MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mkozlows | 2025-12-30 19:12:04+00:00
There is! That is precisely how TVs work! Specs like BT.2020 and BT.2100 define the color primaries, white point, and how colors and brightness levels should be represented. Other specs define other elements of the signal. SMPTE ST 2080 defines what the mastering environment should be, which is where you get the recommendations for bias lighting.

This is all out there -- but consumers DO NOT want it, because in a back-to-back comparison, they believe they want (as you'll see in other messages in this thread) displays that are over-bright, over-blue, over-saturated, and over-contrasty. And so that's what they get.

But if you want a perfect reference TV, that's what Filmmaker Mode is for, if you've got a TV maker that's even trying.
by fsociety | 2025-12-30 19:12:04+00:00
This might help https://youtu.be/6KGYCU_INVI?si=1Ds8Rez8vNbZAyV5, it has more to do with your perception, expectations, and the story you tell yourself rather than an actual state of “loneliness”.

You are going through a normal phase of growth, and need to be able to sit with discomfort and question it. You will likely find yourself cherishing these moments when you are older.
by abixb | 2025-12-30 19:12:13+00:00
Wonder if you could turn this into a .zim file for offline browsing with an offline browser like Kiwix, etc. [0]

I've been taking frequent "offline-only-day" breaks to consolidate whatever I've been learning, and Kiwix has been a great tool for reference (offline Wikipedia, StackOverflow and whatnot).

[0] https://kiwix.org/en/the-new-kiwix-library-is-available/
by tialaramex | 2025-12-30 19:12:18+00:00
I think we're probably at the endgame where ordinary people start to benefit from HTTPS-by-default. Ten years ago it was way too annoying for me to even suggest to my mother that she should have this, although I did use it myself because I understand the caveats, but today "We don't have HTTPS" either means you don't really support web browsers (e.g. some protocols deliberately are HTTP-based but don't use TLS and some even can't if they wanted to) or that the whole site is mothballed so if it didn't have TLS in 2015 it still doesn't today.

As we transition ordinary users to HTTPS-by-default the HSTS feature loses importance. The target audience for HSTS isn't me, or the package management software I run, or some Python code using requests, it's my mother and sister and other ordinary users, and so if they increasingly have HTTPS-by-default then HSTS stops mattering.
by philipkglass | 2025-12-30 19:13:47+00:00
This article doesn't link to the primary research. It's referencing a Spark Award granted this year for work from 2024 and 2021. Here are the relevant articles:

"SCS Foundation News and Announcements 2025"

https://www.chimia.ch/chimia/article/download/2025_885/2025_...

Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) are highly recalcitrant and toxic compounds that pose a profound threat to ecosystems across the world. One of the most notorious representatives of this class of chemicals is hexachlorocyclohexane (HCH) – a known human carcinogen – a specific isomer of which was used as the insecticide Lindane.

...

In 2021, the groups of Morandi and Waldvogel disclosed a vicinal dihalide shuttle reaction under electrochemical conditions, with which HCH could be fully dechlorinated. In the present work, instead of transferring chlorine to another molecule, we sought to sequester it as an innocuous inorganic chloride salt, which is preferable for large-scale application.

Here's the free-to-read Accepted Manuscript version of the earlier 2021 publication:

"Merging shuttle reactions and paired electrolysis for reversible vicinal
dihalogenations"

https://ethz.ch/content/dam/ethz/special-interest/chab/organ...
by duped | 2025-12-30 19:14:07+00:00
The problem is not the APIs, it's symbol versions. You will routinely get loader errors when running software compiled against a newer glibc than what a system provides, even if the caller does not use any "new" APIs.

glibc-based toolchains are ultimately missing a GLIBC_MIN_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET definition that gets passed to the linker so it knows which minimum version of glibc your software supports, similar to how Apple's toolchain lets you target older MacOS from a newer toolchain.
by unholiness | 2025-12-30 19:14:19+00:00
Loving the blog in both style and content, hope to have time to read more in the future!

