MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by LegionMammal978 | 2025-12-13 15:35:53+00:00
It looks like the author has a pretty simple procedure for computing the 'identity' sandpile (which they unfortunately don't describe at all):

1. Fill a grid with all 6s, then topple it.

2. Subtract the result from a fresh grid with all 6s, then topple it.

So effectively it's computing 'all 6s' - 'all 6s' to get an additive identity. But I'm not entirely sure how to show this always leads to a 'recurrent' sandpile.

EDIT: One possible route: The 'all 3s' sandpile is reachable from any sandpile via a sequence of 'add 1' operations, including from its own successors. Thus (a) it is a 'recurrent' sandpile, (b) adding any sandpile to the 'all 3s' sandpile will create another 'recurrent' sandpile, and (c) all 'recurrent' sandpiles must be reachable in this way. Since by construction, our 'identity' sandpile has a value ≥ 3 in each cell before toppling, it will be a 'recurrent' sandpile.
by nkrisc | 2025-12-13 15:36:12+00:00
Ads are only half the problem. The real problem with kids using YouTube is it's too easy for them to access any of the content on the platform.

If I could pay YouTube for the privilege of using an app where I choose exactly which videos are available, and no other video will ever appear on or can be accessed from that app, then I might pay for it.

IMO the only way YouTube can be kid-friendly is if there is an app where the primary utility is the ability to whitelist on a per video basis. There could be convenience methods like whitelisting an entire channel's videos with one action, but the whitelist needs to be built around a per video model.

Last I checked, they had nothing remotely like this as an option.
by randallsquared | 2025-12-13 15:36:19+00:00
A hybrid of physical logging, which is logging page-by-page changes, and logical logging, which is recording the activity performed at an intent level. If you do both of these, it's apparently "physiological", which I imagine was first conceived of as "physio-logical".

I could only find references to this in database systems course notes, which may indicate something.
by uberman | 2025-12-13 15:36:21+00:00
In 2012 a survey found that 99.8% of college students owned a phone that could get SMS texts. There are phones under 25 bucks and plans with talk and text starting for free. This is way less than the calculator my kid was required to have. Hell, A YubiKey can be had for 25 bucks. In my opinion this is a non-issue.
by mistercheph | 2025-12-13 15:36:35+00:00
Someone has to be the stick in the mud, right? I personally enjoy being that guy that doesn’t have a smartphone and causing problems in every government office / institution that assumes everyone has a smartphone, it’s like I’m a pioneer on the frontier :)

E-stim addicts will rationalize their slavery to a small rock in their pocket and sing grand songs about how it’s a curse but they need it. Like all addicts, they are not capable of rationally assessing the utility of the dependence object, and they’ll start carting out all sorts of silly things and gesturing vaguely “See this washing machine? Yep, it needs the rock, that’s why I keep my rock on me and charged at all times”
by dghlsakjg | 2025-12-13 15:36:43+00:00
I can’t be more clear: specificity around predicting the future is close to impossible. There are 9 figure bets on both sides of the RAM issue, and strategic national concerns. I say that prices will go down at some point in the future for reasons highlighted already, but I have no clue when. Keep in mind what I myself have said about human ability to predict the future. You would be a fool to believe anyone’s specific estimates.

Maybe the AI money train stops after Christmas. The entire economy is fucked, but RAM is cheap.

Maybe we unlock AGI and the price sky rockets further before factories can get built.

There are just too many variables.

The real test is if someone had seen this coming, they would have made massive absurd investment returns just by buying up stock and storing it for a few months. Anyone who didn’t take advantage of that opportunity has proved that they had no real confidence in their ability to predict the future price of RAM. RAM inventory might have been one of the highest return investments possible this year. Where are all the RAM whales in Lambos who saw this coming?

As a corollary: we can say that unless you have some skin in the game and have invested a significant amount of your wealth in RAM chips, then you don’t know which way the price is going or when.

