MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by johnmaguire | 2025-12-03 16:37:52+00:00
Yes, but I think maybe people in this thread are painting it unfairly? Another way to frame it is that they used industry best practices and their intuition to develop the game, then revisited their decisions to see if they still made sense. When they didn't, they updated the game. It's normal for any product to be imperfect on initial release. It's part of actually getting to market.
by Night_Thastus | 2025-12-03 16:38:11+00:00
I run into a similar problem. I have a power-hungry GPU (3080) and CPU (9800X3D).

All my audio equipment was on the same UPS (and therefore outlet) as my gaming PC.

The result is that any time a particularly stressful game would be open, I'd get buzzing in the speakers. (Especially if the framerate was at 360) If you ask audiophiles online they will swear up and down that a cheater plug, balanced cables, or optical isolation will fix it - that will not fix it. It's not a ground problem. It's not coming from the connection from the PC to the DAC - it's a power issue.

It seemed almost inconceivable to them that the problem was EMI from the computer making it into the equipment.

I temporarily got a double-conversion UPS (converts AC to DC to AC again) and housed the audio equipment on that instead (separate from PC) Lo-and-behold the noise was completely gone.

However, those UPS are extremely expensive, and far worse they're very loud because the fans run constantly.

So, I went with a simpler alternative. Just get a power strip and plug all the audio equipment into that on a different outlet. That reduces it massively. You can also get some strips that are designed to reduce EMI, but I haven't felt the need as of yet.
by arunabha | 2025-12-03 16:38:12+00:00
My point wasn't that no id was required before Aadhaar. It's that any id from a range of acceptable ids like passports, ration card, drivers license worked.

Post Aadhaar, even though all of those IDs are still legal and acceptable under law, the govt has added so much friction on the non Aadhaar path that in practice those IDs are unusable.
by AlexandrB | 2025-12-03 16:38:14+00:00
> Take a million dollars, give 1,000 poor people $1,000 and every dollar will be spent on goods and services.

If we're being realistic a bunch of this will go to paying off existing debt. Still good, but not the economic stimulus you're imagining. There are also "services" like gambling apps that act as a sponge to soak up money from those foolish enough to use them and transfer that money back to the wealthy shareholders. I'm sure there is research on what percentage of that $1000 can be expected to stimulate the economy, but it's not 100%.
by abainbridge | 2025-12-03 16:38:27+00:00
The examples are fun, but rather than yet another article saying how amazing optimizing compilers are (they are, I already know), I'd probably benefit more from an article explaining when obvious optimizations are missed and what to do about it.

Some boring examples I've just thought of...

eg 1:

int bar(int num) { return num / 2; }

Doesn't get optimized to a single shift right, because the that won't work if num is negative. In this case we can change the ints to unsigneds to tell the compiler we know the number isn't negative. But it isn't always easy to express to the compiler everything you know about your data and use case. There is an art in knowing what kinds of things you need to tell the compiler in order to unlock optimizations.

eg 2:

int foo(void) { return strlen("hello"); }

We all know that strlen will return 5, but some compilers don't: https://godbolt.org/z/M7x5qraE6

eg 3:

int foo(char const *s) { if (strlen(s) < 3) return 0; if (strcmp(s, "hello") == 0) return 1; return 0; }

This function returns 1 if s is "hello". 0 otherwise. I've added a pointless strlen(). It seems like no compiler is clever enough to remove it. https://godbolt.org/z/Koj65eo5K. I can think of many reasons the compiler isn't able to spot this.
by arunabha | 2025-12-03 16:38:40+00:00
My point wasn't that no id was required before Aadhaar. It's that any id from a range of acceptable ids like passports, ration card, drivers license worked.

Post Aadhaar, even though all of those IDs are still legal and acceptable under law, the govt has added so much friction on the non Aadhaar path that in practice those IDs are unusable.
by masklinn | 2025-12-03 16:39:31+00:00
> So? I gave specs for a typical 1 ton truck.

So that's a small fraction of the market, and literally none of what's already landed in europe.