A random note in case Non-Zero-Sum James is looking: It's frustrating that reading footnotes[0] requires scrolling back and finding your previous place. A link from the footnote back to the original place in the text or something that reveals a footnote in-place (e.g. on hover) is fairly universal and very helpful!

[0] e.g. https://nonzerosum.games/emergencespirals.html#notes
by jandrese | 2025-12-30 19:14:22+00:00
If the Apple II had something similar to Steam do you think you would have pirated as much? Ignore the fact that the tech wasn't ready yet and imagine a world where buying Apple II software was as frictionless as buying a Steam game. Also imagine that the software went on deep discounts regularly that allowed you to build up a big backlog of games to play. Do you think you would have been motivated to seek out the seedy underbelly of the software world looking for illicit copies to add to your backlog? Certainly there are some people like that, but they might be a fairly small minority. And then suddenly DRM isn't really helpful because even if it might stop a minority of people who weren't going to buy your game in the first place it always costs you in frustration for paying customers.
by cmrdporcupine | 2025-12-30 19:14:30+00:00
Cantrill is far smarter and accomplished than me, but this article feels a bit strawman and hit and run?

I think unikernels potentially have their place, but as he points, they remain mostly untried, so that's fair. We should analyze why that is.

On performance: I think the kernel makes many general assumptions that some specialized domains may want to short circuit entirely. In particular I am thinking how there's a whole body of research of database buffer pool management basically having elaborate work arounds for kernel virtual memory subsystme page management techniques, and I suspect there's wins there in unikernel world. Same likely goes for inference engines for LLMs.

The Linux kernel is a general purpose utility optimizing for the entire range of "normal things" people do with their Linux machines. It naturally has to make compromises that might impact individual domains.

That and startup times, big world of difference.

Is it going to help people better sling silly old web pages and whatever it is people do with computers conventionally? Yeah, I'd expect not.

On security, I don't think it's unreasonable or pure "security theatre" to go removing an attack surface entirely by simply not having it if you don't need it (no users, no passwords, no filesystem, whatever). I feel like he was a bit dismissive here? That is also the principle behind capability-passing security to some degree.

I would hate to see people close the door on a whole world of potentials based on this kind of summary dismissal. I think people should be encouraged to explore this domain, at least in terms of research.
by bostik | 2025-12-30 19:14:36+00:00
Based on the snippets I've gathered from Money Stuff, essentially bleeding-edge researchers with an already established track record and a PhD.

Couple of items I could easily find from my own archive:

- https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2025-09-29/the-perfect-ai-startup
- https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2025-06-26/anyone-can-sell-you-spacex-stock
- https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2025-09-15/elon-musk-bought-some-stock
by christkv | 2025-12-30 19:14:54+00:00
That is the zeitgeist. American leftists like the democratic socialists talk loudly about being like Scandinavia but are going to visit Cuba and Venezuela. European socialists seems to think there is an unlimited amount of tax that can be raised from people who struggle to make 1500 EUR a month in countries like Spain while the EU political policy has been a major factor in the destruction of their purchasing power over the last 5 years.

They can't buy homes, they don't get raises. The state takes in more than ever. If anything you can argue Europe has too little capitalism going on and too much state capitalism.

No implementation would ever be good enough. We know the current system in Europe at least is collapsing because of the unbearable cost of the welfare system plus growth stagnation not because of "billionaires" (and no amount of raising taxes on the young generation or the "rich" will fix it). But it's easy to avoid dealing with the real economic problems and just blame something external being it "billionaires", the 1%, Trump, Putin, China etc (pick your favourite poison).

In this forum pretty much everyone is privileged in the country they live compared to the normal citizen. It's easy to cosplay about "utopia" when it has little direct impact on you or you can just move away to another place.