Extending that even further: people complaining about RAM prices being so high, and moaning that they bought less RAM because of it are actually signaling through action that they think that prices will go down or have leveled off. Anyone who believes that sticks of DDR5 RAM will continue the trend should be cleaning out Amazon, Best Buy and Newegg since the price will never be lower than today.

The distinct lack of serious people saying “I told ya so” with receipts, combined with the lack of people hoarding RAM to sell later is a good indirect signal that no one knows what is happening in the near term.
Ask HN: How can I get better at using AI for programming?
by lemonlime227 | 2025-12-13 15:37:16+00:00
I've been working on a personal project recently, rewriting an old jQuery + Django project into SvelteKit. The main work is translating the UI templates into idiomatic SvelteKit while maintaining the original styling. This includes things like using semantic HTML instead of div-spamming, not wrapping divs in divs in divs, and replacing bootstrap with minimal tailwind. It also includes some logic refactors, to maintain the original functionality but rewritten to avoid years of code debt. Things like replacing templates using boolean flags for multiple views with composable Svelte components.

I've had a fairly steady process for doing this: look at each route defined in Django, build out my `+page.server.ts`, and then split each major section of the page into a Svelte component with a matching Storybook story. It takes a lot of time to do this, since I have to ensure I'm not just copying the template but rather recreating it in a more idiomatic style.

This kind of work seems like a great use case for AI assisted programming, but I've failed to use it effectively. At most, I can only get Claude Code to recreate some slightly less spaghetti code in Svelte. Simple prompting just isn't able to get AI's code quality within 90% of what I'd write by hand. Ideally, AI could get it's code to something I could review manually in 15-20 minutes, which would massively speed up the time spent on this project (right now it takes me 1-2 hours to properly translate a route).

Do you guys have tips or suggestions on how to improve my efficiency and code quality with AI?
by salawat | 2025-12-13 15:37:33+00:00
So you walk in to negotiate with your capitalist overlords with an equivalent number of lawyers that they can field? Oh, they don't pay you enough to do that? Oh, you need to be working while doing this? Oh, you just got replaced because the default T&C's weren't good enough for you?

You are not a temporarily inconvenienced millionaire/billionaire.
by gcr | 2025-12-13 15:38:01+00:00
I had the misfortune of visiting an Amazon Go store. They charged me for items that I never picked.

No option to contest the receipt....until the "would you recommend a friend visit amazon Go" survey popped up. I responded negatively, then the "why?" question had a "My receipt was incorrect" option.

Suddenly I was able to go through the "contest receipt" workflow.

100% completely automated.
by derwiki | 2025-12-13 15:38:10+00:00
If you’re interested but don’t want to make your own, a Fuji GSW690 is a great entry point. I shoot slide film exclusively, and instead of prints, put the 6x9 in an acrylic frame on a sunny windowsill.

I’m also a sucker for 35mm in medium format so you can see photo content around the glorious sprocket holes.
by rmoriz | 2025-12-13 15:38:15+00:00
AI is a bubble and in a few months, expensive nuclear energy will either be not needed anymore or replaced by cheaper solar and wind energy. The plant was decommissioned years ago because it was just not running profitable. And it will never be except within a bubble phase, like AI is currently in. Nuclear energy is the most stupid energy to ramp up during high demand phases.
by ProllyInfamous | 2025-12-13 15:39:03+00:00
>arbitration could be paid up front by the person appealing

We need a constitutional amendment that prevents binding arbitration agreements, which removes judicial review from public accessibility.

There absolutely should be a legal right to pursue this through the courts (which require a response from the company, to avoid default judgment).

----

My main PiHole blocks all of *.google.* & *.apple.* for many reasons. My exploration into PiHoles began a decade ago, after Google pulled a similar response-less account termination (without explanation). This left me unable to update a blog (with several million annual impressions), with no recourse [0].

[0] Unlike OP's situation, I was able to download most of my writing/photos, only because they were public-facing (website).
by metadope | 2025-12-13 15:39:09+00:00
Stars on Github mean nothing to me.

Github has been the best example of a brilliant UI, presenting a large database of code for easy browsing and consumption, without requiring javascript.