> I grew up in a rural area of the USA where everyone owned trucks they needed and used for work, most were old and rusty and they all also owned a regular passenger car they used when they weren’t hauling something heavy… people were poor and did not waste fuel driving a truck except when it was essential- not a fashion statement, just a tool.

OK. Apparently you're waking up from a coma and missed the last 20 year of US car trends?

> My dad built the home I grew up in, and he had to transport all of the materials to build it himself.

Cool. My grandfather did the same for his family, using an R4. And the odd rental when that wasn't enough.

> I think the hate on here is coming mostly from a place of ignorance about what life in rural America is like

Or you could just read what people actually write, and see that your "thinking" could not be more wrong.

There's never been less farmers in the US, or more trucks sold. And full-size trucks are nowhere near sales leaders.
by jmholla | 2025-12-03 16:39:31+00:00
Next[0] does have fixes for this. Fixed versions:

* 15.0.5

* 15.1.9

* 15.2.6

* 15.3.6

* 15.4.8

* 15.5.7

* 16.0.7

[0]: https://nextjs.org/blog/CVE-2025-66478
by dllu | 2025-12-03 16:39:47+00:00
The externally spinning Waymo Laser Bear Honeycombs do indeed cause whacking and pinching and occasionally get gunked up with wet leaves and debris. One reason why they are like that is because these have very large fields of view. A cylindrical plastic cover seriously degrades optical quality especially when the beam is hitting it at a steep angle. Another reason is that it has a heatsink on the back of the spinny part. Earlier Waymos like the Firefly in fact cover up this lidar, e.g. on the "nose" and the side mirrors [1]. But they went back to leaving it exposed for better performance.

Likewise with the big spinning lidar on top, which was covered in the older Chrysler Pacificas but externally spinning in the newer Jaguar I-Paces.

[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Waymo_self-driving_c...
by progbits | 2025-12-03 16:39:53+00:00
You are entitled to your opinion, and I disagree.

Open source has a meaning. Companies and marketing people are doing their best to muddle it, but I'm dying on this hill and will never accept it.

If it's for non-technical audience they are abusing the fact some people know "open source = good" and try to benefit from that unfairly. They can use a different term.
by baq | 2025-12-03 16:40:29+00:00
Opus 4.5 is good. At least in Cursor it’s much better than Gemini 3 Pro for writing a lot of code autonomously: faster and calls tools better.

That said Gemini is still very, very good at reviews, SQL, design and smaller (relatively) edits; but today it is not at all obvious that Google is going to win it all. They’re positioned very well, but execution needs to be top notch.
by jmpman | 2025-12-03 16:40:52+00:00
I’m concerned with anyone proposing “Medicare for all” in America, because they all state - for doctors who want to stay out of the system, they can be paid directly… that immediately causes a slightly different 2 tier system. Right now our 2 tier system is the 90% with health insurance and the 10% without health insurance. In the new Medicare for all, it will be the 99.9% on government insurance, and the 0.1% - the ultra wealthy - who dominate tax policy and are heavily financially incentivized to reduce their tax contributions to the public system. They will influence politicians to spend less on healthcare, with no impact to their health outcomes. The only system which will work in the US is one in which the ultra wealthy have an incentive to provide funding to the public system, and that seems like you’d need to force them to be on the public system too.
by ToValueFunfetti | 2025-12-03 16:41:04+00:00
Anthropic may or may not have claimed this was evidence of a world model; I'm not sure. I say this is a world model because it is a objectively a model of the world. If your concept of a world model requires something else, the answer is that we don't know whether they're doing that.

Long-term memory and object permanence don't seem necessary for thought. A 1-year-old can think, as can a late-stage Alzheimers patient. Neither could get through a 400-page book, but that's irrelevant.

Listing human capabilities that LLMs don't have doesn't help unless you demonstrate these are prerequisites for thought. Helen Keller couldn't tell you the weight, direction, or size of a rolling ball, but this is not relevant to the question of whether she could think.

