MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jeffrallen | 2025-12-10 18:58:25+00:00
The author is confused about how performance tuning works. Step one, get it right. Step two, see if it's fast enough for the problem at hand.

There is almost never a step three.

But if there is, it's this: Step three: measure.

Now enter a loop of "try something, measure, go to step 2".

Of the things you can try, optimizing GC overhead is but one of many options. Arenas are but one of many options for how to do that.

And the thing about performance optimizations are that they can be intensely local. If you can remove 100% of the allocations on just the happy path inside of one hot loop in your code, then when you loop back to step two, you might find you are done. That does not require an arena allocator with global applicability.

Go gives realistic programmers the right tools to succeed.

And Go's limitations give people like the author plenty of ammunition to fight straw men that don't exist. Tant pis.
by whimsicalism | 2025-12-10 18:58:37+00:00
A few things: In tourist areas they will feel comfortable talking about the protests/reprisal because they get inundated by American tourists wanting to ask them about it. "It’s a tourist destination you have to buy tickets for" -> Right, Tiananmen square has no stigma at all, but that is different from the 1989 incident.

If you post about the 1989 incident on Weibo, it will absolutely get removed and you might get the local police visiting you -- depending on how much time they have on their hands and how incendiary your post was.
by MontyCarloHall | 2025-12-10 18:58:44+00:00
Smartphone keyboards dynamically adjust the "hitbox" of each key based on what's previously been typed and overall letter frequencies of the language. So when typing "Paris is the capital of Fr..." [*], the A key becomes much easier to hit than its neighbors. Fun fact: back in the day, when this tech was less refined, certain letter contexts made the hitboxes of some keys effectively nonexistent [0].

I wonder if an approach like KKeyboard with larger but statically combined keys leads to faster typing than the current approach with smaller but dynamically "combined" keys.

[*] In reality, the context is modeled using a simple Hidden Markov Model with a much smaller effective context window that could not associate "Paris" and "France." But you get the idea.

[0] https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/impossible-to-type-okee...
I built an AI web-scraper that bypasses captchas and login pages
by asaolu_elijah | 2025-12-10 18:58:55+00:00
Hi everyone. I've been building Spidra.io, a no-code web scraping tool that can bypass popular CAPTCHA and login pages. It also lets you describe the pages you want to crawl with AI and set how the data from each page should be extracted.

No other platform offers these features in one place, and I'm excited to see people test it and share their feedback.
by bloppe | 2025-12-10 18:59:05+00:00
A bankrupt company will try to sell the rights to the software. If nobody buys it, and it's completely written off the balance sheet, then most likely they will just flip to an open source license ahead of schedule.

And if they don't, 4 years isn't that long to wait for something that nobody wanted to buy in a fire sale anyway. Especially if you're free to use it the entire time, just not resell it.
by aw1621107 | 2025-12-10 18:59:18+00:00
> which is not fully correct. Undefined behavior in unsafe blocks can and will leak into the safe Rust code so there is nothing there about the "local reasoning" or "encapsulation" or "safety invariants".

Strictly speaking, that encapsulation enables local reasoning about safety invariants does not necessarily imply that encapsulation guarantees local reasoning about safety invariants. It's always possible to write something unadvisable, and no language is capable of preventing that.

That being said, I think you might be missing the point to some extent. The idea behind the sentence is not to say that the consequences of a mistake will not be felt elsewhere. The idea is that when reasoning about whether you're upholding invariants and/or investivating something that went wrong, the amount of code you need to look at is bounded such that you can ignore everything outside those bounds; i.e., you can look at some set of code in complete isolation. In the most conservative/general case that boundary would be the module boundary, but it's not uncommon to be able to shrink those boundaries to the function body, or potentially even further.

This general concept here isn't really new. Rust just applied it in a relatively new context.
by robhlt | 2025-12-10 18:59:41+00:00
Nvidia's kernel driver is open source now [1], they just do the important HDMI bits in their closed source GSP firmware. Basically they moved the proprietary stuff to firmware and open sourced the rest. AMD could do something similar, but it would require a hardware change on their side (the GSP was a new bit of hardware added in Turing Nvidia GPUs).

1. https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules
by hinkley | 2025-12-10 19:00:02+00:00
Hmm. I’ve been out of the loop too long. When did China start getting munitions laws thrown at it? When I cared to know, Boeing could sell to everyone except NK, Syria, Iran, and two others I’m now blanking on. It didn’t matter we were using cryptography that couldn’t ship there because it was illegal for them to have our hardware in the first place.
by ncruces | 2025-12-10 19:00:03+00:00
I pretty much agree with this.

We were able to go back to one TV in the house (at least I was), and even avoid a big chunk of the ads when watching TV (by paying for Netflix/etc) and even radio (Spotify/etc).

Except we now we put a garbage TV in every hand.