That was/is its killer feature. This is what locks me in.

Github has deteriorated since the takeover, to be sure. I would estimate its noscript usability to have regressed from 95% to maybe 80% today. The Ruby-on-Rails backend services have faltered a bit. Markdown files in the repo tree are no longer auto-converted by the server into html, but the main readme still works.

Have you ever visited a Gitlab project with javascript turned off? Worthless!
by pfdietz | 2025-12-13 15:39:14+00:00
Exactly right. Fusion's only hope (and IMO it's not a great one) is a system where entire parts of a fission plant can be deleted. Helion does this by not needing turbine + generator, but doing direct conversion of plasma energy to electrical energy. But even so, they have to struggle with capex and reliability. Their reactor is coupled with a huge bank of capacitors (Zap has a similar problem; it's startling how large the capacitor bank is compared to their small fusion cell.)
by rvnx | 2025-12-13 15:39:22+00:00
So many asslickers of Apple here, blaming the victim when clearly anyone could be the next victim. The same issue with clouds like Google Cloud that can charge you 100k USD tomorrow just because of someone doing a loop of wget on a cdn endpoint.

The real solution is to have a neutral, efficient and formal process under supervision of regulators to have such case escalated and handled.

I already see all the tech-bros coming: “you see it was not an issue, they reinstated the account after you posted” while ignoring there are silent victims.
by jasode | 2025-12-13 15:40:28+00:00
>, how would they know what my Apple account is until they’re redeemed?

To add context, your reddit post also mentioned: >, I purchased eleven Apple Gift cards from [...], and apple.com, and added the amounts to my Apple account.

I'm not saying the following applies to you but one can buy Apple Gift Cards using their Apple ID. After adding gift cards to the ecommerce shopping bag on Apple.com, it offers the option : "Check out with your Apple Account"

So Apple would know the exact AppleID at the time-of-sale instead of waiting until redemption. If for some reason Apple's fraud detection system doesn't like the transaction (e.g. unusual ip address from Mexico instead of USA, or too many high-value cards in a certain time period, or other black-box opaque heuristic) ... then the buyer puts their Apple account at risk.

Fraud prevention heuristics are insanely aggresive these days...

Last week, I bought a Netflix subscription and 5 days later, Netflix cancelled the membership for no apparent reason. I got on a customer support chat with Netflix and the agent said it was cancelled because of the credit-card #. It didn't pass their fraud prevention system and to try using another card. At least Netflix automatically refunded the entire amount back to me -- whereas Apple keeps the gift card balance for itself after locking accounts.

In another incident, I used a Chase credit-card at a physical Apple store to buy 2 iPhones on 2 separate receipts. The first iPhone sale was a success. The 2nd iPhone transaction just 1 minute later was denied and Chase locked the entire account. I had to call Chase customer service and recite the make & model of a car I had 20 years ago to prove my identity for them to re-activate the credit card!
by the_af | 2025-12-13 15:40:30+00:00
I had similar trouble redeeming a gift card on Amazon. Twice. (thankfully they got resolved upon appeal).

Enough that I am very wary of buying or redeeming gift cards now, especially more than one in a row.

Apparently there's some sort of scam with gift cards, which must affect any platform which allows them, and legit uses often get flagged by automated systems.

If they are so much trouble for Amazon/Apple I wonder why not disallow gift cards, instead of randomly banning users?
by marcyb5st | 2025-12-13 15:40:50+00:00
Apart from the despicable thing (IMHO) of being an absent father, I wonder how his mental health will be once he is done. As an avid trekker myself (I did the a good 60% of E1 trail [1], Camino the santiago, Via Francigena, and others) every time I was away for a prolonged time (say longer than 2 months) coming back to normal life was really hard. I believe they now call it post-trail depression.