Can you point to the speed-of-light analogy laws that constrain how LLMs work in a way that excludes the possibility of thought?
by icelancer | 2025-12-03 16:41:06+00:00
Yeah this is the main reason to use a USB DAC. I guess you get marginally better sound quality (more noticeable on expensive studio headphones that need more power to drive them) but better isolation/removal from the noise source is the main reason I use them. Especially relevant because in my travel I'm often in countries that don't have ground plugs in their power sources.
by digdugdirk | 2025-12-03 16:41:12+00:00
I'm intrigued by this thought, and I'm not sure it's the right way to look at the current situation.

Think about it via a manufacturing analogy. I think we can all agree that modern cnc machining is much better for mass manufacturing than needing to hire an equivalent number of skilled craftspeople to match that throughput.

Imagine we had a massive runup of innovation in the cnc manufacturing industry all in one go. We went from cnc lathes to 2d routing tables to 3, then 4, then 5 axis machining all in the span of three years. Investment was so sloshy that companies were just releasing their designs as open source, with the hope that they'd attract the best designers and engineers in the global race to create the ultimate manufacturing platform. They were imagining being able to design and manufacture the next generations of super advanced fighter jets all in one universal machine.

Now these things are great at manufacturing fully custom one-off products, and the technicians who can manipulate them to their fullest are awestruck by the power they now have at their fingertips. They can design absolutely anything they could imagine.

But you know what people really want? Not fighter jets, but cheap furniture. Do you know what it takes to make cheap furniture? Slightly customized variants of the early iterations that were released as open source. Variants that can't be monitized by the companies that spent millions on designing and releasing them.

The tech might work great, but that doesn't mean the investment pays off with the desired returns.
by VBprogrammer | 2025-12-03 16:42:01+00:00
Fat A-pillars is a noticeable problem on modern cars for sure. But the thing with A-pillars is that you can see around them if you use sufficient care to move your head. It is impossible to lift your head high enough to see a small child walking past a vehicle where the bonnet (hood if you prefer) is at an adult males chest height.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-03 16:42:06+00:00
Yes, you and me understand that quote, probably mostly because we've both read all the text around the quote too, not just the quote itself. But there is a lot of people who dogmatically follow things other's write about without first digging deeper, and it's these people I was talking about before. Lots of people seemingly run on whatever soundbites they can remember.
by LM358 | 2025-12-03 16:42:32+00:00
Look, if it works for you and you're happy with it - keep it. More power to you.

I just know that if I handed over something with such shoddy soldering to a customer, I'd lose my job or at the very least lose soldering privileges. But I am working with things that cost slightly more than 99$ that you can't find on store shelves :)
by wavemode | 2025-12-03 16:42:58+00:00
Being a congressperson isn't something you're supposed to have to get good at. You're supposed to just be a representative of the people. The "experts" in government are the nonelected officials, advisors and agencies.

For similar reasons, all presidents are newbies. The benefits of having one with lots of experience would be vastly outweighed by the downsides...
by pbronez | 2025-12-03 16:43:41+00:00
"it is still a LLM and not a "pure" OCR"

When does a character model become a language model?

If you're looking at block text with no connections between letter forms, each character mostly stands on its own. Except capital letters are much more likely at the beginning of a word or sentence than elsewhere, so you probably get a performance boost if you incorporate that.

Now we're considering two-character chunks. Cursive script connects the letterforms, and the connection changes based on both the source and target. We can definitely get a performance boost from looking at those.

Hmm you know these two-letter groupings aren't random. "ng" is much more likely if we just saw an "i". Maybe we need to take that into account.

Hmm actually whole words are related to each other! I can make a pretty good guess at what word that four-letter-wide smudge is if I can figure out the word before and after...

and now it's an LLM.
by varenc | 2025-12-03 16:43:46+00:00
> What’s the middle for taking cyanide ? 1g? 1kg?

Cyanide has an LD50 (50% chance of death) in the 1-2 mg/kg range when taken orally. So middle for taking cyanide is probably 1.5mg/kg. 90mg for someone 60kg.