It's a terrible idea because it's a tiny screen; because it's not a shared experience, but an isolating one; because it's been proven that it's bad for eyesight/myopia. But most of all, it's terrible because the content is crap.

Spending hours watching a never ending sequence of low effort 2min videos that need to deliver on the first 30s (or they're skipped) is not the way to make anyone smarter/saner.
by nostrademons | 2025-12-10 19:00:05+00:00
I thought this was common knowledge. DeepSeek’s Wikipedia entry says that they trained all their models on Nvidia chips procured before the U.S. embargo to China on them. It wouldn’t surprise me if they continued acquiring them through, well, less than legal means.

I also read somewhere (not Wikipedia) that they trained on ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini queries, basically feeding in the output of competitor’s LLMs as training data. Kinda surprised they didn’t run into model collapse problems, but they stole their training data from other people who stole their training data from data collections that arguably stole them from content creators. It’s bandits all the way down, so adding a little smuggling to that doesn’t surprise me.
by 827a | 2025-12-10 19:00:06+00:00
Interestingly, some of Apple’s devices do already serve a special purpose like this in their ecosystem. The HomePod, HomePod Mini, and Apple TV act as Home Hubs for your network, which proxy WAN Apple Home requests to your IoT devices. No other Apple devices can do this.

They also already practice a concept of computational offloading with the Apple Watch and iPhone; more complicated fitness calculations, like VO2Max, rely on watch-collected data, but evidence suggests they’re calculated on the phone (new VO2Max algorithms are implemented when you update iOS, not watchOS)

So yeah; I can imagine a future where Apple devices could offload substantial AI requests to other devices on your Apple account, to optimize for both power consumption (plugged in versus battery) and speed (if you have a more powerful Mac versus your iPhone). There’s good precedent in the Apple ecosystem for this. Then, of course, the highest tier of requests are processed in their private cloud.
by dralley | 2025-12-10 19:00:26+00:00
We literally have videos of these going off in public spaces. The explosions were weak enough that people literally inches away were unharmed. The only way to be seriously injured is to be holding it in your hands or against your body.

You cannot seriously call it an attack "on civilians" - you especially cannot say that it's in pursuit of a non-military goal when it kicked off a literal military operation by crippling Hezbollah communications and (literally crippling) hundreds/thousands of their fighters before a land invasion of the southern border areas of Lebanon. And in any case, all war is politics.
by jMyles | 2025-12-10 19:00:44+00:00
> Societies should be stronger than any industry and fight to maintain freedom, health, peace, and prosperity.

I think (I hope!) we all agree with this sentiment.

But societies also need to be stronger than states, especially in an age of connection and sharing.

States are the main source of uncertainty and violence in the world right now, and I think it's reasonable to hope that the internet will bring the age of peace we pray for.

Obviously the social media giants are not it. They are closer to states than they are to algorithms.

But I'm wary of siding with states over web apps. What we need are healthier (meaning, chiefly, more decentralized and less rent-seeking) web apps.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-10 19:01:12+00:00
Yeah? Tried Ebay Singpore as a first try, seems like there is plenty of stuff: https://www.ebay.com.sg/sch/i.html?_nkw=gpu+blackwell

Edit: just for fun (and actual neighbor of China), tried Ebay India too, seems not-impossible: https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=blackwell+gpu&_sacat=0&...
by iteria | 2025-12-10 19:01:14+00:00
I'm sorry what does a gay kid do about parents that think they are fundamentally immoral? What does any kind of abused kid do? Because my parents were abusive, but not in the way that left marks and the internet was the only thing keeping me sane. I lived in a neighborhood with no kids my age and across town from my school, so even the friends I made there lived nowhere near me. The internet was not a place I made immaterial connections. It's where I maintained what I had until the rare occasions I could see them outside of school. It was where I got to interact with people who gave me the motivation to keep going until I could escape. What does a kid like me do without the internet? No one was going to step in because my parents isolated me and where a bit mean (from their POV, not mine). Not when I was clean, had food and clothing, and was a straight A student, be real.
by jkingsbery | 2025-12-10 19:01:21+00:00
> The strength of conviction people have about this policy–almost either way, but certainly among those against–seems to scale with distance from the city.

Writing this from mid-town Manhattan. There are a lot of strong feelings about congestion pricing. It was a common topic in the local media. The stronger voices tend to be those who drive and are affected by it. For Manhattan that is a relatively low percent of the population.

There are some people who are pro-congestion pricing, but as often has with these things the benefits are distributed whereas the costs are concentrated, leading to certain behavior.
by TulliusCicero | 2025-12-10 19:01:55+00:00
What you're describing as a problem is actually the solution, and what you think is the solution is actually the problem.