We are lead by Donkeys.
by autoexec | 2025-12-30 19:15:08+00:00
You can find any sort of bar you want, but all of them are owned by the same shady company which waters down the drinks, are involved in secret backroom deals which sometimes results in things like selling your personal info or in bars being closed without notice. They also refuse to give the bouncers the training and resources they need which leaves many bars full of jerks who shouldn't have made it inside in the first place, while in other bars you can find yourself thrown out for no reason at all.

It's kind of like an American grocery store where you have shelf after shelf filled with different brand names and products in all kinds of colors and flavors, but they're all owned by one of three corporations so it really doesn't matter which product you buy, you're still supporting the same assholes who will gladly poison you if it'll increase their profits by a fraction of a cent, so naturally most of your choice comes down to the flavor of the poison.
by Mawr | 2025-12-30 19:15:34+00:00
It's a UX issue. The author is correct — nobody cares about all the mumbo-jambo virtualenvs or whatever other techno-babble.

The user

just

wants

to run

the damn program.

> `uv run` and PEP 723 solved every single issue the author is describing.

PEP 723 eh? "Resolution: 08-Jan-2024"

Sure, so long as you somehow magically gain the knowledge to use uv, then you will have been able to have a normal, table-stakes experience for whole 2 years now. Yay, go Python ecosystem!

Is uv the default, officially recommended way to run Python? No? Remember to wave goodbye to all the users passing the language by.
by dheera | 2025-12-30 19:16:17+00:00
> correspondence set in Calibri looks like something dispatched from a leasing office

In general this is the way I feel about anything written in a Microsoft-, Apple-, or Ubuntu-supplied typeface. If you stick to system fonts you the pinnacle of embodiment of apathy in my book.

Have some backbone, browse through Google fonts, pick something that represents your organization and stick with it.

Even if you are a leasing office, pick a good font. That will make me more likely to lease from you because your attention to typography conveys to me that you will also be attentive to details in building maintainence. If you communicate in Times New Roman and Arial it tells me that you probably are apathetic about mold in the walls and electrical code as well.
by regnodon | 2025-12-30 19:16:47+00:00
Really interesting approach to the RAG noise problem. The atomic swap via shadow tables is a clever way to handle the migration.

One edge case I’m curious about is how the system handles modal logic or intent vs. fact. If a user says 'I live in Texas' and then 'I wish I lived in Florida,' a regex-heavy approach might struggle to differentiate between current state and aspiration.

In a 'neuroplastic' database, how do you handle schema deprecation or 'forgetting' when the foundational patterns drift (e.g., a user moves cities or changes a diet)? Do you have a mechanism for the schema to 'de-evolve' or merge back into a generic table if a specific entity's mention-frequency drops below a certain threshold?
by yesco | 2025-12-30 19:16:49+00:00
I have no idea what book you're talking about, and I never claimed water "disappears" or made any argument about consumption statistics. Why would you assume I think water vanishes from existence? That's absurd.

My point is simple: the utility infrastructure is the hard part. The silicon sitting on raised floors is disposable and will be obsolete in a few years. But the power substations, fiber connections, and water infrastructure? That takes years to permit and build, and that's where the real value is.

Building that infrastructure (trenches for water lines, electrical substations, laying fiber) is the actual constraint and where the long term value lies. Whether they're running GPUs or something else entirely, industries will pay for access to that utility infrastructure long after today's AI hardware is obselete.

You're lecturing me about evaporative cooling efficiency while completely missing the point.
by tasty_freeze | 2025-12-30 19:17:07+00:00
some sound good, but:

> The SpaceX docking simulator ported as an in-vehicle game, playable on the infotainment screen

Really? People want that? I know that Elon Musk would think that it would be great to play a video game about Elon Musk's companies, but are Tesla owners similarly afflicted?
by mdhb | 2025-12-30 19:17:11+00:00
There’s a digital euro launching next year AFAIK which is designed to replace Mastercard and Visa. It’s been in the works for ages and is coming online at a pretty critical time it seems.