Sadly the middle ground in other topics is less easy to define!
by frellus | 2025-12-03 16:43:54+00:00
Check out from nvidia, aistore: https://github.com/NVIDIA/aistore

It's not a fully featured s3 compatible service, like MinIO, but we used it to great success as a local on-prem s3 read/write cache with AWS as the backing S3 store. This avoided expensive network egress charges as we wanted to process data in both AWS as well as in a non-AWS GPU cluster (i.e. a neocloud)
by notepad0x90 | 2025-12-03 16:43:59+00:00
Insurance == Social Disease

There is a healthy concept of insurance where people pay to hedge against potential risk, and that's all fine and good. But one of the most insidious social diseases is mandatory insurance, or industries expecting individuals to insure themselves in any capacity whatsoever.

It is never ok for a business (or government) to offer a service that comes with risks, but then ask their customers/subjects to insure themselves for the risk to the business/government.

If I am charging people $100 for a service, then I ask them to insure themselves and everyone reliably insures themselves (the majority at least), they can still afford to pay my me $100, so why don't i just raise the cost to $100+$10000 where $10000 is the maximum the insurance will pay? You see the problem right, all the insurance achieved is the increase in prices, people still pay the same, you just now have a middle-man economy sucking up all the wealth/value people are generating.

If we could all agree on one thing, I wish it would be this. No more mandatory insurance in any context. Not fire, not flood, not health, not cars. Optional is fine, people who can afford it can hedge against the risk. But a bank shouldn't require fire insurance on mortgaged homes.

Businesses must eat the cost of doing business, in the end the price increase they impose will be less than the price increase of insurance mandates. That, or greed should be a felony (not happening).

For health insurance, it should be a simple subsidy for those who can't pay out of pocket. Some industries must be regulated, even in a capitalist free-market country. Health care, prisons, law enforcement, defense contractors, banks to name a few. Regulated as in centrally price-controlled.

For uninsured people that get sick, house burns down, car accident,etc... the government (for health care) or businesses convert the cost to debt. Same as when someone takes out a mortgage and refuses to pay at some point, or refuses to pay their car notes.

It's like we have had this 50+ year running experiment, it's failing really badly and everyone is coming up with ideas that don't involve scraping the experiment, just modifying it and waiting a bit longer to see if it works out.
by mathattack | 2025-12-03 16:44:05+00:00
It’s been a different order of magnitude. IBM repurchased approximately half their outstanding stock. This is consistent with a low growth company that doesn’t know how to grow any more. (And isn’t bad - if you can’t produce a return on retained earnings, give them back to shareholders. Buybacks are the most efficient way to do this.)

I can’t explain why they have a PE ratio of 36 though. That’s too high for a “returning capital” mature company. Their top line revenue growth is single digit %s per year. Operating income and EBITDA are growing faster, but there’s only so much you can cut.

You may be right on the quantum computing bet, though that seems like an extraordinary valuation for a moonshot bet attached to a company that can’t commercialize innovation.
by golfer | 2025-12-03 16:44:08+00:00
Maybe ChatGPT is sticky enough that people won't switch. But since we're talking about something as old as Google Video, we could also talk about AltaVista, which was "good enough" until people discovered a better and more useful alternative.

A lot of "normal people" are learning fast about ChatGPT alternatives now. Gemini in particular is getting a lot of mainstream buzz. Things like this [1] with 14k likes are happening everyday on social. Marc Benioff's love for Gemini broke through into the mainstream also.

[1] https://x.com/kimmonismus/status/1995900344224907500 [2] https://x.com/Benioff/status/1992726929204760661
by toss1 | 2025-12-03 16:44:14+00:00
Yes, that is one solution, but history has shown it is very hard to effectively police it, as there are a million ways to get around it.

The SEC enforcement of Insider Trading laws is also simultaneously both ineffective and created high-profile wrong cases which get people with influence to further weaken it.

Seems to me the best solution to all of the above is to simply require ALL trades to be open and transparent with the ultimate beneficial owner and the trade available in real-time. Pharma scientists & execs start buying/selling their stock unusually? Easy to setup trackers so we know it in the same second and can also take advantage of their knowledge that their new drug trial succeeded/failed, and it will eliminate much of the insider-trading edge. A congressperson buys/sells a bundle of shares of a company in his state? Again, we see they're likely getting/losing contracts soon, and again, much of the margin disappears.