Highways running straight through the middle of major cities is stupid, unnecessary, and harmful. Going to the major cities is fine, but there's no good reason they need to go all the way through them. They should just go around/near the cities instead.
by Teever | 2025-12-10 19:02:10+00:00
The time for discussion and action on this was over a 15 years ago when Snowden and the NSA with their Utah data centre was a big story.

Governments around the world have profiles on people and spiders that quietly amass the data that continuously updates those profiles.

It's just a matter of time before hardware improves and we see another holocaust scale purge facilitated by robots.

Surveillance capitalism won.
by Sevrene | 2025-12-10 19:02:19+00:00
I don't think we should normalise children on platforms where the content contains political agitation, sexual and violent content, crypto and fintech scams, etc. Especially when this content is packaged up to them and commodified.

These platforms make more money than the ATO (Australian Tax Office) brings in a year. I think they have the moral obligation and means to create safer spaces- either inside or seperate from their adult platforms; they can reduce or prevent the types of harms when children are exposed to this type of content.

Whether this approach is the best one, or even worth it as it is written in law is definitely something you can argue, but the idea that there isn't a legitimate goal here (keeping children safe), just isn't true. I know not everyone that says this always has good intentions, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be preventing harm upon them.

If you look back at vox pops from when drink-driving laws were introduced, or when seatbelts became mandatory, or when ID requirements were tightened, the arguments for and against were eerily similar. We haven’t changed much in that regard, but now people wear seatbelts, children can’t buy cigarettes as easily as they used to, and drink-driving rates have fallen. I think these are noble goals.
by carmichgo | 2025-12-10 19:02:29+00:00
I built a small tool called Luna to help with bedtime storytelling for young kids.

You type a short idea (e.g. “A magic Dragon named Charlie drives his toy car to the moon”) and Luna generates a short animated bedtime story video in about 2 minutes.

I built it because my 18-month-old loves inventing scenarios, and Luna helps turn those sparks into something playful and calming before bed.

Would appreciate feedback from the community.
by 9rx | 2025-12-10 19:02:48+00:00
That's a product of coming up through a school system that emphasizes writing engaging content to please teachers. "Oh no, the farmers can't find help" sounds alarming and draws you in. But as you point out, it ends there. Beyond that, the academic goes off and does whatever is interesting to him personally without concern for what anyone else might actually need. And fair enough. He'd be working in industry if he were trying to please others.

And a farmer myself, I can tell you there is no "labor shortage". Quite the opposite. I can't find enough farm work to do! I could easily grow my operation tenfold without breaking a sweat. But there are so many other farmers who want that work as well. It is hard to compete.
by dralley | 2025-12-10 19:03:13+00:00
When Ukraine assassinates a Russian general with a car bomb, is that "terrorism" or is that just a targeted killing of a military leader during a war? Do you think this is somehow morally problematic beyond the typical standards of war?

Do you think that "normal" means of military action, like dropping a 500lb bomb, is less "terroristic" than essentially setting off a firecracker in their face/hands/pocket? Because, like, that's the alternative. If your position is that all forms of war are illegal, then you have the right to that opinion, but it's not a realistic position.
by EvanAnderson | 2025-12-10 19:03:17+00:00
The typical "clean room" process would be to have one group reverse-engineer the original and document it, then have another group of "un-tainted" people implement the spec.

This methodology has been shown to be an effective shield against copyright infringement, but it does not protect you from patent infringement. Presumably the spec is patent-encumbered specifically to prevent this type of "attack".

You also wouldn't have any rights to use any HDMI-related trademarks.
by joecool1029 | 2025-12-10 19:03:20+00:00
So, what exactly did Palantir provide? I'm staying out of commenting whether or not this was legal/justified and asking strictly what service this was that was sold.

Is this like, live location information provided from social media/carriers/etc? Is it AI guessing who might be a target based on collected data?

EDIT: I ask because this sort of claim could just be marketing on Panantir's end and the quotes and this post never actually explained what it was other than saying their software was used.
How to get your app noticed by those who matter
by sshadmand | 2025-12-10 19:03:34+00:00
I'm not looking for low hanging fruit, and I'm definitely not looking for links to products that "change the world." No attention sneakers. What I want to glean is: when you say, "I'm going to push exposure for my product today," what are the actual core things you do? How often do you do them? And what outcomes do you realistically expect?

For example, we're planning to host monthly events in SF to help other founders and operators learn something genuinely useful. (not "use our product," but "here's how to do x,y,z, sponsored by us.") Then we follow it with a: "Join our Discord to keep the conversation going and meet people like you."

We're still small, so we hired someone entry level to post content on social every day to build momentum, with the hope of identifying a spark we can double down on messaging-wise.

I could go on, but if no one reads or comments, it disappears into the ether. So I'll stop here and hope this grows into something we can all learn from, without fluff or shameless self-promotion getting in the way.
by dleary | 2025-12-10 19:03:44+00:00
> Virtual dispatch absolutely has an overhead, but absolutely nobody in their right mind should be using COM interfaces in a critical section of code.