It comes with a full digital wallet infrastructure part of it too. So some of the fundamental tech scene is definitely changing in Europe.

https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/digital_euro/html/index.en.ht...
by Paul-E | 2025-12-30 19:17:24+00:00
That's pretty neat!

I did something similar. I build a tool[1] to import the Project Arctic Shift dumps[2] of reddit into sqlite. It was mostly an exercise to experiment with Rust and SQLite (HN's two favorite topics). If you don't build a FTS5 index and import without WAL (--unsafe-mode), import of every reddit comment and submission takes a bit over 24 hours and produces a ~10TB DB.

SQLite offers a lot of cool json features that would let you store the raw json and operate on that, but I eschewed them in favor of parsing only once at load time. THat also lets me normalize the data a bit.

I find that building the DB is pretty "fast", but queries run much faster if I immediately vacuum the DB after building it. The vacuum operation is actually slower than the original import, taking a few days to finish.

[1] https://github.com/Paul-E/Pushshift-Importer

[2] https://github.com/ArthurHeitmann/arctic_shift/blob/master/d...
by fooker | 2025-12-30 19:18:02+00:00
Several actually.

https://www.finance.senate.gov/chairmans-news/the-one-big-be...

https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/2480

https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/99

https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/241...

https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/2652

Maybe examine the completeness of the sources you obtain your news from?
by rsync | 2025-12-30 19:18:42+00:00
Clean ?

- Gratuitous, unnecessary cookies (and accompanying cookie consent dialog)

- cloudflare insights built into the pages

- non-zero counter in ublock origin

That's before we even get to the page source which contains, among other things:

"text\":\"First, ensure you're using a modern browser. If problems persist, try refreshing the page or clearing your browser cache. Some older devices may have limited font support.\"}}

"Clean" web pages don't need hints like this - they work without clearing browser cache or worrying about "older devices".

I haven't seen this on HN in a while so it is worth reposting:

https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/
by nosianu | 2025-12-30 19:18:47+00:00
> they just haven't accepted this yet.

What on earth are you talking about???

We have accepted that for a long time, and there are no plans to change it.

Why do you think there is zero movement to disentangle from any important US dependencies? Such as software. There is nothing whatsoever happening to be any less dependent on the US, part from defense, and that only after repeated urging and finally some real force-pressure to get the EU moving (even after Trump's first term little to nothing actually happened).

European countries are perfectly fine with where they are, if any less dependency on the US is to happen, it will only be after huge pressure from the US.

That is deliberate, they just don't see value in e.g. trying to recreate the Microsoft and other software ecosystems. After all, it already exists, so why compete at that point? It does not make economic sense. Also, it is not Europe's strength: Every country would, in practice, (have to) develop their own version, while in the US a company can easily scale across the entire nation. For Software, it makes no (economic) sense for Europe to compete in an area where this kind of scale is important.

And that strength argument, only some minor politicians, and some journalists, keep bringing up headlines such as "Can Germany save Europe?", or celebrating "Germany back on the world stage" when there is some minor meeting hosted by Germany (seen recently). The vast majority of people could not care less about being "number one" and "leading (anything, politically)".

Not trying to reinvent the wheel, or many wheels actually, out of some "pride" moment seems pretty foolish to me. If the US is good producing this or that, we get it from there, so what? Everybody, including the US, made even more far-reaching similar decisions with industry moved to China. Compared to that, European reliance on the US is not much, and pretty much unavoidable, unless one gives up lots of wealth.
by Terr_ | 2025-12-30 19:19:00+00:00
Yeah, it's kind of a Bayesian probability thing, where the impressiveness of either outcome depends on what we expected to happen by default.

1. There are bajillions of dollars in incentives for a study declaring "Insane Improvements", so we should expect a bunch to finish being funded, launched, and released... Yet we don't see many.