Traders would rapidly setup hedge funds and ETFs to ensure this happens in milliseconds, and much of the advantage and problems of insider trading being unfair disappear, along with a lot of enforcement cost.

Obviously just a concept, what are the holes?
by redmattred | 2025-12-03 16:44:18+00:00
> Where are these insurance companies' profit margins coming from?

Vertical integration.

UnitedHealthcare's (Larger insurance company in the US) profits are effectively limited by the Medical Loss Ratio rules from the Affordable Care Act.

But they are owned by UnitedHealth Group, which also owns OptumHealth (the largest network of physicians in the US), OptumRx (pharmacies), and OptumInsight (technology consulting, which goes into the COGS for UnitedHealthcare). This is where they make their profits.

UHG controls which physicians + pharmacies are in their network and what their negotiated rates for many services are (the exception being medicare + medicaid).

Here's a write up on their strategy: https://www.unionhealthcareinsight.com/post/unitedhealth-gro...

And an infographic that breaks it down: https://static.wixstatic.com/media/be1b8b_b0d4ebb04ce04b44a3...
by musebox35 | 2025-12-03 16:44:24+00:00
I have deep respect for cuda and Nvidia engineering. However, the arguments above seem to totally ignore Google Search indexing and query software stack. They are the king of distributed software and also hardware that scales. That is way TPUs are a thing now and they can compute with Nvidia where AMD failed. Distributed software is the bread and butter of Google with their multi-decade investment from day zero out of necessity. When you have to update an index of an evolving set of billions of documents daily and do that online while keeping subsecond query capability across the globe, that should teach you a few things about deep software stacks.
by card_zero | 2025-12-03 16:44:43+00:00
Yes, but I didn't know the word "assembler". I was completely bewildered about why BASIC produced clunky results and I could barely phrase the question about how proper games were made. Local libraries didn't have relevant books. I didn't know there was help in magazines. The most clued-up adults wouldn't know either, and would be trying to get me interested in programming turtle bots with LOGO. What I needed was to ask the internet (which didn't exist yet).
by ghurtado | 2025-12-03 16:45:09+00:00
>In the worst cases, a 5x difference was reported between instances that used duplication and those that did not.

Never trust a report that highlights the outliers before even discussing the mean. Never trust someone who thinks that is a sane way to use of statistics. At best they are not very sharp, and at worst they are manipulating you.

> We were being very conservative and doubled that projection again to account for unknown unknowns.

Ok, now that's absolutely ridiculous and treating the reader like a complete idiot. "We took the absolute best case scenario reported by something we read somewhere, and doubled it without giving a second thought, because WTF not?. Since this took us 5 seconds to do, we went with that until you started complaining".

Making up completely random numbers on the fly would have made exactly the same amount of sense.

Trying to spin this whole thing into "look at how smart we are that we reverted our own completely brain-dead decision" is the cherry on top.
by observationist | 2025-12-03 16:45:18+00:00
There's an enormous amount of unused, abandoned fiber. All sorts of fiber was run to last mile locations, across most cities in the US, and a shocking amount effectively got abandoned in the frenzy of mergers and acquisitions. 2 trillion seems like a reasonable estimate.

Giant telecoms bought big regional telecoms which came about from local telecoms merging and acquiring other local telecoms. A whole bunch of them were construction companies that rode the wave, put in resources to run dark fiber all over the place. Local energy companies and the like sometimes participated.

There were no standard ways of documenting runs, and it was beneficial to keep things relatively secret, since if you could provide fiber capabilities in a key region, but your competition was rolling out DSL and investing lots of money, you could pounce and make them waste resources, and so on. This led to enormous waste and fraud, and we're now on the outer edge of usability for most of the fiber that was laid - 29-30 years after it was run, most of it will never be used, or ever have been used.

The 90s and early 2000's were nuts.