I could definitely be wrong, but I think C++ style "virtual dispatch" (ie, following two pointers instead of one to get to your function) doesn't really cost anything anymore, except for the extra pointers taking up cache space.

Don't all of the Windows DirectX gaming interfaces use COM? And isn't AAA gaming performance critical?
by doctoboggan | 2025-12-10 19:03:49+00:00
I've had the same though as Karpathy over the past couple of months/years. I don't think it's good, exciting, or something to celebrate, but I also have no idea how to prevent it.

I would read his "Best to be good." as a warning or reminder that everything you do or say online will be collected and analyzed by an "intelligence". You can't count on hiding amongst the mass of online noise. Imagine if someone were to collect everything you've written or uploaded to the internet and compiled it into a long document. What sort of story would that tell about who you are? What would a clever person (or LLM) be able to do with that document?

If you have any ideas on how to stop everyone from building the torment nexus, I am willing to listen.
by stevekemp | 2025-12-10 19:03:52+00:00
There are no useful discussion to be had on such topics as war in Isreal, Donald Trump (be it "stolen elections", or foreign politics), or Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Nobody will ever think "That was a well-reasoned argument I now believe war crimes were, or were not, committed".

The best thing to do on posts like this is avoid reading them, or flag them.

It feels like there's an obviously correct side to most of these issues, the problem is half the audience here believes their side is correct and yours is wrong.
by SpaceManNabs | 2025-12-10 19:03:54+00:00
I started playing at WCIII TFT too. it is personal for me too. so many good memories.

i did play some brood war after i played tft with some of my tft clan mates and i didn't really like it. i think i prefer micro over macro, at least at the time. whenever i play dota 2 nowadays, i am much more macro oriented but that might be because i got much better than 18 years ago lol.

i also kinda really emotionally, outside of gameplay, like wciii because of the dota connection if it wasn't obvious. seeing the OpenAi bots compete against pros live was such a surprise. I lost it at that TI.

wciii enabled this by being so open. the world editor was incredible. and the game allowed so much functionality cause it allowed integration with ghost++. the community was really in it. wcreplays was a wonderful website where the community was constantly sharing replays, and I loved to watch random FFAs and people doing their own casts. One of my coworkers at my first internship ever actually did his own casting as a hobby.

i just love the game. not just because it was fun, but also because it was such a huge part of my technical/creative life when i was a kid and it still kinda is through dota. i once did a blog post in 2017 showing a light demo of generating item builds with LSTMs, and dota plus the following year added it as a feature. in my mind i hope they saw my blog post, and it inspired them. at the time, it was such a huge validation that i had good ideas for game development, and it made me feel pretty proud that I could contribute something to the game like so many others did.

lol i kinda ranted but man yeah I love that game.
by Aachen | 2025-12-10 19:04:06+00:00
TIL English teenager isn't necessarily the translation of Dutch tiener. Wikipedia at least says 10–19 for us and 13–19 for English. In German the word teenager is also used and the page gives both definitions on the same page without realising it's self-contradictory

Idk that anyone takes this so literally (as that you're only a teenager if your cardinal age ends in the literal word teen and so twelve is definitely not a teenager), I've always understood it as "in their tens" but that may be my origin
by Akhil34 | 2025-12-10 19:04:20+00:00
Hi HN, I’m a B.Tech student from India. I built Recall because my desktop was a disaster of downloaded PDFs and screenshots, but I didn't feel comfortable uploading my personal documents to a cloud-based AI just to get them organized. What it is: A desktop app that runs 100% locally. It uses Ollama (Llama 3.2) to analyze file content, generate context-aware folder names, and move files automatically. I also recently added a local RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) chat so I can query my notes without internet access. The Stack:

Backend: Python Inference: Ollama (running Llama 3.2 or Mistral) GUI: CustomTkinter Storage: Local ChromaDB (for the chat vectors) Installation Note for Mac Users: Since I am a student developer, macOS may flag the app as "Unverified." This is a standard Gatekeeper check. The Fix (2 Methods):

GUI: Go to System Settings > Privacy & Security and click "Open Anyway" next to the app.
by aw1621107 | 2025-12-10 19:04:27+00:00
> Personally, I like 3.1.2 from your link [0] best, which involves getting rid of pointer <=> integer casts entirely, and just adding methods to pointers, like addr and with_addr. This needs no new types and no new syntax, though it does make pointer arithmetic a little more cumbersome. However, it also makes it much clearer that pointers have provenance.

Provenance-related work seems to be progressing at a decent pace, with some provenance-related APIs stabilized in Rust 1.84 [0, 1].

[0]: https://blog.rust-lang.org/2025/01/09/Rust-1.84.0/

[1]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/ptr/index.html#provenance