2. There is comparatively no money (and little fame) behind a study saying "This Is Hot Air", so even a few seem significant.
by reactordev | 2025-12-30 19:19:00+00:00
The only resource suppliers to EU other than the United States is Norway (natural gas pipeline, crude oil 14%) and Australia (coal 36%). The US supplies a a huge minority in those as well as a majority in LNG. (https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/interactive-publications/e...)

If the EU ally’s with Australia, pics up an enemy of an enemy - China, they can withstand a US embargo.

About our increasing consumption, you can read the report here (https://www.unep.org/resources/Global-Resource-Outlook-2024).

We can’t extract our way out of this. We’ll have nothing left. We need space minerals and more rocks that aren’t home. We’re fighting over less and less sand in the sandbox.
by jdlshore | 2025-12-30 19:19:09+00:00
The METR study has a unique approach to measuring productivity. It’s the only one I’ve seen that holds water.

I don’t think I can do the approach justice here, but the short version is that they have the developer estimate how long a change will take, then randomly assign that task to be completed with AI or normally and measure how long it actually takes. Afterwards, they compare the differences in the ratios of estimates to actuals.

This gets around the problem of developer estimates being inaccurate by comparing ratios.
by zahlman | 2025-12-30 19:19:21+00:00
What kstrauser said.

But with much more detail: it seems complicated because

* People refuse to learn basic concepts that are readily explained by many sources; e.g. https://chriswarrick.com/blog/2018/09/04/python-virtual-envi... [0].

* People cling to memories of long-obsolete issues. When people point to XKCD 1987 they overlook that Python 2.x has been EOL for almost six years (and 3.6 for over four, but whatever)[1]; only Mac users have to worry about "homebrew" (which I understand was directly interfering with stuff back in the day) or "framework builds" of Python; easy_install is similarly a long-deprecated dinosaur that you also would never need once you have pip set up; and fewer and fewer people actually need Anaconda for anything[2][3].

* There is never just one way to do it, depending on your understanding of "do". Everyone will always imagine that the underlying functionality can be wrapped in a more user-friendly way, and they will have multiple incompatible ideas about what is the most user-friendly.

But there is one obvious "way to do it", which is to set up the virtual environment and then launch the virtual environment's Python executable. Literally everything else is window dressing on top of that. The only thing that "activating" the environment does is configure environment variables so that `python` means the virtual environment's Python executable. All your various alternative tools are just presenting different ways to ensure that you run the correct Python (under the assumption that you don't want to remember a path to it, I guess) and to bundle up the virtual environment creation with some other development task.

The Python community did explicitly provide for multiple people to provide such wrappers. This was not by providing the "15th competing standard". It was by providing the standard (really a set of standards designed to work together: the virtual environment support in the standard library, the PEPs describing `pyproject.toml`, and so on), which replaced a Wild West (where Setuptools was the sheriff and pip its deputy).

[0]: By the way, this is by someone who doesn't like virtual environments and was one of the biggest backers of PEP 582.

[1]: Of course, this is not Randall Munroe's fault. The comic dates to 2018, right in the middle of the period where the community was trying to sort things out and figure out how to not require the often problematic `setup.py` configuration for every project including pure-Python ones.

[2]: The SciPy stack has been installable from wheels for almost everyone for quite some time and they were even able to get 3.12 wheels out promptly despite being hamstrung by the standard library `distutils` removal.

[3]: Those who do need it, meanwhile, can generally live within that environment entirely.
by cjbgkagh | 2025-12-30 19:19:50+00:00
It hurts those with debts more, they have to pay a higher interest rate than the wealthy and with things being more expensive they have to borrow more. Wages don’t keep up with inflation.

The problem with large redistribution initiatives is that they invite corruption. When such initiatives can be reliably delivered without corruption then maybe I could have some faith in it. I’m to see how all these Somali ‘learning’ daycare centers shake out. Prima facie it looks rather fraudulent. I fail to see how giving more money to fraudsters will help matters.