[1] https://e1.hiking-europe.eu/en
by rwmj | 2025-12-13 15:41:38+00:00
There's a fun short story about this topic in a book called "The Mind's I" [1] edited by Hofstadter and Dennett. Unfortunately the Internet Archive copy is locked and the cat is sitting on my lap so I can't grab my copy right now, but I think it's possibly "The Soul of Mark III Beast" by Terrel Miedaner.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mind%27s_I

Update: Found a PDF: http://people.whitman.edu/~herbrawt/classes/339/Mark.pdf
by Gabrys1 | 2025-12-13 15:42:40+00:00
> I'm more curious how/why the author ended up with a $500 gift card. That's a large amount, and the author never shares how this was obtained, which seems like a key missing detail. Did the author buy the gift card for himself (why?) or did someone give him a very large gift (why not mention that?)

The author mentions a big store (names it similar to Walmart for US based readers).

I would assume this was an accepted form of "return a product without a receipt" or "we want to accept your complain about this product we sold going crazy 1 day after it's warranty but we cannot give you cash back" etc
by dannicou | 2025-12-13 15:42:58+00:00
I noticed that a lot of people (including myself) struggle with what to write in birthday cards or messages, especially for coworkers, family members, or people you’re not super close to.

Most of the time, it’s not about creativity — it’s about feeling awkward or overthinking the tone.

So I built a small side project that organizes birthday wishes by relationship, tone, and occasion. No AI magic, just curated templates and examples that people can quickly adapt.

One small thing I added that I didn’t expect to matter much: at the top of each article, you can define who the message is for (for example, “Jack”), and the name gets substituted throughout the examples.

It turns out seeing the other person’s name inside the message makes it feel significantly more personal, even if the structure of the wish stays the same. It changed how I think about “templates” — they don’t have to feel generic if the context is right.

The hardest part wasn’t building the site, but structuring the content in a way that feels natural and not repetitive. I also underestimated how much “tone” matters depending on who the message is for.

Still very early, but I’m curious how others here think about content-heavy side projects and small personalization features that meaningfully change user perception.
by kragen | 2025-12-13 15:43:18+00:00
He usually garbles the scientific theory in his videos, but I trust that he's honestly reporting his experiments, and that his theoretical errors are honest mistakes rather than intentional attempts to mislead.

You should be aware that there are rigorous constraints on how much absorptance can differ from emittance, known as Kirchhoff's Law of Thermal Radiation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emissivity#Absorptance because without them you could get mechanical power generation from a uniform bath of thermal radiation, which would give you a perpetual-motion machine.
by chongli | 2025-12-13 15:43:28+00:00
To further stretch the analogy: the main street is now full of potholes, sinkholes, and even landmines. The root problem is that, in exchange for convenience, we as a society have ceded too much power to these large businesses and we are now paying the price for it. We have bought the proverbial monorail [1] and now we are stuck with it.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taJ4MFCxiuo
by evanelias | 2025-12-13 15:43:42+00:00
Yes, I read the article and it simply does not directly address who purchased the card.

It certainly implies the author bought the card for himself, yes; but that seems rather unusual to me, especially in such a high amount.

Why would you purchase a $500 gift card for yourself to "keep a subscription without worrying about it" as opposed to just paying the small monthly amount? Honest question, I literally don't understand that motivation at all. In my mind a gift card is more problematic than a normal credit card in this scenario since it eventually runs out.

Second question: why did you create an HN account just to write this comment?
by hvb2 | 2025-12-13 15:43:44+00:00
Since you took the data for federal and state and local, you end up with 22.51 million employees[1].

Out of a total number of employed people of ~160M that's 1 in 8 employees. If you're calling 1 in 8 'a small share' the we just disagree there.

As to the $400 statistic, let me just point out that this

> That leads to those who qualify for many social programs, i.e. low-income earners, to put aside a relatively small portion of their income for savings.

Is very much an opinion, not a fact.

Maybe there's also that for the low income earners there isn't any money left after paying for housing, food and such. And I'm not even talking about health insurance.

[1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/204535/number-of-governm...
by sllabres | 2025-12-13 15:44:00+00:00
I am not a HIFI/TV aficionado, but the ACR [1] thing was new to me.

