

The films make more of the musketeers' slow ruin, I think, than the book does. But Porthos is vain and a bit dim, Athos drinks like a fish, etc. If I remember the book right, the films also tend to make a bit less of D'Artagnan's naïvete and tidy up his personal morality, and Athos is usually a loud, drunken, loyal powerhouse in the films rather than an alcoholic.

The fundamentals of the films are usually right: the musketeers are aimless and in need of direction, aware they serve a pretty weak monarch, mostly powerless to deal with the corruption around him. Everyone has their own motivations.

Weirdly, the delightful eighties Dogtanian and The Three Muskehounds series is pretty close to the book — it's toned down rather than bowdlerised. D'Artagnan really is a feisty puppy, basically.

And now I have that song stuck in my head.

I think what I should actually do is read the book again while rewatching Dogtanian, because that sounds fun and I read the book largely because of it!
by poulpy123 | 2025-12-10 11:53:52+00:00
> We regularly get contacted by people in Europe who want to buy our product, but we haven't been providing support due to the cost of certs, and other regulatory needs (medical/wellness device).

I understand your point but being safe is not an option

> Do people replace their phones because the battery isn't good anymore

I just had to change the battery of my phone, and I wish that it would have been just a swap to do. Actually because it wasn't, I add to buy a temporary phone the time I needed to have the parts and the tools
by ben_w | 2025-12-10 11:54:37+00:00
> To be fair, you end up needing insane amounts of batteries if you want to run 24/7/365 just on solar, particularly if you insist on building your data centres in places with dark winters.

Not "insane", just "lots". Everything in a nation of mere single-digit millions is "lots", let alone the whole world. The quantity isn't far off what's needed anyway to electrify road transport.

But also, the other option besides batteries, for people who want specifically PV to supply power at night to specifically high latitude locations with long winter nights, is to have a long power line going to somewhere less silly to put the PV:

Many such power lines already exist, upgrading them was already necessary even without any questions about the sources putting tension on the lines because they're just so old now, the only question is the *delta* in cost between what would have been needed with no changes in supply and demand vs. what is needed given those have both changed.

And before anyone says "what about grid losses?", right now, China (and only China, and yes I have checked) makes enough aluminium they could put a girdle around the earth with 1 Ω resistance the long way around using a bit less than 5% of their recent production in about 20 years.

The rest of us would need to massively increase our aluminium production to get close to that; it's not immediately obvious why we couldn't given they did.
by RogerL | 2025-12-10 11:55:19+00:00
You assume they were talking about a single product. at my job there is essentially endless amounts of small tasks. We have many products and clients we have many internal needs, but can't really justify the human capital. Like I might write 20 to 50 Python scripts in a week just to visualize the output of my code. Dead boring stuff like making yet another matplotlib plot, simple stats, etc. Sometimes some simple animations. there is no monstrosity being built, this is not evidence of tagging on features or whatever you think must be happening, it's just a lot of work that doesn't justify paying a bay area principal engineer salary to do in the face of a board that thinks the path to riches is laying off the people actually making things and turning the screws on the remaining people struggling to keep up with the workflow.

Work is finite, but there can be vastly more available than there are employees to do it for many reasons, not just my personal case.
by nephihaha | 2025-12-10 11:55:20+00:00
He is a World Economic Forum stooge, mate. There are only two ways into that. You either pay hundreds of thousands to attend each day, or you get invited from the inside as he did.

The WEF includes the top 100 companies in the world, along with the leaders and opposition leaders of every country. He's part of it.

https://www.weforum.org/stories/authors/yanis-varoufakis/
by Tuna-Fish | 2025-12-10 11:56:01+00:00
Bayonet charges were not obsolete, but the killing in war was done by fire.

See, for example: https://journals.gold.ac.uk/index.php/bjmh/article/download/...

By the Napoleonic Wars, something below 10% of casualties were caused by melee weapons. And even that was mostly cavalry, bayonets account for ~2%. The purpose of the bayonet charge was not to kill your enemy, it was to convince your weakened enemy to cede his position after you had already done the killing. The forces rarely fought hand-to-hand and when they did it was notable, usually one side was so weakened and shocked that they fled or refused to charge.
Show HN: Zero – Burner Video Links for Online Dating (WebRTC)
by arush436 | 2025-12-10 11:56:48+00:00
Hey HN,

I built this because the "matching to meeting" flow in modern dating is broken. People chat for weeks, exchange numbers, meet up, and realize there is zero chemistry in 10 seconds.

Meet Zero is a burner video link tool.

The Tech: - Video: Built on Stream's Video SDK (WebRTC) for low latency. - Auth: Supabase (Anonymous guest logins via UUIDs in sessionStorage). - Privacy: No phone numbers stored. Rooms are ephemeral and have a hard 10-minute expiry (enforced via edge functions). - AI: I integrated OpenAI (GPT-4o) as an on-demand "Wingman" (it generates topic cards based on a vibe, rather than listening to the audio, to preserve privacy).

It’s free for guests (no install needed). Would love feedback on the WebRTC stability and the "Vibe" prompt latency.

Live demo here: https://meet-zero.co
by reify | 2025-12-10 11:57:22+00:00
No, AI is not Making Engineers 10x as Productive

Curing Your AI 10x Engineer Imposter Syndrome

https://colton.dev/blog/curing-your-ai-10x-engineer-imposter...

The Math

Let's start by looking at the simple math of 10-100x productivity. 10x productivity means ten times the outcomes, not ten times the lines of code. This means what you used to ship in a quarter you now ship in a week and a half. These numbers should make even the truest AI believer pause. The amount of product ideation, story point negotiation, bugfixing, code review, waiting for deployments, testing, and QA in that go into what was traditionally 3 months of work is now getting done in 7 work days? For that to happen each and every one of these bottlenecks has to also seen have 10x productivity gains.

Any software engineer who has worked on actual code in an actual company knows this isn't possible. You can't compress the back and forth of 3 months of code review into 1.5 weeks. When you code review you:

Tag your reviewer Hope they will get to it sooner rather than later (which will be tough because they are apparently code reviewing 10x as much code as before) Context switch to something else while you wait See a notification (perhaps immediately, perhaps 2 hours after your reviewer went offline for the day) Context switch back to the review Read their comments Respond accordingly Rinse and repeat.

This process can be made fairly efficient at a competent company with good standards and communication practices. But you're telling me you made this process 10 times as efficient to handle 10x the work? This simply can not be done.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44798189
by rsynnott | 2025-12-10 11:58:07+00:00
> NYC has a better subway system than most Euro cities. Probably because NYC has the advantage of being old before cars became affordable.

Nah, it's just because it's very, very big, nearly 9 million people. Very big European cities have comparable transport, but most European cities are smaller than this.

NYC's subway system is a little smaller than London's (though its commuter rail system is much smaller), and both cities have similar populations. And a little bigger than Paris's.

(Comparing metro system sizes can get messy, because there are things that are called metros but aren't really (eg SF muni metro, which shares space with cars) and things which aren't usually called metros but are metro-like (some S-bahn type things, in particular))
by zokier | 2025-12-10 11:58:46+00:00
Of course cloth sims of varying fidelity are everywhere. Even games have had cloth sims for decades at this point.

But it is also something that remains a research problem how to do efficiently and with good results; pretty much every year in siggraph you see couple of new papers around cloth sims. For example this year we got this https://youtu.be/d9TZhtXeMio