I hope it is not yet important for me as I never allowed a TV access to my LAN/WLAN. But with smart devices using accessible open WLANs to transmit who knows.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.06203 / https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.06203
Ask HN: What framework/tool should I use for building agents?
by realberkeaslan | 2025-12-13 15:44:00+00:00
Hi all,

I recently started getting into agents and am looking into tools/frameworks to build my own agents. I am specifically looking for tools that allow me to "build from scratch", so preferably no n8n or some other agent builder platform. I stumbled upon Pydantic AI and it looks very promising. However, I was wondering the following: what is the current go-to standard in industry when it comes to tools/frameworks for building agents "from scratch"?

Best,

Berke
by tucnak | 2025-12-13 15:44:27+00:00
You get occasional accounts of 3090 home-superscalers whereas they would put up eight, ten, fourteen cards. I normally attribute this to obsessive-compulsive behaviour. What kind of motherboard you ended up using and what's the bi-directional bandwidth you're seeing? Something tells me you're not using EPYC 9005's with up to 256x PCIe 5.0 lanes per socket or something... Also: I find it hard to believe the "performance" claims, when your rig is pulling 3 kW from the wall (assuming undervolting at 200W per card?) The electricity costs alone would surely make this intractable, i.e. the same as running six washing machines all at once.
by DonHopkins | 2025-12-13 15:44:40+00:00
I like the focus on python cli tools, using the standard argparse module, and writing good help and self documentation.

You can develop skills incrementally, starting with just one md file describing how to do something, and no code at first.

As you run through it for the first several times, testing and debugging it, you accumulate a rich history of prompts, examples, commands, errors, recovery, backing up and branching. But that chat history is ephemeral, so you need to scoop it up and fold it back into the md instructions.

While the experience is still fresh in the chat, have it uplift knowledge from the experience into the md instructions, refine the instructions with more details, give concrete examples of input and output, Add more detailed and explicit instructions, handle exceptions and prerequisites, etc.

Then after you have a robust reliable set of instructions and examples for solving a problem (with branches and conditionals and loops to handle different conditions, like installing prerequisite tools, or checking and handling different cases), you can have it rewrite the parts that don't require "thought" into python, as a self documenting cli tool that an llm, you, and other scripts can call.

It's great to end up with a tangible well documented cli tool that you can use yourself interactively, and build on top of with other scripts.

Often the whole procedure can be rewritten in python, in which case the md instructions only need to tell how to use the python cli tool you've generated, which cli.py --help will fully document.

But if it requires a mix of llm decision making or processing plus easily automated deterministic procedures, then the art is in breaking it up into one or more cli tools and file formats, and having the llm orchestrate them.

Finally you can take it all the way into one tool, turn it outside in, and have the python cli tool call out to an llm, instead of being called by an llm, so it can run independently outside of cursor or whatever.

It's a lot like a "just in time" compiler from md instructions to python code.

Anyone can write up (and refine) this "Self Optimizing Skills" approach in another md file of meta instructions for incrementally bootstrapping md instructions into python clis.
by jeremyjh | 2025-12-13 15:44:55+00:00
Yeah I was a bit lost from the introduction. High performance object stores are "too expensive?" We live an era where I can store everything forever and query it in human scale time-frames at costs that are far less than what we paid for much worse technologies a decade ago. But I was thinking of datalakes, not vector stores or whatever they are trying to solve for AI.
by expensive_news | 2025-12-13 15:45:02+00:00
On the Apple TV you get ‘ads’ for the apps you have in your top row, with different levels of interactivity. Some are just logos of that streaming service, some show recently watched. The Apple TV app has full-blown ads for Apple TV+ originals.

They won’t actually let you delete the Apple TV app, but if you move it out of the top row you will never see the ads.

My parents have an Amazon Fire TV and when I go to their house and have to use it it drives me insane. Carousels of adds large at the top, banner ads as you scroll, full rows of sponsored apps. Full screen ads for random Amazon products when you pause any show you are watching. Everything you watch on Amazon’s streaming service has minute long unskippable ads. Sometimes when you turn it on Alexa will just verbally read you ads.

It’s truly a dystopian piece of tech.